Nicolae tried to pat Radu on the head, but he could no longer reach high enough. “Mehmed stopped in Edirne. I do not know when your master will return, young pup. Tell me, Lada, have you been able to house-train him while Mehmed was away?”
“Alas, all attempts have failed. He wets his mat nightly with both piss and tears.”
“Always so nice to have you safely returned, Nicolae,” Radu said, his tone as dry as the crops beneath the unseasonably warm autumn sun. He waved and rode away, leaving Lada and Nicolae to their own devices. He would not admit it, but he left to avoid what they were going to do next, and so he could hide the fact that he was preparing to observe Ramadan. As though Lada did not know.
Lada and Nicolae settled in the back of a small shop the Janissaries frequented because, with a little extra coin, the owner conveniently forgot the prohibition against alcohol. Lada waited through several stories, including the disgraceful flight of Hunyadi, before finally broaching the only subject she wanted to hear about.
“How did Mehmed do?” She feigned innocent curiosity. They had spent so much of their time the last two years studying tactics, examining old battles, gathering what information they could of the various threats to the Ottoman Empire. After his humiliating ejection from the throne, Mehmed had been determined to never fall short again.
And after her betrayal of Mehmed and her own father’s betrayal of her, Lada had done everything she could to help him.
“The little zealot surprised us all.” Nicolae raised his drink, his cheek distorted by the livid scar when he smiled. “Those of us in the right flank under his command suffered the fewest casualties. He knew his part, and he played it well. Better even than our father the sultan.”
Lada hid her traitorous smile behind her heavy mug. “Careful, Nicolae. That sounded almost like praise.”
“I will be damned if I ever call him father, but your Mehmed may yet make a decent sultan. Until he bleeds us all out against the walls of Constantinople.”
Relieved and buoyed by news of Mehmed’s triumph, Lada relaxed into her seat, enjoying Nicolae’s tales of the campaign and exaggerated stories of mayhem, gore, and personal heroics. They were joined by several other Janissaries who were not devout and loved to imbibe, each settling into the dim space. Soon the room was packed shoulder to shoulder, everyone silly with drink and post-travel lethargy.
“But you still have not told me how you finally got two eyebrows,” she said, after a comic reenactment of Nicolae’s struggles to pull his sword out of a Hungarian soldier’s stubborn ribs before a screaming Transylvanian reached him.
“Oh, that. I ran afoul of the camp seamstress.” Nicolae gestured to his groin. “She always has to adjust the standard uniform to account for my massive manhood, and she finally tired of all the extra material required. Her shears are very sharp.”
The room roared with laughter. Lada rolled her eyes, glad it was dim enough to hide her blush of discomfort. Though she usually avoided this talk with the men, worrying what it might encourage, she had missed them too much to let them exclude her from their bawdy jokes. She sniffed derisively. “More likely she mistook your manhood for one of her delicate needles.”
She got a louder laugh than Nicolae had, along with several slaps on her shoulders. She leaned back, stretching out and taking up space the way the men around her did, and grinned at her friend.
“I could show it to you, if you like.” Nicolae held his arms out wide. “Are you prone to fainting?”
“My eyesight is quite poor. We would need some sort of lens for me to be able to see something so small.”
Several soldiers banged on the table, and one fell off his chair, either from drunkenness or laughing so hard. Ivan, who had disliked Lada since the day she bested him when she first met Nicolae, leaned forward. “But some things are not so small in here.” He reached out and grabbed Lada’s left breast, squeezing painfully.
Before she could react, Nicolae spun Ivan away, slammed his head against the table, and threw him to the ground. Grinding Ivan’s face into the hard-packed dirt floor, Nicolae growled, “Lada is one of us. And we do not treat our own that way. Understand?”
Ivan groaned his assent. Nicolae sat down again, easy smile back in place, but a weighted silence had poisoned the atmosphere. This had never happened to Lada before, but she suspected she had Nicolae to thank for that. How long had he been deflecting things like this? How much had been said when she could not hear it? Nicolae’s defense had proved the exact opposite of his claim that she was one of them. She felt it, like a curdled meal threatening to come back up out of her stomach: the knowledge that she could never be their equal. She would always be separate.
Ivan’s glare as he pushed himself off the floor promised a future of violence.
She met his stare with an unflinching one of her own.