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“Go warn them,” Lada whispered to Nicolae.
“What are you going to do?”
“Delay them, idiot. Now go!”
Nicolae disappeared into the woods. Lada stood. “The sultan is the son of a donkey!” she shouted in Turkish.
The Janissaries turned as one, arrows already nocked to bows and pointed in her direction. She had cover, but it would not take them long to find her. She darted to another tree. “I am sorry. I should not have said that about the sultan. It is an offense to donkeys, which are perfectly serviceable creatures.”
Lada peeked around the tree. Their weapons still at the ready, the Janissaries were searching the dense foliage for threats. Lada laughed loudly, the sound ringing through the trees. “Are you Janissaries? I have heard that Janissaries are not fit to lick the dust from spahi boots.”
“Who is there?” an angry voice shouted, while another cursed her. Their leader barked an order for them to be quiet. Then he called out, “Show yourself, woman!”
“Why do Bulgars make terrible farmers?” she answered.
There was silence. She peered from behind the trunk, amused to see the Janissaries trading confused looks. Most of them had lowered their bows when no attack came.
“What?” the commander shouted.
“I said, why do Bulgars make terrible farmers?”
One of the Janissaries in front sheathed his sword. “I do not know.”
The commander barked at him for silence, but the Janissary shrugged. “I want to know.”
“So do I,” another called. Most of them nodded, a few grinning at this odd forest interlude.
“Because they confuse the pigs for Bulgar women, and cannot bear to slaughter their wives.”
A chorus of snickering laughs broke out.
“Who are you?” one of the men called. “You should not be in these woods. It is not safe.”
A volley of arrows rained from the sky onto the men.
“I know,” Lada said, coming from behind the tree and letting her shaft join the others.
After, when the work of killing was done, Lada took no pleasure in the white-capped bodies on the ground. Stepping over the corpses, Hunyadi found her and clasped her hand in his. “How did you think to distract them like that?”
She lifted a shoulder as they walked back toward camp. “They are soldiers. They depend upon routine, and anything out of the ordinary will give them pause. And they are men. They hate to be insulted, but they love to hear others mocked. And they are fools, because they cannot imagine that a woman alone in the woods would be a threat.”
Later, around a campfire, Lada sat next to Hunyadi. Nicolae was on her other side. The men traded stories like coins, each trying to make his the most valuable, the brightest. Petru mimed being struck through the eye with an arrow so dramatically he nearly fell into the fire.
Lada remembered a time not so long ago when some of these same men had come back from fighting and she had been forced to listen to stories she feared she would never be part of. Now she was at the center, truly belonging.
“How did you find your men?” Hunyadi asked. He spoke Turkish around her men as a courtesy, since most of them did not speak Hungarian and his Wallachian was dreadful.
“We found her,” Nicolae said, beaming proudly. “Or I did, at least. It is a funny story. When Lada was this small…” He held his hand close to the ground, then squinted at her. “Well, she is still that small.”
Lada punched him in the shoulder. Hard.
He rubbed it, grimacing. “When Lada was not the towering giantess of a woman that she is today, she was in Amasya as the playmate of the little zealot. Back then no one knew he would be sultan. He was just a brat.”
Lada nodded, then quickly erased the wistful smile threatening to break through her expression.
“She was spying on us while we trained. We caught her. Then when she beat up poor Ivan—” Nicolae paused. “Whatever happened to Ivan?”
“I killed him,” Lada said without thinking.
