Queen of the Conquered (Islands of Blood and Storm #1)

by Kacen Callender

The boy is technically my property. Property, like the goats fenced in and awaiting slaughter. That is what the laws of these islands decree: Friedrich, and all other islanders, are not human. The color of their skin, the blood in their veins, make them undeserving of life.

The pale-skinned Fjern often believe they deserve so much. And why shouldn’t they? They’re told they own the world from the moment they’re born, brought wailing into this world and put into their smiling mother’s arms rather than taken away and sold to the highest bidder. If I’d been told as a child that I deserve to own all I see, maybe I would believe it, too.

Yet sometimes, on the darkest of nights while she lay awake, Marieke couldn’t forget that even though her life was not as painful as the lives of so many in these islands, she still wasn’t free.

They won’t attack, but they’re so large that my heart begins to pump with fear. It would be easy for them to kill us—to crush us beneath their weight. They don’t eat humans, I know this, and yet they could swallow us whole.