Bright We Burn

  “I mean, she is not here at all.”

  Radu frowned. “Is Kumal not back yet? What happened?”

  Mehmed shook his head again, and the shift in his eyes from horror to sadness made Radu’s heart race. He wanted to run away from whatever was coming next.

  Radu glanced at Nazira, a pleasant and respectful look on her face as she waited for news of her beloved brother. Radu’s stomach contracted, a shudder running through his whole body. “What did she do?” he whispered, planting his eyes on the floral patterns of the thick carpet. He could not bear to look at anyone.

  “I am so sorry,” Mehmed said. “Apparently she went into the fortress with the intent of kidnapping you. But she found Kumal.” He paused, as though searching for the next words. “She was not merciful.”

  Radu choked, somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

  She was not merciful.

  When had she ever been? Radu dropped to his knees, hanging his head. “This is my fault. I should have been there. I should have gone to her, and sent Kumal to…If I had, then—”

  A light, trembling hand settled on his shoulder. Nazira spoke in a whisper. “What does he mean? Tell me what he means, Radu.”

  Radu shook his head. “I should have known. She is my sister. I of all people know that mercy is not in her nature. It should have been me.” Being a Dracul had cost him so much. He had thought he was done paying for the blood that ran through his veins. But he would never be done. The price of being in his family was everything he held dear, taken from him over and over again. They were the dragons. The devils. There was no mercy in them or for them.

  Nazira knelt next to him. “Tell me. Tell me exactly what he means.”

  Radu’s punishment was having to say the words. Having to do this to Nazira. “She killed him.”

  An unearthly wail started, so low at first that Radu did not know what it was until it built to a scream. Nazira, who had always been so strong, was broken. Fatima dropped down next to her, taking her in her arms. Nazira screamed and sobbed, clawing at Fatima’s arms as though she could burrow in there and hide herself from sorrow.

  Radu did not know what to do. Could not do anything. “I am— Nazira, I am so sorry, I—”

  “Please,” Fatima said. She shook her head in warning. “Please stop talking.” She held out one arm and Radu crawled to the two women.

  Fatima held them both up.

  Radu pictured Kumal as he had last seen him. Smiling. Waving. An unbidden image of his brother, his teacher, his friend sliced like a blade through his memory. Lada killing Kumal. How had she done it? With a knife? A sword? Had Kumal fought back? Radu did not want to imagine it, did not want to picture it. Could not stop.

  He did not realize the guttural sobs were coming from himself until Fatima stroked his back, making a soft shh sound. Nazira grabbed his arm, her fingers digging in painfully as she dragged him closer and buried her face in his shoulder. She shook, silent now, her breath coming in shuddering gasps. They were all three a tangle, a mess of devastation.

  It was not appropriate to behave this way with a servant, but Radu no longer cared to maintain that charade of Fatima’s role. Not now. Not in front of Mehmed, who had not moved to comfort or even touch him. Let Mehmed see and know what he wanted to.

  Radu cried with his family, for all they had lost.

  For all he had cost them.

  Tirgoviste

  LADA SURVEYED THE BRIDGE mournfully. “Are we certain we do not have enough gunpowder to just blow it up?”

  Nicolae put a hand on her shoulder and gave a grim nod. “I am afraid we have to dismantle it the old-fashioned way: by forcing other people to do it.”

  Lada and Nicolae stood on a hill overlooking the work. Below, her men supervised a group of criminals in tearing down the bridge. It was the first of several they had to visit that day. She wanted to oversee everything, to make certain the tasks were done. It was also a chance to take stock of the countryside.

  “All that work to make the roads safe,” she said, scuffing one boot through the dirt, “and now our job is to make the country impassable.”

  “We do not have to do this, you know.” Nicolae was using that soft voice again, the one that slipped like a blade between her ribs. They had not spoken privately since the fight in her rooms. She had not wanted to. She did not want to now.

  She delivered her words like angry blows. “And what should we do instead?”

  Beneath the scar that bisected his face, Nicolae’s expression was wistful. “I rather liked being bandits. We could do that again. Slip away in the night and never look back.”

  Lada leaned back in surprise. She had expected him to push for a new treaty again. “Why would we do that?”

  “Because it would be easy. Because we can. We do not have to choose this.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  Nicolae laughed. “Of course I am afraid. You are demanding the greatest military in the world come fight you. I have been in that military. I know what they can do. I dream about it every night. I am so scared I have had to cut back drinking simply to avoid pissing my pants as frequently.” He paused, and that horrible soft tone came back. He stared at her as though committing her face to memory. “I am afraid to die, and I am afraid to watch you die, powerless to stop it. Every step we take in this direction feels like one step closer to your grave. I do not want to see that.” He cleared his throat, looking away with an automatic smile. “Though we will not have graves, I suspect. Pikes for our heads, if we are very lucky.”

  Lada lifted her eyes to the sky. She had left Bogdan in Tirgoviste to avoid having conversations filled with emotions she did not want to address. Apparently she should have left Nicolae as well. But he was one of her oldest friends, her first supporter, the one who had gotten her into the Janissary ranks. Her father had given her a knife; Nicolae had given her a sword.

  “You did it,” he pressed. “You became prince. No one ever said you had to stay prince. We have so many other options.”

  “I cannot leave.”

  “Why?”

  Like a melody she could not stop from ringing through her head, Mehmed arose in her memories. He knew why. He alone understood this drive, this ambition, this need to have her country. She could not abandon it, because Wallachia was her. If she could walk away from Wallachia, if she could leave it to others, she would not be. It was as simple as that.

  “Will you stay with me?” This time she did not have an elbow to his throat. She held out a hand instead, staring at his hazel eyes, still trying to figure out how they had changed. As he put his hand on hers, she realized what it was that had been missing since the day she attacked him.

  Nicolae no longer hoped.

  His optimism, cloaked in dark and bloody humor, had been a constant in her life. He was a man who was staring at his own death. She had seen men look at her that way before, but always when she was holding a blade. Not when she was holding their hand.

  “Nicolae, I—”

  The bridge fell with a tremendous cracking splash into the river below. Nicolae and Lada shifted to look. “Oh,” Nicolae said, stumbling into Lada’s side. She staggered under his weight.

  “What are you—”

  Nicolae glanced over his shoulder, then shoved Lada to the ground. He flinched, dropping to his knees.

  “What is the matter with you?” Lada demanded, sitting up.

  Nicolae fell forward.

  Two crossbow bolts were embedded in his back. Dark circles of blood bloomed outward along his tunic. Lada scanned the tree line, where a man fumbled a third bolt. She leapt over Nicolae and sprinted, screaming. The assassin loaded the bolt.

  Her knife found his neck before his finger found the trigger.

  She slashed his throat, then followed him to the ground, stabbing again and again and again. Only when his glassy eyes stare
d up at the sky, lifeless, and her hand dripped with his blood did she stop.

  Part of her wanted to run back. To help Nicolae up.

  The other part of her knew exactly what it meant when blood spread that fast, when bolts hit those parts. Those bolts had been meant for her. The first he had taken by accident as they turned toward the falling bridge. But he had taken the second on purpose. Maybe there was still time to say thank you. To berate him for being so stupid. To say she was sorry. But she did not want to say any of those things.

  Not when they were the same as saying goodbye.

  She ran toward him anyway, each footstep a breath, each footstep a heartbeat, each footstep an eternity.

  Dropping to his side, she lifted his head onto her lap. He gazed up at her, his ugly, beloved face pale. She pushed his hair back, stroking his forehead. The blood from her hands smeared across his skin and she panicked at the sight. She needed to clean him up, to get that blood off him. There was a tremendous pressure behind her eyes, a tightening of her throat that made it hard to speak.

  “You would follow me to the ends of the earth, you said.” She held his gaze, though his eyes were going unfocused. “I am holding you to that. We are very far from the ends of the earth.”

  Nicolae’s grin spread slower than the blood pooling beneath him. “No, Lada. I am already there. I beat you, is all.”

  “Be careful, or I really will display your head on a pike.”

  Nicolae laughed.

  And then he died.

  * * *

  “But who was the assassin working for?” Bogdan asked. He sat at a table in the corner of the kitchen along with Daciana, Oana, and Stefan. The scent of freshly turned dirt clung to them, as did the memory of lowering Nicolae’s body into the ground only an hour before.

  Lada kicked a chair. It skittered across the uneven stone floor before tipping and clattering to the ground. “It does not matter who he was working for!”

  “It might have been better to take him alive and get information,” Daciana said. “Then we would know who wanted you dead.”

  “Who does not want me dead? That would be a shorter list.” Lada paced, prowling the length of the room, angry and devastated, wanting to do something, anything, to stop feeling this way. She rubbed at her arms to keep from tearing at her hair.

  The last time she had lost one of her men, it had been Petru, killed in this very castle. That still hurt. But Nicolae. Nicolae she had depended on, had needed in a way she needed very few people. And even though she had doubted him, he remained loyal to her until the end. He had found his end because of his loyalty to her.

  “If we—” Bogdan started, but Lada cut him off.

  “It does not matter. The assassin failed.” He had not failed entirely. A part of her had gone into the ground with Nicolae. She did not know how large a part. It was still too raw, too new to see how the scar would form. She wished it were written across her face the way Nicolae’s scar had been. She wanted visual evidence of what she had lost.

  Lada righted her chair, dragged it back to the table, and sat. “We have too much to do to worry about who sent an assassin. And now we are down one trusted ally, so there is more work for everyone. The first problem is that we do not have enough men. Even if we conscript convicts and vagrants, we are massively outnumbered. I am expecting Mehmed to come with at least twenty thousand, probably thirty or forty. Right now, at most, we have five.”

  “Lada.” Daciana leaned across the table with a hand outstretched. “Let me help. Take some time.”

  Lada stared at Daciana’s hand, then looked up into her face. Daciana was strong. All Wallachian women were—they could not be otherwise and still survive. Lada smiled. They would help. “The women can fight. This is their country as much as the men’s.”

  Bogdan scoffed. “The women?”

  His mother slapped his shoulder. “We are no delicate flowers. We break our backs with the washing and the tilling of soil and the bearing of children. We can beat an enemy as handily as we beat a rug.”

  Lada nodded. “Anyone strong enough will fight. Men, women, it does not matter. We have a lot of work to do before the actual fighting begins, and we only have until mid-spring. Mehmed will not come until then.” Logistically it was impossible. He would wait until there was no risk of freezing to death, until there was scavenging of the land available to help feed his men. “We will start gathering and training women immediately. Children and the elderly will be sent into the mountains.”

  “What about the sick?” Daciana asked, her tone wry.

  “Oh, I have other plans for them.” Lada smiled at the woman’s confused look.

  Stefan sat motionless, always the last to attract attention. “We will still be outmanned and out-trained. What else do we have?”

  “Matthias.”

  “You trust him?”

  “Not at all. But I have word that he received money from the pope to fight the infidels. And he does not want to face an entire Ottoman army camped on his borders. It is in his best interest to keep Wallachia free. He will help.”

  Stefan looked troubled.

  “What?” Lada said.

  “I do not trust him to use the money for what it is intended. He has been trying to raise money for other purposes for a long time.”

  Stefan waited, placid and patient. He already had a conclusion, Lada could sense it. Frustrated, she sorted through what she knew of Matthias. What he would need money for. Then she threw her head back and glared at the ceiling. “The crown taken by Poland. The crown he could not afford to get back.” She swore, grinding her teeth. “That stupid, pointless crown. He is still fixated on it, doubtless. But he took the money with the promise of fighting infidels. He cannot bring the ire of the entire Catholic Church on his head. He will have to come.”

  Stefan did not respond.

  Lada shrugged against the cold prickling of fear on the back of her neck. “He will come, or he will pay for it, one way or another.”

  “I think he will come,” Bogdan said, smiling encouragingly at her.

  “I think you know nothing of Matthias, and therefore should not volunteer an opinion on this subject,” Lada snapped. Bogdan flinched as though struck. Oana shifted in her seat, but Lada avoided looking at either of them. She was not fair to him. But she was prince; she did not have to be fair.

  “Do we have any money?” Oana asked, neatly changing the subject.

  “No.” She should have waited another year or two, let the country settle, let tax revenue come in. But the idea of sitting in this castle, slowly gathering coins, eyeing a future where Wallachia would be free when it was already agonizingly close…She should have waited, but she never could have.

  “Weapons?” Daciana asked.

  “My cousin Stephen cannot send us troops, but he has sent some gunpowder and hand cannons. We will have to use them strategically. We have plenty of bows and crossbows.”

  “What are all those carpenters doing?” Bogdan asked. Lada had invited everyone with knowledge of carpentry and experience clearing forests to the capital. She had several of her men supervising the enormous task. It did not require a tremendous amount of skill, simply a tremendous amount of supplies and manpower.

  Lada smiled again. “They are attending to a different project.”

  “So we have men and women. And sick people, apparently.” Daciana watched as Stefan made notes, calculating roughly how many additional troops they would have if a significant portion of the country’s women were conscripted. “Some gunpowder. Some hand cannons. Do we fortify the cities?”

  “No,” Lada said. “In any siege situation, we lose. We never let it come to that.”

  Stefan nodded in silent agreement.

  Daciana watched him, fear forming new lines around her eyes. “Will what we have be enough?”

  “No.” Lada leaned
forward, looking at Stefan’s calculations. They would be outnumbered at least four to one. Probably more, depending on just how big an example Mehmed wanted to make of her. And she was missing so many things she needed. People, too. Nicolae. Petru. And Radu.

  But she would do this in spite of what she lacked. She was strong enough. Her country was strong enough. She would show Mehmed exactly why he could never own Wallachia, why he could never own her.

  “We have something else: our land. I will use every single league of it against the Ottomans.” Out of habit, Lada’s fingers touched the knives at her wrists. “The empire is coming for us, and I intend to win.”

  Constantinople

  MEHMED RESTED A TENTATIVE hand on Radu’s back. “At least Kumal died knowing his sister was safe.”

  Radu was leaning forward, head cradled in his hands. He had left Nazira and Fatima—finally asleep, thankfully, curled around each other with faces pale and hollowed out by grief—after a long, restless night. Radu had not slept. He had not eaten. He had no desire to do either.

  “We could not have known—”

  Radu sighed to stop Mehmed from talking. Mehmed moved the hand on his back but did not shift away. They sat, shoulder to shoulder, in Mehmed’s private chamber.

  Radu’s voice was filled with the tiny fissures that ran through his whole soul now. “We could have known. We should have known. Of everyone in the world, we should have been the last to underestimate her. And I knew she hated Kumal. She has always hated him. I was so eager to see Nazira and to find out—” He stopped, holding back the next words. To find out Cyprian’s fate as well. “And to find out what had happened to her that I did not think. Kumal paid the price I should have.”

  “If you had gone, we would have lost you.”