Now I Rise (The Conqueror's Saga #2)(108)

“I have to go back.”

Her full lips trembling, Nazira nodded. “Fine. We go back.”

Radu kissed her hand, then held it out to Cyprian. “No woman is safe in the city. Not today, not for the next three days. I cannot let anything happen to you. I promised Fatima. You have to go home.”

Nazira stamped her foot, tears streaming down her face. “We have to go home together.”

“You cannot go back in.” Cyprian stepped past Nazira. He ignored her hand and grabbed Radu’s, the intensity of his gaze overwhelming. “You will die.”

“I know where John and Manuel are. I can save them.”

Cyprian looked as though he had been struck. He closed his eyes, then stepped even closer, pressing his forehead to Radu’s. “Their fate is in God’s hands now.”

“It was never in God’s hands.”

“No, it was in my uncle’s, damn him and his pride. He has killed them, not you. Not us. If you stay, Mehmed will find you, and he will kill you.”

Radu’s final punishment was announced by a new bell pealing nearby, harsh and unyielding. He would not be allowed any mercy for the things he had done. He could not escape, and he could not keep anything he hoped to. Radu shifted his face, resting his cheek against Cyprian’s for the space of one eternally breaking heartbeat. “He will not kill me,” Radu whispered. Then he pulled back, forcing himself to look Cyprian in the eyes. Those eyes that had caught his attention even when Mehmed was his whole world. Those eyes that had somehow become the foundation of a hope that maybe, someday, Radu could have love.

“He will not kill me,” Radu repeated, waiting for Cyprian to understand. The foundation in Cyprian’s eyes crumbled like the walls around them.

Cyprian stumbled back, shaking his head. “All this time,” he whispered.

“Will you still keep her safe?” Radu asked.

Cyprian stared at the rocks beneath them, as mute and stunned as he had been when lightning nearly killed him. “You could have escaped,” he finally whispered. “You did not have to tell me. I would have— We could have—we could have been happy. We could have?” he asked.

Radu knew what Cyprian was asking, and if he had not already lost all hope it would have ended him. “I do not deserve happiness.” The bells of the Hagia Sophia rang out more insistently. “John and Manuel are running out of time. Will you still keep Nazira safe?”

A single tear ran down Cyprian’s face. He did not look at Radu. But he nodded. “I will,” he said.

This one good thing, then, Radu had managed to do. He had not broken all his promises. Nazira threw herself forward, hugging him fiercely. “You come back to us,” she hissed in his ear.

“Be safe,” he answered. Then, his heart breaking all the more for knowing that he could trust Cyprian even now, Radu fled back into the city.



The street was slick beneath Radu’s boots. He slipped, going down on his hands and knees. When he rose again, his hands were bloody. He had not felt them get cut, had not thought he had fallen hard. Then he realized that the blood was not a result of his fall, but rather the cause of it. The streets ran with it.

And so he, too, ran. He ran past soldiers throwing everything portable out of houses. He ran past women and children being dragged screaming from hiding places. He ran, and he ran, and he ran. He tried his best not to look, but he knew that what he saw that day would be seared in his memory.

Today, he saw the true cost of two men’s immovable wills. He saw what happened when men were forced to fight each other for months on end. It was not merely sickness of the body that plagued sieges, but sickness of the soul that turned men into monsters.

Radu was nearly at the Hagia Sophia when he saw a boy thrown to the ground. A soldier flipped the boy onto his back, reaching down to undo his trousers. Radu slit the soldier’s throat from behind.

He reached down and hauled the boy up, only to see the tearstained face of Amal. “Why are you back here?” Radu asked, shocked and despairing.

Amal shook his head, unable to answer. Radu dragged him along. That, with his turban, bloody clothes, and sword, were enough to make him blend in with all the other soldiers dragging people and things through the streets.

In the square outside the Hagia Sophia, soldiers not interested in immediately partaking of spoils secured their prizes. Beautiful children, girls and boys, were highly prized as slaves, as were young women. Anyone who looked wealthy was also carefully bound for future ransom. All around them were the bodies of those deemed too old or too sick to be of any worth.

Radu dragged Amal through the center of the fall of Byzantium, through the center of prophecy. Everything was profaned and ruined. There was nothing holy in this victory. God had truly left the city.

God was not here, but Radu was. And he still had a mission. His suspicion that Mehmed would send men ahead to protect the Hagia Sophia had proved correct. Several Janissaries stood in front of the church’s barred door. But a growing mob of irregulars and other soldiers shouted and screamed for their right to three days’ pillaging of everything. The guards and the bar would not last long. If Radu was not in the first wave of men inside, he did not want to think what would happen to two small, beautiful boys. There was the side door he had broken in through, but there were too many soldiers around to do anything unseen.

He shoved directly through the mob to the Janissary guards. One lowered his sword at him, but Radu brushed it impatiently aside. “Do you know what is in this building?” he asked.