Again, he was annoying her. “If you will not let me kill Stephen or Matthias, who can we kill?”
“I have made a comprehensive list.” Radu shuffled through his sheaves of parchment. Most of them detailed funds, where they were, where they could go. Resources such as food and materials. Lists of men and where they were located, as well as people he felt they could trust or would be able to buy the trust of. In short, all the little details Lada had never wanted to deal with but that it took to run a country.
Radu made an excellent prince. She was not surprised. Nor was she even particularly angry. She had always wanted him at her side. Had always known that together, they could accomplish what neither could alone.
Perhaps if she had not broken so much to get him here, he would stay.
“Ah! Here it is.” Radu lifted a piece of parchment and held it out to her.
Lada’s eyes slitted to knife-thin lines. “This is blank.”
“Exactly! We are building, not burning.”
“I still think it would be easier to start over. Break down everything that existed and led to such weakness and rot.”
Radu’s jaw tightened reflexively. “I have seen what it costs to take something very old and make it new. Streets running with blood to clear out a falling empire and make way for the future. Children—”
Cyprian reached out and placed his hand over Radu’s, which trembled so hard the parchment rustled.
Radu took a deep breath. “You do not want to pay that cost. I promise. Even you built Poenari Fortress on the stones of the past, the strength that was already there. We are doing the same.”
Lada raised an eyebrow. “You knocked that fortress down.”
A soft giggle from Fatima drew everyone’s eyes to where she sat, curled up under a thick fur. “Well,” she said, softly, “it was probably not the best example.”
Lada leaned back and let them talk, listened to Cyprian and Radu discuss and strategize and plan. Radu was trying to give her the most stable throne he could manage, and she did not doubt he would do a good job. They had yet to discuss the biggest problem, the one they shared an entire history with. Neither of them had been willing to broach that topic yet. Lada’s hands rested on her stomach.
She moved them away.
Fatima gently rubbed Lada’s forehead and neck, where she had constant tension. Here in the forest, in her trees, in her country, Lada listened to the family her brother had built and desperately missed her own.
“He wants to meet,” Radu said, staring out from the tower. Lada did not want to be up here. Neither of them liked the castle, but he seemed fond of the tower. It held only ghosts for Lada. Another night, another time, other men she loved. Lada looked down at Tirgoviste, trying to forget. Everything was frozen. Calm. War slept during the winter, curled up like a bear in a cave.
And so Tirgoviste was filling up again. Thanks to Radu’s stores of food and Lada’s presence, the people of Wallachia had slowly returned. And, again thanks to Radu, several of the large manors once again held boyars. Radu visited them daily, making social calls with his charming flower of a wife. But he also met with the people Lada had picked, the ones she had given land to. She could see in his actions that he respected what she had tried to do, what she was still hoping to do. He just wanted to be nicer about the whole thing, which was typical of him.
“We work well together,” he said, as though reading her mind.
“You mean I do all the work and then you come in and smile at people to make them like you?”
Radu laughed. “Yes.” Then he sighed and his face got serious again. “Mehmed wants to meet. He is sending envoys, all of whom will survive and leave healthy and well, and I am working on new terms that I think—I hope—he will accept. He owes me, and I have never asked him for anything. I think he will allow you to remain on the throne. But he wants to meet in secret.”
“The two of you?”
“The three of us.”
The thing inside her jabbed her ribs, which were still sore from her fall those months before. She shoved it with her hand. She had shed her usual chain mail. She wore odd, bulky robes somewhere between a dress and the entari worn in the Ottoman Empire. Her body was naturally thick and had hidden her condition for some time, but these clothes were her only option now. It would not be long.
Lada shook her head. “I have nothing to say to him.”
“Even after everything?”
“Especially after everything. Did I tell you I saw our mother?”
Radu tilted his head, frowning at the subject change. “When?”
“When you were in Constantinople. I was trying to find support. I thought maybe she could connect me with her father.”
Radu’s eyebrows rose, and he looked like the little boy she had saved so many times growing up. But she could not save him from this. “She did not care,” Lada said. “About us. About what had happened to us. She did not even ask about you.”
Radu blinked rapidly, then attempted to lift the corners of his mouth along with his shoulders as he shrugged. “I do not even remember her.”
“She does not deserve any place in your memories. She let the world—our father—break her. And she left so the same could be done to us. I will not be broken. And I will never forgive or forget those who failed to stand by my side.”
“Mehmed was our friend, Lada. More than that. To you, at least.” Radu’s smile was wistful but not bitter.
“He had all the power in the world, and he would extend none to help me. He did not want to see me succeed. He only cared about me in relation to himself.” She knew it was true, because she had treated Bogdan the same way. She hated Mehmed for it, and she did her best not to think about Bogdan, lest she hate herself.
Radu sighed, nodding. “I do not want to see him, either.”
“What happened between you two?” Lada had been jealous for so long, worried about Mehmed’s affections. She should have worried more for Radu. But neither of them had been able to avoid Mehmed becoming the central star around which they spun.
“Nothing happened. He asked me to stay, and I chose to leave. He is alone.”
Lada scoffed. “He has an empire.”
“And he has to be over and above all of it. He loved us—he needed us—because we were the only people he could be a person with. The only ones for whom he was just Mehmed, not the sultan.”
“That is the cost of power.” Lada did not look at Radu, knowing he would leave her, too. She would be alone, just as Mehmed was. Only Radu had chosen people over power. Lada looked up at the sky, where a crescent moon was beginning to rise. “Do you remember the night the moon turned to blood?”
Radu nodded. “I was in Constantinople with Cyprian.”
Lada had been right here with Bogdan. With Nicolae. With Stefan. With Petru. She had already been alone. She just had not realized it yet.
“Mehmed can live in a hell of his own making,” Lada said. “Promise him money I will never send. Do not agree to give him any Wallachians. As long as I am prince, the Janissaries will not be given Wallachian blood to fill their ranks.” If the princes before her had been as strong, she would never have met her friends.
She wished that were the case. If they had not been Janissaries, they would not have been her Janissaries. They would all still be alive. And she would never have known them, which meant she would not miss them.
“Mehmed was humiliated by the failure of his attack,” Radu said. “I think he will agree as long as it means peace. And because it is me asking.”
“I am going to take back the Danube, though.”
“Right now you are going to come down to the throne room and settle some land disputes. And if in ten years your people are not in danger of starving, and you have a standing army and the support of your neighboring countries secured through years of peace, then by all means: take back the Danube.”
Lada faked a casualness she did not feel. “We could do it together.”
“You will be alone,” Radu said, his voice sad but firm.
“I know,” Lada said.
48
Snagov Island Monastery