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Lada’s eyes burned with a look the nurse had come to dread. That look meant injury, destruction, or fire. Often all three.
“Do not thank me. All I did was teach them to fear me. How does that help you? Next time you hit first, you hit harder, you make certain that your name means fear and pain. I will not be here to save you again.”
She studied the tree squeezing life out of stone. It was twisted and small but green, growing sideways in defiance of gravity. It lived where nothing had any business thriving.
Sometimes she imagined a shadowy figure standing at a stone altar. She would hold up her hand, and he would take everything she had for himself. She burned with hatred at the very idea of that man, waiting, waiting to make her crawl.
Lada had a sense for power—the fine threads that connected everyone around her, the way those threads could be pulled, tightened, wrapped around someone until they cut off the blood supply.
A small sob threatened to break free. What could she do? She had no power. Yet, she vowed. She had no power yet.
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.
“People forget I am listening. I am always listening.”
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.
Behold, the gardener, pruning treason.”
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…
Lately the tutor had been taking Lada and Radu on frequent tours of the prisons and torture chambers in addition to viewings of public executions. It seemed that they spent more time in the damp, airless corridors of the prisons than they did in their own rooms. Radu was constantly ill. His eyes were dark and sunken. He could barely eat, and he was plagued by nightmares. Lada suffered no such effects. Occasionally she informed her tutors when a torture method appeared to be less effective than others. They ground their teeth and whispered that she had no soul. She had a soul. At least, she was
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She composed herself before the tutor looked at her, his chest heaving and his eyes bright. Waiting for her reaction. If she killed him, they would kill her, and no one would be here to protect stupid, fragile Radu. Her stupid, fragile Radu. And if she got angry, the tutor would know—they would all know—how to control her. The same way they had known to control her father. The same way the Janissaries had known to hurt her by taking Bogdan away.
The tutor hit Radu again. Radu stayed on the ground, gasping out the answer, his words garbled by a split and swiftly swelling lip, but Lada did not look away from the tutor’s face. She kept a pleasant smile on her own, kept her hands loosely folded in her lap, kept control. Control was power. No one would make her lose it. And eventually the tutor would realize that she would let him hit Radu over, and over, and over. And only then would Radu be safe.
You can choose to be brave and compassionate. And you can choose to find beauty and happiness wherever they present themselves.”
The boy stood, stomping a foot. “I am no slave. This is my city!” Lada snorted. “And I am the queen of Byzantium.” She turned on her heel, pulling Radu along. “I will see you again!” the boy called. It was not a question, but a command. “I will burn your city to the ground,” Lada called back over her shoulder. The boy’s only response was a burst of surprised laughter. Lada was shocked when her lips answered with their first smile in weeks.
Lada spoke with a quiet, clear voice, and the room hushed in surprise. No one expected a girl to speak. She was probably not allowed to. Radu knew Lada would not care either way. “On our wedding night,” she said, “I will cut out your tongue and swallow it. Then both tongues that spoke our marriage vows will belong to me, and I will be wed only to myself. You will most likely choke to death on your own blood, which will be unfortunate, but I will be both husband and wife and therefore not a widow to be pitied.” Lada’s intended dropped the quill. A single spot of ink bled onto the marble floor.
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“People respond to kindness, Lada. They trust a smile more than a promise that you will leave them choking on their own blood.” Lada snorted. “Yes, but my promise is more sincere than your smiles.”
Her relief was tempered by the knowledge that they would find something else to hurt her with. They always did.
Lada amused herself by lying on her back, throwing a knife straight up to try to snag an apple. Sometimes she did. Sometimes the knife came back down and nearly stabbed her. She was equally entertained by both outcomes.
Belief is weakness.”
Religion was a means to an end. She had seen it wielded as a weapon. If she needed to use it, she would, but she would never allow herself to be used by it.
“Good. In the spirit of friendship, I must tell you that I am bitterly jealous of the time you spend in the Janissaries’ company. I want you to stop training with them.” “And, in the spirit of friendship, I must tell you that I do not care in the slightest about your petty jealousies. I am late for my training.” She hooked her foot behind Mehmed’s ankle, then slammed her shoulder into his, tripping him and throwing him to the ground. He sputtered in outrage. “I am the son of the sultan!” She pulled the door open, slicing her sword through the air in front of his throat. “No, Mehmed, you are my
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“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.”
“You see this”—Huma gestured to the room, the building, and finally to herself—“as a prison. But you are wrong. This is my court. This is my throne. This is my kingdom. The cost was my freedom and my body.” Her fine eyebrows raised, mouth playful, eyes hard. “So the question becomes, Daughter of the Dragon, what will you sacrifice? What will you let be taken away so that you, too, can have power?”
“But hands painted red are hands that do what needs to be done.”
I can listen, I can watch, I can trade false secrets for real ones, I can keep my finger on the pulse of life in that wretched man’s plans.
Lada was, in truth, an oddly graceful dancer. While there was nothing beautiful about her movements, there was a flow and power to them that was arresting to watch. Her sense of her own body moving through space was instinctive, well honed after so many years of training to fight. And if her expression looked as though she were plotting to murder her partner, well, Radu was used to that. He had missed it, actually.
“Did you not hear? Halima had a child not two months ago. She is still in confinement.” Lada could not help the gasp that escaped her. “Murad’s new son is Halima’s?” “Oh yes. She was violently ill all nine months of carrying him, and then nearly died giving birth. He is the ugliest infant I have ever laid eyes on. He never stops crying. Halima has never been happier.”
This love would break him. Unless Lada broke him now. It would not be the first time she had allowed him to be beaten down in order to protect him.
“You have both been so busy learning tactics and studying battles, you have failed to see the truth of where thrones are won and lost. It is in the gossip, the words and letters passed in dark corners, the shadow alliances and the secret payments. You think I am worthless? I can do things you could never dream of.”
“I am not one of you,” Lada said, her mouth right next to his ear. “I am better.”
“There is a body in the woods behind the fortress,” she said, watching the tunic contaminated by Ivan’s hands turn to ash. “What?” Mehmed’s hands hovered in midair, on either side of Lada’s hips. She turned to face him, carrying the fire in her eyes as a burning shield against everything she saw. “Also, I want to lead my own contingent of Janissaries.”
beat of his life beneath it. The pulse that thrummed for so long to the name of Mehmed. “I think
“We were not planning on the crowd.” Lada nodded toward them. “And yet you still managed to use them as a shield. Admirable. And also questionable. What if I had no qualms about firing into innocent bystanders?” Lada shrugged. “That would be on your shoulders, not mine. Besides, I know you, Ilyas. You are a man of honor.” He laughed. “And you?” “Not a man.”
“Give me charge of a frontier group of Janissaries. Let me pick them by hand—men who will not question my orders, who are not afraid to follow a woman. Let me train them how I see fit to be Mehmed’s personal guards. Twice now I have seen Mehmed’s life threatened. It would be advantageous to have a group that thinks differently and functions outside of normal Janissary movements. We will see things no one else does. And if people dismiss my soldiers because they are led by a woman, well”—she gestured to the men cleaning flour off their horses—“I can use that to my advantage.”
“You did it.” He elbowed her armored side. “Where do we start?” “I want Wallachians. Only Wallachians.” Nicolae raised his eyebrows. “And why would that be?” “If Ilyas asks, explain it is so that I can give commands in a language attackers will not understand.” “And if I ask?” “Because I do not trust men who fail to remember they were not born to this.”
Lada had picked him because he had been pulled from Wallachia at a relatively late age—he was already fourteen by the time he came to the Ottomans. But he was arrogant and thickheaded, with a mean streak that reminded her of her older brother Mircea. Sometimes it made her like him more. Most of the time it made her want to pitch him off the cliffs.
Do not ever think you are on their side, because they are not on yours. They fight to gain land, prestige, and wealth. We fight because it is the only thing given to us.”
“I am not going in as a woman. I am going in as an assassin. So we have nothing to fear.”
“You need me safe? Who will keep you safe? I have killed you again under your guard’s very noses.” He had the audacity to lie back on the floor and laugh. “Lada, no one in the world would ever be as devoted or ingenious in the pursuit of killing me as you are time and again.”
“Think bigger, little idiot.”
If we were not pushing, fighting, claiming what is ours and challenging what is not yet ours, others would be doing it to us. It is the way of the world. You can be the aggressor, you can fight against crusaders on their own land, or you can stay at home and wait for them to come to you. And they would come. They would come with fire, with disease, with swords and blood and death. Weakness is an irresistible lure.”
“The price of living seems to always be death.” Tohin stood, joints popping audibly. “And that is why you become a dealer of death. You feed death as many people as you can to keep it full and content so its eye stays off you.” A dealer of death. Lada carried the phrase back to the fortress on her tongue, rolling it around. Borders and aggression, sieges and sickness. Dealers of death.
For the first time ever, his life had been in danger and no one had been there to save him. He had saved himself. But no one had saved that boy in the forest, and Radu cried for him, wishing that someone had.
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.
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.
“I have always thought red was a better color for me than blue,” Nicolae said, his mouth and nose obscured by a veil as he plucked at his flowing skirts. “We speak of this to no one.” Mehmed’s voice was a growl. If anyone looked too closely at the new concubines, they would doubtless be terrified of the murder they saw in their faces.
The head gardener raised the stake, planting Ilyas. Ilyas, who had allowed her to train with his men. Ilyas, who had given her a chance to prove herself and accepted it when she did. Ilyas, who had given her responsibility in an empire where she should have been invisible. Ilyas, who had stabbed her.
“You once told me some lives are worth more than others. How many deaths before the scales tip out of our favor?” She had no answer.
