No one answered.
The horses moved forward, a cart loaded with supplies in the middle of the party and Janissaries surrounding them. Radu looked over his shoulder to see Mircea standing with a torch, watching them leave. Staying behind. Smiling.
Radu shivered. He had not been frightened until he saw the look of triumph on Mircea’s face. Nothing that made his older brother look that happy could be good.
As his wariness abated, Radu dozed on and off in his saddle, startling awake several times when he nearly slid off. One of the times a hand steadied him, and he found Lazar next to him, holding the reins of Radu’s horse and his own. Comforted, Radu snuggled deeper into his cloak and was lost to the lullaby of hooves and the whisper of leather.
They made camp well after the sun had risen. Their party was small. Several Janissaries, a few servants, a driver for the supply cart, Lada, and their father.
Radu rubbed his sore neck, then realized with a start that his nurse was not with them.
“Lada!” He tugged on her sleeve, interrupting her ferocious attempt to braid her hair. “They forgot Nurse!”
She glared at him, eyes red and tight with exhaustion. She watched the camp around them warily, tracking the movements of the soldiers. “She is not coming.”
Radu swallowed hard against the painful lump in his throat. He had never been a day without his nurse. Here with his father, but not his nurse? He had the same sensation as when he had been out on the ice and felt it shifting beneath him, threatening to plunge him into frozen terror. “But how long will we be gone?”
Lada strode past him, ripping her bundle of possessions out of Lazar’s arms. “That is mine,” she snapped. “Never touch my things.” She turned on her heel and stalked away, toward their father’s tent.
Lazar made an exaggerated bow, then winked at Radu. “Charming girl, your sister.”
Radu’s mouth formed a smile for the first time all day. “You should see her when she has had enough sleep.”
“Is she nicer?”
“Oh no, far worse.”
Lazar’s laugh made Radu feel lighter. Lazar motioned for him to follow, and he did, helping the Janissaries unload and set up their spare, efficient camp.
They traveled this way for more days than Radu thought to count. At first he worried about what his father would think of how he spent his time, but his father never so much as spoke to him or Lada. He wore his worry in the gloom of his brow, wrapped around him tighter than his cloak. He muttered, practicing some sort of speech, waving away anyone who got too close.
So Radu was free to ride with the Janissaries. He loved the constant jokes, the exaggerated stories, the calm and easy way they rode, as though they were not fleeing—which Radu suspected was the case, though no one would tell him—but rather on an adventure.
“Your sister rides like a man,” one of the soldiers—a quiet Bulgarian with an old scar cutting across his chin—said one day as they passed through a rocky valley.
Radu shrugged. “They tried to teach her to ride like the ladies, but she refused.”
“I could teach her to ride like a lady,” the Bulgarian said, something in his tone different. A few of the other Janissaries laughed, and Radu shifted uncomfortably, certain he had missed something, but unsure what.
“Too young,” Lazar said dismissively.
“Too ugly,” another soldier added.
Radu glared, but he could not tell who had said it. He watched his sister ride tall and proud and alone. “She could beat any of you.” The soldiers laughed, and he scowled. “I mean it. Any one of you.”
“She is a girl,” the Bulgarian said, as though that were the end of any discussion.
“Shhh.” Lazar shook his head. “I think no one has told her this. We would not want her to hear it from us.” He grinned at Radu, bringing him in on the joke, and Radu smiled, though it was not as easy as his smiles for the Janissaries usually were.
After that, Radu spent more time riding beside Lada. She pretended not to notice, but she held her shoulders a little more loosely when he was next to her. Her hands drifted frequently to a small leather pouch, tied around her neck and tucked under her collar. Radu wondered what was in it, but he knew better than to ask.
They were going south, through Bulgaria, studiously avoiding any cities as they picked their way across valleys and over steep terrain. Radu had gleaned enough to know that they were heading for the Ottoman capital of Edirne. The closer they got, the further into his cloak their father retreated. He spoke only when he had to, casting heavy, worried looks at Lada and Radu over the evening fire.
“I am sending them back,” he said, several nights into the journey. “I do not want them with me. They slow us, and the boy is too weak to travel so far. He has always been delicate.”
Radu did not realize whom his father meant until all the Janissaries turned toward him and Lada. What had they done wrong? Radu had kept his homesickness and his longing for his nurse to himself. Surely no one had noticed him crying silently the first two nights. He had ridden without complaint, helped set up and take down camp, done everything right!
He expected Lada to protest their father’s rejection, but she remained silent, staring at the fire. Their father looked anywhere but at them, his face a mask in the darkness.
Lazar rested a hand on Radu’s shoulder. “Radu is doing very well. He rides like a seasoned soldier. Besides, we cannot spare a guard for them. The sultan’s hospitality is beyond compare. You would not want to deprive your children of the opportunity to experience his generosity.”
Radu’s father sniffed and turned his face away, staring into the night. “Very well. It is all the same.”
He retired to his tent, and for the rest of the trip he neither spoke to nor looked at them. Radu tried to ask Lada about it, but she, too, was silent and preoccupied.
When at last they came over the crest of a hill and saw Edirne laid out before them, Radu’s heart seized with joy and wonder. The buildings were pale white stone, the roofs red. Streets lined with spring-green trees weaved through it all, leading to a building with a spire so high that Radu was surprised it did not scratch the blue of the sky. Several domes made up its roof, and another, shorter spire rose to greet the party, welcoming them.
Nearby was a large, imposing building, its outside striped red and white with alternating brick and stone, but Radu could not take his eyes off the spires that reached so confidently for heaven.
They had arrived.
1448: Edirne, Ottoman Empire
VLAD WALKED BEHIND SULTAN Murad, half stooped from bowing so often. Lada watched with resigned wariness. Radu was at her side, clinging to her like a small child. She had to pry his hand off her arm, where he was wrinkling the sleeve of her finest dress. He had acted as though their journey here was playtime and befriended the soldiers. The enemy soldiers. Radu was a fool. They had not journeyed here, they had fled. Leaving the throne in the waiting hands of Mircea.
Mircea, who had long curried favor with the boyars and Hunyadi. Mircea, who promised to hold the prince title in wait for his father’s return.
Lada had no doubt her father would need an army to return, and not just against the boyars and Hunyadi.
For a few precious hours Lada had nurtured a dream that perhaps she could find Bogdan here, but all hope had vanished. They had been welcomed with rooms prepared just for them. Lush, perfumed, and pillowed prisons they had not been permitted out of for the past two days. Vlad had paced so much, muttering and practicing speeches, that sweat soaked his silk undershirt. Radu had stared out the window, which was framed by metal twisted and shaped like vines. Lada had watched her father, his threads snapped. One left. One single thread that he desperately hoped to loop around the sultan and his mercurial support.
She tugged Radu’s hand to make him walk faster so they could keep up with the party of adults. This was not the behavior Lada expected from Vlad Dracul. From her father. From a dragon. A dragon did not crawl
on its belly in front of its enemies, begging for their help. A dragon did not vow to rid the world of infidels, and then invite them into its home. A dragon did not flee its land in the middle of the night like a criminal.
A dragon burned everything around herself until it was purified in ash.
The party came to a stop on a balcony overlooking a square paved in intricately swirled tiles of bright blue and yellow. Edirne was beautiful—ornate and stately, but with a dizzying elegance to everything. Lada distracted herself by imagining razing it to the ground.
“It is settled, then,” the sultan said, not looking at her father while he spoke. His eyes were dark points beneath carefully shaped eyebrows that were turning silver with age. He was cradled in silks, an enormous turban towering above and around his head. He traced the line of his mustache down into his beard, fingers glinting with jeweled rings. “I will send you back with a Janissary guard and the full support of the Ottoman throne. You will pay a yearly tribute of ten thousand gold ducats and five hundred Janissary recruits for the honor of our patronage, and you will ensure that our interests are protected along your Hungarian and Transylvanian borders.”
Lada stopped listening as her father bowed and made promises and expressed his gratitude. The sultan left, leaving behind one of his advisors, Halil Pasha, to finalize the details of the agreement.
She no longer cared. For all its beauty, Edirne was alien and cold, the earth beneath her foreign and uncaring. Five times a day a voice somewhere near her window called out a song in a language she did not know, its inescapable notes stabbing into her. Radu became excited whenever the singing happened. Lada plugged her ears.
Wallachia was out there, somewhere. Her Wallachia. Though she despised her father for his weakness, at least it would get her home again.
Several soldiers dragged two bound men into the center of the square. Lada noticed a series of holes in the ground, the tiles surrounding them stained dark. The prisoners were laid on the ground next to the holes. A man dressed in flowing lavender robes with a brilliant red plumed turban entered the square. More soldiers, carrying two long, sharpened planks of wood, followed.
“Ah.” Halil Pasha interrupted Vlad’s continued praising of the sultan. Though her father was a prince and Halil Pasha merely the Ottoman equivalent of a noble, the other man acted as though Vlad should pay him deference. And Vlad did.
Halil Pasha swept a hand toward the courtyard. “Here is the head gardener.”
Lada wondered if she had mistranslated. The man looked nothing like a gardener, and there were no plants in the empty square.
Halil Pasha kept his eyes on the courtyard. “As a further favor to you, our court will oversee the education of your children.”
The blood drained from her father’s face. “You are too generous. I could not accept such an offer.”
“It is our pleasure to teach them.”
Vlad looked at the square, where the two bound men had been stripped of their clothing. He met Lada’s questioning eyes, and his own widened with an expression she had never before seen in them.
“Radu, then,” he said, hurriedly. “The girl is due for a convent. She is far too willful and contrary to be taught, and anyway, education is wasted on women.”
Normally such a statement would have enraged Lada, but she was unnerved by her father’s face. Last year she had wandered out to the slaughterhouse, drawn by the noise of the pigs. She had expected them to scream only when being killed, but instead they began screaming, their eyes rolling back in terror, at the mere scent of their littermates’ blood.
That was the expression flickering beneath her father’s composed features, betrayed by the whites showing around his dark irises.
“Hmm.” Halil Pasha stroked his thick beard thoughtfully. “We would hate for an unfortunate marriage to shift your allegiances westward. You have a history of forgetting your promises. Besides, the girl speaks perfect Turkish; I have noticed that she understands all our conversations. Time and attention has been put into her education. A great deal of care. Our children are our most precious possessions, are they not? The sultan wanted Radu, but I insist we educate both of them.”
Her father swallowed roughly, eyes lingering on Lada’s. Then he turned away and nodded.
“It is settled, then,” Halil Pasha said. “We will keep Radu and Ladislav here with us so they will be safe while you remember to serve our interests on the Wallachian throne.”
Radu looked to Lada, trying to put together what he was hearing. Lada understood perfectly well what this man was saying. Their lives were valuable only insofar as their father did what he was told. And instead of just taking Radu, Halil Pasha had known what her father valued the most.
All those years working toward her father’s love and approval had led her here.
It had made her a prisoner.
The Ottomans held all the threads, and they had looped Vlad’s around his own neck. Lada had known that her marriage, her future, was a tool for bargaining, but she had never considered that the very spark of life itself was something to be traded and bartered. And that her father would be so willing to do precisely that.
“Ah! They are ready. Your education starts now, young ones. Behold, the gardener, pruning treason.”
They watched as the head gardener slit an opening into each man and then, with practiced efficiency, inserted the long, thick wooden stakes. The men were lifted into the air, and the stakes planted into the holes in the ground. Lada saw how the men’s own weight would slowly pull them down, forcing the stakes higher and higher along their spines until they finally exited through the throat.
She did not stop staring, but something behind her eyes shifted and changed the scene. She needed to see it differently. These men were not real. They did not matter. It was not real. Their screams were distracting. She was trying to think. She needed to focus on her threads. She clutched the pouch around her neck and stared at the men until they blurred into indistinct shapes. There. They were not real.
She felt Radu squeezing her hand, heard him gasping for breath through sobs. She saw the anguish written across their father’s face. Whatever underhanded dealings he had anticipated with this new treaty, he could no longer act. He had made the critical error of loving his children—or Lada, at least—enough that they could be used against him.
Love and life. Things that could be given or taken away in a heartbeat, all in the pursuit of power. She could not avoid her own spark of life. Love, however…
Lada let go of Radu’s hand.
She took a step away from him and watched as the head gardener finished his work.
Lada hated herself for it, but she loved the food. Delicately spiced meats with cool, contrasting sauces, roasted vegetables, fresh fruits—every bite she enjoyed felt like treason. She should miss everything about Wallachia. She should hate everything about Edirne.
But oh, the sweetness of the fruit. Perhaps she had a bit of Eve in her after all.
The clothes, too, were infinitely preferable. A light entari robe was worn over flowing skirts and woven tunics. Everything was bright and soft, far less restrictive and binding than the fashions in Tirgoviste. Easier to move in. Easier to breathe in.
It should be harder to breathe here, with the air of her enemies surrounding her. Lada rebelled where she could, wearing her hair loose instead of elegantly wrapped as was the fashion, holding on to her shoes from Wallachia, and always keeping her precious tiny pouch around her neck and tucked against her heart.
Because food and clothing could never replace what she had left behind, and she would not forget.
She picked through a bowl of dates, sucking on them as noisily as she could to annoy their tutor. He was currently instructing them on the military structure of the empire. Which was better than religious instruction, but still odious.
“How are spahis different from Janissaries?” Radu’s forehead wrinkled as he tried to sort through the information they were receiving.
r /> The tutor looked bored. He always looked either bored or angry. It was the only thing Lada felt they had in common. “Spahis are local garrisons, citizens of the Ottoman Empire. They are not regular troops; they are called up when we have need of them. Local valis of small areas, or beys of larger cities, lead them as appointed by the sultan. Janissaries are a standing force, their only role to be soldiers.”
“Slaves,” Lada said.
“They are educated, paid, and the best-trained soldiers in the world.”
“Slaves,” Lada said again, her inflection never changing. Radu squirmed next to her, but she refused to look at him.
“Janissaries can rise to meteoric heights. We recognize and reward the exceptional. Some Janissaries even become beys. Like Iskander Bey, who…” The tutor trailed off, blanching as though a bad taste were in his mouth.
Lada sat forward, finally intrigued. “Who is Iskander Bey?”
“A poor choice of example. I had forgotten about recent events. He was a favorite of the sultan, promoted to bey and given the territorial city of Kruje, in his homeland of Albania. He has…not been cooperative since then. It is a deep betrayal and shameful to the highest degree.”
Lada laughed. “So your sultan educated and trained him, and now he is using that knowledge to fight you? I think he is a perfect example.”
Their tutor sat back in disgust, glaring at Lada, while Radu toyed nervously with his quill. “Let us move on. Repeat the five pillars of Islam.”
“No. I like this other subject very much. I want to know more about Iskander Bey.”
The tutor pulled out a wooden switch and tapped it menacingly against his leg. Lada’s hands were purpled with bruises, yellow in the spots that had not yet been covered by fresh bruises. Doubtless they would be soon. She leaned back, stretching languorously.
“Perhaps we should visit the dungeons,” the tutor growled.