“Then why did you?” Radu turned to face him.
“Because!” Mehmed wrapped his own arms around himself, shrinking. “Because I am building an empire, and turning this city into the jewel of the world, and becoming the sultan my people need. And it is so lonely.” His voice broke on the last word.
Gone was the cold assurance of the sultan, the calculating intelligence that last year had sent Radu away as a spy. The untouchable Hand of God was replaced by the boy at the fountain. The friend of Radu’s youth. The foundation of his heart. Radu opened his arms, and Mehmed fell into him, burying his face in Radu’s shoulder.
Radu held him close, taking his own deep, shuddering breaths.
“I need you,” Mehmed whispered.
“I am here,” Radu answered.
“Halil amassed too much power.” Mehmed was on the floor of his private chamber, lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling. Radu lay next to him, shoulder to shoulder. No sultan and bey. Just Mehmed and Radu. “My father was too permissive, too willing to let others take over much of the business of running the empire. It led to corruption and waste and weakness. So I keep myself separate, let no one think they have a greater portion of my ear or my confidence. Soon I will have a palace complex made, all the rooms and walls circling out in rings from the center. I will be there, and everyone else will revolve around me. Just as I am at the center of the empire, and everyone else exists to serve the empire through me.”
“It does sound lonely,” Radu said softly.
“It is. And it will be. But I cannot put my own needs ahead of the needs of my people. They need a strong sultan. They need me to be the Hand of God, not a mere man. And so I must set aside the things that I want, my own comforts and relationships, to be what my people deserve.”
Radu thought of his own life, of the things he had sacrificed to be the person others needed him to be. Most often to be the person Mehmed needed him to be. Could he do the same as Mehmed? Set aside the things he wanted—the things of his heart—for the good of the empire?
He closed his eyes. He did not know where his heart was anymore. He could not set aside something he could not find.
“I want you to stay here with me,” Mehmed said, his voice tugging Radu back. “Be my friend in the midst of the madness.”
Radu knew he should say yes. He should not ruin this closeness. But he had spent so much of his life pretending. He did not wish to any longer. “You know what people will say. What they already thought. If I am back at your side, Halil’s old rumors will resurface.” Radu felt Mehmed’s head turn toward him, felt Mehmed’s dark gaze heavy on his cheek. Swallowing against the emotion pounding in his chest, Radu turned his own head toward Mehmed’s, their lips a breath apart. Mehmed was watching him, his dark eyes careful and searching.
“Let them say what they will. They cannot harm me, and I will not let them harm you.”
“And Lada?” Radu asked, dragging his sister into the space between them, where she always was.
Mehmed frowned. He looked back up at the ceiling, but linked his arm with Radu’s. The move felt very deliberate, like a step in a dance. “We three were always meant to be together. I have you. She will come back to us.”
“You want her to? Even after that?”
Mehmed’s silence was answer enough. He would forgive her this murder of his envoy. Radu should have been surprised. He was not.
“And if she does not come back to us?”
“Well.” Mehmed let the word hang heavy in the air above them. “At least I will always have you.”
“I am the prettier one, after all.”
Mehmed’s laugh filled the room. It used to fill Radu, too, until he could feel it in his veins. But the feelings he had now were echoes of the ones he had before. He did not know if they would grow again.
Mehmed laced his fingers through Radu’s and Radu lay still beside him, thinking of how often he had imagined what that would feel like.
He had been wrong. Time had taken even this from him, because with Mehmed’s fingers tangled in his own, he remembered another finger tracing wounds on his hands. Gray eyes in place of dark ones. The love he had found when his first love had been lost.
Now Cyprian was lost. Would his feelings for Mehmed return?
Did he want them to?
5
Bulgaria
THE ASHES OF the village were as cold as the dawn around them. Everywhere the ground was dusted black instead of white, like some hellish snow had fallen.
Lada, wrapped in furs, crouched down. She took off her gloves and ran her hand through the ashes that remained of the village. Her village. Wallachia’s village. Her hand came away stained with dull black.
“How many people were killed?” she asked. They had ridden here immediately after seeing Mehmed’s envoy off. She had come straight down the border to make certain no other villages had been attacked. Along the way, she had picked up witnesses.
A peasant from the next village scratched his head, eyes wandering as he mentally calculated. “Three hundred?”
“Who is the boyar in charge of this region?” She should know. But she had never been able to care about the boyars unless they were giving her trouble.
He shrugged. “Never met him.”
Lada looked at Stefan. He nodded, slipping away. He would find out. And there would be consequences for the boyar, both for failing to protect the people in his care and for failing to report this attack to Lada. She should not have heard about it from Mehmed’s people. She closed her eyes, letting herself imagine Mehmed’s reaction to her message. It filled her with something sharp and hot, like anticipation.
“What are you smiling about?” Bogdan asked.
Her eyes snapped open. “Nothing.” Standing, she brushed her hands off on her trousers, the ash that had looked black against the snow now showing up gray against the black cloth. A shift in perspective changed everything. “When will Nicolae be here?”
“Within the hour.”
Nicolae had been gathering all her soldiers. When he arrived, it would be with over three thousand men. And the special supplies she had been stockpiling.
Lada squinted at the rising sun, let its brightness warm her face. “Three hundred. Very well. We will kill three thousand of them. Every Wallachian death will be answered tenfold.”
“We will have to go deep into Bulgaria to kill that many,” Bogdan said.
“Then we will go deep.” No one would be able to doubt her ferocity, her commitment to her people. And no one would attack Wallachia without thinking very carefully about the consequences from now on. It would be a lot of bodies, but she looked at them as an investment. Kill thousands to save thousands.
Two days later, the boyar who had failed his people clutched his chest with his torn and bleeding hands. The hole he had dug— one of hundreds since Stefan brought him to their camp—was ready. Two men took the stake and leveraged it into the hole, tipping it up. The body slumped at the top, a gruesome coat of arms for Lada’s push into Bulgaria.
Lada looked down the road lined with a forest of bloody reminders.
“How many is that?” she asked Bogdan, who rode next to her.
“Fifteen, sixteen hundred.”
They had broken through the border villages as swiftly as a river smashing through a dam. Everyone was swept up in their wake, no one spared. But it was not quite right. So few of them had been her actual enemies. She spared no love for Bulgars—they were too weak to break from Ottoman rule, and were thus as culpable as anyone—but they were not Turks. Her point that her borders were inviolable had been made. But … she wondered if she could make another point, too.
A point that the protection of the Ottomans was no protection at all.
A point that her way was better.
Nicolae eyed the stakes with weary distaste. “Only a handful of casualties among our men.”
“Good. And does word spread?”