“She will be with the Janissaries. Since they returned, I have hardly seen her.”
Huma made an interested sound in the back of her throat but said nothing. After she was settled in one of the keep’s nicest apartments, Radu went to find Lada. He could have sent for her, but he did not want to stay in Huma’s company alone. The secret between Lada and himself felt like a burden but still a bond. With Huma here, it felt like a threat.
The Janissaries who had arrived with Huma were unloading gear. “Can you show us the barracks?” one asked.
“I am going there now. You can follow.” He turned to gesture to the soldier, then froze, trying to place how he knew him. The man’s face was round, with full lips over gapped teeth; it promised a heaviness that was at odds with his long limbs and slim build. He looked much younger than Radu had remembered, now that Radu was nearly as tall as him. “Lazar!”
Lazar smiled, puzzled. “Do we know each other?”
“I have looked for you ever since we got here! I cannot believe this!” Radu grasped Lazar’s shoulders, and finally Lazar’s face erupted in the warm, open smile Radu had found such comfort in a lifetime ago.
“The little boy from the stables! Can it be?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I have been reassigned to Ilyas’s men. We all have.”
“I am so glad! It is a joy to see you. It truly is.” Radu could not take his eyes off Lazar’s face, could not believe this friend lost to him so long ago was back. It softened some of the sting of his disappointed hopes for Mehmed’s return.
“My presence does not usually elicit such joy. I will make a point of disappearing from your life for years only to surprise you again more often.” Lazar put an arm around Radu’s shoulders, and they walked to the barracks together.
Lazar was quickly drawn away by logistical duties, but with a promise that they would be seeing much of each other. Humming with happiness, Radu found Lada. His mood fell as he remembered why he was there.
“Huma is here,” he said without preamble.
Lada flinched, putting away the sword she had been sharpening. “Mehmed?”
“No. She wants to see us.”
“I do not wish to see her.”
“Lada,” Radu said, and Lada hung her head, resigned. She had to know, as he did, that Huma could always have whatever she wanted of them.
When Radu and Lada entered the sitting room, Huma had her hands buried in a large piece of carefully embroidered cloth. She looked up, smiling brightly. “Lada, dear girl. Do you have any thread?”
Radu did not understand the humorless, near-hysterical laugh that burst out of Lada’s mouth. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I have no threads. Not a single one.”
Huma raised an eyebrow at Lada’s outburst, then swept her eyes up and down Lada as though she were a crumb on the floor. “I see you have not given up your pursuit of becoming a man.”
“I have no desire to be a man,” Lada snapped, coming back to herself.
“And yet you wear trousers and train with the Janissaries.”
“Yes, when otherwise I could be sitting in this room with you, invisible, sewing and growing old. How strange I should choose something else.”
Huma tsked. “There is great power in being a woman. You are ruining your chances. There is much I could do with you, if you chose to let me.”
Lada turned to leave, but Huma cleared her throat, patting the space beside her. Scowling, Lada slouched against the wall, watching with hooded eyes.
“What did you want to talk about, Huma?” Radu asked. The longer she was here without telling them the reason, the more nervous he became. Why was Mehmed not back yet? Had something happened in Edirne? Was Huma here to tell them their plot had been discovered and Mehmed hated them?
Radu clutched his hands together, knuckles white.
Huma ignored him, picking at colored strands that trailed from her embroidery. “Tell me, have you ever heard of Theodora of Byzantium?”
Lada leaned her head back, raising her eyes in exasperation. “Does she sew, too?”
“Actually, she was a prostitute.”
Radu sat on a bench near Huma, confused but intrigued. This did not sound like the beginning of a way to tell them that Mehmed wanted them dead for taking the throne from him.
“She lived nearly a thousand years ago in Byzantium, when Byzantium was still Byzantium and not a single, sad city clinging to life behind its walls. Her father trained bears, and her mother was an actress.” Huma said the word actress with a knowing smirk that implied all the other duties an actress would have had. “Theodora followed in her footsteps, becoming quite accomplished at everything she did. There are some interesting stories about her early life. But I will skip those, as they are not polite for mixed company.” She glanced at Radu, who looked away, trying not to blush. Why she would think those stories fine to share with Lada but not him, he did not know.
“Why are you telling us this?” Lada said, her voice flat.
“I am doing you a favor. Be gracious. Theodora, after many years, ended up accepting Christianity and living an honest but simple life of spinning wool near the palace. That is where she met Justinian. Emperor Justinian. Perhaps it was her cleverness that attracted him, her humble roots, her…experience. Regardless, he fell in love with her. He threw out the laws that prevented him from marrying an actress, and she was crowned empress. Not empress consort, mind you. Full empress, full partner with her husband. Imagine.” Huma paused, her gaze going far away and soft. Then, she returned to herself. “She went from entertaining men on stage and behind it, to ruling all of Byzantium. She crushed a rebellion when her husband would have run, she improved laws for all women under her rule, and she helped build the most beautiful cathedral in all the world—the Sancta Sophia. It stands in Constantinople to this day as a testament to what Theodora and her husband accomplished together.” Huma leaned forward. “She never picked up a sword, but thirty thousand traitors died under her command. She was a prostitute, bowing to any man with enough coin, then a woman who never again bowed to anyone. And do you think she did that wearing trousers?”
“She still needed a man,” Lada said, her eyes slits.
Huma showed her teeth in a predatory approximation of a smile. “You understand the story perfectly.” She coughed, a dry, rattling sound, and it was a while before she could speak again.
“Can I get you anything?” Radu asked.
She waved him away. “I understand your position, better than you know,” she said to Lada. “But you are holding Mehmed back. Make a decision, Lada. If you do not wish to marry my son, release him.”
Lada stood straight, sputtering. “I have no hold on Mehmed!”
Radu, too, could not believe what he was hearing. “There has never been talk of marriage, to anyone!” He looked to Lada for confirmation. It was the three of them—together—and had always been. There was no love between Lada and Mehmed that Radu and Mehmed did not also share. No, he would have seen it. And Radu and Mehmed shared the bond of a brotherhood of faith, which surely drew them closer than any bond Mehmed shared with Lada.
Huma shook her head. “Mehmed wanted to return to Amasya immediately. I persuaded him to stay in Edirne to create connections, build a foundation of strength. Little has changed since he left. I have nothing, not the esteem of my husband”—she spat the word like a fig gone rotten—“and not the promise of a son who will ever be able to keep the throne I have secured for him. He should be capitalizing on his success against Hunyadi, not yearning to return to this forsaken place. But he has been so content with his dear, faithful friends here that he has not been paying attention to the things that matter. So I tell you again: let him be free of your hold.”
A chill flowed from Lada’s mouth, her cold fury palpable. “You will have to excuse my confusion. Freedom is not something with which I am well acquainted.”
“This is foolish.” Radu held out his hands and tried to sound l
ighthearted. “Mehmed has spent all this time studying, preparing to rule. And we would never hold him back from that. You know that we would do—have done—anything to protect Mehmed.”
“Oh yes, I know. But he does not know, does he? And if I ever suspect you two are getting in my way, I will not hesitate to remove you.”
Radu’s blood went cold. Huma could have them killed, doubtless. But worse, still: she could tell Mehmed the truth of how he had lost the throne. They would lose him forever. Radu could not imagine a life without him.
No, that was not the problem. The problem was that he could perfectly imagine a life without Mehmed. He had lived it all the years of his childhood, and he never wished to go back to that cold and lonely state, even if Lada was forced along with him.
Huma stood, letting her embroidery drop to the ground. “I have other business to attend to. Do not forget what we have spoken of.” As she left, she stepped on the cloth as though the hundreds of hours of work that had gone into the stitches were nothing.
T WO WEEKS AFTER HUMA’S painful visit and quick return to the capital, a full month after the Janissaries returned but Mehmed did not, Lada once again made excuses for why she could not join Nicolae’s contingent for practice. Everything was different now. Before, she had striven to prove herself the fastest, the cleverest, the most ruthless. But after Ivan’s lewd attack and Nicolae’s protective response, she had seen that none of it mattered. She would never be the best Janissary, because she would never be a Janissary. She could never be powerful on her own, because she would always be a woman.
She had thought the return of the soldiers would signal an end to the directionless melancholy that had plagued her during Mehmed’s six-month absence, but it only sharpened it. Even Radu was distracted and cranky, worried that Mehmed would never return, worried about what Huma would say to keep him away.
The sun beat brutally overhead as Lada stripped down to her underclothes. She had taken to wearing long tunics, tied with a sash, with loose breeches underneath. Huma disapproved, but if it scandalized anyone in the fortress or the village, no one bothered—or dared—to say so. She had also had new leather cuffs made to wear on either wrist, a hidden knife in both. These she unbuckled and laid on her clothes, alongside her boots. Finally, she undid the white scarf that bound her tangled and knotted hair, and lifted it from her neck. She held the scarf out, looking at it. Wondering if she always chose white because it looked like a Janissary cap.
But nothing would ever look enough like one.
With a sigh, she slipped into the hidden pool, nestled among rocks and hidden by trees. The water was a deep green, and so cold it took her breath away and left her toes numb.
It was still their glorious secret, a place that felt truly theirs. When they got back to Amasya, Mehmed had been so sad, so frustrated. He had not wanted to lose the throne. So Lada and Radu had bent all their attentions to distracting him. They made a game of how often they could evade Mehmed’s guards and retreat to the pool. It had been an escape they had all needed. But with Mehmed gone, Radu had not wanted to come here. Lada, too, had not been here since, dreading the quiet and the solitude.
Until today. Everywhere she went, no matter how many people surrounded her, she knew now she was alone. She may as well be alone in a place that was beautiful.
Closing her eyes, she floated on her back and let herself hang, only her face above the water, the sunlight brilliant and hot in contrast to the cold water. Her breasts floated up beneath her clinging undershirt, which she found both amusing and oddly disturbing. While she had not grown much in stature, becoming thicker and more solid instead of taller, her breasts had become soft, full things. She had been forced to adjust her knife-throwing and her archery—always her weakest skill—to account for the unwieldy changes. And now here they were, bobbing gently in the water, unavoidable.
There was something claustrophobic about breasts.
Her nipples, too, seemed animated with a will of their own. Sometimes they were flat and small; other times they puckered and stuck out. She suspected it was the cold now, but on a few other occasions it had happened. Her nurse could have explained it to her.
Or Huma. Though she would cut off her breasts before asking Huma for advice about her body.
Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to have a mother. Would she have guided Lada through her traumatic first bleeding, reassured her that no, she was not dying? Helped her hide the evidence for longer than she had been able to?
No. Her mother would have crawled away in terror or made the nurse do it.
Lada let her face go underneath the water. A mother. A nurse. Even a friend. Perhaps if she had more women in her life, she would not feel so outraged at the physical and social demands of being one.
She thought of needlework. Of the weight of layers of dresses and the pinching of shoes. Of downcast eyes and well-timed smiles. Of her mother. Of Huma, Halima, and Mara. All the ways to be a wife, all the ways to be a woman.
No, more women in her life would change nothing.
And she could still learn to shoot a bow better, breasts be damned. She put her hands on either breast and squeezed until they hurt, trying to figure out what Ivan had wanted. What could possibly be the allure of the fleshy mounds? And then she screamed, as a body half landed on her, pushing her underwater. Choking, she clawed her way to the surface.
Only to find Mehmed’s smiling face inches from her own.
Her anger at being startled was washed away, carried in rivulets down her face and hair. He looked different. He had aged in the months he had been away. While the changes that growing had carved into Radu’s face made her brother more beautiful, the changes in Mehmed’s made him look harder. Distant. Less like the crying boy she had met at the fountain, and more like what she felt a sultan should be.
But now, so close to her, the hard planes of his face softened into familiarity as he flashed the smile that had not changed since he was a boy. His lips were soft and full and welcoming, but his eyes were sly.
It was his lips she found herself unable to look away from.
“Did you miss me?” he teased.
Sincerity betrayed her, tumbling out of her mouth in a whisper before she could rein it in. “I did.”
He put his hands on her waist, as he had done so many times last summer, pulling her under, pushing her, playing. But this time he left his hands there. They were warm through the thin material of her underclothes. His voice was husky, lower than it had been. “I missed you, too.”
He pulled her closer, and Lada warred within herself. Her inclination was to push him away, to cut him with a clever, sharp remark, to find something, anything to do with her hands, her worthless hands that floated uselessly at her sides.
Huma’s words echoed in her head. Set him free. Did she truly hold him that way?
Did she want to?
As though heeding her desperation but heedless of the confusion and fear ringing through her like the clash of blades, her hands lifted and grabbed the back of Mehmed’s head, tangling in his wet hair. And then her lips, from which nothing but poison had ever dropped, found his and were baptized with sweet fire, reborn into something new and wild. His mouth answered hers, lips parting, his teeth catching hers, her tongue meeting his.
It felt like fighting.
It felt like falling.
It felt like dying.
“Mehmed?” Radu called, his voice muffled and indistinct, as if Lada’s head were still underwater. She and Mehmed paused their mouth-to-mouth combat, and Lada realized her legs were wrapped around his waist, his hands around the backs of her thighs, their chests pressed together.
She pushed him away, dropping beneath the water and swimming to the other side just as Radu appeared from the trees and jumped into the pool between them. He burst up, water raining from his hair, droplets of sunshine glittering in it. His laughter matched, ringing with joy. Mehmed’s laughter was not quite so genuine. His gaze burned into Lada’s.
His eyebrows formed a question or a promise—she could not tell which.
“Mehmed is back!” Radu shouted.
“I think she noticed,” Mehmed said.
“Lada.” Radu swam over and pushed her shoulder playfully. “The pool is not that cold. Why are you trembling?”
Lada tore her eyes away from Mehmed’s. “No reason.”
RADU LAUGHED, BREATHLESS, AND dropped his wooden practice sword. “I am finished.”
Lazar’s lazy smile belied the perspiration beading on his forehead and upper lip. “You have gotten quite good.” He adjusted his long white cap, a few strands of dark hair peeking out.
Lazar was one of the happiest parts of Radu’s life, second only to getting Mehmed back the month before. Although at Mehmed’s suggestion Radu had been training with the Janissaries for a couple of years now, having a familiar face among them made it enjoyable rather than a chore. Lazar always volunteered when Radu visited the barracks looking for a training partner. Quick with a sword and quicker with a laugh, Lazar was the same bright spot he had been in Tirgoviste. Their ten-year age gap seemed so much smaller than it had when Radu was a boy.
Lazar set his sword next to Radu’s. “Very soon you may even best your sister.”
Radu leaned against the wall, shaking his head. “Do not let her hear you say that, or she will spend even more time training than she already does. I never see her as it is.”
Lazar raised a black eyebrow. “And that is a bad thing?”
“She is my family.”
“Yes, you poor thing.”
Radu laughed, reaching for a bucket of water. He scooped some into his mouth, then put a wet hand to the back of his neck. Lazar leaned over, shoulder brushing Radu’s, and took the bucket. He pulled off his cap and upended the whole thing over his head.
Radu jumped away, but his side still got soaked. “Wasteful cur!”
Lazar’s smile turned his face from boyish to wicked. He held the bucket behind his back. “Come and get it, then.”