“I am sending them back,” he said, several nights into the journey. “I do not want them with me. They slow us, and the boy is too weak to travel so far. He has always been delicate.”
Radu did not realize whom his father meant until all the Janissaries turned toward him and Lada. What had they done wrong? Radu had kept his homesickness and his longing for his nurse to himself. Surely no one had noticed him crying silently the first two nights. He had ridden without complaint, helped set up and take down camp, done everything right!
He expected Lada to protest their father’s rejection, but she remained silent, staring at the fire. Their father looked anywhere but at them, his face a mask in the darkness.
Lazar rested a hand on Radu’s shoulder. “Radu is doing very well. He rides like a seasoned soldier. Besides, we cannot spare a guard for them. The sultan’s hospitality is beyond compare. You would not want to deprive your children of the opportunity to experience his generosity.”
Radu’s father sniffed and turned his face away, staring into the night. “Very well. It is all the same.”
He retired to his tent, and for the rest of the trip he neither spoke to nor looked at them. Radu tried to ask Lada about it, but she, too, was silent and preoccupied.
When at last they came over the crest of a hill and saw Edirne laid out before them, Radu’s heart seized with joy and wonder. The buildings were pale white stone, the roofs red. Streets lined with spring-green trees weaved through it all, leading to a building with a spire so high that Radu was surprised it did not scratch the blue of the sky. Several domes made up its roof, and another, shorter spire rose to greet the party, welcoming them.
Nearby was a large, imposing building, its outside striped red and white with alternating brick and stone, but Radu could not take his eyes off the spires that reached so confidently for heaven.
They had arrived.
1448: Edirne, Ottoman Empire
VLAD WALKED BEHIND SULTAN Murad, half stooped from bowing so often. Lada watched with resigned wariness. Radu was at her side, clinging to her like a small child. She had to pry his hand off her arm, where he was wrinkling the sleeve of her finest dress. He had acted as though their journey here was playtime and befriended the soldiers. The enemy soldiers. Radu was a fool. They had not journeyed here, they had fled. Leaving the throne in the waiting hands of Mircea.
Mircea, who had long curried favor with the boyars and Hunyadi. Mircea, who promised to hold the prince title in wait for his father’s return.
Lada had no doubt her father would need an army to return, and not just against the boyars and Hunyadi.
For a few precious hours Lada had nurtured a dream that perhaps she could find Bogdan here, but all hope had vanished. They had been welcomed with rooms prepared just for them. Lush, perfumed, and pillowed prisons they had not been permitted out of for the past two days. Vlad had paced so much, muttering and practicing speeches, that sweat soaked his silk undershirt. Radu had stared out the window, which was framed by metal twisted and shaped like vines. Lada had watched her father, his threads snapped. One left. One single thread that he desperately hoped to loop around the sultan and his mercurial support.
She tugged Radu’s hand to make him walk faster so they could keep up with the party of adults. This was not the behavior Lada expected from Vlad Dracul. From her father. From a dragon. A dragon did not crawl on its belly in front of its enemies, begging for their help. A dragon did not vow to rid the world of infidels, and then invite them into its home. A dragon did not flee its land in the middle of the night like a criminal.
A dragon burned everything around herself until it was purified in ash.
The party came to a stop on a balcony overlooking a square paved in intricately swirled tiles of bright blue and yellow. Edirne was beautiful—ornate and stately, but with a dizzying elegance to everything. Lada distracted herself by imagining razing it to the ground.
“It is settled, then,” the sultan said, not looking at her father while he spoke. His eyes were dark points beneath carefully shaped eyebrows that were turning silver with age. He was cradled in silks, an enormous turban towering above and around his head. He traced the line of his mustache down into his beard, fingers glinting with jeweled rings. “I will send you back with a Janissary guard and the full support of the Ottoman throne. You will pay a yearly tribute of ten thousand gold ducats and five hundred Janissary recruits for the honor of our patronage, and you will ensure that our interests are protected along your Hungarian and Transylvanian borders.”
Lada stopped listening as her father bowed and made promises and expressed his gratitude. The sultan left, leaving behind one of his advisors, Halil Pasha, to finalize the details of the agreement.