Now I Rise (The Conqueror's Saga #2)(72)

They paused at the peak’s base, refilling their canteens and watering the horses. Lada dismounted. She scrambled through a jumble of dark gray boulders, following a trickle of water that met the stream. Hidden behind the rocks was a cave. She ducked inside, where the frigid temperature dropped even lower. She could not see far, so she felt along the rough edges of the cave. But then something changed under her fingers. These were too smooth, no longer the natural shape of rocks. Someone had carved this out of the mountain. Which meant it was not a cave.

It was a secret passage.

Lada pushed forward blindly until she hit the end. There were no other tunnels, no branches. Why make a passage that led nowhere? Had someone been cutting to the heart of the mountain just like Ferhat in the old story, only to find that mountains have no hearts?

A drop of water fell on her head and she tipped her chin up. She shouted. The sound echoed upward, disappearing into the noise of frantic bats disturbed in their slumber. Lada flinched, but none came down toward her.

Which meant there was another way for them to escape. She felt the wall again until she found handholds carved into the stone. There was only one place this tunnel could lead: straight to her ruined fortress. Which meant it was a secret escape, a way to be free when all other ways were closed.

Wallachia always found a way.



Though it was spring—bitterly cold, but still spring—Lada saw more fallow fields than ones ready for planting. The land they traveled through had an air of stagnation.

Finally they reached farmland that was being used. Decrepit hovels with smoke rising from their chimneys dotted the edges of fields. On the horizon, the Basarab manor soared, two stories and large enough to house all the peasants in all the hovels they had passed. Lada and her men made no attempt to hide their approach. Matthias had promised to send notice. If he had betrayed them, they were going to have to fight regardless.

A child sat on the side of the road. His head was too big for his rail-thin body, which was visible through his rags. It was too cold to be out in anything less than a cloak. He watched them approach, listless.

Nicolae paused in front of him. “Where is your mother?”

The boy blinked dully.

“Your father?”

When there was no response, Nicolae held out a hand. “Come with me,” he said. The boy stood, and Nicolae easily lifted him onto his horse.

“He is probably crawling with bugs,” Petru said, frowning. “Leave him be.”

Nicolae gave Petru a dangerous look, all his good humor gone. “If being infested disqualified someone from our company, you would have been out years ago.”

Petru sat straighter in his saddle, hand going to the pommel of his sword. “I tire of being the butt of your jokes.”

“If you do not want to be the butt, try to be less of an ass.”

Petru’s expression turned ferocious. Lada moved her horse between them. “If Nicolae wants to pick up strays, that is his choice.”

Bogdan, next to Lada as always, nodded toward their party. “We are doing a lot of that.” Behind the mounted men, straggling back for half a league, a weary but determined group of people was catching up.

In addition to her thirty remaining Janissaries, Lada had picked up more than two dozen young Wallachian men from her time in Transylvania and Hungary. They carried staffs, pitchforks, clubs. One had a rusty scythe. None of them had horses, but they marched in as near a formation as they could manage. Lada knew those men. But behind them were the fringes of the camp—women organized by Oana to run things, men too old to fall in easily with the eager young ones, even a man and his daughters who had followed them from Arges rather than take the dangerous roads alone.

“This is absurd,” Lada said. “Why do they stay with us?” Her men, she understood. They had nothing better, nowhere else to go. They were loyal to her, and to the hope that perhaps she would find them a place in the world. They were soldiers, too, used to travel and hardship. But these people, they …

They had nothing better, nowhere else to go. They were loyal to her, and to the hope that perhaps she would find them a place in the world, too.



An hour later Lada sat in a pleasantly furnished room, drinking hot wine, and warm for the first time since her mother’s stifling sitting room. Bogdan was on one side, Nicolae the other. Petru and Stefan stood at the door, casually intimidating. Against the opposite wall, Toma Basarab’s guards stood with snide confidence.

“The letter I received from Matthias Corvinas was … interesting.” Toma Basarab’s hair and beard were silver. He wore velvet and silk as dark as his wine, his buttons shining silver beacons that matched his hair.

“I want to be prince,” Lada said.

Toma Basarab laughed, his mirth as bright as his buttons. “Why would you want that?”

“Our princes fail Wallachia. They are too busy appealing to foreign powers, pandering to boyars, desperately going over their own coffers. Meanwhile our country rots around them. I will change that.”

Toma leaned back, tapping his fingers on his glass. “The system is what it is. It has worked for this long.”

“Worked for whom?”

“I know you have big dreams, little Draculesti. But Wallachia is as Wallachia was and will ever be. What can you offer it?”

Lada understood immediately his true question was “What can you offer me?” She wished Radu were here. He would have this old fox eating out of his hand. Lada fixed a cold glare on him. “Your mistake is in thinking I care one whit about offering anything. The system is broken. I am going to change it.”