Bright We Burn

by Kiersten White

  “Still empty. And the men?” Along with the farmland, they had set aside a portion of Toma Basarab’s estate for training Lada’s soldiers. Princes had never been allowed to have a standing army. They were expected to depend entirely on the boyars and their individual forces. It was a disorganized, messy system. And a system that saw prince after prince dead before their time.

  But Lada was like no prince before.

  Nicolae tugged down his hat. In the cold, his nose had gone bright red, and his scar almost purple. “You were right to send us out here. It is easier to control the men and instill discipline when there are no city temptations. And everything I learned from the Janissaries is being put to use. This will be the greatest group of fighting men Wallachia has ever had.”

  Lada was not surprised, but she was pleased. She knew her methods were better than what had always been done. Power was not split among meddling, selfish boyars. It flowed in a direct line of command to her. She rewarded merit, and she punished disloyalty and crime. Both with very public efficiency. And she knew from her stay the night before that word was spreading. Her people were motivated.

  They passed two frozen bodies hanging from a tree. One had a sign that said DESERTER. The other, THIEF. Nicolae grimaced and looked away. Lada reached up and straightened one of the signs.

  She had been focusing on making the roads safe and preparing for the spring planting. She had also been pruning the boyars. But Nicolae’s work was just as important for the future of Wallachia, and she would invest whatever she had to. It was a different type of seed to nurture.

  Nicolae stretched, holding his long arms above his head and yawning. “How are things in the capital? Any problems with the boyars? I heard rumors that Lucian Basarab was angry.” Nicolae’s casual tone was as artfully constructed as a Transylvanian woodcut. Lada knew he had not forgotten nor forgiven her choices at the bloody banquet.

  Though she had mostly killed Danesti boyars, the family most directly responsible for the death of her father and older brother, Toma Basarab had also been eliminated. It did not go over well with the Basarab family, including his wealthy and influential brother, Lucian. She was not sorry. The fewer boyars alive to betray her, the better. They had outlived far too many princes. This had made them comfortable and lazy, assured of their own importance. If boyars now lived in constant fear for their lives? She did not think that was a problem. They needed to know they were the same as all Lada’s citizens: they served Wallachia, or they died.

  But Nicolae always wanted more delicacy. More mercy. It was part of the reason she had sent him out here, even though he was one of her best. She had no use for his counsel on moderation and placation. Neither of those were skills she had any interest in cultivating. If boyars served a purpose, they could remain. But they so very rarely did.

  Mercy was a luxury Lada’s rule was not yet stable enough to afford. Perhaps someday. Until then, she knew what she was doing was both necessary and working.

  She breathed in the sharp, cold air, the scent of woodsmoke beckoning them toward warmth and food. They rode across the fields, through the Wallachia she had carved free from the failure of the past. “I addressed Lucian Basarab’s concerns. It is all taken care of. I am a very good prince.”

  Nicolae laughed. “When you are not busy cutting babies in half.”

  “Oh, that takes almost no time. They are such small things, after all.”

  * * *

  A few days later, satisfied that Nicolae had her troops well under control, Lada rode along the same banks she had traveled twice before. Once, as a girl with her father discovering her country. And then with her men in an attempt to take that country back.

  This time she rode alone. She paused at a bend in the river where a hidden cave contained a secret passage down from the ruins of the mountain fortress.

  But they were ruins no longer. There was no solitude to be found here today. Lada listened to the chisels, the shouts of men, the clinking of metal chains. Here, at last, a promise fulfilled: she had come back to rebuild her fortress.

  She rode slowly along the narrow switchbacks leading up the steep mountainside. This morning, she had dressed in her full uniform, complete with her red satin hat marking her as the prince. Where she passed, her soldiers bowed. And the men and women working cowered, ducking out of the way.

  Near the top, as the new walls of her fortress loomed gray and glorious from the peak, Bogdan came out to meet her. She let him help her down from her horse, his hands lingering at her waist.

  “How is it?” She devoured the walls with her eyes. Her silver locket, given to her by Radu and filled with the flower and tree clipping she had kept with her all their long years away, felt heavy around her neck, as though relieved to be home, too.

  “Nearly finished.”

  A man in chains staggered past, pushing a cart filled with stones. His clothes were ragged and stained, only a hint of their former finery showing through. She much preferred Lucian Basarab this way. Behind him, his wife and their two children pushed more carts. The children were dead-eyed, trudging numbly along. Lucian Basarab looked up, but did not seem to see her. He collapsed on the side of the path.

  One of her soldiers hurried forward, a club in his hand. Lada did not know whether Lucian Basarab was dead. It did not matter. There were more to take his place. Just like the rest of her Wallachia, the fortress was being remade at remarkable speed thanks to the unwilling efforts of those who opposed her.

  At last she had found something that boyars were good for.

  “Show me my fortress,” Lada said, striding past her foes and into her triumph.

  Constantinople

  SOMEDAY RADU WOULD NOT long for a time when he was certain things were terrible but had no idea just how much worse they were about to get.

  This day, however, he was plagued with memories of riding this same road to Constantinople with Nazira and Cyprian at his side. He had been so nervous, so frightened, so determined to make something of his time there. To prove himself to Mehmed.

  He pitied the man he had been on that ride. And he missed him. Riding toward the city today, all he felt was the absence of Nazira and Cyprian. The absence of his assurance that he was doing the right thing. The absence of his faith in Mehmed. The absence of his faith in faith itself.

  It was a very lonely road.

  He had not planned to return to Constantinople. The city was haunted for him, and forever would be. After Mehmed took it, Radu had returned to Edirne at the first possible opportunity. Both to escape, and to be with Fatima. The guilt he carried was nothing compared to the debt he owed her for losing her wife, and so, to ease some of Fatima’s suffering, he endured his anguish at being around her. There was nothing else he could do for Nazira.

  All his letters—joined by Kumal’s and even Mehmed’s efforts—had yielded no news. Nazira, Cyprian, and the servant boy Valentin had disappeared. He had watched them sail away from the burning city, swallowed up by smoke and distance. He had sent them away so they could live, but he feared he had simply found another way for them to die. Every day Radu prayed that they had not joined the thousands sent to anonymous graves. He could not bear the idea that the people he longed for might not exist anymore.

  And so he sent more letters, and waited at their home in Edirne, where he would be easy to find.

  But then Mehmed had written. A request from the sultan was never a request—it was a command. Though Radu considered rejecting Mehmed’s invitation to join him in Constantinople, in the end he did what he always did: he returned to Mehmed.

  Fatima had enough faith for both of them that all would be well. She waited at the window of their house in Edirne every day. Radu imagined her there now, in the same place she had been when he left. Would she wait there fruitlessly for the rest of her life?

  A passing cart startled him from his gloomy reverie. The road to Constantinop
le had been empty last time, cleared by the specter of war hanging over the countryside. Now traffic flowed to and from the city like blood through a vein. Carrying life in and out in a constant pulse. The city was no longer a dying thing.

  Like arms reaching out to welcome—or drag—him in, the gates were open. Radu tamped down the panic that arose at seeing them that way. He had spent so long both defending them and praying they would fall, his body did not know how to respond to seeing them function as city gates should.

  Much had been done to repair the walls he had fought on. Shiny new rocks re-formed sections that had fallen during the long siege. It was as though the events of last spring had never occurred. The city healed, the past erased. Rebuilt. Buried.

  Radu looked at the land in front of the wall and wondered what had been done with the bodies.

  So many bodies.

  “…Radu Bey!”

  Radu crawled out of his memories of darkness, thrust back into brilliant day. “Yes?”

  It took a few confused moments for Radu to realize that the young man who had addressed him had been only a boy a few months ago. Amal had grown so much he was nearly unrecognizable. “I was told you would be arriving sometime today. I am to escort you to the palace.”

  Radu reached out his hands to clasp Amal’s. His heart swelled to see the young man here, alive, healthy. He was one of three boys Radu had been able to save from the horrors of the siege.

  “Come,” Amal said, grinning. “They are waiting. We will ride between the walls and go straight there.”

  Radu did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed. He had thought about riding through the city, but he knew where his heart would take him. An empty house where no one waited for him. Better to go straight to Mehmed.

  “Thank you,” Radu said. Amal took the reins of Radu’s horse and led him through the space between the city’s two defensive walls. Radu did not want to be here. He would have preferred to visit ghosts that were, if melancholy, at least tinged with sweetness. Here at the walls there were only the ghosts of steel and bone, blood and betrayal.

  Radu shuddered, dragging his eyes from the top of the wall and toward the gate they were heading for. The gate Radu had unlocked in the midst of the final battle, sealing Constantine’s fate and bringing the city down around himself.

  Amal gestured to the walls on either side. “They finished repairs only last month.”

  Radu glanced up at the nearest Janissaries. He wondered if these men had been part of the siege. If they had flooded the wall, spilling over it. What had they done when they got into the city after so many endless days of anticipation fueled with frustration and hatred?

  Radu swallowed a bitter, acidic taste, unable to look at the walls any longer. “I would like to go the rest of the way alone.” Radu took the reins back.

  “But I am to—”

  “I know the path.” Radu ignored Amal’s panicked expression and turned his horse around. He entered at the main gate amid the press of humans, the crush of life. It was something, at least.

  Once inside, he let his horse meander, guided by the crowds. He was desperate not to be alone. There was much to be distracted by. This portion of the city had been nearly abandoned before. Now windows were thrown open, walls repainted, early flowers planted in tiny pots. A woman beat a rug, humming to herself, as a child toddled on unsteady legs after a dog.

  Where the spring had been unseasonably cold, the winter was moderate and pleasant. It did not feel like the same desperate, starving, suspicious city. Everywhere Radu looked, things were being built and repaired. There was no evidence of fire, no hint that any tragedy other than age had ever befallen this city.

  Radu was so distracted that he missed the road he was supposed to follow and ended up in the Jewish sector. He had not spent any time there before. It, too, was humming with activity. He paused in front of a building under construction.

  “What is this?” Radu asked a man carrying several large wooden beams.

  “New synagogue,” the man said. He wore a turban and robes. He passed the beams to a man wearing a kippah on his head and ringlets at his ears.

  Radu rode through the sector, then found himself in a more familiar area. Boys surrounded a giant building that had been a derelict library. They lounged on the steps, talking or playing. A bell clanged, and the boys jumped up and rushed inside. Radu wondered what their lives were like. Where they had come from. What they knew of what had happened to create a city where they could play on the steps of their school, safe. At peace.

  Radu stared down the street. If he went farther this way, he would reach the Hagia Sophia.

  He turned and headed for the palace instead. The ride had been enough to clear his head a bit. He had anticipated how difficult it would be to see the walls again. But seeing the vitality of the city was a balm to his senses. He would not risk that by revisiting the Hagia Sophia so soon.

  Amal was waiting near the palace entrance, nervously wringing his hands. Doubtless Radu had complicated his day by taking a detour. It was not Amal’s fault Radu felt the way he did, and Radu really was glad to see Amal alive and well. He dismounted and passed his reins to his former aide. “Forgive me,” Radu said. “Coming back has been…emotional.”

  “I understand.” Amal smiled, and suddenly he looked even older than the young man he had grown into. Radu had shielded Constantine’s two young heirs from the horrors of the city’s fall, but Amal had been in the thick of it before Radu pulled him free. “I will see to your horse. And, if you do not mind, I have asked to be assigned as your personal servant while you are here.”

  “I would like nothing more.” Radu watched as Amal led the horse away, putting off his own entrance into the palace.

  A small bundle of motion rushed toward him. Radu barely had a chance to hold out his arms before a boy threw himself into them.

  “Radu! He said you were here!”

  Radu pulled back, looking into the saintly face of Manuel, one of the two heirs to the fallen emperor Constantine. Radu had stayed behind when Nazira, Cyprian, and Valentin left so that he could save Constantine’s child heirs. They were his attempt at redemption for all he had done during the siege and everyone he had betrayed. He had fallen far short of redemption, but holding Manuel—alive, healthy, happy Manuel—in his arms, Radu felt joy for the first time in months. Laughing, Radu pulled him close, pressing a kiss to the top of his head.

  Of all the life he had seen return to the city, this little life was the best he could possibly have hoped for. “Where is your brother?”

  Manuel squirmed free, adjusting his clothes. He wore silk robes in the style of the Ottomans. It was a far cry from the stiff and structured Byzantine clothes he had worn before. “Murad is inside, waiting. He is too old now to run, he says.”

  “Murad?” Radu asked, puzzled. It had been Mehmed’s father’s name.

  Manuel beamed. “Yes. And I am Mesih. The sultan let me choose it myself.”

  “You have new names.” Radu frowned.

  “We thought it was best. It is a new empire! A new start. A rebirth, we decided.”

  “We?” Radu asked.

  “Yes, Murad and me. And the sultan.”

  Mehmed had meant what he said, then—that he would make the boys part of his court. Radu was glad to hear that this promise had been kept. And he supposed renaming them made sense. He himself had finally been able to adjust and accept his new life when he felt like he truly belonged. It was probably best for the boys to remove themselves from who they had been, to forget the trauma and loss of the past. Manuel—Mesih—certainly seemed happy enough.

  If only Radu Bey’s new name had had the same effect.

  Mesih took Radu’s hand and pulled him deeper into the palace. He kept up a steady stream of chatter, telling Radu what they could expect for dinner and asking whether Radu would join them for
evening prayer at the Hagia Sophia or if he would be praying somewhere else. Then he went on to speak of his lessons, which tutors he liked best, how his writing was much better than his brother’s. “And you have noticed how good my Turkish is, I am sure.”

  Radu laughed. “I have. I could listen to it all day.” And he suspected he would, until they were separated. Something nagged at Radu, though, as Mesih continued describing his lessons.

  He realized with a pain both happy and sad what was different: This boy was receiving a true education with no cruelty. There were no visits to the head gardener, no instructional trips to the prisons and torture chambers, no beatings. This was not the same childhood Radu and Lada had experienced under a sultan.

  Mehmed was not his father. He had taken the city and made something better. He had taken the heirs of his enemy and made them his family. The dread Radu had felt about seeing his oldest friend dissipated. There was still much distance between them, but at least Radu had not been wrong to believe in Mehmed’s ability to do great things.

  “Are you well, Radu Bey?” Mesih asked.

  Radu sniffed, clearing his throat. “Yes, I am well. Or at least, I think I will be.”

  Tirgoviste

  IF LADA HAD KNOWN the sheer volume of parchment she would be buried under, she might have taken a title other than prince. She had returned revitalized from her visit to her fortress, only to find mounds of letters waiting for her.

  Lada groaned, leaning her head forward. The brush Oana was working through her hair caught on a snarl.