Bright We Burn

by Kiersten White

  She frowned thoughtfully. “Not personally, but I am certain I know someone who will. Why?”

  “I am looking for news of my wife and my…friends. They fled during the fall of the city, and I have had no word of them since.”

  Mara put a hand on his. Her dark eyes were sympathetic and serious. “Write down their names and any details that matter. I will set all my resources on it.”

  “Thank you,” Radu said. “I have been searching, along with Kumal Pasha, and—”

  “He is very handsome.” Urbana said it in the same tone she would use for talking about the quality of metal for casting cannons, or remarking on the weather. “He does not seem like he would ever be violent. And he has been a widower for some time.”

  Radu could not quite follow the change in conversation. “Are you…courting him?”

  Urbana gave him the same glare of disgust she directed at the spiced meat. “I meant for Mara. I have neither use nor time for a husband.”

  Mara shared a long-suffering look with Radu. “Urbana worries that my childbearing years are dwindling quickly. She speaks of it often.” She sighed heavily. “Very often.”

  Radu nearly laughed but was hit with a pang, remembering Urbana prying into his own private life—and lack of babies—with Nazira. Nazira should be here, at his side. No. She should be at Fatima’s side. It was his fault she was not.

  “You could marry Radu,” Urbana said, thoughtful. “He is quite young for you. Eighteen, now? But he married his first wife very young, so he does not mind. He is very kind and does not have a temper. I used to hear girls gossiping about how handsome he is, with his large dark eyes and his prominent jaw.” She peered at Radu in a way that made him intensely uncomfortable. “I suppose I understand what they meant. He is tall and healthy, at least. And with his wife missing, he is lacking for company.”

  Radu choked on the piece of bread in his mouth. He stood, unable to sit for a meal in this place that had taken so much from him. If Mehmed wanted him here, he would be here. But he could not pretend everything was normal. He could not have conversations about his future as though his past were not looped around his neck like a noose, choking him with regret and sorrow.

  Just then, the banquet hall doors opened. A procession of unarmed men, roughly dressed under fine black cloaks, entered, dragging and pushing large wooden boxes. Mehmed’s Janissaries stood at the ready, eyes narrowed in observation. A servant hurried past them and bowed at the base of Mehmed’s dais. “They would not wait,” he said, trembling.

  The leader of the men bowed as well, sweeping one arm out in exaggeration. His boots were filthy and his clothes dusty. They must have just arrived. Radu looked closer, and realized all the men wore cloaks with the Dracul family seal on them. It was a dragon and a cross, taken from the Order of the Dragon. It felt wrong, seeing it here. Radu’s already fragile emotions recoiled at the symbol of his family. Of his past.

  The man spoke Wallachian, not Turkish, as would have been appropriate. “We bring a gift from Lada Dracul, vaivode of Wallachia, to his honor the sultan. She sends her respects, and asks that, in the future, you make certain your men offer her the level of respect she deserves as prince.”

  With that, the man turned on his heel and left the room. The other Wallachians followed him out. They walked quickly. Radu looked up at Mehmed, who met his gaze, raising an eyebrow. Mehmed did not speak much Wallachian.

  “He said it is a gift. From Lada. She sends her respects and asks that your men respect her as a prince in the future.”

  “What is it?” Mehmed asked.

  Radu shook his head in a small motion. “He did not say.”

  Mehmed had gotten even better at keeping his expressions guarded. Radu did not know how Mehmed felt about the surprise, or how he felt about Lada. The sultan gave away nothing. He gestured, and a servant ran forward with a lever to pry open the lid of the first box. As soon as it was lifted, he cried out in shock and dismay. He covered his nose and mouth with one arm and backed away.

  Mehmed moved to get off the dais, but Radu held up a hand in warning. “Let me.” He stopped a few paces from the boxes. The smell released with the lid gone was enough to tell him he did not want to see what his sister had sent.

  He leaned over to peer inside anyway.

  A corpse stared up at him, dried blood in lines of agony down its sunken face. As far as Radu could see from his vantage point, a metal spike had been driven through the turban, right into the head.

  Radu leaned away to hide the horror from his sight once more. Keeping his eyes on the far wall, he replaced the lid. “Clear the room,” he said.

  No one moved.

  Mehmed stood, gesturing sharply. The room emptied rapidly, only his Janissary guards and one personal servant remaining. He stepped down from the dais and joined Radu next to the first box. There were ten more. Mehmed reached out.

  “No,” Radu said. “You do not need to see it.”

  “My ambassadors?” Mehmed asked.

  “Yes.”

  Mehmed stared down at the box, then swept his eyes over the rest of them. “And there is no letter with them.”

  “No.”

  Mehmed pointed to one of his guards. “Catch the men who delivered these. I want a full account of what happened.” The guard sprinted from the room.

  Mehmed turned, his purple silk robes swishing through the air. “Come with me.” He glided through a separate, private door. Radu followed. They entered a sitting room with high ceilings. Tiny jeweled windows let in light but were too small for anyone to break in through. As soon as Radu was inside, Mehmed bolted the door behind them. There were no other exits.

  Radu faced a wall bearing Mehmed’s elaborate, beautiful tughra, the sultan’s own seal and signature. Around it in gold Arabic script were verses from the Koran. Without turning around, Radu said, “This is why you called me back, then. Because of her.”

  Mehmed hesitated. Radu could feel the other man just behind him, close enough to touch. Then Mehmed sat with a sigh on one of the low sofas. “I did not know this was coming.”

  “You should not be surprised.”

  “She always surprises me.”

  Radu clenched his teeth so hard his jaw ached. “I cannot help you with her. I cannot—I will not—go between you and my sister. You will have to find someone else.”

  Radu turned to leave. Mehmed stood and grabbed his arm. Radu looked down at Mehmed’s hand, each finger weighted with a jeweled ring. Mehmed was heavy with privilege and power. Radu remembered the lightness of their shared childhood. If the two boys who had met at a fountain in Edirne, who had clung to each other against the cruelty of the world, saw themselves now, they would see strangers. All the years had built a wall of silk and gold and power and pain between them.

  Mehmed dropped his hand from Radu’s arm. “I did not ask you here to help me with Lada!”

  “Then why did you?” Radu turned to face him.

  “Because!” Mehmed wrapped his own arms around himself, shrinking. “Because I am building an empire, and turning this city into the jewel of the world, and becoming the sultan my people need. And it is so lonely.” His voice broke on the last word.

  Gone was the cold assurance of the sultan, the calculating intelligence that last year had sent Radu away as a spy. The untouchable Hand of God was replaced by the boy at the fountain. The friend of Radu’s youth. The foundation of his heart. Radu opened his arms, and Mehmed fell into him, burying his face in Radu’s shoulder.

  Radu held him close, taking his own deep, shuddering breaths.

  “I need you,” Mehmed whispered.

  “I am here,” Radu answered.

  * * *

  “Halil amassed too much power.” Mehmed was on the floor of his private chamber, lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling. Radu lay next to him, shoulder to shoulder. No sultan
and bey. Just Mehmed and Radu. “My father was too permissive, too willing to let others take over much of the business of running the empire. It led to corruption and waste and weakness. So I keep myself separate, let no one think they have a greater portion of my ear or my confidence. Soon I will have a palace complex made, all the rooms and walls circling out in rings from the center. I will be there, and everyone else will revolve around me. Just as I am at the center of the empire, and everyone else exists to serve the empire through me.”

  “It does sound lonely,” Radu said softly.

  “It is. And it will be. But I cannot put my own needs ahead of the needs of my people. They need a strong sultan. They need me to be the Hand of God, not a mere man. And so I must set aside the things that I want, my own comforts and relationships, to be what my people deserve.”

  Radu thought of his own life, of the things he had sacrificed to be the person others needed him to be. Most often to be the person Mehmed needed him to be. Could he do the same as Mehmed? Set aside the things he wanted—the things of his heart—for the good of the empire?

  He closed his eyes. He did not know where his heart was anymore. He could not set aside something he could not find.

  “I want you to stay here with me,” Mehmed said, his voice tugging Radu back. “Be my friend in the midst of the madness.”

  Radu knew he should say yes. He should not ruin this closeness. But he had spent so much of his life pretending. He did not wish to any longer. “You know what people will say. What they already thought. If I am back at your side, Halil’s old rumors will resurface.” Radu felt Mehmed’s head turn toward him, felt Mehmed’s dark gaze heavy on his cheek. Swallowing against the emotion pounding in his chest, Radu turned his own head toward Mehmed’s, their lips a breath apart. Mehmed was watching him, his dark eyes careful and searching.

  “Let them say what they will. They cannot harm me, and I will not let them harm you.”

  “And Lada?” Radu asked, dragging his sister into the space between them, where she always was.

  Mehmed frowned. He looked back up at the ceiling, but linked his arm with Radu’s. The move felt very deliberate, like a step in a dance. “We three were always meant to be together. I have you. She will come back to us.”

  “You want her to? Even after that?”

  Mehmed’s silence was answer enough. He would forgive her this murder of his envoy. Radu should have been surprised. He was not.

  “And if she does not come back to us?”

  “Well.” Mehmed let the word hang heavy in the air above them. “At least I will always have you.”

  “I am the prettier one, after all.”

  Mehmed’s laugh filled the room. It used to fill Radu, too, until he could feel it in his veins. But the feelings he had now were echoes of the ones he had before. He did not know if they would grow again.

  Mehmed laced his fingers through Radu’s and Radu lay still beside him, thinking of how often he had imagined what that would feel like.

  He had been wrong. Time had taken even this from him, because with Mehmed’s fingers tangled in his own, he remembered another finger tracing wounds on his hands. Gray eyes in place of dark ones. The love he had found when his first love had been lost.

  Now Cyprian was lost. Would his feelings for Mehmed return?

  Did he want them to?

  Bulgaria

  THE ASHES OF THE village were as cold as the dawn around them. Everywhere the ground was dusted black instead of white, like some hellish snow had fallen.

  Lada, wrapped in furs, crouched down. She took off her gloves and ran her hand through the ashes that remained of the village. Her village. Wallachia’s village. Her hand came away stained with dull black.

  “How many people were killed?” she asked. They had ridden here immediately after seeing Mehmed’s envoy off. She had come straight down the border to make certain no other villages had been attacked. Along the way, she had picked up witnesses.

  A peasant from the next village scratched his head, eyes wandering as he mentally calculated. “Three hundred?”

  “Who is the boyar in charge of this region?” She should know. But she had never been able to care about the boyars unless they were giving her trouble.

  He shrugged. “Never met him.”

  Lada looked at Stefan. He nodded, slipping away. He would find out. And there would be consequences for the boyar, both for failing to protect the people in his care and for failing to report this attack to Lada. She should not have heard about it from Mehmed’s people. She closed her eyes, letting herself imagine Mehmed’s reaction to her message. It filled her with something sharp and hot, like anticipation.

  “What are you smiling about?” Bogdan asked.

  Her eyes snapped open. “Nothing.” Standing, she brushed her hands off on her trousers, the ash that had looked black against the snow now showing up gray against the black cloth. A shift in perspective changed everything. “When will Nicolae be here?”

  “Within the hour.”

  Nicolae had been gathering all her soldiers. When he arrived, it would be with over three thousand men. And the special supplies she had been stockpiling.

  Lada squinted at the rising sun, let its brightness warm her face. “Three hundred. Very well. We will kill three thousand of them. Every Wallachian death will be answered tenfold.”

  “We will have to go deep into Bulgaria to kill that many,” Bogdan said.

  “Then we will go deep.” No one would be able to doubt her ferocity, her commitment to her people. And no one would attack Wallachia without thinking very carefully about the consequences from now on. It would be a lot of bodies, but she looked at them as an investment. Kill thousands to save thousands.

  * * *

  Two days later, the boyar who had failed his people clutched his chest with his torn and bleeding hands. The hole he had dug—one of hundreds since Stefan brought him to their camp—was ready. Two men took the stake and leveraged it into the hole, tipping it up. The body slumped at the top, a gruesome coat of arms for Lada’s push into Bulgaria.

  Lada looked down the road lined with a forest of bloody reminders.

  “How many is that?” she asked Bogdan, who rode next to her.

  “Fifteen, sixteen hundred.”

  They had broken through the border villages as swiftly as a river smashing through a dam. Everyone was swept up in their wake, no one spared. But it was not quite right. So few of them had been her actual enemies. She spared no love for Bulgars—they were too weak to break from Ottoman rule, and were thus as culpable as anyone—but they were not Turks. Her point that her borders were inviolable had been made. But…she wondered if she could make another point, too.

  A point that the protection of the Ottomans was no protection at all.

  A point that her way was better.

  Nicolae eyed the stakes with weary distaste. “Only a handful of casualties among our men.”

  “Good. And does word spread?”

  He shook his head. “No one is left to send out warnings. My scouts report no mobilization of the Turkish forces at any of the nearby fortresses.”

  Lada rubbed her eyes. They were irritated from the smoke of burning cottages and fields. “This is all the protection their loyalty to the sultan buys them. How can they not see it? How can they not see that all their bowing and scraping to Mehmed benefits them nothing?”

  “Onto the next village?” Bogdan asked.

  Lada shook her head. “Where are the Turkish troops?”

  “There is a stronghold two hours’ ride from here. Perhaps a thousand men are stationed there for easy deployment around the region. Another one, with five hundred men, is half a day’s ride from there.”

  Lada nodded, turning her horse from the corpse-lined road. “No more Bulgar deaths. I want the rest of my stakes baptized in the blood of Mehme
d’s men.”

  * * *

  Taking their first fortress was easier than Lada had expected. The Ottoman troops here were lazy, unused to resistance or fighting. She had sent her Janissary-trained men on ahead. By the time they reached the fortress, the guards at the gate had been slaughtered and everything was wide open, waiting for them.

  She lost one hundred and twenty-seven men, and added their deaths to the count required in vengeance.

  Before they impaled the Ottoman troops, they stripped them. The guards at the next fortress opened their gates without question when they saw the uniforms of their fellow Ottoman soldiers coming toward them in the night. Lada rode at the front and killed both gate guards herself. Most of the Ottomans were sleeping, slaughtered in the chaos and tangle of their sheets. Those who were awake fought well.

  Her men fought better.

  The next day they reached a small city. It was made almost entirely of wooden structures, with a high fence encircling them. Two gates, one at the front and one at the back, let people in and out.

  Word had preceded them. Hundreds of Bulgars were outside the city gates, prostrate. “Please,” a man said as Lada rode up. He did not look up at her. “Please, do not kill us.”

  “Who protects you?” she asked, looking from side to side with her arms extended, palms up. “I thought this country was under the protection of the sultan.”

  The man trembled. “No one protects us.”

  Lada dismounted. She gestured impatiently for him to stand. He did, shoulders stooped, balding head respectfully lowered. “Are you Christians?”

  He nodded.

  “Would you like protection?”

  He nodded again, shivering though the day was warm enough to hint at spring.

  Lada lifted her voice. “Any Christians this close to Wallachia are close enough to be my people. I have farms and land and safety for any who go back with me. Which is more than the sultan can offer you.”