Chapter 1
Rustenburg District, Transvaal, 1878
Frederick always arrived too late.
In the dream the meadow looked harmless, green as blessing, stitched with white flowers that nodded as though they approved of what was about to happen. A woman ran through them with her skirts clutched high, boots thudding soft into the grass, breath snagging hard as if the air itself had turned traitor.
He could never see her face clearly at first, only the shape of her, the way she moved like she had decided long ago she would not be owned by fear. Hair loose. A ribbon, maybe. The sun caught it, then lost it again.
“Blair,” he heard himself call, though he did not know why that name lived in his mouth.
She glanced back, and the look in her eyes struck him like a hand across the chest. Recognition, sharp and unreasonable. As if she knew him too, as if she’d been waiting for him, as if the world had been cruel enough to teach her what waiting cost.
A crack split the air.
Her body jolted. She stumbled as though the earth had shifted under her, then folded into the meadow, flowers swallowing her with obscene politeness.
Frederick hit his knees beside her. His hands went red. Warm, sticky, and far too much. Her fingers found his sleeve with a weak grip, refusing to let go like a child refusing sleep.
“Love you,” she whispered, and the words were smaller than the wound.
Then her eyes went glassy, fixed on him with a soft, aching insistence, and he did the one thing he always did.
He begged.
He promised.
He promised the sky, the land, his own bones, as if bargains could be struck with God through desperation.
And as always, nothing answered.
He woke with a shout lodged in his throat and dust in his mouth that had no right to be there.
The room was dim, the kind of grey that belonged to early mornings and hard work. The sounds outside were ordinary and rude, oxen shifting in the yard, wheels creaking, men’s voices calling to one another like this was any day at all.
Frederick sat upright, heart battering his ribs, his hands clenched into the sheets as if fabric could keep a life from slipping away.
He stared at his fingers. Clean. Empty. Useless.
The dream clung anyway, not as story, but as a bruise you could not stop pressing.
A knock hit the doorframe. Not polite. Not patient.
“Frederick.” His father’s voice, rough with sleep and authority. “Up. We ride. The neighbour’s land won’t buy itself.”
Frederick swallowed. His throat felt scraped raw. “Ja, Pa.”
He swung his legs out of bed and stood, steadying himself with a hand on the wall. The stone was cool. Real. The kind of real that made dreams feel like madness.
He dressed fast, boots laced tight, shirt tugged down hard as if he could pull himself back into the world by force. But the dream followed him to the basin, followed him to the yard, followed him to the saddle.
The sun edged up over the Magaliesberg, turning the ridges gold. The veld lay stretched and dry, patched with stubborn green where thorn trees refused to die just because the season demanded it.
Frederick’s mother stood by the wagon, shawl pulled around her shoulders, lips pressed like she was holding back words she didn’t wish to spend this early. The younger children were half-awake, leaning into each other in that soft way only the young could manage, still trusting the world not to break them yet.
His father checked the harness again, as if he could inspect doubt out of it.
“Where’s your head?” his father asked, eyes narrowing.
“In my skull,” Frederick said automatically.
His father’s mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. “Try keep it there. This farm is good land. If we buy it, we will need neighbours who don’t bring trouble with them.”
That was the world now. Land, water, neighbours, trouble.
Since last year, people spoke in lowered voices about flags and authority, about the English sitting in Pretoria and calling it order. Men argued in church yards and on stoops. Some said it would blow over. Others said nothing English ever simply “blew over”, it settled, heavy as a wet blanket, smothering whatever it pleased.
Frederick didn’t know which was worse, the British presence or the way it made men look at each other like wolves deciding whether they could still be pack.
He mounted. His father did the same. They rode out with the wagon behind, the whole family moving like a small migrating thing, pulled by the promise of land and the fear of losing it.
The neighbour’s farm lay beyond a rise, a stretch of thorn and dry grass that made your tongue feel dusty just looking at it. But when they crested the koppie, Frederick’s breath caught.
A line of trees stood ahead, lush where nothing else was. Orange trees, heavy with the kind of green that looked almost indecent against the brown veld. Rows and rows, disciplined and thriving like soldiers who had learned obedience from the sun.
Water. Work. Money. Survival.
And beyond that, a homestead nestled as if the mountain itself had taken it in.
His father let out a low whistle. “That’s not nothing.”
Frederick stared too long. Not at the trees, though they were impressive, but at the feeling that tightened at the back of his neck.
Like he was being watched.
Like something in him had leaned forward and gone very still.
His mother glanced at him. “You look ill.”
“I’m fine,” he lied.
He wasn’t fine. Fine was for boys who slept and woke without death on their tongue.
They rode on.
Blair Maxwell’s hands smelled of orange leaves and dry dust, sap clinging to her fingers like stubborn truth.
She stood on a wooden crate between two trees, sleeves rolled, hair pinned back in a way that did not entirely tame it. The fruit she lifted was firm but not as fat as it ought to have been. The season had been stingy. The rain had come late, then teased and left again, as if it enjoyed watching people pray.
Below her, baskets waited. Around her, women moved through the rows with quiet competence, their chatter low, broken by little sighs when a branch gave less than expected.
Blair listened the way she always listened, half to the orchard, half to the space under the words.
“Prices in Pretoria are down,” one of the women murmured.
“English buyers,” another answered, sour. “They want cheap. They always want cheap.”
“And if they don’t buy, who will?” a third said, as if the question itself tasted bitter.
Blair dropped another orange into the basket and felt the weight of it as responsibility. Their orchard was their life. It had been built with sweat and stubbornness, with hands blistered raw and backs bent until the spine learned new shapes.
Her father called it legacy.
Her mother called it survival.
Blair called it… a cage she could redecorate, if she had to.
She was sixteen, going on seventeen, and she wanted two things with the sharpness of hunger.
The first was learning. Real learning, not bits and pieces handed down between chores like a treat for a clever dog. She wanted books. She wanted to teach, not as a polite skill, but as a way out, a way forward, a way to stand in the world with her own name.
The second was freedom, though she would never have said it in those exact words to most people. Freedom sounded like rebellion. Freedom sounded like a girl not being grateful.
If freedom never came, if the world clamped shut and she stayed here, then she would do the other thing. She would turn this farm into an empire, not out of softness, but out of spite. She would not let drought and politics and men with flags take what her family had carved from the land.
Love did not sit anywhere on that list.
Love was a luxury. Love was a story for other people.
Blair hopped down from the crate and wiped her hands on her apron.
Her mother, Sara, stood at the end of the row, watching the sky like it owed her money.
Sara Maxwell had the kind of beauty that came from Highland blood and a will that refused to bow. She carried Scotland in her bones, even here beneath African sun, and Blair had grown up with that duality, the soft vowels and sharp pride, the friendliness offered with one hand and suspicion held behind the back like a knife.
“Ma,” Blair said, lifting her chin toward the mountains. “Still no clouds.”
Sara huffed. “Clouds are like promises. Pretty from a distance.”
Blair smiled despite herself. “Da says we’ll manage.”
“Da believes the earth will always forgive us,” Sara said, then lowered her voice. “Come. Walk with me.”
They moved between the trees, the shade dappling their faces. The orchard, in this light, looked less like wealth and more like a patient, living thing that needed care the way a baby needed milk.
Sara picked a leaf, rubbed it between her fingers, and frowned. “We’ll need to ration water again. The furrows can’t run as often. Tell your father.”
Blair nodded, then took a breath. “The women are talking about buyers.”
Sara’s mouth tightened. “Of course they are.”
“And about the English.”
Sara gave a small sound, somewhere between a laugh and a growl. “The English are always the shadow at the edge of the fire.”
Blair glanced at her mother, careful. Sara’s anger toward the British was old, inherited like eye colour. Blair had heard the stories since she was small, stories of Scotland and pride and the way the British took and took and called it law.
Still, Blair had never asked the question outright. Not in full.
Now she did.
“Why do you hate them so much?” she asked, quiet, as if the trees might carry the words away.
Sara stopped. Her hand rested on a branch, fingers curled around it like she could snap it if she chose.
“You mean,” Sara said, “why I do not want their blood in my house.”
Blair’s cheeks warmed. “I didn’t say that.”
Sara’s eyes flicked to her, sharp, then softened a fraction. “You didn’t need to.”
She turned and continued walking, slower now.
“My father,” Sara began, voice slipping into the cadence that came when she spoke of home, “was a Collins, stubborn as the hills. He did not come all this way to be told he should bow to the same people who had spent generations stepping on our throats.”
Blair had heard pieces of this. Never the whole.
Sara exhaled. “When I was a girl, there was talk. Always talk. Match this one to that one. A tidy union. A ‘good’ union. They tried to steer my cousin toward an Englishman once. My grandfather nearly had a fit. You’d have thought they’d asked him to marry the devil himself.”
Blair’s mouth twitched. “You make it sound like you’ve lived in a war.”
“In Scotland, you do,” Sara said. “Not always with guns. Sometimes with names and loyalties and the quiet ways people refuse to forgive.”
She glanced toward the homestead, where Jamie Maxwell could be seen in the distance, sleeves rolled, directing men around barrels and crates, his posture that of a man who carried responsibility like a second spine.
“And then I met your father,” Sara continued, her voice softening. “A Maxwell. A Scot. Familiar enough for my people to breathe again. Different enough that my father still squinted at him like he expected trouble.”
Blair laughed, small. “Da says your father watched him eat like he was judging a horse.”
“He was,” Sara said dryly. “It was all the same thing. Can this man be trusted with what matters? Can he be trusted when hard times come?”
Sara’s fingers brushed Blair’s sleeve, brief, grounding. “You are not a child, Blair. The world will try to marry you off like you are a parcel.”
Blair rolled her eyes. “I know.”
“You do not,” Sara said, and there was something fierce in it. “Not fully. When you are sixteen, you think you have time. Then you blink, and someone is measuring you for a ring.”
Blair’s chest tightened. “I’m not going to marry some British officer just because he can write his name.”
Sara’s gaze held hers, steady. “Good.”
Blair hesitated, then said the thing she’d been chewing on for months. “I want to teach.”
Sara’s eyes softened, but not in pity. In recognition.
“I know,” Sara said.
“You never say it like you mean it,” Blair accused, though her voice was quieter than her words.
Sara reached up and fixed a pin in Blair’s hair that had come loose. “I mean it. But wanting is one thing. Getting is another. Your father sees you as his clever girl, and he loves you, but he also sees the world as it is. He thinks keeping you here keeps you safe.”
“And you?” Blair asked.
Sara’s mouth pulled into something like a smile. “I think keeping you safe is not the same as keeping you small.”
Blair’s throat thickened. She looked away quickly, pretending sudden fascination with a leaf.
Sara leaned closer. “And Blair…”
“Yes?”
Sara’s voice lowered. “If anyone ever tells you you should marry English to ‘smooth things over’, you tell them you dinnae ken what nonsense they’re speaking.”
Blair blinked. “Ma.”
Sara’s eyes gleamed. “What? It’s a useful word. The Boers hear ‘ken’ and think you’re one of them. Scots hear it and think you’re family. The English hear it and think you’re uneducated. Let them.”
Blair snorted. “That’s… actually clever.”
Sara lifted her chin as if it was obvious. “I’m your mother.”
A shout carried from the fence line. A man’s voice. Another answering. Oxen lowing.
Sara and Blair both turned.
At the boundary of their land, a wagon had stopped. New faces. New horses. Men who sat like they belonged in a saddle.
Neighbours.
And in the air, a subtle tightening that made Blair’s skin prickle.
Sara’s eyes narrowed, measuring. “Who are they?”
Blair’s heart did something odd, a small stutter, as if it had tripped.
“I don’t know,” she said.
But the orchard suddenly felt smaller.
Frederick’s father rode up to the fence first, the way men did when they wanted to show they were not afraid of land lines or other men’s eyes.
A tall man met him from the orchard side, dust on his boots and sun on his skin. He wiped his hands on his trousers before he offered one, which Frederick noticed. Pride. Courtesy. A man who cared how he was seen.
“Jamie Maxwell,” the man said, voice carrying the faint music of Scotland under the Afrikaans he spoke well enough to be understood.
“Pieter Potgieter,” Frederick’s father replied, grip firm. “So you’re the one with all the orange trees. We could see them from the koppie. Made my wife jealous.”
Jamie’s laugh was short, genuine. “Tell her she’s welcome to come pick them herself. We can always use more hands.”
That was how it went here, friendliness offered first, suspicion held back until it was earned.
Frederick stood slightly behind his father, as was proper, but his eyes scanned the orchard the way a hunter scanned bush.
He saw women working. He saw children darting between trees. He saw an older woman with sharp eyes that pinned him like a needle.
Then he saw a girl step out from the shade.
Not a child. Not fully a woman either, though she stood like someone who could become one the moment she decided she was done asking permission.
She wore an apron dusted with orange leaves, hair pinned back but unruly anyway, as if it had opinions of its own. Her hands were stained faintly from sap. Her shoulders were straight, chin lifted, gaze direct.
Frederick’s breath caught hard enough to hurt.
The dream slammed into him without warning. The meadow. The blood. The whispered love.
His mouth went dry.
The girl’s eyes met his.
And something in him went silent, like a room where all the talking stops when a stranger walks in.
He didn’t know her.
He did.
The feeling was wrong and right at the same time, like recognising a hymn you haven’t heard since childhood and still knowing the words.
She looked at him as if she’d stepped too close to a fire and realised it was hotter than she thought.
Her mother, the sharp-eyed woman, shifted closer to her, a subtle protective movement. That, too, pricked something in Frederick, because in the dream he had never had protection. Only loss.
Pieter Potgieter spoke again, voice carrying. “My son, Frederick.”
Frederick’s father gestured, and Frederick stepped forward on instinct, as if the land itself had tugged him.
Jamie Maxwell nodded. “Frederick. Welcome.”
Frederick managed, “Dankie,” because his tongue refused anything more complicated.
The girl’s gaze didn’t leave his face. It wasn’t rude. It was… searching.
Jamie turned slightly, pride softening his posture. “This is my daughter.”
The girl’s throat moved as she swallowed. Then, like she was forcing herself to speak through a strange thickness, she said, “Blair.”
The name struck Frederick like a blow.
Not because it was surprising. Because it was inevitable.
He heard it the way a man hears the final click of a lock.
In his mind, the dream replayed, sharper now, cruelly detailed. Her falling. His hands red. That whisper, love you, threaded through his ribs like a knife.
He stared at her and forgot to breathe properly.
Blair’s cheeks flushed, whether from the heat or from whatever was happening between them, Frederick didn’t know. He only knew he felt exposed, like the world had pulled his skin back and left his nerves in the air.
Blair’s mother stepped forward, eyes flicking from Frederick to his father and back, as if she was weighing not just people but futures.
“And your family?” she asked, voice polite, not soft.
Pieter answered readily. “Potgieters. We have been on this land since the Cape was still young, since our people came with the ships long before the trek north. We do not borrow our roots from England.”
Sara Maxwell’s lips twitched. Not quite approval, but less ice.
Blair’s eyes flicked to her mother, then back to Frederick, as if she was aware of the political shape of this moment even while something else, something older, coiled under her ribs.
Frederick forced his voice to work. “It’s good land,” he said, because it was safer than saying, I’ve watched you die a hundred times.
Blair nodded once. “It is,” she replied. Her voice carried the faintest Scottish edge, and yet the word she used next landed with Afrikaans ease. “We ken it.”
Frederick blinked.
Sara’s eyes flashed with amusement, brief as a spark. “She means she knows it well.”
Frederick swallowed, then managed, “Ja,” and the syllable came out like prayer.
Jamie Maxwell chuckled. “My wife is determined our girl should speak like her people and like her neighbours, so she doesn’t get swallowed by either.”
Sara lifted her chin. “A girl should know how to stand in more than one world.”
Blair’s gaze held Frederick’s, steady now, daring. “And you?” she asked him, direct as a thrown stone. “Do you ken this place, Frederick Potgieter, or are you only passing through?”
The question was innocent enough on the surface. Neighbours’ talk. Land talk.
But under it, Frederick heard something else, the same question his dreams asked him every night.
Will you leave me?
He felt his father’s presence beside him, the weight of expectation. He felt the dry wind on his face, carrying the scent of dust and orange blossoms.
He looked at Blair, at the stubborn set of her jaw, at the wary curiosity in her eyes, at the faint flush that told him she felt it too, whatever “it” was.
“I’m here,” Frederick said, and he didn’t entirely know who he was answering.
Blair’s breath left her in a slow, careful exhale, as if she’d been holding it without meaning to.
Sara’s gaze sharpened again, catching that tiny exchange. Noticing.
People always noticed. They just didn’t always speak of what they saw.
Jamie clapped Pieter’s shoulder. “Come. Let’s drink coffee. We can talk about boundaries and water rights like respectable men, and let the women decide whether they think we’re worth trusting.”
Pieter laughed. “That’s how it always is.”
As the men started toward the house, Blair lingered half a step behind, as if she’d forgotten the proper rhythm of walking away.
Frederick found himself matching it, half a step behind his father, half a step behind the world.
Blair glanced sideways at him, quick, like she didn’t want to be caught doing it.
“Do you… truly have those dreams?” she asked, so softly the words could have been stolen by the leaves.
Frederick’s blood turned cold.
He stopped walking.
Blair stopped too.
In the distance, adults talked, coffee was mentioned, laughter rose and fell. Life carried on.
Frederick stared at Blair as if she’d spoken in the language of his bones.
“What dreams?” he asked, careful, because admitting madness to a girl you’ve just met is a fine way to end up prayed over by the dominee.
Blair’s throat moved again. She looked almost angry with herself, as if she’d said something she’d sworn she wouldn’t.
“The kind that don’t feel like dreams,” she answered.
Frederick’s lungs finally drew a full breath. It shook slightly.
He saw it then, not in her face, not in her features, but in the way she held herself, like someone braced against something invisible.
He didn’t know what God was playing at, tying two people together with threads they could not see. He only knew the thread existed.
And for the first time in all those nights of blood and meadow, Frederick felt something he hadn’t felt in the dream.
Not victory. Not certainty.
But possibility.
He lowered his voice. “Ja,” he said simply. “Those dreams.”
Blair’s eyes softened, not into sweetness, but into something like grim understanding.
“Then,” she whispered, “we should be careful.”
Frederick nodded once.
He didn’t tell her the whole truth, not yet.
He didn’t tell her that in his dream she always died, and he always failed.
He didn’t tell her that her name had been haunting him before he knew it belonged to a real girl.
He didn’t tell her that he had just met her, and already the thought of losing her made his hands feel unsteady.
Instead, he said the only thing he could say without breaking apart.
“I will not be late,” he promised.
Blair stared at him as if she wanted to believe it and was furious at herself for wanting anything at all.
Then she turned and walked toward the house, shoulders straight, hands clenched at her sides.
Frederick followed.
Behind them the orchard rustled, leaves whispering like old women in church, and the mountains watched, silent as they always had.
The land did not care about love.
But it cared about war.
And somewhere, far off, the world was shifting under their feet, slow at first, then inevitable, like thunder you didn’t hear until it was already above you.
As the adults’ voices faded toward the house, Blair’s hand brushed a leaf, but her eyes stayed on Frederick. “It’s like... a thread,” she murmured, voice barely above the rustle of leaves. “Pulling me toward something I can’t name.” Frederick’s chest tightened, the dream’s ache blooming into something real. “I feel it too,” he confessed, his words heavy with unspoken longing. “As if I’ve lost you before and can’t bear it again.” Their gazes locked, the air thick with a passion born of souls recognizing each other, no need for touch—just the raw promise of forever.
