“We all do, I suspect.” Radu drew his legs up, wrapping his arms around them and resting his chin atop his knees. There! A fleeting glimpse, but Lada saw her Radu.
“Tell me what has happened to you. And why are you in Mehmed’s tent? Are you—do you stay here now?” Lada kept her voice as even as she could to avoid betraying anything. But Radu was always better at emotion, better at reading people than she could ever be.
He laughed. She stood, bristling. Radu waved one hand, gesturing for her to sit back down. “No, I do not stay here now. I am in Mehmed’s tent because you came here tonight to kill him, did you not?”
“Of course I did,” Lada snapped.
Radu sighed, stretching his legs out again. “He did not believe me.”
“He is a fool. Surely after all these years of studying him you have discovered that.” Lada felt the pressure of time pushing down on her. She had spent too long here already. Her task should have been finished by now.
“Do you think it was him that came between us? Or were we destined to end up on opposite sides?”
Lada felt an unfamiliar heaviness behind her eyes. “We had to survive. We just figured out different ways to do it.” It struck her, then, how they had lived the exact same childhood. How had the same circumstances shaped them in such divergent ways?
“So you do not blame Mehmed?”
“Of course I do! I blame him for a great many things.” She kicked a pillow in exasperation. “Why, tonight of all nights, do I finally find someone who has beaten me at my game of ‘Kill the Sultan’? Tell me where he is and then flee the camp. I will send word that you are not to be killed.”
“I had a chance, once,” Radu said, slowly standing. “In Constantinople. Emperor Constantine trusted me. And I watched as good people on both sides were dying, smashed in blood and bone and terror against each other by immovable forces. Mehmed on one side of the wall, Constantine on the other. And I liked them both.” Radu smiled wryly. “Though of course we both know where my heart was. There was one moment, one perfect chance to end it all. To take a life and spare thousands, tens of thousands, by making that choice.”
Lada did not know what this story had to do with her. “Well?” she prompted, impatient.
“I made no choice. And because of it, Constantine still died, but countless others died alongside him who might have been spared had I made a choice. You would have made the choice.”
Lada would have. It was a simple scenario. But she had a nagging feeling she did not like where this story was leading. “You could have killed Mehmed instead, you know.”
“Do not pretend like that was ever an option.”
But something tired and worn down in Radu’s face suggested otherwise. There was potential there. An opportunity. To get him back—and to end this. Lada crossed the space to him and took his shoulders in her hands. “Tonight. Tonight, it is an option. We can kill him. For Wallachia. We can finally be free of the cage our father crafted for us, once and for all. Make the right choice tonight.”
Radu, so much taller, so much fairer, looked down on her. He stepped forward, folded her into a hug. She stood stiff, unsure how to respond.
“I hope I already have,” he said. Then, raising his voice, “Come in.”
He held Lada tighter, pinning her arms to her sides and smashing her face against his chest so she could not see what was happening. “I do not want to see you ended,” he said. “I could not bear it. I am sorry.”
Lada stomped on his foot and shoved her way free. Ten Janissaries had entered, swords drawn. And from behind a flap where he had heard everything, Mehmed stepped free with cold murder on his face.
26
One Day South of Tirgoviste
“YOU CHOSE HIM again,” Lada said.
Radu expected fury, rage, the Lada who had been the terrifying center of his childhood, ruling everything with her temper and her fists. Instead, his sister looked resigned. Tired, even. She spoke in Wallachian, changing from the Turkish they had been conversing in.
Radu answered back in the tongue of their shared history. “I did not choose him. I chose what I felt would create the best, most fertile ground for lives and faith. Look at your country, Lada. Do you really think you are growing a future here?”
“You know nothing about it! In the time since I have taken the throne, crime has disappeared. My people need not lock their doors, need not sleep beside their livestock for fear they will be gone in the morning. They no longer require an armed guard just to travel from village to village. My country is prospering like never before!”
“You turned an entire plain into marshes. You poisoned wells and burned bridges. You have cut a swath of destruction across the countryside.”
“Because he was coming!” Lada gestured sharply in Mehmed’s direction. Radu did not look at Mehmed, certain Mehmed would signal him to speak in a language he could understand. The Janissaries edged closer. Radu was surprised to find he wished he had not called them so soon. This conversation with Lada felt like it might—like it would—be their last. And he did not want it to end.
She might have found him changed, but he found her more precisely, more powerfully herself than she had ever been. He was … proud. In spite of everything. And it made him devastatingly sad. She had worked so hard and fought so long for this. They were going to take it all away.
This was the first time the three of them—once inseparable—had been in the same room since Lada left. Everything had changed. And nothing had. She was still choosing Wallachia over them. Radu was still supporting Mehmed. And Mehmed was still demanding they both be his. The stakes had just gotten higher.
Radu sighed. It could have been such a different reunion. Well, no. Not with Lada. But it should have been different. “We came because you forced us to. We did not want this.”
Lada shook her head, but there was something evasive in her expression that hinted to Radu she knew he was right. “I only sped up the inevitable. He was never going to let me have this.”
“All you had to do was make concessions. We would have given you—”
“It is not his to give me! Wallachia is mine, and I owe nothing to him or anyone else!”
“That is why you will lose it!” Radu shouted. “Because of your refusal to bend. Because of your damnable pride! We offered you peace.”
“And came armed with usurpers to betray and replace me!”
Radu threw up his hands in exasperation. “You cannot accuse us of betrayal. Not when you agreed to sign a treaty and came here to assassinate Mehmed.”
Lada opened her mouth to argue, then stopped. A shocking giggle escaped her mouth. It made her almost girlish. “I suppose that is true.”
Caught off guard, Radu found himself returning her smile. “We always have contingency plans, you and me. That has not changed.”
Lada’s smile deepened and darkened. “You have no idea what is coming.”
“Are you certain about that?”
Unease crept into Lada’s face. Her deep-set, hooded eyes narrowed, and her full lips pressed together. Radu had a shameful thrill that she now respected him enough to question herself. He would have given anything for a moment like this as a child, even more for a moment where she looked on him with pride for besting her. But he would never get that.
“Enough,” Mehmed said. “I am taking you prisoner.” His face was etched with anger, something cold and hard growing beneath the softness of his cheeks. “I should kill you right here for this.”
Lada tilted her head, gazing up at him through her thick lashes. “You really should.” She gave him a banal, blank smile as though she were the woman she should have been, a woman like their mother. “Make Radu do it.”
Radu balked, stepping back. He glanced at Mehmed, seized with a sudden fear that Mehmed might be angry enough to demand that. But his friend shook his head. “I would never ask that of him.”