“No,” Mehmed said. “You betrayed me. You are nothing.”
“Betrayed you? You have no idea what I have done for you. How many times I have saved your life. If going behind your back to keep you alive is betrayal, then they should be banished with me.” She pointed a bony, twisted finger at Lada and Radu.
Mehmed waved in disgust at Stefan. He took Huma’s arm and led her, wide-eyed and shaking, out of the room. Lada thought they had escaped, but then Mehmed turned on them. “What was she talking about? What did you two do?”
Radu looked like a rabbit caught in a trap. Lada understood his fear. Mehmed would never forgive them when he found out their role in his loss of the throne during his first rule. And Huma had no reason not to tell him, not now. She had no more leverage to employ, and Lada had no doubt she would try to burn everyone down with her.
Tears filled Radu’s eyes, despair pulling his head low. He was no longer the man Lada did not know. He was the boy on the ice, the boy in the forest, the boy in the thorns.
He was hers.
“Radu had nothing to do with it,” Lada said. “It happened when you first came to the throne. After I killed the assassin Janissary, I knew it would never stop. Radu was certain you could be sultan. He was stupid and shortsighted, so I went to Huma. It was my idea to have the Janissaries revolt then, to contact Halil and work with him to get your father back to the throne.”
Lada watched as shock and anger transformed Mehmed’s face from the one she knew and loved into something too distant to touch. It was physically painful to watch. She did not look away.
“How could you? All the power Halil gained! All the years I lost…”
Lada lifted her head higher. “I did it to save your life. I would make the same choice again.”
Mehmed sat, refusing to look at her. “I cannot—I cannot think about this right now. Not with what just happened. Ahmet. Little Ahmet.” A curtain came down over his face, as though he had cut off all thoughts of Lada’s betrayal until he could sort through them.
Radu put a hand on Mehmed’s shoulder, but he stared at Lada. “Thank you,” he mouthed.
She did not acknowledge it or the immense gratitude welling in his eyes. She owed him a debt. Nothing was more important to him than Mehmed’s trust. Perhaps it would have been kinder to break that trust and force a removal. Maybe then Radu could be free of the impossible love he carried. But she could not do that to him, not when it was so easy to take this blow on her own shoulders.
“They will think I ordered Ahmet’s death,” Mehmed said, oblivious to Radu’s feelings, as always. “Halima was with me when it happened. I will have to tell them, it was Huma, it was not—”
“No,” Lada said. “They will think it was your order no matter what you say. If you claim it was your mother, it will make you look like a murderer and a liar.”
“What am I to do?”
Lada thought of what she would do. This was a time for power, not subtlety. No one could question that the sultan was in charge. “Make it law. You know what your father’s brothers did. The wars they fought are still raw wounds. Your father had to kill them all eventually. Make a decree that when a sultan is crowned, it is legal for him to kill his brothers for the security of the empire.”
Mehmed had never looked at her with genuine horror before, but he did now. She stopped herself from taking a step back and steeled herself against the fear that, between this and the revelation of her betrayal, she had lost his love.
She would not be weak to avoid his judgment. That was not who she was.
“You think my mother was right to do this?” Mehmed asked.
“I think…” Lada pushed away the image of hopeful, happy Halima glowing as she talked about her son. The son who was being murdered even as she spoke. Did she know yet? Had she learned her whole world had been taken from her? “I think sometimes when balancing a nation against a single life, impossible decisions must be made. Huma made the decision. Whether it was right or wrong is beside the point. It is done.”
“If I make that law, I am already condemning one of my own sons to death.”
Lada had not thought of that and cringed at the accusation in Mehmed’s eyes. Did he think her so monstrous, that she craved the death of his sons? She shook her head. “If you do not make this law, you are allowing a future civil war that will claim untold thousands of your citizens.”
“These are lives, Lada,” Radu said. “How can you speak of them like they are matters of simple mathematics, a problem to be solved?”
Lada stood, a hand to her side against the pain of her wound. “Because thinking like that is the only way to keep from losing our minds.”
“What about our souls?” Mehmed whispered.
Before Lada walked out, she paused at the door. “Souls and thrones are irreconcilable.”