His Janissary friends were in the back of the stable, waiting for him. Lazar, the one with the gap-toothed smile and easy laugh, took in the scene—and Radu’s terrified expression—with a quick look. Radu had been riding with them nearly every day, and under their playful tutelage he had become comfortable, even skilled, in the saddle. He had also perhaps told them too much about his family. He hung his head as the horses that had been prepared for the riding party were brought out. There was not one for him, making it clear to everyone that he was not intended to be a part of this. Or a part of anything, for that matter.
As Radu watched his father mount, shame welling up and threatening to leak from his eyes, Lazar cleared his throat. “Your horse.” He held out the reins and nodded respectfully, as though Radu were more than a forgotten boy.
Radu took the reins, grinning, but then closed his mouth quickly and imitated Lazar’s detached formality. “Thank you.” He mounted as smoothly as he could, sitting straight in the saddle and nudging his horse forward to be level with Mircea’s. He clenched his fists around the leather straps so his fingers would not tremble. The party headed toward the forest, keeping together as they rode through an open field.
His father looked over and, as though once again surprised to see him existing, took in Radu’s excellent form. Radu’s chest swelled with pride to be here, riding with his father and his older brother, at the head of a group of boyars. Where he belonged. He lifted his chin higher and met his father’s eyes, anticipating a smile.
“Do not embarrass me,” his father said, tone flat, before urging his horse forward without another glance.
Radu’s chest collapsed, all his pride and hope turning ugly and sour in his stomach. The rest of the ride was a sweaty and uncomfortable slog among trees buzzing with insects. He let his horse fall back, ending up near the rear of the group with the less important boyars, who grumbled and gossiped among themselves, oblivious to his presence.
Twice branches whipped Radu’s face, leaving it stinging. But he did not cry out, and he did not break form. He listened to the conversations around him, and he noted when complaints were a bit too pointedly directed at the head of the group.
He embarrassed no one. He remained unnoticed and invisible.
It was, apparently, both the least and the most he could do for his father.
LADA COULD NOT BREATHE in the castle. A miasma of anxious fear hovered over everything. People gathered in dark corners, whispering. Her father threw banquet after banquet, trying to appease the boyars, who were growing increasingly open in their hostilities. Everywhere she went eyes followed her. Bogdan had been a sort of shield—always at her side, always obedient. Losing him would have been difficult enough, but she had also lost the love and worship she had nurtured for her father.
Now she could see how little her father actually cared for Wallachia. Everything he did was for himself, to protect his own power at whatever cost. The armor she imagined his love had given her had been stripped away, and without it, she was naked and vulnerable. Every day was precarious, every smile and interaction dangerous. One false move and perhaps she, too, would be discarded. Her father still favored her, and she suspected that, in his own way, he truly cared about her, but his love was as contemptible and flimsy as one of his endless string of false political promises.
She would be thirteen this summer. Her mother had married at thirteen.
Lada’s mouth tasted like blood and iron all the time now. It tasted like defeat. As she walked through the corridors one evening on her way to the kitchens, a boyar knocked her out of his way without so much as an apology. It made her feel small and unimportant.
She was small and unimportant.
She hurried to the gardens behind the castle courtyard, dunked her head in a fountain, and swished water through her mouth to rinse everything away. Muffled screams caught her attention. She knew that sound well, as she was usually the one causing it. A fierce possessiveness welled in her chest and she stormed through the garden, closing in on Radu and his assailant.
Mircea had Radu by the back of his neck and was pushing him deeper and deeper into the unforgiving thorns of a dense rosebush. Mircea was strong and thick like their father, but his facial hair was still patchy. Sometimes Lada caught him standing over a reflecting pool and tugging on his sparse mustache like he could make the symbol of his status grow faster.
“What did you hear?” Mircea hissed, unaware of his audience. Radu screamed as Mircea pushed harder.
“Nothing, nothing,” Radu insisted.
Lada silently unsheathed the knife she always wore under her sash and held it behind her back. “There you are.” She scowled. “Father has been asking for you.”
Mircea looked over, face open and pleasant as though he had not been caught torturing their brother. “Has he?”
“Something about the boyars.” Lada lifted her free hand and waved it in disinterest. It was a good lie. There was always something about the boyars that needed attending to. She plucked a rose and held it to her face. She hated the way roses smelled, their sweetness too fragile. She wanted a garden of evergreens. A garden of stones. A garden of swords. She smiled conspiratorially at Mircea. “He seemed angry.”
Mircea met her smile. “He is always angry.”
“Perhaps his cap is too tight.”
“Perhaps his breeches are too small.”
“Perhaps,” Lada said, noting that Mircea had relaxed his grip on Radu’s neck and that Radu had the sense to stay perfectly still, “what is inside his breeches is too small.”
Mircea let go of Radu, throwing his head back and roaring a laugh. He clapped his hand on Lada’s shoulder, squeezing too hard. “Be careful, Sister. You have dirt inside that mouth.”
He directed one vicious kick at Radu’s prone backside, then hurried past them into the castle. There was meanness at Mircea’s core. Lada had watched him torment the castle dogs for sport, causing pain for no reason. She did not understand it. Why do anything without purpose? She had no love whatsoever for him, but she had a healthy portion of fear.
“Come on.” Lada yanked Radu free of the bush, his sleeves catching and tearing on the thorns. Based on his cries, his skin caught and tore as well. She pulled him along after her, out of the garden and through the gate into an abandoned stable, empty save for the overwhelming odor of rotting hay. Any extra horses they once had had been sold to cover their father’s spiraling debts. Most of the main stable was occupied by Janissary horses, boyar horses, horses of their debtors.
“If Mircea finds father, he will know I lied.” Lada sat on the floor, skirts bunching beneath her.
Radu wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Why did you help me?”
“Why do you always need help?” Exasperated, she directed him to sit next to her and examined his face. The cuts were shallow, nothing serious. She pulled a few thorns from his arms, not pausing at his whimpers. She was never kind or tender with Radu, but what she did was for his own good. He was too delicate for this world, and the sooner he changed, the easier life would be for him. “What was Mircea so angry about?”
Radu shifted, angling his face away from her. “Nothing.”
She grabbed his chin and forced him to look at her. A stray beam of light hit his ears, and she felt Bogdan’s loss and her loneliness like a pain in her stomach. Sighing, she put an arm around Radu and drew him closer. Would their father send Radu away, too? Would he let Mircea, the eldest and most favored, kill him?
The pale spring day was chilly, and her wet hair left her shivering. “You have to stay away from Mircea,” she said. “He is meaner than Father’s falcon, and far dumber.”
Radu sniffled a laugh. “And far uglier.”
“And far more likely to carry fleas.”
They were quiet for a while, breathing together, when Radu spoke again. “I was hiding behind the drapes. I heard him speaking with a Danesti family boyar.”
In the fifteen years before their father took the throne,
there had been ten princes, alternating between two families: the Basarab line, now out of contention with no heirs of age, and the Danesti line. The Danesti family was not happy with the Draculesti usurpers, first Lada and Radu’s uncle Alexandru and now their father. And, as history proved, being prince was a very tenuous position in Wallachia.
“Why was he speaking with the Danestis?”
Radu squirmed, and Lada realized she was squeezing his shoulder so tightly she was hurting him. She let go, and he said, “There is talk of a boyar coalition. They mentioned Hunyadi.”
Lada’s skin prickled. Hunyadi was the military leader of Transylvania and Hungary, their constantly shifting border countries to the west. Where her father had sworn to fight the Ottomans, Hunyadi actually did. He had beaten the sultan on numerous occasions.
Lada could never decide what to think of Hunyadi. She sensed that he was a threat to her father’s power, but she could not help seeing that Hunyadi was the man her father was supposed to be. She listened in when she could, stole her father’s letters and annotated maps, and studied Hunyadi’s strategies. He was fascinating. He fought like a rabid dog at unexpected times, and then disappeared to harass the enemy again later. Even with inferior numbers and forces, he usually wore the Ottomans down.
He was the Draculestis’ ally, but he was also dangerous and did not look kindly on her father’s double-dealing. “I thought the boyars supported Ottoman ties. They encouraged Father to seek their help.”
“Most of the boyars are unhappy. They see how successful Hunyadi’s campaigns against the sultan are. They want to ally only with him now. There is talk of a betrothal.”
Lada stiffened. “Who?” she asked, though she knew the answer.
“Matthias, Hunyadi’s son.”
A sharp pain beneath her fingernails alerted Lada to the fact that she was scraping them against the rotting wood floor so hard that slivers were stabbing into her palm. She would be married to grant someone else an advantage. And when that alliance fell through, as all alliances did, she would be shuffled to the side. Left in a convent, abandoned and cut off.
An image of their mother, nearly forgotten since she had left them, crawled through Lada’s mind. She recoiled from the memory of that woman. Powerless. Broken. An abandoned alliance had left her a prisoner in someone else’s home, someone else’s country.
Lada squeezed her hand shut around the splinters, warm drops of blood pooling in her palm, covering the scar of her playacting with Bogdan. There would be no happy marriage of equals for her, no one who would agree to let her rule. “I will never marry.”
Radu pried her hand open and attempted to dig out some of the slivers. She let him. He was far gentler with her wounds than she had been with his.
“How do you know all this?” She considered him in wonder. She had assumed Radu spent his days dreaming. His big eyes had a way of looking pleasantly vacant, as though he were not even aware of conversations going on right in front of him. While Lada was fixated on tactics and Hunyadi, she had studiously ignored the intrigues of the boyars. She saw now that was an error.
“People forget I am listening. I am always listening.”
“We should tell father about Mircea’s plans.”
Radu went perfectly still, head down. Lada did not have to see his expression to know how he looked. Terrified. “He will be angry. And Mircea will kill me. I am scared to die.”
“Everyone dies sometime. And I will not let Mircea kill you. If anyone is going to kill you, it will be me. Understand?”
Radu nodded, snuggling into her shoulder. “Will you protect me?”
“Until the day I kill you.” She jabbed a finger into his side, where he was most ticklish, and he squealed with pained laughter. The look he gave her was one she recognized—the same hungry, desperate look she used to give their father. Radu loved her, and he wanted her to feel the same for him. For the first time since he had been introduced into her life, placid and beautiful and worthless, she found Radu interesting. Perhaps even useful. And more than that, in Bogdan’s absence, she felt like someone belonged to her again.
THE SCRATCHES ON RADU’S face and arms from Mircea’s garden attack had faded to thin red lines. He had lied to his nurse, told her that he tripped and fell into a bush. Reporting on Mircea never accomplished anything.
But this time…this time perhaps it would. Lada had told him to talk to their father. And he could.
He would.
Radu paced in their chambers. The information he had about Mircea conspiring with the boyars would hurt all Radu’s enemies. Mircea, first and foremost. Oh, Radu would love to see him fall from grace. And the Danesti family were the main aggressors behind the coalition, so if they were punished or ostracized, it would hurt Andrei and Aron.
Of course, Andrei and Aron avoided him now, avoided nearly everyone. They were already outcasts in the court after their false crime and real punishment. But Radu still feared that someday they would trace it back to him. He had made his nurse arrange for the servant boy who had helped him to be sent with a family to Transylvania, lest the boy reveal Radu’s deception. He lied to himself that Emil was better off, but Radu knew it had been entirely selfish.
But beneath every other motivation—the desire to hurt Mircea, to punish the Danestis—was this: if Radu heroically revealed the plot, his father would finally see him. He would know that Radu was smart, that Radu was valuable. And Lada would be proud.
Lada entered their chambers, glaring at him. “Sit down. You make me dizzy.”
He did not sit, too flushed with excitement. “I am going to tell Father about Mircea and the boyar coalition. He will be so proud of me!”
“He will be furious.”
“Not with me!”
“Do you imagine him thanking you? Embracing you warmly, thrilled with the news that his own son is working against him? You are a fool.”
All Radu’s careful hopes were fleeing. He shook his head. “He will be glad to know! He will thank me!”
“We cannot always predict how our father will respond.” She looked at the corner, where their nurse’s basket of mending sat beneath her chair. The nurse used to darn Bogdan’s socks, cursing him for wearing them out so quickly. She no longer had that task.
A dark realization seized Radu. “You are jealous. You want Father to see only you.”
Lada laughed, a bitter sound. “I do not want Father to see me offering him a conspiracy to take away even more of his power. You are welcome to that.” She stomped out of the room.
Radu found her later that day, standing on the narrow walled ledge that surrounded the tower. “Did you tell him?” she asked without looking at her brother.
Radu did not answer.
“Coward.” But she angled her body so he could stand next to her. “We will think of some way to reveal the truth without entangling you in the mess. You do not want to draw Father’s attention as being part of this.”
“But how?”
“We need a little time. We have information, which means we have power. We must think of—” She stopped, narrowing her eyes at something in the distance.
A man rode down the main street, surrounded by soldiers. As the man got closer, Radu saw that he smiled, one hand uplifted in a gesture of friendship. His men, grim and hardened, with hands hovering near their swords, promised something else entirely. Several flags Radu did not recognize hung limply from poles carried at the group’s rear. “Who is he?”
“Hunyadi,” Lada said, the name dropping from her lips like a curse.
They watched from the tower and, though Radu knew he was supposed to hate Hunyadi, he found himself in awe. Hunyadi rode into another man’s kingdom and the people he passed smiled and bowed. When Radu’s father was on horseback, he rode hunched over and leaning forward. Whether to arrive faster or to make himself a smaller target, Radu did not know. Hunyadi sat straight in his saddle, shoulders back, chest presented to the world in defiance of assassins’ arrows.
“We are too late,” Lada said. “All your information is worthless now.”
Radu’s eyelids felt heavy with shame. He had never managed to be useful to his father, and now, because of his cowardice and delay, he had failed once again.
Lada turned toward the door. “Well, we may as well see what doom the Transylvanian terror brings with him.”
Radu tripped over his own feet in his haste to keep up with Lada as she threw herself down the tower steps and into the great hall before Hunyadi arrived. She paused at the entrance and Radu slipped past her, finding a dim corner where he often stood unobserved. She elbowed him sharply in the side, and he made room for her.
A few minutes later, their father rushed in. His hat was askew, his mustache so recently curled Radu could still smell the oil. He sat down on his ornate throne, fixing his hat and breathing heavily.
He was sweating.
In that moment, Radu knew his father was no longer in control of Wallachia. Perhaps he never had been. The stinging taste of his father’s perfumed oil was heavy on Radu’s tongue as John Hunyadi strode confidently into the room.
“He is magnificent,” Radu whispered.
“He is the end of us,” Lada answered.
When his father pulled him out of bed, Radu was certain he was dreaming. He dressed in a sleepy, candlelit haze, his father’s murmured, anxious words washing over him. He knew it was a dream because his father had never been in his room before, had never helped him dress or asked if he would be warm enough. Radu was twelve, he was old enough to dress himself, but he let his father help.
He would not puncture this dream, not willingly.
It was not until they were outside in the sharp night air and Mircea arrived, leading horses, that panic set in. He and Lada were lifted onto saddles, though they could mount by themselves. Several Janissaries waited nearby, their horses huffing soft white clouds of breath.
“Where are we going?” Radu whispered. No one had told him to be silent, but a blanket of stealth and threat hung over them all and he did not want to disrupt it.