Now I Rise (And I Darken Series, #2)(7)

Bogdan scowled, crossing himself. He still clung to some bastard version of the religion they had been raised with. His mother—Lada and Radu’s nurse—had wielded Christianity like a switch, lashing out with whichever stories suited her needs at the time. Usually the ones about naughty children being eaten by bears. Lada and Radu had also attended church with Bogdan and his mother, but Lada remembered very little from those infinite suffocating hours.

Bogdan must have carried his religion with him through all his years with the Ottomans. Janissaries were converted to Islam. There were no other options. The rest of her men had dropped Islam like their Janissary caps, but they had not replaced it with anything else. Whatever faith they had had in their childhood had been trained out of them.

Lada wondered what it had cost Bogdan to hold on to Christianity in spite of so much opposition. Then again, he had always been stubborn both in grudges and loyalty. She was grateful for the latter, as his loyalty to her had been planted young and deep in the green forests and gray stones of their childhood in Wallachia. Before he had been taken from her by the Ottomans.

Impulsively she reached out and tugged on one of his ears like she had when they were children. An unexpected smile bloomed on his blocky features, and suddenly she was back with him, tormenting Radu, raiding the kitchens, sealing their bond with blood on dirty palms. Bogdan was her childhood. Bogdan was Wallachia. She had him back. She could get the rest.

“If you are working for the devil, can you tell him to pay us? Our purses are empty.” Matei held up a limp leather pouch to illustrate. Lada startled, turning away from Bogdan and the warmth in her chest. Matei was one of her original Janissaries, her oldest and most trusted men. They had followed her in Amasya, when she had had nothing to offer them. And they still followed her, with the same result.

Matei was older even than Stefan, with years of invaluable experience. Not many Janissaries lived to his age. When they had been surprised on the border, Matei had taken an arrow in the side protecting Lada. He was graying and gaunt, with a perpetually hungry look about him. That look had grown hungrier still during their sojourn in the mountain wildernesses of Transylvania. Lada valued that hunger in her men. It was what made them willing to follow her. But it was also what would drive them away if she did not do something more, soon. She needed to keep Matei on her side. She needed his sword and, in a less tangible but just as important way, she needed his respect. Bogdan she had no matter what. Her other men she was determined to keep.

Lada kept her eyes fixed on the walls of the city beneath them, watching as lights appeared like tiny beacons. “When your work is done, Matei, take anything you wish.”

Brasov had sealed its gates, allowing no one in after dark. Matei and Petru led five men each to scale the walls under cover of darkness. After waiting for them to get where they needed to be, Lada lit the base of a bone-dry dead tree. It greeted the flames hungrily, pulling them so quickly to the top that she and her men had to run from the heat.

The bases of the two towers on the opposite end of the city were engulfed in a matching bright blaze. Lada watched as panicked guards ran around atop the tower nearest her and peered over the edge. “Are you Wallachian?” she called out in her native tongue.

One of them shot an arrow. Lada twisted to the side, and it glanced off the chain mail shirt she wore. Bogdan fired a return arrow. The man tipped silently over the tower’s edge.

“Are you hurt?” Bogdan said, voice desperate as his big hands searched for a wound … around her breasts.

“Bogdan!” She slapped his hands away. “If I were, it would certainly not be a wound for you to see to!”

“You need a woman, then?” he asked, looking around as though one would magically appear.

“I am fine!”

Another man waved a piece of cloth above the edge of the tower. “Yes, we are Wallachian!” he shouted, voice quavering.

Lada considered it. “Let us in and you can run. Or you can join us.”

She counted her heartbeats. It took only ten before the tower door opened and seven men filed out. Three skulked silently into the trees. Four stayed. She walked past them and climbed the stairs to the top of the tower. It was circular, with a thick stone railing that she leaned over to view the city.

Already, panic spread like disease within the walls. People flooded the streets, women screaming, men shouting directions. It was chaos.

It was perfect.

Three days later, stray remnants of smoke still wrote Lada’s anger across the sky above the crippled city. She and her men had camped brazenly close by, drunk on soot and revenge, secure in the knowledge that every man in the city was spent with the effort of saving what had not already been lost. They were also more than a little drunk on the cart full of wine that Matei had somehow managed to bring back.

It was there that Stefan slid in, silent and anonymous as a shadow. He, too, had been with Lada since the beginning. He had always been the best at gathering information: a blank and unremarkable face making him a half-forgotten memory even as he stood in front of someone. One day, Lada thought, the world would know she was deserving of an assassin such as him.

“What news from Tirgoviste?” she asked. Her throat was still raw from breathing in so much smoke, but her hoarseness did not disguise her excitement. “Did you kill the prince?”

“He was not there.”

Lada scowled, hopes of announcing her rival’s death to her men dashed. His death would not have meant the throne was hers—he had two heirs her own age, and she still needed the damnable boyars to support her claim as prince—but it would have been satisfying. “Then why have you returned?”