Like her brother, Lada had big eyes, but hers were close-set, with arched brows that made her look perpetually cross. Her hair was a tangled mass, so dark that her pale skin appeared sickly. Her nose was long and hooked, her lips thin, her teeth small and—judging from Bogdan’s angry cries—quite sharp.
She was contrary and vicious and the meanest child the nurse had ever cared for. She was also the nurse’s favorite. By all rights the girl should be silent and proper, fearful and simpering. Her father was a powerless tyrant, cruel in his impotence and absent for months at a time. Her mother was every bit as absent, withdrawn and worthless in their home, incapable of doing anything to help herself. They were an apt representation of the entire region—particularly the nurse’s homeland of Wallachia.
But in Lada she saw a spark, a passionate, fierce glimmer that refused to hide or be dimmed. Rather than trying to stamp out that fire for the sake of Lada’s future, the nurse nurtured it. It made her feel oddly hopeful.
If Lada was the spiky green weed that sprouted in the midst of a drought-cracked riverbed, Radu was the delicate, sweet rose that wilted in anything less than the perfect conditions. Right now he wailed at the nurse’s pause in spooning the thin gruel, sweetened with honey, into his mouth.
“Make him shut up!” Lada climbed over her father’s largest hound, grizzled and patient with age.
“How should I do that?”
“Smother him!”
“Lada! Bite your tongue. He is your brother.”
“He is a worm. Bogdan is my brother.”
The nurse scowled, wiping Radu’s face with her apron. “Bogdan is not your brother.” I would sooner lie with the dogs than your father, she thought.
“He is! You are. Say you are.” Lada jumped onto Bogdan’s back. Though he was two years older and far bigger, she pinned him to the ground, jamming her elbow into his shoulder.
“I am! I am!” he said, half giggling, half crying.
“Throw Radu out with the chamber pots!”
Radu wailed louder, working himself up to a fit. The nurse clucked her tongue, picking him up even though he was much too large to be carried around. He put a hand in her blouse and pinched her skin, which was loose and wrinkled like an old apple. She sometimes wished he would shut up, too, but when he did speak it was always so sweet it made up for his tantrums. He even smelled nice, as if honey clung to his mouth between meals.
“Be a good boy,” the nurse said, “and you can go sledding with Lada and Bogdan later. Would you like that?”
Radu shook his head, lip trembling with the threat of more tears.
“Or we could visit the horses.”
He nodded slowly and the nurse sighed with relief. She looked up to find Lada gone. “Where did she go?”
Bogdan’s eyes widened in fear and indecision. Already he did not know whose wrath to fear more—his mother’s or tiny Lada’s.
Huffing, the nurse tucked Radu onto her hip, his feet bouncing against her legs with every step. She stalked down the hall toward the narrow stairs leading to the bedrooms. “Lada, if you wake your mother, there will be—”
She stopped, holding perfectly still, her fearful expression matching Bogdan’s own. From the sitting room near the front of the house, she heard voices. Low voices. Men’s voices. Speaking in Turkish, the language of their oftentimes enemy, the Ottomans.
Which meant Vlad was home, and Lada was—
The nurse ran down the hall and burst into the sitting room to find Lada standing in the middle of the room.
“I kill infidels!” the child snarled, brandishing a small kitchen knife.
“Do you?” Vlad spoke to her in the language of the Saxons, the tongue most spoken in Sighisoara. The nurse’s Saxon was crude, and while Vasilissa was fluent in several languages, she never spoke with the children. Lada and Radu spoke only Wallachian.
Lada waved the knife at him in answer to the question she did not understand. Vlad raised an eyebrow. He was wrapped in a fine cloak, an elaborate hat on his head. It had been nearly a year since Lada had seen her father. She did not recognize him.
“Lada!” the nurse whispered. “Come here at once.”
Lada stood as tall as her short, stocky legs allowed. “This is my home! I am the Order of the Dragon! I kill infidels!”
One of the three men accompanying Vlad murmured something in Turkish. The nurse felt sweat breaking out on her face, her neck, her back. Would they kill a child for threatening them? Would her father allow it? Or would they simply kill her for being unable to control Lada?
Vlad smiled indulgently at his daughter’s display, then bowed his head at the three men. They returned the bow and swept out, acknowledging neither the nurse nor her disobedient charge. “How many infidels have you killed?” Vlad’s voice, this time in the melodic romance language tones of Wallachian, was smooth and cold.
“Hundreds.” Lada pointed the knife at Radu, who hid his face against the nurse’s shoulder. “I killed that one this morning.”
“And will you kill me now?”