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IT TOOK ONLY THREE fingers smashed beyond recognition before the would-be assassin screamed the name of Lada’s enemy.
“Well.” Nicolae raised his eyebrows, once singular but now bisected by a vicious scar that failed to fade with the passage of time. He turned away as Bogdan slit the young man’s throat. The heat of life leaving body steamed slightly in the frigid winter air. “That is disappointing.”
“That the governor of Brasov betrayed us?” Bogdan asked.
“No, that the quality of assassins has fallen this low.”
Lada knew Nicolae meant to make the situation palatable through humor—he never liked executions—but his words struck deep. It was c
ertainly a blow that the governor of Brasov wanted her dead. He had promised her aid, which had given her the first shred of hope in months.
Now she had none. Brasov was the last of the Transylvanian cities she had tried to find an ally in. None of the noble Wallachian boyar families would so much as respond to her letters. Transylvania, with its fortified mountain cities crushed between Wallachia and Hungary, was heavily Wallachian. But Lada saw now that the ruling class of Saxons and Hungarians treated her people like chaff, and considered her worthless.
But almost worse than losing her last chance at an ally was that this was the most they could be bothered to spare for her: an underfed, poorly trained assassin barely past boyhood.
That was all the fear she instilled, all the respect she merited.
Bogdan kicked the body over the edge of the small ravine bordering their encampment. Just as when they were children, he never had to be asked to clean up her messes. He wiped the blood from his fingers, then tugged his ill-fitting gloves back on. A misshapen hat was worn low, hiding the ears that stuck out like jug handles.
He had grown broad and strong. His fighting was not flashy but was brutally efficient. Lada had seen him in action, and had to bite back the admiring words that sprang to her lips. He was also fastidiously clean—a quality emphasized by the Ottomans that not all her men had retained. Bogdan always smelled fresh, like the pine trees they hid among. Everything about him reminded Lada of home.
Her other men crouched over their fires, scattered in groups among the thick trees. They were as misshapen as Bogdan’s hat, their once pristine Janissary uniformity long since abandoned. They were down to thirty—twelve lost when they had met an unexpected force from the Danesti Wallachian prince as they attempted to cross the Danube River into the country, eight more lost in the months since, spent hiding and running and desperately seeking allies.
“Do you think Brasov is in league with the Danesti prince or with the Hungarians?” Nicolae asked.
“Does it matter?” Lada snapped. All sides were set against her. They smiled to her face and promised aid. Then they sent assassins in the dark.
She had bested vastly superior assassins on Mehmed’s behalf. Meager comfort, though, and worse still that she found it only by remembering her time with Mehmed. It seemed as though anything she might look on with pride had happened when she was with him. Had she been so diminished, then, by leaving the person she was at his side?
Lada lowered her head, rubbing the unceasing tightness at the base of her neck. Since failing to take the throne, she had neither written to nor received word from Mehmed or Radu. It was too humiliating to lay bare her failure before them and anticipate what they might say. Mehmed would invite her to return. Radu would console her—but she questioned whether he would welcome her back.
She wondered, too, how close they had become in her absence. But it did not matter. She had chosen to leave them as an act of strength. She would never return to them in weakness. She had thought—with her men, with her dispensation from Mehmed, with all her years of experience and strength—that the throne was hers for the taking. She had thought that she would be enough.
She knew now that nothing she could do would ever be enough. Unless she could grow a penis, which did not seem likely. Nor particularly desirable.
Though it did make for an easier time relieving oneself when perpetually hiding in the woods. Emptying one’s bladder in the middle of the night was a freezing, uncomfortable endeavor.
What, then, was left to her? She had no allies. She had no throne. She had no Mehmed, no Radu. She had only these sharp men and sharp knives and sharp dreams, and no way to make use of any of them.
Petru leaned against a winter-bare tree nearby. He had grown thicker and quieter in the past year. All traces of the boy he had been when he joined Lada’s company were gone. One of his ears had been mangled, and he wore his hair longer to cover it. He had also stopped shaving. Most of her men had. Their faces were no longer the bare ones that had indicated their station as Janissaries. They were free. But they were also directionless, which increasingly worried Lada. When thirty men trained to fight and kill had nothing to fight and kill for, what was there to keep them bound to her?
She pulled a branch from the fire. It was a burning brand, searing her eyes with its light. She sensed more than saw the attention of her men shift to her. Rather than feeling like a weight, it made her stand taller. The men needed something to do.
And Lada needed to see something burn.
“Well,” she said, spinning the flaming stick lazily through the air, “I think we should send our regards to Transylvania.”
It is easier to destroy than to build, her nurse had been fond of saying when Lada would pull all the blossoms off the fruit trees, but empty fields make hungry bellies.
As a child, Lada had never understood what her nurse meant. But now she thought she might. At least the part about destroying being easier than building. All her time spent writing letters or standing in front of minor nobles attempting to forge alliances had been wasted. It had been nothing but struggle for the past year. Struggle to arrange meetings, struggle to be seen as more than a girl playing at soldier, struggle to find the right ways to work within a system that had always been foreign to her.
They were closer to the city of Sibiu than to Brasov. For efficiency’s sake, Lada decided to stop there first. It took less time to herd hundreds of Sibiu’s sheep into the icy pond to drown than it had for a servant to inform her that the governor would not be meeting with her. The Wallachian shepherds, who would no doubt be killed for their failure to save the sheep, were quietly folded into her company.
That accomplished, Lada and her men passed through the slumbering, unprotected outer city of Sibiu, harming nothing and no one. Ahead of them rose the walls of the inner city, where only Transylvanian nobles—never Wallachians—were allowed to sleep. She imagined they dreamed deeply, pampered and protected by the sweat of Wallachian brows.
They had neither the time nor the numbers to launch an attack on inner Sibiu. And they were not here to conquer. They were here to destroy. As each volley of flaming arrows arced high over the walls and down into the maze of roofs, Lada’s smile grew simultaneously brighter and darker.
A few days later, they waited outside Brasov for the sun to go down. The city was set in a valley ringed with deep green growth. Towers stood at intervals along the inner city walls, each maintained by a different guild. If she were planning a siege, it would be a challenge.
