Lada laughed, showing all her sharp teeth. “Because when you are on the battlefield, honor will mean so much. You will die with a blade between your ribs, secure in the knowledge that you fought with manners.” She picked up her dull practice sword, abandoned on the edge of the circle, and swung it through the air, sweeping it across the line of the Janissaries’ collective throats.
“I would rather die in this ring at your hand than on the field in the name of the little zealot,” Nicolae said. The other Janissaries grumbled in assent. They had become more and more vocal in their complaints about Mehmed, about their work, about their pay. Lada did not fail to notice that their grievances were aired without regard for who could hear, indicating little fear of reprisal or reprimand.
“What is going on here?” A short man with piercing dark eyes, one ear a mangled, scarred stub, strode into the practice ring. The Janissaries snapped to attention.
“We were practicing, sir.” Nicolae stared straight ahead, as though if he did not look at Lada, the commander would not notice her.
She met the man’s gaze without batting an eye. “I train with these Janissaries.”
“Since when?”
“For months now. I traveled with them from Amasya.”
“We are not so lax in Edirne as they are in the outer regions. You will remove yourself.” He turned, effectively dismissing her.
“No.”
He cocked his head. “No?”
“No. I am doing no harm, and your men can certainly use the challenge.”
The man turned toward Nicolae. “Show this girl that she has no place on a field with Janissaries.”
Nicolae grimaced, rubbing the back of his neck. “Do I have to, Ilyas?”
“Did it sound like a request?”
“But I just fought with her. Make someone else go.”
Disbelief coloring his face, Ilyas gestured at one of the other Janissaries. He was a Wallachian, so Lada automatically liked him. With a beleaguered sigh, Matei stepped forward, picking up a practice sword. Lada had not fought him yet. The Edirne Janissaries always hung back, confused and wary, while the Amasya Janissaries were used to her.
Matei had decent form, his precise movements backed by a compact, powerful body. Lada had him disarmed and on the ground in six moves. The next Janissary took four. The third Janissary was more difficult, and it was a full minute before he, too, was beaten.
“Enough!” Ilyas took up a sword and strode into the center of the practice ring.
Lada attacked first—she always attacked first. He anticipated it, blocking her strike with bone-jarring force. He seemed to know what she would do before she did it, reading her as easily as Radu read people’s emotions.
After several of her failed attacks, Ilyas caught the edge of Lada’s sword, ripping it from her hands. Instead of backing away, she screamed and spun herself into him, past his sword, a dagger pulled from her wrist sheath at his neck.
He slammed his head into hers, knocking her to the ground.
The bright blue sky spun above her. Ilyas leaned into her view, holding out a hand. She took it, and he pulled her up. She refused to sway on principle, though her head complained bitterly.
Ilyas regarded her. “Carry on.” He walked away.
“I lost,” Lada said, hand against her head.
“No,” Nicolae answered, draping an arm across her shoulders. “I am pretty sure that means you won.”
“Lada!”
She turned, scowling, to find Radu running toward her. He was gasping and breathless. She crouched into a fighting stance, looking behind him for the threat, ready to kill whatever was chasing him. Instead, he grabbed her by the shoulders. His eyes shone with panic or excitement or both.
“Hunyadi. The pope. They have declared a crusade. They are already marching.”
Lada blinked. Even as she wrote to Hunyadi, she doubted anyone would listen to her. They must have already been poised on the brink of attack, waiting for an opening. And now they were taking it. She threw her head back and laughed, a barking, strangled sound like that made by the stray hounds that slunk through the streets of Tirgoviste. “Hunyadi! A crusade!”
Matei shouted a command, and the Janissaries left, instantly falling into formation as they headed to the barracks for more information. Radu had not let go of Lada’s shoulders, his grip crushing. Lada looked at his face, the tightness and fear there.
“What? This is what we wanted. What Mehmed wanted. It will force Murad to take the throne again.”
Radu shook his head. “No, there is more. Father…he sent troops. Mircea leads a contingent of Wallachians.”
For one brief, glorious moment, Lada’s heart swelled with pride for her father. He had finally found his spine, had come down in defense of his own people, against—
Against the country that held their very lives as collateral.
“He has sacrificed us,” Radu whispered.
Lada squeezed the pommel of her practice sword until her fingers cramped. Mara’s talk of duty to one’s country was meaningless if one’s country cared nothing for its duty to you. “He sacrificed us years ago. But I will be damned if I let him kill us.” She dropped her sword and grabbed Radu’s wrist, pulling him along behind her as she rushed to the main wings of the palace. Her head ached, a bump already growing where Ilyas had struck her, but she did not have time to indulge the pain.
“Mehmed will not let them kill us. He is the sultan now.” Radu sounded as though he was trying to convince himself.
Lada hissed, nearly laughing at the irony. “We engineered this whole situation to get his father to be sultan again. Mehmed may not have a say for long. We are running. Right now. We can slip out during the confusion of troop movements.”
“With what supplies? With what money? Even if we make it out of the city, we have no way of getting back to Wallachia.”
Lada skidded to a stop in front of the door to their small apartments within the palace. Mehmed paced there, hands behind his back, forehead creased in worry. With him was a contingent of guards, and Halil Pasha, the main advisor he had inherited from his father. The man responsible for Lada’s stay as captive. If Halil Pasha was here, Mehmed must have lost the argument to protect Lada and Radu. Her fingers twitched toward her wrist sheaths, where she had not removed the daggers.
Mehmed looked up, his expression unchanging. Lada lifted her chin in defiance. If she and Radu were to be punished for their father’s actions, she would not let it happen without a fight. The first man to touch Radu would die.
“There you are!” Mehmed hurried forward, waving for Lada and Radu to join him. “You are excused, Halil Pasha.” Then the guards were not here for Lada and Radu. Lada did not relax her posture.
The older man narrowed his eyes. “We still have much to discuss.”
“I said you are excused!”
Lada noted with interest the look of derision that crossed Halil Pasha’s face, and the petulant tone to Mehmed’s voice. It was not the tone of someone in power.
She met Halil Pasha’s shrewd eyes. As he walked away, she could practically see the threads trailing from him, snagging on everything he passed. Mehmed was sultan, but he was not in power.
They were escorted to Mehmed’s new chambers, which were even more opulent and dizzying than his previous ones. He instructed his guards to remain outside, then slammed the doors shut and threw himself onto a pillow.
“He will not come.”
“What?” Lada walked the borders of the room, tracing the gold patterns painted onto the walls.
“My father. He has refused to come lead the armies. He says that I am sultan now, and it is my job. I will do it if I must, the best I can. But I am not ready to face Hunyadi!”
Radu spoke up, voice high and fast with the relief that they were still safe. For now. “Lada could tell you about Hunyadi’s tactics. She studied him.”
Lada’s eyes cut at Radu like a knife. “Yes, and I can tell you that he and his forces ha
ve the blessing of God and the fervor of a renewed crusade. That he uses wagons as mobile barricades, that he is organized and swift and brutal. That they have been waiting for this opportunity to unify them for years, and they will descend on your holdings like a swarm of locusts. And I can tell you that your Janissaries—the soldiers you need to obey you without question—call you names behind your back and complain of poor wages and treatment. I can only imagine you are equally popular with the spahis.” Spahis had even more to lose under an unsuccessful sultan. They had land and wealth, prestige and influence. All the Janissaries had were their lives and their salaries.
Mehmed threw his hands up in despair. “I know I am not ready to face Hunyadi! That was never the plan. I need my father!”
His voice broke at the end of the sentence, and Lada realized with a pang that he had been thrown to the wolves just as she and Radu had. His father had abandoned him, sacrificed him, as assuredly as their own had. If this war did not devour him, men like Halil Pasha would.
Lada sighed, sitting down near Mehmed and leaning back to look at the grandeur of the ceiling’s carved geometrics. “Your father says you are the sultan.”
Mehmed clicked his tongue in annoyance. “Yes, that is the problem.”
“That is the solution. If you are the sultan, he must obey your command to come and lead your armies. And if you are not the sultan, he must come back and lead his armies.”
A slow smile spread across Mehmed’s face. “Lada, I think I love you.”
She slammed her fist into his shoulder, and he slouched away, looking at her in outrage. “How dare you strike me!”
“I dare perfectly well. Now go write your missive. The crusade is not waiting, and neither should you.”
While Mehmed went to gather his writing tools, Radu stood in the middle of the room, wringing his hands. “What about our father? What should we say?”
“We say nothing. We do nothing. You do not poke a sleeping bear to ask what it will do when you wake it up.”
“I think I have an idea, though. To keep us safe.”
Lada let out a dismissive puff of air between her lips. “I keep us safe. Remember what I told you in the stables when Mircea was torturing you?”
A smile finally broke through Radu’s concern. It lit his face with a beauty to rival the ceiling. “You would not let anyone else kill me.”
“That honor is mine and mine alone.”
Radu finally relaxed, sitting back on a pillow and flinging his arms wide. He was still such a child in so many ways, and Lada wanted to keep him that way.
Or force him to leave it behind forever.
She never could decide which, and it nagged at her.
Only when Radu was no longer looking did Lada let her smile fade into a calculating frown. She had to keep them safe from Murad’s wrath. She had to turn Mehmed’s rule to their advantage, but she did not know how.
“WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” Radu asked, though he knew the answer.
Lada finished tugging on her boots. She wore trousers beneath her skirts, the skirts ill-fitting and put on almost as an afterthought. “To train.”
“Even with all the Janissaries gone to fight?”
“There are a few left.”
Radu scowled. “You are such good friends with the Janissaries. I never see you.” He tried to keep the pleading out of his voice, but he was lonely. Mehmed was always busy, and Radu dreaded ever becoming the nuisance he had been viewed as by Lada and Bogdan growing up. When Mehmed wanted him, he was there without question or delay. But if Mehmed did not call for him, Radu drifted, listless.
Lada did not respond, and Radu could not resist digging at her. “Do you remember when we came here?”
“Of course I remember. It has only been a few weeks. Are you stupid?”
“No, I mean the first time we came here. With Father.”
She got quiet, then. They never spoke of their father, not to each other nor to anyone else. Tension pulled around Lada’s eyes that Radu felt, too, as though merely by invoking their father’s memory someone would realize that his contract with the Ottomans was broken and Lada’s and Radu’s lives were the price.
“You were angry with me the whole time.”
“I am always angry with you, Radu. Say what you mean.”
“You were angry with me because I befriended the enemy. Riding with the Janissaries, talking with them. I simply find it…amusing that now they are your dearest companions.”
A flurry of emotion descended on Lada’s face. Guilt, Radu suspected, though the rage that followed was more familiar. She finally settled on derision. “I do not have to answer to you. Go crawl on your belly in front of their god. At least I have a sword in my hands.”
The door slammed behind her, punctuating her exit. Radu sighed and rubbed his face, wondering what he had hoped to accomplish by needling his sister. Did he want her to stop training with the Janissaries? Or did he want her to admit that she had accepted this as their home? Because if she admitted it, then he finally could, too.
The unfairness pricked at him—that she could hate them and enjoy them at the same time. If anyone deserved to be friends with the Janissaries, it was him. He had never found Lazar again and wondered about his fate, wishing he were here to joke with and to help Radu find a place he belonged, as he had so long ago in the stables.
His soul sputtering like a candle at the end of its wick, Radu went in search of Molla Gurani. The tutor was in his chambers, studying. He weighed Radu with his eyes and stood. “Let us walk.”
Lada loved to make comments about how dull Molla Gurani was, claiming he was the bastard son of a shepherd who had become too amorous with the sheep. She used to repeat his lessons at night in a bleating monotone until Radu begged her to stop, worried her version would replace the real lessons in his mind.
Radu found Molla Gurani deeply comforting, his ascetic demeanor restful and safe. When they were standing in front of a fountain, Radu blurted out what he could not admit to Lada. He had come so close, had even thought that if he presented it as a secret plan to save their lives she might agree. But he was alone in this, as always. “I want to convert.”
Molla Gurani simply blinked and nodded, as though Radu had commented on the weather.
“No one can know. I mean, would that be acceptable? If it was just between God and me?”
“A true conversion is always only between a man and God.”
Radu wiped his brow, relieved. If Lada found out that he had made it official, he worried it would break what remained of their bond. Whatever else she was, Lada was his family, his childhood, his past. They had to stay together.
A man walked past them, his robes formal but unfamiliar. He was slender with a pronounced belly, like his middle was a bulb anchoring slender branches. His face was devoid of hair. Not clean-shaven, but hairless. Molla Gurani inclined his head, and the two men exchanged a greeting. The hairless man looked toward Radu as though expecting an introduction.
“Radu is one of my students. Radu, this is the chief eunuch,” Molla Gurani said.
Radu knew it was a title of some sort, but he did not know what level of respect he was supposed to show. Embarrassed, he asked, “What is a eunuch?”
For the first time he could recall, Molla Gurani looked ill at ease.
The chief eunuch smiled, though, and gestured for Radu to join him. “Walk with me and I will tell you.”
Radu stood neck-deep in the water, then bent his knees to leave only his nose and eyes above the surface. The steam rising all around him obscured the patterns of blue and white tile, everything a dizzying blur of heat and color. In Wallachia, they had only bathed during the summer when they stayed on the banks of the Arges. The rest of the time they washed with cloths and basins. Baths were a luxury of the Ottomans he savored.
Lada enjoyed no such comforts. Though the palace bath had certain hours set aside for women, Lada refused to use them. There was a permanent private bath for women, but it was in
the harem complex. Lada, of course, could not and would not set foot there. Radu had heard tales of women who entered the harem as a method of divorcing their husbands. The chief eunuch had more stories than anyone in the whole city, and Radu loved hearing them.
But no matter. Lada could spend her free time with the soldiers and their crude jokes and their worse smell. Radu spent his studying the scriptures and the teachings of the Prophet. The feeling he found in holy words was one he could only compare to the long afternoons he had spent with his nurse, sitting by the fire, safe and separate from the rest of the world. He could not quite describe it, and hid it as well as he could from Lada, but when he listened to the call to prayer it felt like home inside his heart.
He wanted to ponder this more, and to practice the words of conversion he said so many times in his heart but never aloud, so he was glad for the solitude of the baths today. He always went at odd times to avoid a crowd. He had begun sprouting hair in new places, his legs aching every night with the stretching pull of time finally claiming his childhood. Besides, there was the curious effect the warm water had on his developing manhood, which he quite enjoyed and preferred to experience alone.
Poor eunuchs. Though the chief eunuch said being castrated and sold was the only future his parents had been able to offer him, Radu did not think it was very kind. The chief eunuch was powerful, yes, in charge of the entire harem and privy to the inner workings of the empire, but what a sacrifice!
Radu closed his eyes, let his arms float, felt all the tension swirl away from him.
Then someone grabbed his ankles and dragged him under the water.
He kicked out, terrified and frantic, remembering the times Mircea would hold his head beneath the fountain until his vision went dark and his lungs nearly burst for want of air. A horrible thought clawed through Radu’s panic. Had Mircea been killed in battle and sent his spirit to drag Radu down with him?
As his scream bubbled out around him, Radu’s foot connected with a shoulder and he twisted free. He surfaced, spluttering.
Mehmed popped up next to him, water streaming down his face, white teeth shining. No ghost. Mehmed teasing, not Mircea tormenting. Mehmed’s laughter echoed around them, filling the room until they were completely cocooned by it.
And I Darken Page 12
