Bright We Burn

by Kiersten White

  “I saw her outside. She heard me talking with Aron and Andrei.”

  “That does not matter.”

  “Imagine you were in her place. We have proved ourselves repeatedly to be against her. We are sitting on her capital’s doorstep with an entire army. Of course she will agree to something. And then she will find the next opportunity to retain power, and the next, and the next. She is never coming back to us.”

  “She already has. I am not dead after all.”

  “For now.” Radu opened his eyes. The chandelier dazzled his sight, making bright white spots where the flames imprinted on his vision.

  “Radu Bey,” one of the Janissaries outside called. “There is someone to see you. He claims he represents the Basarab family.”

  “It can wait,” Mehmed told Radu. “I am happy. Lada is happy. You should be happy. Radu.” His voice was low and insistent, demanding Radu’s attention. Radu dragged his eyes away from the light. White points of flame still danced, surrounding Mehmed.

  Mehmed narrowed his eyes thoughtfully, his smile tentative but devious. Radu remembered that smile well from their days in Amasya, sneaking out of the castle in the middle of the night. Stealing apples. Swimming in their secret pool.

  Mehmed patted the rug next to himself. “Come. Spend the night with me.”

  It was not a question, but it sounded as though Mehmed were trying on the words to see how they fit. Radu did not know what would happen if he crossed the endless, impossible space between them.

  In that moment, his certainty was proved: he did not want this. He did not want to accept whatever love Mehmed decided to gift to him. His time with Cyprian—knowing that if their love had been possible, it would have been one of equals, hearts given completely and without reservation—had either broken him forever or finally healed him.

  He loved Mehmed—he would always love and care for him as a friend and as his childhood savior—but he no longer needed or wanted something between them that would never be enough.

  “Thank you, my friend.” Radu’s smile was the release of years of yearning and pain and the desperation to be loved. “But I have work to do.” Radu bowed his head, then left before he could see Mehmed’s reaction.

  Outside, the night was clear. The stars shone cold and constant above him. Once, long ago, Mehmed had told them the story of two lovers, Ferhat and Shirin. Ferhat had carved through to the heart of a mountain to bring water to the other side and win Shirin’s hand in marriage. Ferhat had died inside that mountain, his heart broken. At the time, Radu had thought it the most romantic thing he had ever heard. What a noble end, to die for love.

  Perhaps Radu would never know complete love in his life. But all these years of digging desperately had opened up the path to his own heart. He no longer lived in fear that it would break if exposed. A heart did not have to be stone to be strong.

  “Radu Dracul?” a tentative voice asked.

  Radu turned. Radu Dracul. Radu the Handsome. Radu Bey. All names bestowed on him by those with power over him.

  “Just Radu, please,” he said with a smile. “Now, tell me how I can help you.”

  One Day South of Tirgoviste

  LADA HAD THIRTY MINUTES to topple an empire.

  She doubted she would need that long. She walked confidently through the dark camp along the same path she had taken the night before. She still wore the uniform of a Janissary. Perhaps that was fitting. She would use everything the Ottomans had given her, right down to their own clothes, to destroy them.

  Only outside Mehmed’s tent did she pause. The weight of history, everything they had been and done together, slowed her steps. She felt it, accepted it, let it settle.

  Could she do what she had set out to? It was one thing to plan murder and another to follow through. And tonight she would not act out of rage or instinct. This had to be a choice.

  She would walk into that tent, and she would stab her first friend, her first lover, her only true equal through the heart.

  She did not want to, she found. But she would do it anyway. It was what Wallachia needed, what it demanded, and Wallachia came before Mehmed. It always would. It had to.

  Her heartbeat even, her breathing calm, Lada used the cut she had made the night before and entered Mehmed’s tent for the last time.

  “Hello, Lada,” her brother said.

  Lada scanned the tent quickly, her heartbeat finally picking up.

  “He is not here,” Radu said, leaning against Mehmed’s desk. “But I can oversee the signing of the new treaty.” He spoke in Turkish.

  Lada’s lip curled in distaste around the language she, too, had spoken for years of her life. “I am not here to sign a treaty.”

  Radu smiled. Truly looking at him for the first time, Lada saw in that smile how much her brother had aged since they had been apart. He was taller. Still lean, but with a hollowness to his face that threw his jawline and cheekbones into sharper relief. The too-large eyes were still just as striking. He was beautiful. And he was a stranger. The boy she had known, the boy she had loved and protected, was gone.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “Too many things.” Radu sat on one of the cushions, gesturing for Lada to join him.

  She remained standing. “I told him he should not have sent you to Constantinople. I cannot believe he put you in harm’s way.”

  “You would have done the same.”

  “I would not have! You always needed protection, and I protected you.”

  Radu tilted his head, a puzzled look on his face. She was reminded again how much he looked like their mother. And, with the weary sadness pulling at his mouth, she saw how life and its cruelty would break him. She had seen a glimpse into his future when she visited their own ruined mother.

  “I think,” he said, “you and I remember our childhood much differently. You protected me from Mircea, but only because you liked him even less than you liked me.”

  Lada snorted. “That is certainly true. But what about in Edirne?”

  “I recall you refusing to do your studies even when I was beaten for your insolence.”

  “Are you that stupid?” When Radu looked hurt instead of understanding, Lada sat in a huff across from him. “They used everything they could against us. And they used us against our father. If I had stopped that tutor, if I had let them see they could use you to control me, you never would have been safe again. I let you be beaten to keep you from being used as leverage against me.”

  A dozen emotions flitted across Radu’s face, none of which Lada understood. He settled on amused and sad. “We do have very different definitions of protection, then.”

  Lada searched her brother’s eyes, trying to find the little boy he had always been to her. Even after his refusals to help her, even after all this time, he had not changed in her mind. But reality presented her with the truth. He was not her delicate, weak baby brother anymore.

  “You look upset,” he said, his voice soft.

  “I have lost something.” Even though Lada should have known it, she had never let herself believe it. But now the truth was undeniable. She had completely lost her brother to the Ottomans. “Where is Mehmed?”

  “Why?”

  “He has much to answer for.”

  “We all do, I suspect.” Radu drew his legs up, wrapping his arms around them and resting his chin atop his knees. There! A fleeting glimpse, but Lada saw her Radu.

  “Tell me what has happened to you. And why are you in Mehmed’s tent? Are you—do you stay here now?” Lada kept her voice as even as she could to avoid betraying anything. But Radu was always better at emotion, better at reading people than she could ever be.

  He laughed. She stood, bristling. Radu waved one hand, gesturing for her to sit back down. “No, I do not stay here now. I am in Mehmed’s tent because you came here tonight to kill him, did
you not?”

  “Of course I did,” Lada snapped.

  Radu sighed, stretching his legs out again. “He did not believe me.”

  “He is a fool. Surely after all these years of studying him you have discovered that.” Lada felt the pressure of time pushing down on her. She had spent too long here already. Her task should have been finished by now.

  “Do you think it was him that came between us? Or were we destined to end up on opposite sides?”

  Lada felt an unfamiliar heaviness behind her eyes. “We had to survive. We just figured out different ways to do it.” It struck her, then, how they had lived the exact same childhood. How had the same circumstances shaped them in such divergent ways?

  “So you do not blame Mehmed?”

  “Of course I do! I blame him for a great many things.” She kicked a pillow in exasperation. “Why, tonight of all nights, do I finally find someone who has beaten me at my game of ‘Kill the Sultan’? Tell me where he is and then flee the camp. I will send word that you are not to be killed.”

  “I had a chance, once,” Radu said, slowly standing. “In Constantinople. Emperor Constantine trusted me. And I watched as good people on both sides were dying, smashed in blood and bone and terror against each other by immovable forces. Mehmed on one side of the wall, Constantine on the other. And I liked them both.” Radu smiled wryly. “Though of course we both know where my heart was. There was one moment, one perfect chance to end it all. To take a life and spare thousands, tens of thousands, by making that choice.”

  Lada did not know what this story had to do with her. “Well?” she prompted, impatient.

  “I made no choice. And because of it, Constantine still died, but countless others died alongside him who might have been spared had I made a choice. You would have made the choice.”

  Lada would have. It was a simple scenario. But she had a nagging feeling she did not like where this story was leading. “You could have killed Mehmed instead, you know.”

  “Do not pretend like that was ever an option.”

  But something tired and worn down in Radu’s face suggested otherwise. There was potential there. An opportunity. To get him back—and to end this. Lada crossed the space to him and took his shoulders in her hands. “Tonight. Tonight, it is an option. We can kill him. For Wallachia. We can finally be free of the cage our father crafted for us, once and for all. Make the right choice tonight.”

  Radu, so much taller, so much fairer, looked down on her. He stepped forward, folded her into a hug. She stood stiff, unsure how to respond.

  “I hope I already have,” he said. Then, raising his voice, “Come in.”

  He held Lada tighter, pinning her arms to her sides and smashing her face against his chest so she could not see what was happening. “I do not want to see you ended,” he said. “I could not bear it. I am sorry.”

  Lada stomped on his foot and shoved her way free. Ten Janissaries had entered, swords drawn. And from behind a flap where he had heard everything, Mehmed stepped free with cold murder on his face.

  One Day South of Tirgoviste

  “YOU CHOSE HIM AGAIN,” Lada said.

  Radu expected fury, rage, the Lada who had been the terrifying center of his childhood, ruling everything with her temper and her fists. Instead, his sister looked resigned. Tired, even. She spoke in Wallachian, changing from the Turkish they had been conversing in.

  Radu answered back in the tongue of their shared history. “I did not choose him. I chose what I felt would create the best, most fertile ground for lives and faith. Look at your country, Lada. Do you really think you are growing a future here?”

  “You know nothing about it! In the time since I have taken the throne, crime has disappeared. My people need not lock their doors, need not sleep beside their livestock for fear they will be gone in the morning. They no longer require an armed guard just to travel from village to village. My country is prospering like never before!”

  “You turned an entire plain into marshes. You poisoned wells and burned bridges. You have cut a swath of destruction across the countryside.”

  “Because he was coming!” Lada gestured sharply in Mehmed’s direction. Radu did not look at Mehmed, certain Mehmed would signal him to speak in a language he could understand. The Janissaries edged closer. Radu was surprised to find he wished he had not called them so soon. This conversation with Lada felt like it might—like it would—be their last. And he did not want it to end.

  She might have found him changed, but he found her more precisely, more powerfully herself than she had ever been. He was…proud. In spite of everything. And it made him devastatingly sad. She had worked so hard and fought so long for this. They were going to take it all away.

  This was the first time the three of them—once inseparable—had been in the same room since Lada left. Everything had changed. And nothing had. She was still choosing Wallachia over them. Radu was still supporting Mehmed. And Mehmed was still demanding they both be his. The stakes had just gotten higher.

  Radu sighed. It could have been such a different reunion. Well, no. Not with Lada. But it should have been different. “We came because you forced us to. We did not want this.”

  Lada shook her head, but there was something evasive in her expression that hinted to Radu she knew he was right. “I only sped up the inevitable. He was never going to let me have this.”

  “All you had to do was make concessions. We would have given you—”

  “It is not his to give me! Wallachia is mine, and I owe nothing to him or anyone else!”

  “That is why you will lose it!” Radu shouted. “Because of your refusal to bend. Because of your damnable pride! We offered you peace.”

  “And came armed with usurpers to betray and replace me!”

  Radu threw up his hands in exasperation. “You cannot accuse us of betrayal. Not when you agreed to sign a treaty and came here to assassinate Mehmed.”

  Lada opened her mouth to argue, then stopped. A shocking giggle escaped her mouth. It made her almost girlish. “I suppose that is true.”

  Caught off guard, Radu found himself returning her smile. “We always have contingency plans, you and me. That has not changed.”

  Lada’s smile deepened and darkened. “You have no idea what is coming.”

  “Are you certain about that?”

  Unease crept into Lada’s face. Her deep-set, hooded eyes narrowed, and her full lips pressed together. Radu had a shameful thrill that she now respected him enough to question herself. He would have given anything for a moment like this as a child, even more for a moment where she looked on him with pride for besting her. But he would never get that.

  “Enough,” Mehmed said. “I am taking you prisoner.” His face was etched with anger, something cold and hard growing beneath the softness of his cheeks. “I should kill you right here for this.”

  Lada tilted her head, gazing up at him through her thick lashes. “You really should.” She gave him a banal, blank smile as though she were the woman she should have been, a woman like their mother. “Make Radu do it.”

  Radu balked, stepping back. He glanced at Mehmed, seized with a sudden fear that Mehmed might be angry enough to demand that. But his friend shook his head. “I would never ask that of him.”

  Lada’s smile turned coy. Radu saw a hint of himself there, as though she were imitating him. “You would, if you thought it was your best option. Do not pretend to put his feelings ahead of your own. You never have. You cannot.”

  “Just as you cannot release your insane fixation on this country!” Mehmed took a deep breath, trying to get his anger under control. The men around them shifted uncomfortably. This was not the aloof, self-possessed sultan they were used to serving under. “I offered you the throne.”

  “You offered me nothing I do not already have.” Her upper lip curled in defiance, returning her
to the Lada that Radu knew. “And you have given me nothing I cannot find elsewhere with far less hassle and far more pleasure.”

  Mehmed’s eyes widened in shock and hurt. Then he shifted from Mehmed to sultan with a lift of his chin and a firming of his jaw. “Bind her and take her to the wagons. We will make quick work of the rest of this campaign while she is sent ahead to Constantinople.”

  Lada smiled at Radu, showing all her sharp little teeth. “Tell the Danesti boyars their kind does not live long in my Wallachia.”

  Radu wanted this to be over. He wanted to sleep. He knew he would not be able to, not tonight. He would change his plans and request to escort Lada back to Constantinople. Knowing her, she would goad the guards into killing her. She would never admit it or even realize it, but she needed his protection now. He would see her to prison—safe, at last, once and for all—and then he would be finished. “Lada, I am—”

  “How long would you say I have been in here?” she asked, her expression thoughtful.

  Radu gestured for the Janissaries to take her. “Be careful.”

  “We will not hurt her,” Kiril said, nodding respectfully.

  Lada widened her stance and bent her knees. “That is not what he is afraid of.”

  “I—” A deafening explosion rocked through camp, cutting Radu off. The tent shook, several panels detaching from their stakes and blowing inward. Radu ducked, covering his head as the chandelier came crashing to the ground. By the time he straightened, the two Janissaries closest to Lada were already dead.

  “Protect the sultan!” he shouted, pushing Kiril toward Mehmed instead of toward the fight with Lada. “All of you, around the sultan!”

  Radu drew his sword. Lada paused, two bloody daggers in her hands, three bodies on the floor. The other Janissaries had rushed Mehmed out of the tent.

  “Will you really fight me?” she asked, pointing one red blade at his sword. Then she ran right for him. Radu twisted to the side, holding his sword to block her blades, not to strike her.