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“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.
He had won.
No one had been there to protect him, not this time, and he had—
He looked down.
The enemy—the terrible threat that he had single-handedly ended—was a boy. His wrists were knobby, his elbows sharp points. His eyes, wide and wondering with death, were orbs in a gaunt face that told of hunger and desperation. And so very, very few years.
Radu dropped to his knees and reached out. His hand hovered over the hole he had made that tore this boy from life. He had shot arrows at enemies before, had probably killed before, but never like this. Never with a face right there to fall still and cold with the question of why.
“Radu?”
A hand came down on his shoulder. “Radu, are you hurt?”
Radu twitched away with a shudder. “I will scout ahead.” He stumbled back to his horse, galloping beyond the train, beyond the line, beyond the last scouts kneeling on the ground around one of their dead. When he had left them all behind, he gasped for air but could not find it.
For the first time ever, his life had been in danger and no one had been there to save him. He had saved himself.
But no one had saved that boy in the forest, and Radu cried for him, wishing that someone had.
Radu threw down his maps, rubbing his face wearily. “We could burn down the trees.”
