EXHAUSTION PLAGUED LADA, dragging her limbs and mind down. Nicolae was occupied with scouring the Edirne Janissaries for Wallachian recruits to fold into their ranks. Stefan was training the few they had found. And so, with Petru and Matei both ill, Lada had taken a double night watch. Now, finally past dawn, all she could think of was bed.
It had been strange, standing inside Mehmed’s room while he slept. He had pleaded for her to join him in his bed, teased and flirted, but she reminded him that she was all that stood between him and a knife in the dark.
And that if he did not shut up and go to sleep, the knife would belong to her.
Still, there was something discomfiting about the whole experience. It was like watching him during the coronation. He was there, he was Mehmed, but he was so separate from her. Unreachable. His face sleeping was the same as it had been during the ceremony: alien.
During the longest, loneliest hours of the night, it had been all Lada could do to keep herself from waking him just to see the way his eyes changed when he saw her, the way his lips formed around words and intentions. She liked who she was when he looked at her, craved it. But she had resisted. And now, with her own sleep so close, she found her door blocked by a woman.
“Lada?” The woman’s round face was sweetly pleasant, like a plum, with equally round lips. Her eyes were weak, too large and watery.
“What?”
“I—it is me. Nazira.”
Lada frowned, her mind sluggish. The woman did look familiar.
“I introduced myself at Mehmed’s wedding? I danced with Radu.”
“Everyone danced with Radu.”
The woman laughed. It came so easily to her, a reflex of a muscle Lada did not have. “Yes, that is true. Radu has not mentioned me?”
Red flashed before Lada’s eyes, all her muscles tensing. Was this some sort of test? A trick? Did someone know Radu’s true heart and feelings for Mehmed? If Halil had discovered it, he would try to use it to his advantage. Lada would not betray her brother so easily. “Radu and I do not speak much. We are both very busy.”
“Oh. I am sorry. You would know my brother, though. Kumal?”
Recognition slammed into place, jarring Lada completely awake. She had never paid much attention to the women who floated around the edges of the court, but she did remember Kumal. Kumal, the stealer of souls. The man who had driven Radu into the heart of the Muslim god.
“I do know him.”
Nazira must have missed the growl in Lada’s voice, because she smiled in relief. “Well, apparently Radu has not spoken of it with you yet, but I—we…we are being married tomorrow.”
“You are what?”
“We have only recently decided, and we wanted to be married quickly, without fuss. There is so much else going on, and Radu must be available for Mehmed.”
Lada felt dizzy, as though she had dismounted from a daylong ride and the earth still moved beneath her with the gait of a horse. “He is marrying you.”
“We are avoiding the more rigorous traditions, but I wanted to spend today at the baths with my cousins and aunt. And you, of course. You are his only family.” She mistook Lada’s expression of confused horror for a questioning one about the baths. “It is custom to spend the day before a wedding at the baths. Radu has reserved one of the palace baths for us, so we will not be disturbed. And I hoped, since we will be sisters, that you would join us.”
Who was this woman? First her brother delivered Radu’s soul to a foreign god, and now, when Radu had the ear of the sultan, she swooped in to marry him? Lada knew Radu did not love her. She suspected her brother incapable of loving anyone but Mehmed. Why, then, had he agreed to this marriage? Did they have some sort of hold on him, some vicious blackmail?
If Nazira was using Radu to get to Mehmed, Lada would need to have as much information as possible. She could work with subtlety like Radu. He was not the only one who could play that game. She gritted her teeth in an approximation of a smile. “Give me a few moments to change?”
Lada followed Nazira through a walkway over which deep green vines arched, waxy and impervious to the chill of winter. She had never been to the baths, preferring to clean herself in private rather than spend time with other women. The exterior of the building was simple, almost austere. But once they were inside, a new world was revealed. Hand-painted tiles featured a repeating flower motif that grew along the walls and climbed across the ceiling in brilliant reds and yellows accented by the deepest blues.
High-set windows let in light, which cut through the steam curling in the air. Nazira greeted several women with delight, exchanging kisses. Everyone seemed overjoyed and surprised, remarking on the speed of the engagement and Nazira’s good fortune in nabbing the handsomest man in Edirne.
Lada wondered whether her own head or the tiles would break first if she began smashing her skull into them.