“She breathes fire and pisses vinegar.”
“So, the same.”
Mehmed laughed darkly. “The same. I fear she will never forgive me for leaving her behind, but this is no place for a woman.”
“Lada is no woman.”
“Be that as it may, I could not bring her into so much danger. But you! I could have had you by my side this whole time.”
Radu sat back onto his heels, putting more distance between them. He did not know whether to rejoice that Mehmed would have brought him over Lada, or to despair that Lada was too precious to risk, while Radu would have been welcomed. Everything that Radu had been through, all the things he had done while here. He could never go back to what he was before. He had lost too much. But Mehmed could not see that.
“I have to stay with your father.” Radu stood, his knees nearly betraying him by sending him back down to the ground, to Mehmed. He locked them in place, standing as tall and straight as the impregnable city behind them. “Otherwise…” Otherwise he would be unable to repair the vicious rubble this night had made of the walls around his heart. “Otherwise all my work will be for naught, and I intend to be the more useful Dragwlya for you.” He forced a smile and a light tone. “Lada is already two assassination attempts ahead of me. I have some catching up to do.”
Mehmed stood. “You say you have to do these things. But what do you want to do?”
Radu stretched his fingers, reaching toward Mehmed, touching just the hem of his tunic. Behind Mehmed, he saw a group of Janissaries running toward them.
Radu smiled his best, most innocent smile. The smile without guile, the smile that said, Tell me your secrets, no harm will come, the smile that said, There is nothing more to me than what you see, trust me, trust me. “What I want does not matter. What matters is preparing the way for you to be the sultan we both know you can be. You will be the hand of God on Earth, and I will do whatever I can to see that come to pass.”
Radu walked back to camp alone, wondering if maybe he did understand Skanderberg, after all. Because there was nothing he would not sacrifice for Mehmed.
Including himself.
Lazar stood, alarmed, when Radu entered the tent. Radu had not expected to see him again tonight.
“What happened? You look as though you have seen the devil.”
Radu shook his head as he sat, wishing Lazar were not here so he could think about Mehmed and indulge this exquisite pain in private. “Not the devil. Mehmed.”
Lazar smiled bitterly. “I see little difference. How was he?”
“He looked ill. The siege has not been kind to him.”
“As it should be.”
When Radu curled up and turned away, Lazar put a hand gently on his shoulder. It did not burn as Mehmed’s did, did not sear where it touched. “You still feel the same for him?”
“I always will.”
“And your sister?”
Radu flinched, remembering Mehmed’s careful protection of Lada. And regretting having confessed to Lazar that Mehmed and Lada had something between them that he craved. “Please, Lazar, stop speaking.”
Lazar’s hand moved, and Radu heard him rummaging through items in Radu’s chest nearest his small writing desk. “I am writing up the reports for you. It will be a while. Do you mind?”
Radu grunted and waved. He wanted to be alone, but he did not want to have to write the reports himself. Lazar often did it for him, collecting the information. All he needed was Radu’s signature. After several minutes, Lazar knelt in front of Radu, holding a sheaf of papers so that only the bottom, where Radu needed to sign, showed.
Radu signed them all without hesitation. And then, finally, Lazar left. Radu buried his face in his blanket, heart beating to the sorrow and joy of Mehmed, Mehmed, Mehmed.
“WHAT I WOULD NOT give for a roving band of Huns right now.” Nicolae sighed, lying flat on his back in the middle of the training ring. The dirt beneath him was packed hard by decades of feet. The low wooden walls of the ring were lined with pegs that held the equipment of the men who practiced there.
Like all days the last six months, the pegs were empty.
Tohin had left shortly after they destroyed the canyon. She had other outposts to visit, other soldiers to teach. Lada missed her. And she especially missed creating explosions. They could not even keep training with gunpowder, because there simply was not enough of it.
There was so little to do. Today, Petru and Matei were on patrol with Stefan. Lada did not know where her other troops were and found it nearly impossible to care. They were relegated to minor local duties to compensate for the lack of spahis and vali governors. Last week, they had investigated the theft of several pigs from a local farm. The thief, caught in the act, was a hole in the fence and a patch of truffles in the forest.
Even her hatred of Mehmed for leaving her had lost its spark, its flame dampened by the fear introduced with Tohin’s news of the siege. Increasingly she found herself thinking of him with regret. Fondness, even. Imagining what she would do if he were here. And then she stabbed those thoughts with her sharpest dagger, cut them right out of her mind. He could do without her, she could do as well without him. He would be fine. Without her.
She stood over Nicolae, looking down at him.
“Do you want to kiss me?” she asked.
Nicolae made a strange choking noise. “What?”
“Do you want to kiss me?” She did not feel things when she looked at Nicolae, but then, she had not felt so much for Mehmed before they kissed. Maybe the secret to successfully bleeding him from her veins was replacing him. She generally found Nicolae more than tolerable, and he was good at taking orders.
“Please take this in the kindest way possible,” he said, standing and walking backward to put more space between them, eyeing the knife she was toying with. “But I would sooner try to romance my horse. And I suspect my horse would enjoy it more than you.”
Lada lifted her nose in the air. “Your horse deserves better.”
“We can both agree on that.” Now relatively certain he was not about to be stabbed, Nicolae sat on the wall next to her. The fact that she was not upset over his rejection indicated that kissing him would have done nothing to alleviate her problems.
“I think of you like a sister,” he said. “Like a brilliant, violent, occasionally terrifying sister that I would follow to the ends of the earth, in part because I respected her so much and in part because I feared what she would do to me if I refused.”
She nodded. “I would do awful things.”
Nicolae laughed. “The most awful.”
“And then I would steal your horse lover, to spite you.”
“Your cruelty knows no bounds.”
Lada stood, stretching, wishing she had somewhere to go. She could no longer retreat to the forest like she used to. A phantom voice followed her there now, whispering whore in her ear, the smell of dirt conjuring memories she preferred to leave buried.
“I am going to patrol the grounds,” she said.
Nicolae nodded, then his jovial face turned serious. “I mean it, you know. I will follow you to the ends of the earth.”
An unusual warmth spread through her chest. She looked away, trying to twist the smile off her lips. “Of course you will.”
She made her way to the massive front gate of the fortress, feeling more buoyant than she had in weeks. Whatever else happened, she had her men. She had her command. And that was something, at least.
A messenger, wearing the dust of leagues on his cloak, rode a weary horse up to the gate. He pulled a bag off his shoulder and held it out. “Letters from Albania.”
“I will take them.” Lada grabbed the bag and called a servant. They sorted through the letters. Most were for servants who had family attending the soldiers, a few for her men from friends in the siege. It had been over a month since they had had any news, and it was all she could do not to open those letters.
Then she came to a letter addressed to
her. Her heart twisted, squeezing up too high and making it difficult to breathe. Had Mehmed finally written her?
Leaving the servant without a word, she retreated to her room in the barracks. She set the letter on her desk, pacing around it, eyeing it with suspicion as though it might disappear. What would it say? What did she want it to say? After all this time, what could he say to make her forgive him?
Nothing. He could say nothing.
She broke the seal, ripping the edge of the paper with her force, and opened it, scanning the contents quickly. It was not from Mehmed.
The hand was unfamiliar, but the signature at the bottom was undeniably Radu’s.
She sat heavily, shock making it difficult to focus on the words. Radu was at the siege? How? Why? Was he with Mehmed?
A strange sensation seeped through her, a writhing jealousy that Radu was there, where she had been forbidden, with Mehmed. Mehmed must have taken him, must have rescued him from Edirne. Gritting her teeth, Lada started at the beginning. The letter was brief, only a few lines long. He greeted her without preamble or explanation, stating merely that the siege was a disaster and would soon end. Then…
Lada stopped, dropping the letter to the floor. Then she picked it up, reading each word with care as though she could change what it said.
“ ‘Sickness is rampant. This is a secret to remain between us, but Mehmed has fallen ill. I do not expect him to recover or survive the journey back. When he dies you will be at the mercy of Murad, who still wishes you dead. Without Mehmed’s protection I fear for you. Whatever else has transpired between us, I could not live with myself without warning you. Gather what you can and flee while no one is there to take note.’ ”
When he dies.
Not if.
When.
Lada looked at the date on the letter—it had been written more than a month before. Which meant that Mehmed might already be dead, might have been dead all this time. All the poison she had nurtured, the bitterness, the anger. Her last words to him. Her thought that if he did not come back he would have deserved to never know how she felt about him. She doubled over, holding her midsection, a wail threatening to tear free from her throat.
She had sent Mehmed to his death with nothing but cruelty, and, worse, it was a death that even she could not have prevented. She could not fight the plague with a sword, could not stop the assassin illness with a dagger, no matter how clever and sharp.
She dropped to her cot and curled into a ball, incapable of imagining a world without Mehmed in it. Radu was right—there would be no place for her in that world. And Radu was not threatened as she was, because he had found his own role to play.
Radu had earned his place. Everything she had now—her home, her men, her very life—was because Mehmed cared for her. All her threads led back to him, and with his death each one would snap.
Rolling off her cot, she picked up the letter and read it again and again, willing it to change. Then she slammed it onto the desk with a scream, burying her dagger in it so deeply that the handle stuck straight up from the wood.
A week later, Lada was nearly ready to leave. She would steal a horse. As a Janissary, she had no horse of her own, but there were a few left in the fortress stables. All she needed was two more days. If only she had accepted or demanded extravagant gifts of Mehmed. She had almost nothing other than her payments as a Janissary. She had visited the bursar to draw her salary early, but the aggravating old fool would not budge the schedule. Stealing more than was strictly necessary would draw attention, so she was forced to wait.
It was agony.
All her men picked up on the change in her demeanor, but none could account for it. Nicolae in particular seemed nervous, and Lada feared he had received word of Mehmed’s demise in his own letter, or that he suspected she would flee.
While she glared at the sun, willing it to set faster so she could escape, Nicolae put a tentative hand on her shoulder. The other Janissaries had left for a meal. She had not noticed him staying. “We can talk,” he said, voice strained. “About what is bothering you.”
She turned to him, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why would you think something is bothering me?”
“This last week, you have been…”
“What?” What had he noticed? Had he told the other men? She did not know whom she could trust, and the fewer people who knew of her plans, the better.
He shrugged. “You nearly broke Petru’s arm sparring. And then you missed yesterday’s training entirely. You either fail to respond to what we say, or you snap so sharply it wounds. I am sorry. I thought— I did not realize you were serious.” He shifted on his feet, tugging at his collar. “If you want, I mean, if it is important to you, I— We could try kissing.”
Lada stared at him in disbelief. Then, the strain of the last week being too much, she threw her head back and laughed. It bubbled out of her like a mountain stream from dry rock, cascading from her lips in a cold, unstoppable rush. She laughed so hard she fell to the ground, clutching her stomach, which soon began to ache.
Nicolae nudged her with his foot, scowling. “This is the most offensive rejection to an offer of romance I have ever received. And that is saying something, as I have had many rejections.”
“You idiot,” she gasped. “You tremendous, arrogant ass. You thought I would be so distraught over you?”
He sat beside her. “Yes, right. While I still have some dignity, can you tell me what is really wrong?”
She sighed, wiping beneath her eyes where tears had leaked from them, and sat up so their shoulders were touching. She knew Nicolae. She could trust him. “I am leaving.” With a grimace, she added, “Running away.”
“Why?”
“Radu wrote from the siege. Mehmed is—was—sick.” She swallowed the pain that built like a cancer in her throat, but it would not move. The letter, folded and tucked into her chemise, sat right beneath the pouch around her neck and poked into the skin above her heart. “Dying. Or already dead. He is the only reason I have any freedom or power. If he is gone, I will lose this.” She gestured at the practice ring, toward the small building she had been allowed to claim as private barracks. “Murad loves Radu but still wants me dead, and no one will stop him. No one will care. So I am leaving.”
“God’s wounds, it is about time.”
Lada turned to him, surprised. “What do you mean?”
“I only marvel that it took you this long to decide to run away! I always wondered what was keeping you when clearly you had the intelligence and ability to escape years ago.”
“I—I could not have. If I could have, I would have!”
Nicolae lifted his eyebrows, scar wrinkling across his forehead. “You have had access to money and horses. You can hunt, you can track, you can fight. With a little planning, you could have been across the border and on your way home at any time.”
Lada leaned back against the wall, mind churning. He was right. There was nothing that made now different from any time in the last two or three years. Except…
Mehmed.
She had stayed because he gave her a reason to.
“I have no home to return to,” she said, avoiding Nicolae’s gaze lest she see the truth reflected back at her. “Our father betrayed and abandoned Radu and me, twice. Once when he left us here, and once when he signed our death warrants by breaking his treaty. He was—” She closed her eyes, sick with remembering how she had looked up to him, how she had craved his approval. “He was never a great man, and now I know that. If I return to him, he will find some other way to barter me for scraps of power to be squandered.” It was true. If she went home to Wallachia, she would be married off before she could show her father she had grown into so much more than he could have dreamed.
“Then we go somewhere else.”
Lada opened her eyes, looked at Nicolae. “We?”
“This place was no fun before you got here, and it will be even less so in your absence. I told you I meant it—I w
ill go with you to the ends of the earth. Though I would prefer the ends to be closer rather than farther, as riding makes me quite sore in a very treasured spot.”
“I cannot ask you to come.”
“You cannot ask me to stay.”
“You have a position here. Money. Value.”
“I am a salaried slave. We both know it.”
Lada nodded, relief warming her like a hearth in wintertime. It would be good to have Nicolae with her.
“You should ask the other men,” Nicolae said.
She shook her head. “The more we take, the greater the odds of discovery. I will not risk their lives. And I doubt they will come.”
“I think you would be surprised. You chose well.”
“I will consider it. We have two days. Prepare what you need to.”
He stood, offering a hand to help her up, then kept his hand clasped tightly with hers. “To the ends of the earth,” he said.
“To the ends of the earth.” With a tight smile, she turned to leave.
“And, Lada? I am sorry about Mehmed. I know what he was to you.”
She missed a step, nearly stumbling. “That is strange,” she said, eyes burning. “Because I do not think I know.” All she had was how she felt, and that was such a mixture of anger, bitterness, jealousy, desire, and affection that she knew she would never untangle it to see what was at the center.
She went to her old room in the fortress to see if there was anything worth taking. It was as she had left it, untouched, a layer of dust over everything. Empty. An empty past, an empty future, and no one left to care about her in either.
“The devil take you, Mehmed!” she screamed, filled with sorrow poisoned by rage. This was his fault. She had stayed for him, had let him lull her into feeling like she had security, safety, a future. But, as always, she was at the mercy of the men in her life. And, just like her father, Mehmed had abandoned her.
“And where is the devil to take me?”
Lada whirled around, heart racing. Mehmed leaned in the doorway, mirth twisting the new form the siege had carved his weary face into. He looked haggard, his cheeks stubbled, dark circles beneath his eyes showing weeks of poor sleep. He crossed the room to her, arms open.