Bright We Burn

by Kiersten White

  Radu took a deep breath, closing his eyes against the anger flaring toward Lada and her ever-growing damage to the world they both had to live in. “I cannot imagine this is the worst of what awaits us, either.”

  Radu had been wrong all this time. He had felt guilty for the way his heart yearned for other men. But it was not his own love that was poisonous and destructive. His love destroyed nothing, hurt no one. Lada loved Wallachia above all else, and this was the result. What Mehmed and Lada did—because of what they set their hearts on with both people and land—was far worse than anything Radu’s love could ever lead him to do.

  It was an odd sort of thing to take comfort in, but he accepted it. Nazira was right. His love had no evil in it.

  He could not say the same for his sister’s.

  Tirgoviste

  LADA HAD NOT BEEN able to take a deep breath since she hit the outskirts of Tirgoviste. Closing the castle door behind her, she pulled off the cloth over her mouth and nose and gasped for air.

  “Yes, it is unpleasant out there,” Oana remarked, eyeing her with something like humor, though far darker.

  “They have not completed as much as I had hoped.” Lada leaned against the door as though her weight would help keep the air outside from coming in. The smell had followed her, but it was merely overwhelming, not unbearable.

  “They can only work in short shifts. We have to trade workers in and out more often than we had planned for.”

  “They can do more.”

  Oana laughed gruffly. “Not unconscious, they cannot. You will have to buy them a little more time.”

  “Fortunately that costs only effort and lives, not money. I can always give up more of the first two, but the third I am entirely lacking.” Lada rubbed the small of her back. It had been a long, hard ride, and she did not have the luxury of resting. Not that she thought she could sleep here. “Why are you still here? I want you in the mountains. Go to my fortress at Poenari.”

  Oana patted the top of Lada’s head in a way that made Lada wonder if it would be inappropriate to punch her old nurse in the stomach. “Child, are you worried about my safety?”

  “The entire city could burn down and you would be standing in the center, entirely unharmed, holding a comb and telling me it was time to deal with my hair.”

  Oana squinted. “It is looking rather the worse for wear.”

  “Oh, go hide in the mountains, you monster.” Before Lada could dodge, Oana wrapped her in a hug.

  “Be careful. We need you.” Oana squeezed too tightly, then released her and opened the door. The stench was so powerful that Lada staggered back as though struck. Oana did not even cover her face as she scuttled toward Lada’s horse.

  Lada slammed the door shut again. She needed to do one last sweep to make certain Mehmed would find nothing to his advantage here, should he manage to make it to the center of the city.

  In the throne room she found tiles still stained with the blood of her predecessor. The faded outline of the sword that once hung over her father’s head—now worn at her side—remained on the wall. In the halls she found ghostly whispers and memories of fear and rage. And in her chambers that had once belonged to her father, she found no memories at all worth taking.

  “Lada,” a man said behind her.

  She shouted in surprise, turning around with one dagger already drawn. Stefan was standing in a shadowed corner of the room. How long he had been there, she had no idea. Either she was slipping, or he was better than ever. She hoped it was the latter.

  “I am glad it is you.” Her heart still raced as she replaced her dagger in its wrist sheath.

  He remained as unmoving and still as his expression. His was such a forgettable face that when he was away, Lada had a hard time remembering what, exactly, he looked like. He tilted his head ever so slightly to the side as though Lada were a problem to be solved.

  “I have been paid a tremendous amount of money to kill you.” His voice was so emotionless it took Lada several seconds to process what he had said.

  Her hand twitched toward her wrist, but she stopped. She knew how deadly Stefan was. She had taken great pride in it. It was rather less pleasant knowing that, if he wanted her dead, she already was. At first, anger and sadness bubbled to the surface. But they were replaced with a bleak sort of pleasure. Had she not hoped that someday someone would realize she was deserving of an assassin of Stefan’s caliber?

  She would have preferred that day never come. But it was validating in its own morbid way.

  “How much?” she asked.

  “More than you have left to fund this fight.” He reached into his vest—his movements deliberate and slow—and pulled out a leather pouch. He tossed it onto the bed behind her. “That is not all of it. Or even most of it.” This time a hint of a smile, like a quickly fading dream, brushed over his face. “But you can use it how you see fit.”

  “So you are not going to kill me.”

  “I considered it.”

  She appreciated his honesty. If she had to kill him, she would be very sorry. “Why?”

  “Because if whoever wants you dead is willing to offer this much gold, someone will do the job sooner or later. I could do it in a manner befitting our long history.”

  “I think that is the most emotional sentiment I have ever heard you express about us.”

  This time his smile was real and lasting. She hoped she would remember it, even if she forgot his face. “I do not know who paid me to kill you. I suspect either Matthias Corvinus, because you are making him look weak in the fight against the infidels, or your Moldavian cousin, who is using your distraction to take back several border fortresses.”

  “God’s wounds. I liked him!” Lada rubbed her forehead, then shrugged. “Though I would do the same in his position. We are blood, after all.” She sat on the bed, tapping a foot against the worn carpet beneath it. “You do not think it was Mehmed?”

  “He has proved several times over he wants you alive. If you die because of him, it will be in battle and against his wishes.”

  Lada agreed. She felt the same way about sending an anonymous assassin after Mehmed. If he died, she wanted it by her hand. Anything else would feel unfinished.

  She did not know if she wanted him dead. All this maneuvering, all this horror and fighting and death between them, and still she did not think she preferred the world without him.

  She looked back up, wishing more than ever she had time to sleep. And when she awoke, Stefan would still be hers. So would Nicolae. And Petru. And Radu and Mehmed and everyone else she wished to have. “Where does this leave us?”

  “I cannot stay at your side when this is over. And…I do not wish to. You gave me something to fight for, and I am not ungrateful. But now I have something to live for. And long lives do not seem likely in your company.”

  Lada grinned at him. “I can see why Daciana fell for you, with a sweet tongue such as that.”

  Stefan cleared his throat, as though clearing away any emotion that had managed to work its way through.

  Though his choice was not unexpected, it still stung. She hated that Stefan would not be hers for much longer. It was good that Daciana was far away from Lada’s anger and resentment. Lada had liked her, too, but now that meant losing both of them. Her smile turned darker and sharper. “I have the family that you live for. You see this through to the end, whatever that may be, and I will give them back to you.”

  She expected anger, but Lada could swear something like affection disturbed Stefan’s calm. He inclined his head respectfully. “I started this at your side. I will finish it there. And then you will never see me again.”

  “Fair enough. Go get me word of the men Matthias is sending, and where we stand with the pope.”

  Stefan turned toward the door.

  “Stefan,” Lada said. He paused, his back toward her. She coul
d put a knife in it right now. But she did not reach for her blades. Perhaps she was tired, or just tired of seeing her friends bleed. Or perhaps it was because he had to know she could do it, and in spite of everything, he trusted her enough to turn his back on her anyway. “How would you have killed me?”

  “With all the gentleness you never had in life.” He walked out.

  For a few brief, mean seconds Lada considered sending word to have Daciana and the children killed. Stefan would not find out until it was too late. But she did not wish any of them dead. They had been her friends. That they would betray that friendship did not threaten her life or her success.

  She had been trying so hard not to lose anything or anyone. But she had been wrong to feel that way. They would all be gone one day, one way or another. She stood, striding from the room without bothering to look anywhere else in the castle. Nothing—and no one—was left inside that she could not afford to lose.

  And that was why she would win in the end. Because she would offer up everything on the altar of sacrifice, so long as she kept her country.

  Three Days South of Tirgoviste

  “DOES IT MAKE ANYONE else nervous that the prince has not yet attacked us?” Ali Bey asked, staring down at their map—which had been altered with notations for the new bogs and swampland. All the existing wells and cities had been crossed out. The map sat in the center of a table set up in Mehmed’s tent. Around it also stood Aron, Andrei, Radu, and the pashas, bleakly considering their options in ink and parchment.

  Aron’s face was as dour as the map. “She does not need to. It has taken us three weeks to get this far. We had planned for three days.”

  “How are we with supplies?” Radu asked.

  “Between the delays and the lack of anything to scavenge or claim, we are not doing well.” Ali Bey slammed his fist down on the table. “Why will she not just meet us out in the open?”

  Mehmed laughed, startling them and drawing their attention to the other end of his sumptuous tent, where he sat, apparently engrossed in a book about the life of the Prophet, peace be upon him. “Why would she? We have all the men and force on our side. But on her side she has time. She will wield it against us in whatever ways she can.”

  Ali Bey frowned, his bushy eyebrows drawing so low Radu wondered whether they tickled his eyes. “It sounds as though you admire her.”

  “Should I not admire excellence wherever I find it? I am certainly not finding any to admire in my current company.”

  The other men flinched. Radu felt the sting of the words, but they did not wound him as deeply as they once might have. There was something to be said for having his heart broken so many times. Broken things healed thicker and stronger than they were before. Assuming one survived long enough to heal.

  “The sultan is right,” Radu said. “Lada is using every advantage she has. But she does not have many at her disposal. We have to find the weak points and press them as hard as she has pressed ours.” He stared at the annotated map and the story it told. It was Wallachia, turned into a weapon. Lada was using their country the way she had always worshipped it: completely and viciously.

  Aron threw down his pen with a splatter of ink. “What are her weaknesses, then?”

  “People.”

  Hamza Pasha, the oldest man in the tent and leader of ten thousand spahi forces, snorted. “We have taken prisoners, and they are all mindlessly devoted to her, to the point of lunacy. We will find no weakness to exploit there.”

  “Not those people. Our people.” Radu turned to Aron and Andrei. “She has killed many boyars. Those that remain are loyal to her, but they cannot truly trust her. Not after what she has done. She is giving land and power to whomever she chooses. They must know their titles—their lives—are not safe so long as she is prince. She has too little regard for tradition and blood.”

  Andrei lifted an eyebrow. “It seems to me she has tremendous regard for blood. She simply prefers it spilled on the ground.”

  Mehmed gave a small laugh from the corner, but continued to keep his eyes on his book as though he were not following the conversation.

  Radu resisted the impulse to defend his sister. She did not deserve it, and she could defend herself. She had proved as much. “I have sent out men to find the remaining boyars. I will offer them an alternative to Lada’s reign of terror, and they will betray her.”

  “How can you be sure?” Ali Bey’s turban had come loose, revealing silver streaks in his black hair. He had lived far past the average Janissary life expectancy. Perhaps that was why he was leader—because of his experience, and his knack for not dying.

  “They are boyars,” Aron said with a wry smile. “It is what they do. They betrayed Radu’s father in favor of mine. They betray the memory of my father in favor of a prince they hate. If we offer them security and power, they will betray her. And, eventually, they will betray me.”

  Radu placed a hand on Aron’s shoulder. “We will see you on the throne. We will fix this.” Radu hoped that Aron could restore some of the balance Lada had upset. Although the more Radu saw of the country, the more he questioned how long it would take to return things to the way they had been. Lada had done so much in such a little time. Not only the destruction of the land—though that would take time to repair—she had also introduced her rebellious ferocity into a people long accustomed to accepting what was offered them and never demanding more. That infection of ideas would be far harder to recover from.

  And, perhaps, it should not be recovered from. Radu would suggest to Aron that he should capitalize on the new social structures, rather than immediately dismantling them. Lada focused only on common Wallachians, not the nobility. It was her weakness. But the nobility had proved their own weakness in so long ignoring the potential of their own people. If anything, Lada had proved Wallachians could do great things under the right leader.

  “Radu?” Andrei prodded.

  “Sorry, yes?” The conversation had continued, leaving him behind.

  “We have had outbreaks of sickness,” Hamza Pasha said. Even now he hung back, fanning his face though the tent was not overly warm. At these strategy meetings he was often quiet. Not out of reticence, but because he apparently thought himself above discussing strategy with three outsiders and a Janissary. The Janissary-spahi rivalry was maintained for a couple of reasons—so that neither group got too powerful, and so that they never banded together against the sultan—but it was deeply inconvenient at times like this.

  “And I should…” Radu trailed off, unsure what Hamza Pasha thought he should do about it.

  “It is your country making them ill. Perhaps you know something about it.”

  Radu recognized a power play when he saw it. Hamza Pasha knew Mehmed was listening, and wanted to remind them all that Radu, though a bey, was not and would never be one of them. That it was Radu’s country costing them so much. And that he was intimately tied to the person doing it all.

  Radu smiled sweetly. His handsome face earned him no advantage here, but old habits were difficult to shake off. “It made me sick having to live here, too. I was not whole until I found my home at our sultan’s side.” Certain that his own point had been made—he had more of the sultan’s ear than the pasha did—Radu stood. “But I will go see what needs to be done. Do tell me if this map reveals any secrets while you continue staring at it.”

  Radu walked from the tent, his steps light and confident. But his shoulders fell along with the flap behind him. Why was he still playing this game? What did he care about a stupid pasha questioning his value and his place in the empire?

  Mehmed had said nothing when Hamza Pasha challenged Radu. Radu understood on an academic level the need for a sultan to hold himself separate. But Mehmed had had no problem commenting when Lada was the topic. Radu was tired of his place in all of this. He had been making these same desperately calculated plays for power all his life.r />
  It came easily to him now, but that did not mean he enjoyed it.

  He made his way past the borders of the camp, where they kept those who were sick. There were a startling number of them. Mehmed’s insistence on sanitary methods of camp order usually kept sickness to a minimum. Maybe there was something about Wallachia that made people ill.

  Radu covered his mouth with his cape, walking slowly. A feverish man lay on the ground on a worn bedroll, covered in sweat and mumbling to himself. Radu paused, listening. The man was mumbling to himself not in Turkish, but in Wallachian.

  Radu grabbed one of the attendants. “This man. Where did he come from? Is he a Janissary?”

  The attendant shook his head. “No, just a worker. Most of the sick are not soldiers.”

  “That is good,” Radu said.

  The attendant gave him a witheringly dismissive look. “It is good until you need support for sixty thousand soldiers. And then it is devastating.”

  Embarrassed at the rebuke, Radu crouched closer to the sick man. The language had given Radu a terrible suspicion he needed to disprove. “What did the prince promise you?” he asked in Wallachian.

  The man had his eyes closed, but his mouth twitched in a smile. “My family. Land for my family.”

  Radu stood, dizzy. He had not expected to be right. He strode back to camp and found Kiril, the Janissary he used most among his group of four thousand. “Get me your whole unit. We have to go through the camp and interview everyone who is not a soldier.”

  “Why?” Kiril asked, but with curiosity, not judgment.

  “Because my sister is full of surprises. None of them pleasant. Look for Wallachians. And look for anyone who is ill.” There was no telling how many Wallachians had slipped in among the chaos of the massive camp. They had to check the cooks, the servants, the—oh, God’s wounds, the women who followed the camp to service any needs the men had.

  They had been dragging Lada’s weapons along with themselves the entire time.