“WHAT I WOULD NOT give for a roving band of Huns right now.” Nicolae sighed, lying flat on his back in the middle of the training ring. The dirt beneath him was packed hard by decades of feet. The low wooden walls of the ring were lined with pegs that held the equipment of the men who practiced there.
Like all days the last six months, the pegs were empty.
Tohin had left shortly after they destroyed the canyon. She had other outposts to visit, other soldiers to teach. Lada missed her. And she especially missed creating explosions. They could not even keep training with gunpowder, because there simply was not enough of it.
There was so little to do. Today, Petru and Matei were on patrol with Stefan. Lada did not know where her other troops were and found it nearly impossible to care. They were relegated to minor local duties to compensate for the lack of spahis and vali governors. Last week, they had investigated the theft of several pigs from a local farm. The thief, caught in the act, was a hole in the fence and a patch of truffles in the forest.
Even her hatred of Mehmed for leaving her had lost its spark, its flame dampened by the fear introduced with Tohin’s news of the siege. Increasingly she found herself thinking of him with regret. Fondness, even. Imagining what she would do if he were here. And then she stabbed those thoughts with her sharpest dagger, cut them right out of her mind. He could do without her, she could do as well without him. He would be fine. Without her.
She stood over Nicolae, looking down at him.
“Do you want to kiss me?” she asked.
Nicolae made a strange choking noise. “What?”
“Do you want to kiss me?” She did not feel things when she looked at Nicolae, but then, she had not felt so much for Mehmed before they kissed. Maybe the secret to successfully bleeding him from her veins was replacing him. She generally found Nicolae more than tolerable, and he was good at taking orders.
“Please take this in the kindest way possible,” he said, standing and walking backward to put more space between them, eyeing the knife she was toying with. “But I would sooner try to romance my horse. And I suspect my horse would enjoy it more than you.”
Lada lifted her nose in the air. “Your horse deserves better.”
“We can both agree on that.” Now relatively certain he was not about to be stabbed, Nicolae sat on the wall next to her. The fact that she was not upset over his rejection indicated that kissing him would have done nothing to alleviate her problems.
“I think of you like a sister,” he said. “Like a brilliant, violent, occasionally terrifying sister that I would follow to the ends of the earth, in part because I respected her so much and in part because I feared what she would do to me if I refused.”
She nodded. “I would do awful things.”
Nicolae laughed. “The most awful.”
“And then I would steal your horse lover, to spite you.”
“Your cruelty knows no bounds.”
Lada stood, stretching, wishing she had somewhere to go. She could no longer retreat to the forest like she used to. A phantom voice followed her there now, whispering whore in her ear, the smell of dirt conjuring memories she preferred to leave buried.
“I am going to patrol the grounds,” she said.
Nicolae nodded, then his jovial face turned serious. “I mean it, you know. I will follow you to the ends of the earth.”
An unusual warmth spread through her chest. She looked away, trying to twist the smile off her lips. “Of course you will.”
She made her way to the massive front gate of the fortress, feeling more buoyant than she had in weeks. Whatever else happened, she had her men. She had her command. And that was something, at least.
A messenger, wearing the dust of leagues on his cloak, rode a weary horse up to the gate. He pulled a bag off his shoulder and held it out. “Letters from Albania.”
“I will take them.” Lada grabbed the bag and called a servant. They sorted through the letters. Most were for servants who had family attending the soldiers, a few for her men from friends in the siege. It had been over a month since they had had any news, and it was all she could do not to open those letters.
Then she came to a letter addressed to her. Her heart twisted, squeezing up too high and making it difficult to breathe. Had Mehmed finally written her?
Leaving the servant without a word, she retreated to her room in the barracks. She set the letter on her desk, pacing around it, eyeing it with suspicion as though it might disappear. What would it say? What did she want it to say? After all this time, what could he say to make her forgive him?
Nothing. He could say nothing.
She broke the seal, ripping the edge of the paper with her force, and opened it, scanning the contents quickly. It was not from Mehmed.
The hand was unfamiliar, but the signature at the bottom was undeniably Radu’s.
She sat heavily, shock making it difficult to focus on the words. Radu was at the siege? How? Why? Was he with Mehmed?
A strange sensation seeped through her, a writhing jealousy that Radu was there, where she had been forbidden, with Mehmed. Mehmed must have taken him, must have rescued him from Edirne. Gritting her teeth, Lada started at the beginning. The letter was brief, only a few lines long. He greeted her without preamble or explanation, stating merely that the siege was a disaster and would soon end. Then…
Lada stopped, dropping the letter to the floor. Then she picked it up, reading each word with care as though she could change what it said.
“ ‘Sickness is rampant. This is a secret to remain between us, but Mehmed has fallen ill. I do not expect him to recover or survive the journey back. When he dies you will be at the mercy of Murad, who still wishes you dead. Without Mehmed’s protection I fear for you. Whatever else has transpired between us, I could not live with myself without warning you. Gather what you can and flee while no one is there to take note.’ ”
When he dies.
Not if.
When.
Lada looked at the date on the letter—it had been written more than a month before. Which meant that Mehmed might already be dead, might have been dead all this time. All the poison she had nurtured, the bitterness, the anger. Her last words to him. Her thought that if he did not come back he would have deserved to never know how she felt about him. She doubled over, holding her midsection, a wail threatening to tear free from her throat.
She had sent Mehmed to his death with nothing but cruelty, and, worse, it was a death that even she could not have prevented. She could not fight the plague with a sword, could not stop the assassin illness with a dagger, no matter how clever and sharp.
She dropped to her cot and curled into a ball, incapable of imagining a world without Mehmed in it. Radu was right—there would be no place for her in that world. And Radu was not threatened as she was, because he had found his own role to play.
Radu had earned his place. Everything she had now—her home, her men, her very life—was because Mehmed cared for her. All her threads led back to him, and with his death each one would snap.
Rolling off her cot, she picked up the letter and read it again and again, willing it to change. Then she slammed it onto the desk with a scream, burying her dagger in it so deeply that the handle stuck straight up from the wood.
A week later, Lada was nearly ready to leave. She would steal a horse. As a Janissary, she had no horse of her own, but there were a few left in the fortress stables. All she needed was two more days. If only she had accepted or demanded extravagant gifts of Mehmed. She had almost nothing other than her payments as a Janissary. She had visited the bursar to draw her salary early, but the aggravating old fool would not budge the schedule. Stealing more than was strictly necessary would draw attention, so she was forced to wait.