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IT TOOK TWENTY THOUSAND stakes to make a single point:
Lada was not ever giving up.
Radu did not know which had shaken Mehmed more deeply: seeing so many of his men impaled in horrific defiance of Muslim burial traditions, or understanding that Lada truly had intended to kill him during the night attack.
Their retreat from the city had been necessary for both morale and health. At best, the tenor of the camp was one of unease. Radu heard a lot of rumblings about going home. They had to decide what to do before opinion shifted too far in one direction or the other and made the men unruly.
Mehmed had relocated to a far less ostentatious and more anonymous tent. They were there now, and had been for hours. Radu waited in silence next to Mehmed, who sat with his back straight, his eyes on the carpet. He picked mercilessly at the gold stitching on his robe.
“How can I fight this?” Mehmed finally asked. This was the first time since the night of Lada’s first visit that they had been alone. Mehmed seemed a different man. Radu, too, felt different. Far older, again. How many lifetimes could he age over the course of a few years?
“How can I fight this?” Mehmed repeated, but Radu did not think Mehmed was asking him. Radu suspected that, until the double blow of Lada’s true intentions and her horrific display, Mehmed had not actually taken any of this seriously. It had been more than a game to him, but far less than a war. He had faced Constantinople with religious determination. This had been all about getting Lada back.
And now Lada had made certain they could never forgive her. All hope Mehmed had held of reunion was as lifeless and rotten as the sentinels at Tirgoviste.
The camp had moved far enough away from the city that the smell was no longer making men sick. Radu had his own men—four thousand skilled and disciplined fighters—digging graves instead of riding into battle. But his men were not alone. Ali Bey, Ishak Pasha, Hamza Pasha, they had all spared as many as they could for the work of giving the Ottomans proper burials. Shifts were taken with solemn sadness. Some to dig, some to guard, and some to pray.
“We have Tirgoviste, but it does not matter.” Mehmed’s voice was as haunted as his eyes. “I do not know how to fight a war where tactics are useless, where numbers gain me no advantage, where gates are left open and cities are guarded only by the accusing dead of my people. Tell me how I can fight this.” He looked up, pleading.
“You cannot.” Radu knelt in front of Mehmed. His friend leaned forward, resting his head on Radu’s legs and curling in around himself. Radu put a hand on Mehmed’s turban. Radu’s fierce desire was gone, his passion dulled by the long, heavy wear of time and disappointment. But his tender affection and deep respect for his friend, for the sultan, would not leave him without a fight.
“If we stay,” Radu said, “we will have to chase her into the mountains. It will be months. Perhaps even years. She will wear down your men with time and starvation, sickness and frustration. We cannot fight on her terms and win.”
“What should I do, then?”
The eyeless face of Kumal rose unbidden in Radu’s mind. He closed his own eyes. It did not help.
Lada could not win this. Radu would not let her. “Go back to Constantinople. Burn the cities you pass, take whatever livestock is left, and, everywhere you can, exaggerate the numbers. Have Mara tell all her contacts what a great victory this was, how easily you restored Wallachia to its vassal status and put Aron on the throne.”
“But Lada won!”
“And who will tell that story? Her peasants? Her hordes of landless, nameless people? How will they travel to the pope, to the Italians, to the rest of Europe to tell of her victory? Rumors will spread, certainly, but all evidence will be in our favor. Our man on the throne in the capital. Our triumphant march home.”
“If we go, we leave Lada free to do it all again.”
“No.” Radu let out a heavy breath and smoothed the edge of Mehmed’s turban. “I said we could not fight on her terms. We fight on mine, instead. With your permission, I will keep my men and stay
behind to work. I can steal the country from my sister through the one thing she never could beat me at.”
“Archery?” Mehmed said, his dark attempt at humor acknowledged by both men with wry smiles that faded as soon as they appeared.
“Sheer likability. I will defeat her through manipulation. Politics. Saying the right thing at the right time to the right people.”
“She will fight you.”
“She can try, but she will fail. She tried to dismantle the foundation of a building she was still living in. She tried to be prince while taking apart the entire system that supported the prince. I will find every enemy, every boyar who has lost a son or cousin or brother, every noble who rightly fears for their place in her new world. I will use Transylvania and Hungary and Moldavia. I will steal every stone of support she has until she is standing alone in the ruins of the new Wallachia she tried to build.”
“And then?” Mehmed sat up, locking his eyes onto Radu’s. “She will never stop. She does not have it in her. And what foolish hopes I nurtured that she could return to us are gone.” Mehmed had been firmly against killing Lada. Radu saw that his position had changed. They had so much in common, his sister and his sultan. And now they hated with as much determination as ever they had loved.
The bodies were piling up because of it.
Radu knew he had faced this before, knew he had been too weak to make the right decision, knew he could not afford to do so again with so many lives at stake. It had been selfish of him, avoiding what had to be done. What Lada would do in his place. Radu could be strong for this one terrible task. It would destroy him, but he could no longer ask thousands to pay the price of his tender conscience. “Then I will do what must be done. I will finish it.”
Poenari Fortress
LADA LEANED OVER THE stone wall where it jutted past the edge of the cliff. The Arges River curled distant and silver beneath her. Her fortress was finally complete. It would be her refuge, her sanctuary, her rallying point. Breathing deeply of the cold air still wet with morning mist, Lada fortified herself with the same unassailable strength as her fortress.
There was work to do.
