“Nothing. They will push at the wall until it breaks or winter comes, and then they will return home. Whether they win or lose, the result is the same. The men come home, and I have less work to do but more mouths to feed.”
“Why do they bother? What difference does Kruje make? Does it really hold so much value for the empire that it is worth this risk?” Lada stood, pacing. She let the fear she felt for Mehmed act as a fuse to light her anger. “Damnable fools!”
“It is not about Kruje,” Tohin said.
“Of course not. It is about Murad’s pride! He cannot stand that his protégé betrayed him, and so he risks Mehmed—” Lada paused, taking a deep breath. “He risks thousands of men to take revenge against one.”
“It is not about Skanderberg, either.” Tohin raised a hand, cutting off the argument brimming on Lada’s tongue. “Yes, he wants to make an example of Skanderberg, punish him. But what do you think would happen in the other border cities if Murad did not address this?”
“They would return to their rightful rulers! He overreaches. He has no business there.”
“And what if he allowed Kruje to leave? If he allowed all the vassal states their freedom, if he withdrew to the borders of the Ottoman Empire as they were before we began eating into Europe, what then?”
“I do not understand the question.”
“Where would it stop? Should we leave all the cities, go back to the deserts in the east? Roam on horses?”
“Of course not.”
“So we stay here. You would allow us the first territories of our conquest—how generous of you. Do you think Hunyadi would be satisfied? Do you think Byzantium would thank us and happily live on their sliver of land? Do you think the pope would stop calling for crusades?”
“I do not think—”
“When do borders ever stay as they are? Our own people were driven from the east, fleeing from destruction. They saw cities and walls, and they wanted that. So they took them. If they had not taken them, they would have died. And someone else would have come and taken the cities instead.”
“So defend what is yours! Why must it turn to conquest?”
“Kruje is ours. Skanderberg is ours. If we were not pushing, fighting, claiming what is ours and challenging what is not yet ours, others would be doing it to us. It is the way of the world. You can be the aggressor, you can fight against crusaders on their own land, or you can stay at home and wait for them to come to you. And they would come. They would come with fire, with disease, with swords and blood and death. Weakness is an irresistible lure.”
Lada remembered Hunyadi riding into her father’s capital as though he owned it. Her father was weak, and because he was weak—because he tried only to maintain what he had and avoid a fight—Wallachia suffered.
Tohin continued. “Murad takes war to other countries so that here, in the empire, we can carry on with the business of living. We expand, because if we did not, we would die. It is Murad’s responsibility to see that we live.”
Lada stared at the ruined canyon. “The price of living seems to always be death.”
Tohin stood, joints popping audibly. “And that is why you become a dealer of death. You feed death as many people as you can to keep it full and content so its eye stays off you.”
A dealer of death. Lada carried the phrase back to the fortress on her tongue, rolling it around. Borders and aggression, sieges and sickness. Dealers of death.
She prayed that Mehmed would not be one of those fed to death to keep it away from the heart of the Ottoman Empire.
NO ONE WAS MORE surprised to see the shaft of an arrow appear in the middle of Yazid’s torso than he was.
He looked up at Radu, a half smile on his face as though the arrow were the end of the joke he had been in the middle of telling. And then he fell off his horse, tangling under the wheels of the supply wagon behind them.
“Ambush!” Lazar shouted.
Radu should have shouted that. But he kept looking at the space on the back of the horse where Yazid had just been. Now there was nothing.
An arrow flew by, so close to his face that he felt the sting of its wind. Two more came in quick succession, though these were flaming and not meant for him. They found their larger target in the wood and canvas of the wagon.
Shouts up and down the twenty-wagon train sounded, letting Radu know the whole thing was under attack. The trees were close, pressing in like giant fingers ready to pull them all into the depths of the forest. To smother them in murky green and muffled birdsong until everything was quiet again.
There was a lot of screaming.
Water drenched Radu. Someone had thrown a bucket at the wagon and soaked Radu more than the wood. A flash of movement in the trees caught Radu’s attention, and he threw himself from his horse, shouting as he drew his sword and ran for the enemy.
There was an arm, a scream, a flash of an eye showing white all around the iris, and then—
And then there was a body at his feet, his sword red with a terrible knowledge. Radu threw his head back in a howl of triumph. All he saw among the trees were men running, away from him, away from the wagon train. They had won.