Now I Rise (The Conqueror's Saga #2)(65)

“Yes.”

“Like a sister.”

Radu stopped, causing Cyprian to stumble. Radu forced a quiet laugh. “You have never met my sister if you think I could ever adore her as I do Nazira.”

Cyprian gestured emphatically. “But there is no passion.”

Radu began walking again, his mind whirling. Cyprian saw too much. They should never have agreed to live with him. If someone suspected Nazira was anything other than his beloved wife, they were in more danger than ever. She had come to sell his story beyond doubt. But if people doubted the marriage itself … “She is my wife, and my concern. And now you are my concern, too. What is wrong? I have never seen you like this.” In the weeks that they had known him, Cyprian had never been drunk. Even when he had learned of the deaths of his fellow ambassadors, he had remained focused and collected in his grief. Something must have happened tonight to effect such a change.

“Eight thousand,” Cyprian said, his voice a whisper.

“Eight thousand what?”

“Eight thousand men. That is all we have.”

Radu paused, causing Cyprian to stumble again. Radu caught him and held his arms. “Eight thousand?” That was fewer than Radu had suspected. He had seen how bleak the city was, but not even that was enough to indicate just how few men they had to call on.

“Eight thousand men for twelve miles of wall. Eight thousand men against sixty thousand.”

“But surely more help will come.”

Cyprian shook his head, listing to the side with the movement. “My uncle holds out hope, but I have none. The Turks are already here. You told us they have a navy on the way. Who will send aid? How will they get here? Who will look at the hordes at our gates and dare stand with us?”

“But you heard Giustiniani on the walls. You are still fighting from a place of strength.” Radu did not know whether he was trying to press Cyprian for more details on the city’s defenses or to comfort him. “You were able to repel that attack yesterday!”

Mehmed had sent a small force against one of the weaker sections of the wall. It was a sudden, ferocious attack. But after a couple of hours, two hundred Ottomans were dead and only a handful of defenders had been lost. It was a huge victory for Giustiniani, evidence that his claims of being able to defend the city had some weight.

Or at least, that was what was being said. Radu suspected that Mehmed had been playing, like a cat with its prey. Because what no one knew, what they did not take into account, was that throwing men at the walls was not how Mehmed meant to break them. The cannons had not arrived yet. Until then, he was content to bat at the walls and watch the mice scramble.

Radu saw a familiar building in front of them. He steered Cyprian toward the Hagia Sophia and propped him against the wall while he picked the lock. The door clicked open. Radu grabbed Cyprian and pushed him into the church. Cyprian stumbled, looking up at the ceiling instead of at his feet. “Why are we here?”

“Because it is quiet.”

“Have you come here before? You picked that lock very easily.”

Radu smiled, because Cyprian could not see it in the dark. “It took me forever to pick the lock. You are too drunk to remember. You fell asleep in the middle.”

“I did not!”

Laughing, Radu guided Cyprian toward a corner, where the drunk man slid down against the wall and leaned his head back. Radu sat next to him, mimicking his posture.

“I am so sorry,” Cyprian said.

“For what?”

“For bringing you here. I condemned you to death. I should have— I thought of taking us somewhere else. To Cyprus. I should have talked you out of this madness. Now you are trapped here, and it is all my fault.”

Radu put a hand on Cyprian’s arm, hating the anguish in his friend’s voice—no, not his friend. He could not view him as a friend—would not. He quickly pulled his hand back. “You saved us from Mehmed. Do not apologize for that. We came because we wanted to help the city. We would not have accepted running and hiding, just as you could not bring yourself to do it.”

“You call him Mehmed.”

Radu turned toward Cyprian, but the other man was staring straight ahead into the darkness. Radu could not make out his expression. “What do you mean?” he asked, his voice careful.

“The sultan. You try not to, but when you are not being careful, you call him Mehmed. You were close to him.”

Radu searched the shadows around them for the right way to answer. Cyprian spoke before he could, though. “It was not all bad, was it? Being with him?”

Now Radu was fully alert. Could Cyprian’s drunkenness have been an act to lull Radu into security, to get him to reveal something he should not? Was this a follow-up to the prying questions about Radu’s relationship with Nazira? He chose his words with as much care as he had ever given anything. “The sultan was kind to me when we were boys. I looked up to him. I thought he had saved me from the pain we endured from his father’s tutors. He was all I had.”

“Your sister was with you, though.”

Radu laughed drily. “Again, you have never met my sister. She responded to our torments by getting harder, crueler, further away. It made her stronger, but it was breaking me. So when Mehmed—the sultan—offered me kindness, it was like someone had offered me the sun in the midst of the longest, coldest winter of my life.” Radu cleared his throat. He walked as close to the truth as he could, so that his lies would be masked in sincerity. “But as we grew older, he became different. More focused. More determined. The friend and protector I thought I had was not mine at all, and never had been. I valued him above everything else, and he— Well. Everything in the empire belongs to him, and he uses people as he sees fit.”