Bright We Burn (The Conqueror's Saga #3)(81)

He looked for his mother.

“She is not with me.” Lada gestured for Bogdan to follow, knowing that this might be the last time he was ever willing to follow her anywhere. She managed to walk to her room at the back of the fortress, regally ignoring the men she passed. And then, at last, with the door shut behind Bogdan, she collapsed into a chair.

“What happened?” he asked. “Where have you been? I told everyone you were hunting Ottoman spies, but I did not know how much longer I could keep control of the men without you. I wanted to come after you. I knew you would want me here, though.”

“It is good you did not come. You would have been killed. Matthias betrayed us. He took me prisoner.”

Bogdan knelt in front of her, searching her face. “You have not been well.”

“I think he was poisoning me.”

“And my mother?”

Lada knew she should apologize. She knew Radu would, in her place. But she could not bear to. If she apologized, it meant she had done wrong, and if she admitted out loud she had done wrong in leaving Oana, she could never forgive herself.

“When I got there, Matthias killed all my men. I was in a cell smaller than this room for three months. Your mother was put to work in the kitchens, safe and healthy. I escaped with Stefan’s help. We had to kill all the guards. Your mother was supposed to meet us, but she was in the castle when it happened. I could not go after her.”

Bogdan’s blocky features twisted, flickering through a host of emotions. Finally, swallowing hard, he nodded. “She would have wanted you to go.”

Lada tried not to let her relief show, but she felt those traitorous tears from before pooling in her eyes. All she had now was Bogdan. If he had hated her for this, left her for this … she did not want to think about it. And she did not have to. She reached out and tugged on one of his stupid jug-handle ears, clearing her throat to try to dislodge some of the inconvenient emotion stuck there with all the tender aching of an old wound.

“Tell me what has happened in my absence.”

Bogdan reported that Tirgoviste was fortified, but no major offenses had been made into the mountains. He had found and killed the Basarab boyars. The men under the boyars’ command were scattered, hiding from scouts looking for them, but all were within half-a-day’s ride and ready to reassemble as soon as she called for them.

“They remain loyal?”

“Most of them. The Hungarians left long before we got there.”

It was as much as Lada could hope for. “How many do we have now?”

“Counting the women? Two thousand, maybe three. It is hard to know how many are still waiting and how many have fled. Are we going to kill King Matthias?” Bogdan’s words were as rough and strong as his fists. He wanted it as much as she did.

Lada rested her head against the back of the chair and closed her eyes. “We are going to kill all of them.”

“Good.”

Lada smiled, reaching out a hand. Bogdan put his in it, hesitantly.

“Never leave me,” she said.

“I never will.”

As she slipped toward sleep, Lada finally felt safe again. She did not know what she would have done without Bogdan. She knew she should tell him how she felt—knew that he would treasure that knowledge more than the woman in the village had treasured this scrap of red cloth in her hair—but she could not bear to part with the words. He was no Mehmed. But perhaps he was something better. He would never challenge her, never demand she yield to what he wanted. He was hers.

Instead of thanking him, she decided that she would marry him. It meant nothing to her, but it was a reward for his loyalty. And it served the double purpose of removing her marriageability from anyone else’s political machinations.

She would tell him in the morning. They would marry, and then they would begin the work of destruction.





44





Carpathian Mountains


RADU HAD NO desire for pageantry, for tradition, for celebration. And so his coronation took place in the middle of the twenty thousand graves that marked his sister’s rule.

Amid the settling dirt and sprigs of trees growing around them, Radu knelt. He bowed his head, and a simple iron crown was placed there by the only priest who had returned to the capital. It felt far heavier and more restrictive than Radu’s turbans ever had.

He thought of Mehmed’s coronation. The weeks of celebration. The sense that it was the beginning of something truly great, of history on an unimaginable scale. Radu wondered what Mehmed would think of his new role. There had not been time for Mehmed to have received word and written back yet. Radu felt the distance between them keenly. But he also appreciated it. Because if he was being forced to do things he had no desire to, at least he could accomplish them however he saw fit.

Radu had but five witnesses: the priest, Nazira, Fatima, Cyprian, and Kiril. A few dozen citizens stood respectfully nearby, more out of curiosity than any sense of duty or excitement.

When the priest was finished, Radu stood. He was prince, like his sister and father before him. The grave dirt clung to his knees. He did not brush it off.



A week after the coronation, after making certain the city’s defenses were set and the crops were well managed, Radu and Cyprian went into the mountains with Kiril and a select group of Janissaries. The sooner they finished this, the sooner Radu could lure back the boyars. Including someone—anyone—who could take over as vaivode. He was only prince because of Lada’s violence. He considered it his singular princely duty to put a stop to that violence. And then his responsibilities would be fulfilled.