And I Darken

  Leaving the rest of her things for servants to pack, she crossed the hall to Radu’s room. He had kept the opposite of a low profile, suddenly becoming even more a darling of the court. Lada had not been able to so much as speak to him all week. No longer did he keep company with second sons and minor officials. At last night’s feast, he had spent most of the night at Murad’s side, paraded around like a long-lost son. Meanwhile Lada had stood in the corner, and Mehmed had remained banished in his silken prison with wilting Sitti Hatun.

  Lada pounded on Radu’s door. He opened it, still in his bedclothes.

  “Hurry up! We leave in an hour. Back to Amasya at last.” She pushed past him and sat on his rumpled bed. “I will be so happy to have this nightmare behind us.”

  Radu looked at her with an intensity she was unaccustomed to. Usually he smiled or said something funny to deflect her bad moods. But now he stared expectantly and unkindly.

  Lada shifted on the bed, scowling. “You are the one who has been avoiding me. I was going to thank you. It was very well handled with Murad. But how dare you say I have converted to Islam! I could have killed you.” It was the most she could bring herself to say, because in truth she knew she would have been dead without Radu’s brilliant intervention. She could muster some gratitude, but more than that she was annoyed, angry, even jealous. Radu was in his element among these people, while Lada could not be further from hers.

  Radu’s expression remained the same. Lada stood, throwing her hands in the air. “What do you want?”

  “I know,” he said.

  “What do you know?”

  “About you and Mehmed.” He said Mehmed’s name as he always had, like a prayer. But this time it was laced with despair and longing. Lada turned her head defensively, picking up a candle from its stand and playing with the flame.

  “What do you think you know?”

  “You do not deserve him.”

  Slamming down the candle, Lada spun on Radu. “Perhaps he does not deserve me! I asked for none of this! How can you judge me for finding some measure of happiness in—” She stopped, searching her brother’s face. It was there, as plain as the stars in a cloudless night sky. Perhaps it had always been there. She sat back on the bed, all fight and fire extinguished.

  She had heard rumors of this type of thing. Jokes and bawdy stories from Nicolae and the Janissaries about men who loved other men in the manner of a woman. It had never made sense to Lada, but then, she had never loved anyone the way she knew her brother loved Mehmed.

  Had always loved him.

  With knife-sharp clarity, her own feelings of powerlessness and loneliness since being taken from Wallachia rose within her breast. How, then, must it feel to want a someone as much as she wanted a something, and to know that someone would never want you?

  “I am sorry,” she said, unmoving and emotionless because she did not know how to express what she understood.

  Radu’s anguish was palpable, choking her from across the room. “You do not love him.”

  Lada shook her head. She did not know what she had with Mehmed, only that it buffered her against despair. She would not give that up. “I care about him.”

  “You care about how he makes you feel. You cannot love him.”

  Radu was quivering, fists clenched, consumed with his feelings. This love would break him. Unless Lada broke him now. It would not be the first time she had allowed him to be beaten down in order to protect him.

  She spoke with all the bitterness of the truth, each word a lash against Radu’s heart. “He will never love you. He will never look at you the way he looks at me. You cannot have this, Radu.”

  They locked eyes, neither moving. Finally Radu slumped to the floor, long legs folded up to his chest, hands over his face. “You have no love to give him, and I have no love he will accept. What are we supposed to do?”

  Lada leaned forward, a hand outstretched. Then she curled it into a fist. She could not comfort him, could not fix this. He would need to be stronger. That was the only solution. “Get up. Stop pitying yourself. We are leaving, and things will go back to how they were before.”

  “We can never go back.” Radu looked up at her with empty eyes, and the truth of his words rang through her like a bell. It was true. There was no going back from Radu’s feelings, no going back from what Lada had let happen between her and Mehmed. Perhaps this had all been a mistake.

  “Get dressed!” she snapped, overwhelmed and angry.

  “No.” A cold distance settled over his face as his square jaw tightened.

  “We will not wait for you.”

  “I am not coming.”

  Exasperated, Lada began pulling clothes at random from the large armoire. “You are worthless. What will you do? Stay here?”

  “Yes.” He stood—straight, taller than her—then stepped close enough so that she had to bend her neck back to look him in the eyes. He stared down at her, and the little brother she had dragged through life was now entirely gone. “You have both been so busy learning tactics and studying battles, you have failed to see the truth of where thrones are won and lost. It is in the gossip, the words and letters passed in dark corners, the shadow alliances and the secret payments. You think I am worthless? I can do things you could never dream of.”

  Lada stumbled back. His words hit the precise tender spot she had been avoiding touching. “But—we have to stay together. We are all we have against this empire.”

  Radu opened his door, looking above her head. “Your mistake is in assuming we both view them as an enemy.”

  Rage and disgust spat from her lips. “You cannot mean that. We are Wallachian.”

  “You are Wallachian. I am home. Get out.”

  Lada could think of nothing else to say. She wanted to hit him, to pin him to the ground until he relented like when they were children. But this was not the child she had known. She did not know this man. She had lost Radu somewhere along the way, and she did not know how to get him back.

  She walked numbly past him, the door nearly slamming into her as he shut it.

  Dazed, she found herself astride a horse an hour later. Mehmed, eschewing his grand carriage, rode beside her. He looked relaxed and happy, as though a weight had been removed from his shoulders.

  It was not until they had entered the countryside that he looked around, puzzled. “Where is your brother?”

  Lada thought how it would break Radu’s heart to know it had taken this long for his absence to be noticed by the person he valued most in the world.

  Lada thought how Radu had broken her own heart.

  “I have no brother,” she said, urging her horse into a gallop and leaving the party behind.

  Amasya fit like a pair of boots she had outgrown. The contours hit at the wrong places, and it left her pinched, skin rubbed raw. Everything that had been comforting there, safe, was gone.

  “Careful!” Nicolae shouted as Lada slammed her wooden practice sword into the side of one of the newly appointed Janissaries, a Serb her own age. But so much younger. She hated him for his youth, for his happy, easy laugh. She hated all of them. She spun and hit the boy again. He cried out and dropped his sword, backing away.

  “Easy now.” Nicolae held up his hands. Lada threw her sword at him. He laughed, catching it. “I thought we agreed you would save the beatings for Ivan?”

  The rest of the soldiers laughed. Ivan glowered, viciously kicking the Janissary he was sparring with in the corner.

  Ignoring them all, Lada stomped out. She had been practicing more with the Janissaries, throwing herself into their routine, but it ended. It always ended. Every night they went to the barracks, and she went to her empty room.

  Mehmed went to wherever Mehmed went when he was not with her, and he was never with her long enough to make everything feel better.

  And Radu was nowhere.

  She scaled the stone wall surrounding the fortress and dropped to the ground, then headed straight up the mountainside into the trees.
That still felt the most like home to her, the heavy scent of pine needles underfoot, sun-warmed dirt, cool shadows. She breathed in deeply, then choked on a sudden fear: What if this was nothing like what home smelled like? What if this had replaced her memories of her own land?

  She stumbled to sit beneath a tree, hugging her knees to her chest, clutching the pouch around her neck. She was terrified to open it and find only dust, with no trace of a scent. Or, worse, a scent she did not recognize.

  Maybe Radu was right. Maybe Amasya was home now, and she needed to accept that.

  She heard the footfall a second before the sharp blow to the side of her head. Her vision spun as she sprawled on the ground, face pressed against a sharp rock and the rough, pungent needles. A kick to her stomach froze her breath, a creaking noise escaping her mouth. She panicked, begging her lungs to work as bright points of light swam lazily in her vision.

  She reached for her wrist sheath, and a boot came down, pinning her hand to the ground. “I know your tricks, little whore.”

  Her sluggish, aching head recognized the voice. She gasped, grateful her stomach muscles were working again. “Ivan?” He was a dark blot against the sun, standing over her. He dropped to his knees, straddling her, pinning her legs beneath his and holding both her wrists above her head. His face was so close to hers she could see the pocked scars covering his cheeks, the dark roots of hair beneath his skin.

  “You think you are special? You are nothing.” He spat in her face, the warm, sticky saliva dripping down her temple and into her hair. “You are a whore, and whores are good for only one thing. You should know your place.” Backhanding her across the face, he grabbed both her wrists in one of his enormous hands, then reached down to his trousers.

  Lada tried twisting away, but his weight pinned her legs. Disbelief warred with the disorientation of the blows to her head. She could not be here. This could not be happening. Ivan could not be beating her.

  “You will never be one of us,” he said, putting his face right above hers so she could look nowhere else as he wrenched her tunic up and grabbed for her underclothes.

  She slammed her head into his nose. In his momentary distraction, she pushed up, knocking him off-balance enough to free one leg. She brought it between his, and he howled in pain, rolling off her. He pushed himself to his feet, and Lada jumped on his back, fastening her legs around his waist and wrapping her arm around his throat. She grabbed her own wrist, pulling the arm tighter. Ivan staggered backward, slamming her into a tree, but she held tight. He clawed at her arm, trying to get a good enough grip to yank it away. She slammed her heel down into his stomach and groin, three sharp jabs.

  Finally, he stumbled forward, falling to his knees.

  “I am not one of you,” Lada said, her mouth right next to his ear. “I am better.”

  Ivan pitched forward and Lada went with him, never relaxing her arm though her muscles screamed for release. Long after he stopped moving, she stayed there. And then she stood and walked away.

  This was the third man she had killed.

  This time, her hands were clean.

  She found Mehmed in her room, waiting for her. Walking past him, she pulled off her tunic and dropped it into the hearth. The low-burning flames picked at it, a slow devouring as the cloth turned black and caught fire. “There is a body in the woods behind the fortress,” she said, watching the tunic contaminated by Ivan’s hands turn to ash.

  “What?” Mehmed’s hands hovered in midair, on either side of Lada’s hips.

  She turned to face him, carrying the fire in her eyes as a burning shield against everything she saw. “Also, I want to lead my own contingent of Janissaries.”

  RADU HAD NEVER IMAGINED how deeply lonely being well liked would be.

  At tonight’s feast, he sat only three people down from Murad. A position of honor, one that made him highly visible—and desirable—to all the attending pashas, their pashazada sons, visiting valis, local spahi leaders jockeying for position against rival Janissary leaders, even several powerful beys. People who were, by virtue of their birth, all more important than he was.

  But he was here, and they were not, and they all wanted to know why.

  Radu smiled, eyes wide and guileless, looking as though he were innocently delighted with everything before him. Halil Pasha sat immediately to his left, though, and it was hard to be aware of anything else.

  Halfway through the course of roasted game birds with a delicate, creamy sauce, Halil spoke. “You have not been to visit my son Salih since your dear friend Mehmed left last month.”

  Radu swallowed the piece of meat threatening to choke him. There were so many traps in that sentence, so many things to avoid or spin in the right direction. He had no doubt that Halil Pasha viewed him with suspicion, and Halil Pasha was the deadliest man in Edirne. Radu shrugged, offering an embarrassed and pitying smile. “I found that Salih and I do not…share the same interests.”

  Halil Pasha’s eyes hardened knowingly as he glanced in Salih’s direction. He was at the far end of the table, barely visible. At every event they had attended together, he had tried to catch Radu’s eye, and he had sent him several invitations to visit, but Radu felt it kinder to do this than to let him think there could be something real between them.

  “Yes, Salih’s interests are rather peculiar.” Halil Pasha resumed eating, then, his voice as casual as a knife in the dark, asked, “And what of your friend Mehmed? Do you hear much from him?”

  Radu sighed, letting guilt play across his face as he looked over in Murad’s direction. “My comportment with Mehmed does not reflect well on my character. It is a source of shame for me.”

  Halil Pasha leaned closer. “Oh?”

  “When he left, he accused me of using his friendship to get closer to his father, and…I fear he was not wrong. I am grateful for the kindness Mehmed showed me, but I never agreed with his tolerance for radical views on Islam, nor his misguided militaristic ideas. Though,” Radu said, tilting his head thoughtfully, “he has softened considerably on those. I think his time in the country has much improved his temperament. But our sultan is a scholar and a philosopher of the highest order, and it has long been my dream to be near enough to absorb some small portion of his wisdom.”

  Halil Pasha made a thoughtful noise in the back of his throat, though he frowned as he digested Radu’s words. Radu went back to his meal as if the information he had just given Halil Pasha was not carefully constructed and entirely false.

  From across the table, a conversation grew more heated, loud enough for Radu to pick up a few words. One, Skanderberg, kept being repeated. “Who is this Skanderberg they speak of?” Radu asked, leaning close to Halil Pasha.

  “Have you not heard? He was once a favorite of Murad, though back then he was Iskander Bey. An Albanian Janissary who rose through the ranks until Murad made him bey of Kruje. And Skanderberg repaid Murad’s generosity by betraying him and claiming that section of Albania as his own. Twice now we have made attempts to reclaim it and been repulsed.” He paused to give Radu a poisonous smile. “Favorites can fall far.”

  Murad shifted in his chair, face deepening to red. If Radu could hear the talk of Skanderberg, surely Murad could. It had to be a source of tremendous embarrassment for him.

  Seeing an opportunity to insinuate himself further into Murad’s good graces, Radu stood.

  All eyes turned to him, but he bowed toward Murad. “If it pleases you, my father, I have written a poem about the glory of your rule.”

  It was one of the many weapons in his arsenal, one he had hoped to keep sheathed for a while longer. But Murad was primed for a strike. The sultan beamed, gesturing for Radu to stand on a platform in the corner of the room.

  Radu had practiced the poem so often he could recite it in his sleep. He had stolen shiny bits from famous Arabic poems, gathering them like a raven to line his own nest. The language was dense and flowery, hyperbolic in the extreme. Murad listened, enraptured, as his reign was li
kened to the ocean and his posterity a mighty river.

  While Radu performed the many long stanzas, he watched as the meal was finished and men began to move around the room. While Murad sat, untouchable, nearly everyone of any importance eventually followed the pull to Halil Pasha to pay their respects. He sat in the center of a vast web of influence.

  Radu smiled and spoke in brighter tones to cover the despair he felt watching his enemy, the spider, and wondering how he ever thought he could hope to defeat him.

  Lately, prayer brought Radu little comfort. Even joining five times a day at the dizzyingly beautiful mosque, surrounded by his brothers, Radu felt alone. Heart heavy and head hanging, he trudged out onto the steps of the mosque, evening already eating away the blue of the sky. If he lost his faith, what was left to him?

  “Radu?”

  He looked up to find a man staring at him, arms open, face wide with wonder. “Can this be the lost little boy I prayed with so long ago?”

  Recognition dawned on Radu, warming him like the sun. “Kumal?”

  With a laugh, the older man threw his arms around Radu, drawing him into an embrace. It was the first sincere physical affection Radu had had since that horrible night with Salih. Something in his chest broke free, and he hugged Kumal too tightly, clinging to him.

  Kumal’s voice was as tender as his touch on Radu’s back. “Are you still lost, then?”

  “I think I am.”

  “Come, let us take a meal.” Keeping an arm around Radu’s shoulder, Kumal shepherded him as he had when Radu was so much younger. They found an inn serving supper. Plates of spiced meat, steaming with fragrant warmth, were set before them.

  “Where have you been?” Radu asked. “I have not seen you in the courts.”

  “I do not visit often. There is too much to do in my vali, and I have always preferred filling my duties there to spending time here.”

  Radu nodded. He had seen much of the striving of valis and beys, local rulers abandoning or neglecting their duties in hopes of being given even more.