Bright We Burn

by Kiersten White

  And a deeply inconvenient one. This was a fine time for someone to take her seriously at last.

  “Well, sixty thousand or six hundred thousand, if he cannot ferry them across the water, he will either have to tack weeks onto the plans to find another passage or give up. And given how much he loves frugality for everything other than his wardrobe and personal tent, I am counting on the latter option.”

  Stefan nodded. “Where do you want me?”

  “Back near the capital. When we know the outcome here, we will be able to determine our next best move. I want you out of harm’s way, and as close to Hungary as possible.”

  Without another word, Stefan slipped into the darkness where he was most at home.

  “Sixty thousand,” Lada whispered to herself, giggling. Mehmed might as well have sent her another love letter.

  * * *

  It was two nights until the Ottoman crossing was attempted.

  A broad, flat skiff launched, maneuvered with poles across the narrowest part of the river. A thick rope trailed behind it. Lada and her men watched as the skiff hit their side of the river. They waited as the Janissaries disembarked, then trudged through the mud and reeds up to the point directly across from where they had launched. The Ottomans had built a dock on their side, and several much larger skiffs were waiting to ferry men and wagons across.

  Metal on metal rang through the night as huge spikes were driven into the soft ground and the rope was tied off for the skiffs to be pulled back and forth across the river.

  Still, Lada and her men watched. They waited until the work was finished. They waited while the first three skiffs—packed shoulder to shoulder with two hundred men each, all Janissaries with their stupid white-flapped caps glowing like surrender in the moonlight—were filled to capacity and began the slow pull across the river.

  When at long last they were halfway, Lada stood, stretching her agonized muscles. Then she fired her crossbow. All the crossbows around her went off, the bolts singing dark through the night. Men fell, the river accepting Lada’s offerings with hungry splashes.

  The skiff in back reversed direction, heading for the dock. The men in the first skiff pulled faster, evidently thinking reaching the closer shore was the best course of action. And the middle skiff simply let go, drifting aimlessly down the river as Lada’s men decorated it with death.

  Lada whistled sharply. Her cannons fired. Three of the shots went wide, but two found their mark on the skiff closest to Mehmed’s shore. The skiff capsized, dumping all the men still onboard into the swift, unforgiving water. Their armor would be their end.

  The skiff heading for Lada’s bank slowed, and then stopped. There were no longer enough men to pull it. It drifted, one last Janissary heroically keeping hold of the rope until Lada planted a bolt in his back. Then the skiff joined its brother on a scenic trip down the Danube and away from Lada’s land forever.

  Mehmed’s men had finally recovered their senses. Cannons wheeled into place to answer Lada’s. But a few parting shots from hers made quick work of the temporary dock, and then Lada and her men slipped back down to the ground, giving Mehmed nothing to aim for.

  Lada, elated, knew exactly what she was aiming for. She would not miss.

  * * *

  “If only we had more cannons,” Lada said with a sigh, patting the heavy, cold metal side of one, “we could have bombarded his whole camp.”

  Nicolae’s voice whispered in her ear: Stop calling it his camp. You are not fighting Mehmed, you are fighting the Ottomans.

  Lada rested her cheek against the cannon. Her heart squeezed painfully. What she would not give for Nicolae to actually be here, making her angry with his always-too-insightful observations. Or Petru, eager and excited for whatever came next. She would never hear the two of them again, never listen to Nicolae mock Petru, and Petru threaten to kill him for doing so.

  She wanted them back.

  She wanted everything she had ever lost back. Her childhood. Her brother. Even her love and respect for her father. The Ottomans had taken them all.

  A gentle hand came down on her shoulder. “Are you well?” Bogdan asked.

  “Why does everyone ask me that? I am always well!” Lada stood straight, shaking off her feelings and, inadvertently, Bogdan’s hand. He flinched, his face falling.

  Lada reached out and took his hand. She had not lost him. She had not lost Wallachia. She would yet regain some of what she had lost, but she would give nothing else without a fight.

  Bogdan’s face lit up with quiet joy. He held perfectly still, as though afraid of spooking her. “What next?”

  “We need to move the cannons. Fire them and then move them again. We will keep doing that, keep them guessing and pinned down and unable to attempt another crossing. Tell—”

  A bolt bounced off the cannon, spinning in the air before coming to rest at Lada’s feet. She frowned down at it. Bogdan tackled her, his body on top of hers as more bolts flew around them.

  “Janissaries!” someone screamed.

  Lada rolled out from under Bogdan—he was unhurt, she noticed with trembling relief, a flash of Nicolae’s bloodied back rising unbidden—and drew her sword. Because they had chosen deep tree cover, it meant they could not form a line. They were not expecting hand-to-hand combat, not now.

  “Where did they come from?” Bogdan whispered as they crawled away from the cannon and met up with a reserve of men that had been resting. They were not resting now.

  “The second boat. The one that floated downstream. They must have made it to this shore and worked their way back up to us. Damn. Damn, damn, damn.” That meant there were at least one hundred Janissaries, assuming half of them had been killed before their escape. Lada knew better than to question their skills. They were far deadlier than the bulk of her newly trained forces. One hundred Janissaries on the attack could easily wipe out her four hundred scattered men.

  “We should pull back to the second line,” Bogdan said.

  “We will lose the cannons. We cannot afford that.” Lada whistled sharply. “To the guns!” she shouted. “Protect the cannons!”

  “She’s over here!” a man shouted in Turkish. “Take her alive!”

  The men around her hesitated. “They are here for you,” Bogdan said.

  “But the cannons!”

  “Better the cannons than you.” He drew his sword, then shouted the next commands. “Protect the prince! Form around us and spread word down the line to hold off pursuit. We get the prince to the second line! Abandon the cannons!”

  Lada stood rooted to the ground, staring at the taunting river. They had come so close to victory, so close to winning without ever having to fight. So close to humiliating Mehmed as he had humiliated her. It was not fair. If she had half the resources Mehmed did—a quarter, a tenth, even—she would have beaten him here. All she had was Wallachia. And as much as she loved it, she was seized with a sudden fear that it would not be enough. It never had been. Who was she to defy all of history, which taught her that her country had never and could never be free?

  “We can lose today and still win,” Bogdan said, buzzing with urgency. “But if we lose you, we lose everything.”

  Who was she? She was the dragon. Her country had teeth and claws and fire, and she would use every last bit of them. Lada drew her own sword. “To the second line!” she shouted, each word causing her more pain than the crossbow bolt would have. As they cut their way through the Janissaries appearing in the dark to bar their path, all Lada’s thoughts were on what they were leaving behind.

  Mehmed. Radu. And a clear crossing for their journey into Wallachia.

  She had failed at her first task. But she would make certain to send a strong welcome message.

  Southern Border of Wallachia

  RADU STOOD OUTSIDE WITH the other leaders, watching as their men set up a massive, neatly organized c
amp for the night. With this many men, they had to stop marching for the day by midafternoon to have everything settled before nightfall. It was a tremendous undertaking, and one they had to do every single day.

  “We lost over three hundred Janissaries,” Ali Bey said with a concerned frown. “And as far as we know, they lost only a few dozen men in the retreat. I do not like those numbers. If they continue…”

  Mahmoud Pasha squinted at the forbidding clouds in the distance. It was not monsoon season, but spring brought heavy rains that would swell the rivers and muddy the roads, making their jobs more difficult. There was a reason attacks took place at the end of spring instead of at the beginning. Lada had pushed them too soon. “The numbers will not continue. We took all their cannons. She is running scared.”

  “My sister does not do anything scared.” Radu looked ahead toward Wallachia with a heavy heart and heavier worries. He was fairly certain they would face no attack here. Lada knew what her strengths were, and direct combat with the stronger Ottoman forces was not something she would risk. But she was out there, somewhere. Waiting.

  Waving off further discussion, Radu entered Mehmed’s tent. His had gone up first, in an easily defensible position, while the rest of the camp was staged. Radu expected to find his friend angry. Instead, he found Mehmed sitting on a pillow, staring up at the ceiling of the tent with a bemused smile.

  “I think she missed us,” he said.

  Radu lowered himself to the carpeted floor, biting back a bitter reply. Mehmed’s amusement neglected to take into account that men had died between them. But Mehmed probably needed a few moments to be a person instead of the sultan. All recent conversations about Lada had revolved around tactics, viewing her as a prince and a military leader. She was just Lada in this tent. Radu ignored the ghosts of the dead to speak with Mehmed on the level Mehmed wanted. “She is angry with us. And as fearsome as that was when she was young, facing it now that she is grown, armed, and surrounded by soldiers? I find myself longing for a stable to hide in until she finds another object to direct her ire toward.”

  Mehmed laughed. “Do you remember when we used to have footraces through the hills in Amasya?”

  Radu cringed. He did his best imitation of Lada’s voice, adding a slight growl to his own even as he projected it higher. “Are you proud of yourself for being able to run faster than me? It does not matter, because I will always catch you in the end. You may run faster, but I still hit harder.” Radu rubbed his shoulder at the phantom pain. Most of his memories of Lada included that sensation.

  Mehmed laughed even harder, laying back on the floor cushions. “Do you remember when she memorized more verses of the Koran than I did, just to prove she was better than I was at everything?”

  “I remember all this. And it is making me question our judgment in chasing her. Do we really want to catch her? And what will we do once we have her?”

  The easy happiness in Mehmed’s face was replaced with familiar tension. “You know why I have to. You have not changed your mind.”

  “No. I agree that we cannot let her actions stand without a response. She threatens the stability of all our European borders. But I cannot help worrying where this ends. How it ends.”

  “I worry about that as well. I just want her back home, with us.”

  Radu spoke as gently as he could. “She is home, Mehmed.”

  Mehmed scowled, waving Radu’s words away. “She cannot sustain this. We both know it. If she keeps fighting the whole world, eventually she will lose.” He sat up, earnest and intense. “She needs to lose to us, Radu. Not because I hate her, or because I am angry with her. She needs to lose to us because we love her. Because we understand her.”

  “But losing Wallachia might break her.”

  “Better broken than dead.”

  Radu was not certain that he agreed with Mehmed. Not after what he had been through and seen himself. He was still healing, and was uncertain he would ever fully heal. And the things that meant the most to him—Nazira, his faith, protecting those most innocent—had not even been taken from him. If they had…

  He was also uncomfortably uncertain whether the claim that they both loved Lada was true. Certainly their actions over the past year said otherwise.

  “I know what Wallachia is to her,” Mehmed continued. “I am not blind to her devotion to it. She has made it clear she will always choose it over me.” There was a pause, then bitter longing in Mehmed’s tone. “But we will take that choice away from her before it destroys her.”

  Radu looked up at the elegant silk ceiling of the tent. A gold chandelier hung from it, lit even though it was day. Only Mehmed could make taking an army against his sister sound like an act of love and friendship.

  * * *

  “Today we will reach the Arges,” Aron Danesti said, riding beside Radu and Mehmed. Aron was shorter than both of them—Mehmed and Radu were tall and lean, though Mehmed was growing broader now that he had finally stopped growing taller—and it did not help that Aron’s horse was smaller than theirs. He constantly adjusted in his saddle, trying to sit up straighter, but he still had to crane his neck to look up at them. “There is a good bridge we can use. And the land across is a fertile area. We should find early crops and livestock. We can rest there.”

  Mehmed did not respond. More and more often he chose not to speak to those around him unless he was correcting them.

  Aron cleared his throat self-consciously, then continued. “We should not leave Bucharest open behind us. It will cost several days, but it is worth it to take the fortress rather than leaving us exposed to a potential attack from the rear.”

  Ali Bey, on the other side of Radu and Mehmed, grunted. “I do not like it. We had to send men to retake Giurgiu as well. But it is a necessity. We will cross the Arges, and then send a force to take Bucharest.”

  Radu wanted it all to be over with. He wanted Tirgoviste taken, Lada in custody, this entire country and his history with it behind him. But he knew even after they took Tirgoviste it would not be simple.

  They crested a hill and found the scouts waiting, all facing the same direction.

  Where they had anticipated a bridge bordered by a large town, complete with livestock, supplies, and crops—not to mention people—lay only a smoldering ruin. Radu had a sudden flashback to his time in Albania fighting the Ottoman rebel Skanderberg. Radu had been at Murad’s side then in an endless siege. It was his first taste of war, and he had never managed to cleanse his palate of the burning rot it had left behind. Skanderberg’s men had waged the same type of campaign, destroying their own crops to prevent the Ottomans from getting to them.

  Had Radu told Lada about that strategy? He could not remember. They had not been close anymore, not at that point. She had taken Mehmed, and he had joined Murad in an effort to prove himself the more useful sibling through political maneuvering. Surely he had not told her about it. This was not his fault. She could have learned it from her time with Hunyadi, though it did not seem like the old Hungarian military leader’s style.

  It was probably his sister’s natural inclinations coming out. If she could not have it, no one could.

  “So much for our bridge,” Radu said. It would mean a delay, and one spent without extra provisions at that. Radu watched as a few mounted scouts explored the area around the bridge. One of them just…disappeared. There, and then gone. The others quickly turned their horses, shouting about pits and traps. Ali Bey began issuing instructions to avoid the entire area.

  “Radu Bey?” a man interrupted, drawing Radu’s attention. Several of his own scouts had approached. Though Ali Bey had the bulk of the forces, Radu’s four thousand mounted men were independent of the main Janissary troops. Radu had sent them scouting the surrounding area rather than the path directly ahead.

  The scouts had two people with them, peasants by the look of their clothing. The man and the woman regarded
Radu with baleful expressions.

  The lead scout bowed. “We caught them a few miles up, dumping rotten animal carcasses in the river. They have been doing it for weeks. It will have tainted the water this far down for at least a few days.”

  The woman grinned. “Thirsty? I hope you brought the Danube with you.”

  Radu massaged his forehead. “Where is the nearest source of clean water?”

  The man snickered. He had facial hair, which was puzzling. Only boyars were allowed to have facial hair in Wallachia, just as Janissaries were required to be clean-shaven. It was a matter of status. “You are welcome to try any well you find. Please do.”

  “What family are you from?” Radu asked. The man had neither the speech nor the carriage of a boyar to account for the facial hair.

  “No family you would know.” He rubbed his jaw, eyes narrowing with a sly smile. “Did you think you would return and find things how you left them? We have a new prince. New rules. New freedom.”

  Aron Danesti had joined Radu. “This does not look like freedom to me. You have no crops. No people.”

  “They are in the mountains.” The woman shrugged, grinning to reveal more gaps than teeth in her mouth. “I can tell you that, because you will never find them. You would all starve first, or look so long that winter will return and claim you blue and frozen as its own. Then our people will step over your bodies to reclaim our land. Look as long and as hard as you want, you will find only death here.”

  “We are coming to help you,” Aron said, genuinely puzzled by their defiance. “Your false prince is provoking other countries. She has made you unsafe.”

  “She is everything.” The woman spat at Aron. One of the scouts grabbed her arm, but she jerked toward them, eyes feverish. “Everything we have, we owe to her. The bastard boyars have been given the place they always wanted: they are above everything, looking down on us from their lofty stakes.” She jutted out her chin. “I know you, Danesti son. You will join your father.”