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“Moldavia?” Petru said.
“Is there an echo here?” Lada glared at Petru.
Though he ducked his head and blushed, excitement animated his voice. “Are we burning Moldavian cities? Like we did in Transylvania?”
Lada had not forgotten Matei and the waste of his death, traitor or not. She would not lose men to petty vengeance again. Only to vengeance worth taking. She shook her head.
“What, then?” Nicolae asked.
“We go to appeal to my blood. We go to see my—” She paused, feeling the edges of the next word sticking in her throat, threatening to choke her. “My mother.”
“She is so beautiful,” Petru whispered, peering through the hedge they hid behind. “You look nothing like her.”
Nicolae cringed. “And that, Petru, is why your line will die with you.”
Lada did not—could not—answer as her mother rode elegantly toward them down the dirt path of her country manor.
The only clear memory Lada had of the woman was one of lank hair hanging over her face, sharp shoulder blades, bowed back. Crawling. Weeping. She had expected to come here and find the same broken creature. She had not been able to picture her mother standing, much less riding.
This woman was small and fine-boned like a bird. Her hair, pinned elaborately beneath her hat, shone black with hints of silver threaded through. Her back was straight, her chin lifted, a veil of lace over her face.
Lada had been apprehensive about trying to leverage her connection to her mother to get help from the Moldavian king, her grandfather. But it had been easier to think of her mother that way, as a stepping-stone. Someone to climb over.
Here her mother was not on the ground. She was higher than Lada.
“We should leave,” she said. “This was a bad idea.”
“We should at least talk to her,” Nicolae said.
“I do not even know if that is her. I have not seen her since I was three. Perhaps we were misdirected. My mother might be dead.”
Bogdan pushed Petru aside, taking over his vantage point. “That is her.”
“How do you know?”
He shrugged. “I was older than you when she left.”
“By a year!”
He blinked at Lada, expression intractable. “I remember everything about our childhood.” He said the word our with uncharacteristic tenderness. It made Lada feel unsettled, even more than she already was.
Lada crossed her arms over her chest. “Well, what are we supposed to do? Jump out of the hedge and scream, ‘Hello, Mother!’?”
Nicolae shook his head. “Of course not. She is not our mother. Only yours.”
“She is barely even that. She will not recognize me.” Lada would have to prove her identity to the woman who had fled when she was a child. She had no way of doing that.
“We could bring my mother,” Bogdan said. “She was your mother’s companion for many years.”
They had left Oana at camp with the rest of the men, hidden along the mountain pass where they had crept into Moldavia. The whole journey Lada had longed to turn around, to flee, to go back home. But she could not. She needed help.
She hated needing.
“Fine.” Lada stood and pushed through the hedge. She struggled out from it right as her mother’s horse passed.
“God’s wounds!” Vasilissa shouted, using Lada’s father’s favorite curse. “Where did you—” She stopped, her fingers going to her mouth, pressing at the veil.
“You should travel with guards.” Lada wore her anger as armor against this woman. “We could have been anyone.”
