Bright We Burn (The Conqueror's Saga #3)(65)

“Cyprian,” he whispered.

Cyprian held his hands out at either side in a stiff gesture. He smiled wryly; it was not the smile that had opened Radu’s heart back when he’d thought it was closed to anyone but Mehmed. “I have no weapons.”

“I—” Radu shook his head. He had not even considered that Cyprian might be here to harm him. Though the man had every right to hate him, to want him dead.

Cyprian’s eyes flitted over Radu’s face, and Radu did not know what to do with any part of himself. Every facial expression or posture that had ever come naturally abandoned him. He froze beneath Cyprian’s gaze.

Cyprian nodded toward Radu’s turban. “It suits you.” He lifted his fingers to his own. “I am not used to mine yet.”

“You—you came with Nazira.” The man he had recognized from afar at the back of her guard. He had not looked closely at Nazira’s guards when he went out because he had been so overwhelmed seeing her again. This was why she had given her meeting instructions so loudly. They were not for Radu. They were for Cyprian.

“I went back to Constantinople first,” Cyprian said. “I will not lie: it hurt to see my city remade. But you were right. Mehmed has done incredible things with it already. It is vibrant and living in a way I have never known it to be. He has renewed its former vitality. But that only explained why you trusted Mehmed. I wanted to understand you, where you came from.” He turned to the side and gestured out at the landscape, scarred and marked with the violence of twenty thousand desecrated men. “This explains a lot.”

Radu was still too shocked to know what to say, or how to say it.

“I can see now, a little, why the Ottomans were your salvation. Why you love them. It is the same reason I loved my uncle. He took me from cruelty and gave me a place, a purpose.”

Radu could not bear to look at Cyprian any longer. If being apart from him and knowing they would never be together had hurt, being here with him and knowing they would never be together was such agony Radu did not know if he would survive. He lifted his eyes to the cloudless blue sky. “I am sorry. I am so sorry. I cannot ever—”

Cyprian interrupted him. “I have thought through it all. I have thought of very little else, to be honest. And I have had a tremendous amount of time to think while stuck being cared for by our dear Nazira. I keep coming back to three details.

“The first: You never betrayed me or my trust personally. I gave you many chances to use me against my city, and you never did.

“The second: You saved my two little cousins when you did not have to. I saw them, in the city. I did not approach them. But they are alive, and happy. They would not have survived had you not gone back for them.

“The third: You had ample opportunities to assassinate my uncle, and you never made that choice.”

“I thought about it,” Radu whispered.

“But you could not do it.”

“No.”

“Because you are a good person.”

“How can you say that after what I did?” Radu finally looked at Cyprian, searched his face for the trick or the lie. Because it was not possible that Cyprian could look on him with anything but hate.

“We were on different sides. I would have done the same, given the circumstances. I did do the same—I went into Edirne with the sole purpose of using you for information. But the sides we were on no longer exist.” Cyprian took a step, closing the distance between them. Radu could touch him, if he could lift a hand. If he were not paralyzed and terrified by what he wanted.

“I told you once,” Cyprian said. “Do you remember?”

“I remember every moment we spent together.”

“I told you,” Cyprian said, with a tentative smile so full of hope it was physically painful to see, “that I would forgive you. I meant it.”

Radu let out a breath like a sob. This could not be real. It was too big, too great a gift, too powerful a mercy. He had never had anything like this in his cruel and punishing life. He did not know it was possible. Radu lifted one trembling hand and—still half expecting Cyprian to turn away—placed it against his cheek. Cyprian lifted his own hand, covering Radu’s and twining their fingers together.

“I meant it,” he whispered.

Radu leaned forward and Cyprian met him halfway, their lips touching in a movement as familiar, as sacred, as healing as prayer.





35





Hunedoara


“I THOUGHT SHE was going to be kept in a house,” a man with a face like a turnip said, peering into Lada’s dank cell. The door was solid wood with a square—too small to fit through, too high to reach the lock on the other side—cut out of it. A barred window was set high in the wall opposite the door. A pile of matted and mildewed fur lay on a low cot, beneath which a much-used and little-cleaned chamber pot resided.

“She is,” another guard out of her view said. “But she needs a little time to calm down. She killed four guards.”

“Four of them?”

Lada watched the first man’s face make an expression no turnip ever could. She did not smile. She did not break eye contact. He looked away first, tugging at his collar.

A third man shouldered the others out of the way, carrying a metal tray with a bowl of porridge on it. “I know you prefer to eat your meals in the company of the dead.” He leaned close to the opening. “Seen the woodcuts myself. No human flesh for you today.” He jerked his chin toward the door. “Back up.”