“I was always better with a bow and arrow.” Radu smiled wryly.
“Lada does not need a perfectly aimed arrow. She needs a perfectly aimed smile. Perfectly aimed words. Perfectly aimed manners.”
Radu finally dared to look back up. “Her aim in those matters has always been off.”
“And your aim never errs. Do not devalue what you can do merely because it is not what Lada excels at. You two are a balanced pair.” Mehmed stared into the space between them, eyes no longer focused on Radu. “Or you were, at least.”
In that moment Radu knew Mehmed was not seeing him but the absence of his sister. “Do not keep secrets from me,” he said.
Mehmed refocused sharply on him. “What?”
“When you keep things secret, it gives them more power, more weight. I assumed the worst as soon as I discovered your deception. I was willing to risk our friendship being found out simply to talk with you. Be open with me in the future.” Radu paused, knowing he had spoken to Mehmed as a friend and not as a sultan. In the past he would not have noticed. But now—now there was a distance. And he wondered if maybe the pretend distance had grown into something more. Frightened of this unknown element between them, he added a gentle “Please.”
“And you are open with me in all things?” There was a note in Mehmed’s voice, a subtle teasing lilt that terrified Radu in a different way. Was Mehmed asking what it seemed like he was asking?
“I— You know I work only for you, and—”
Mehmed dispelled the terror with one raised corner of his lips. “I know. And I was foolish to doubt your loyalties to our cause. But you cannot blame me for selfishly wanting to have you only to myself.”
“No,” Radu croaked, his mouth suddenly parched. “Of course not.” But the words that wanted to leave his mouth were “I am yours. Always.” He swallowed them painfully.
Mehmed shifted on the bed. “Do you have further plans for this evening?”
Radu’s heart pounded so loudly he wondered if Mehmed heard it. “What? What do you mean?”
Mehmed gestured toward the door. “Any idea how you are going to sneak out without being seen?”
The sweat that had broken out on Radu’s body turned cold and suffocating. He was a fool. “No.”
“I will go out and make certain any guards follow me to the first antechamber. You should be able to slip into the passageway then.” Mehmed stood, and Radu followed. Too close. He bumped into the other man.
Mehmed paused, then turned and clasped Radu’s arms. “It is good to see you again, my friend.”
“Yes,” Radu whispered. And then Mehmed was gone.
A letter from Nazira waited for him on his desk. She wrote that she and Fatima would be staying in the city in the modest home Kumal kept there. And, she informed Radu, he would be joining them for regular meals.
Radu was both annoyed and pleased. She did not need to fuss over him, but it would be nice to have someone to talk with who expected nothing from him. If he imagined the perfect sister, Nazira would be close to what he would create for himself.
The guilt resurfaced. He had been able to dismiss thoughts of Lada because he assumed she had everything she wanted. Now he knew otherwise. With a weary sigh, he pulled out a piece of parchment and a quill.
Beloved sister, he wrote. One of those words was true, at least.
Three days later, Radu walked toward an inn close to the palace, swinging his arms in time to his steps. A gathering of pashazadas—sons of pashas who were unimportant enough to still welcome him—had been talking about a foreign woman trying to be seen by the sultan. They joked she wanted to join his harem and had brought a cart full of cannons to make up for her homely face.
It was the cart that sparked Radu’s curiosity. And his concern. If a foreign woman was in the city with weapons, trying to meet the sultan, Radu wanted to know why. The other men might dismiss her as crazy, but he knew firsthand that women could be every bit as violent as men.
Turning a corner, Radu ran right into a woman. He managed to catch her, but her bundle of parchments tumbled to the ground. She swore loudly and vehemently in Hungarian. It made Radu oddly homesick for his stuffy, stuttering tutor running through their lessons in the middle of a forest. And then he realized this had to be her. The foreign woman trying to meet Mehmed.
“Forgive me,” Radu said, his Hungarian sliding into place despite years of neglect. He practiced his other languages—Latin, Greek, Arabic, anything that Mehmed had learned with Radu at his side—regularly, but Hungarian and Wallachian had not been on his tongue since Lada had left. “I was distracted.”
The woman looked up, surprised. She was young, older than him but only by a few years. She wore European-style clothing, sturdy skirts and blouses designed for travel. “You speak Hungarian?”
“Among other things.” Radu handed her the parchments. Her fingers were blunt and blackened, her hands shiny with scars from old burns.
“I do not speak Turkish. Can you help me?” She said it crossly, more demanding than pleading. “No one in this damnable city will let me have a conference with the sultan.”
Radu felt this wise of the damnable city. “Where are your servants? Your father?”
“I travel alone. And I am about to be kicked out of my inn for just that. I have nowhere to stay.” She rubbed her forehead, scowling. “All this travel wasted.”
“Are you trying to join the sultan’s harem?”
Her look of murderous outrage was so sudden and severe it reminded him of Lada. He liked the woman more for it, and was also alarmed. Maybe she was here to kill Mehmed.
“I would sooner join his stables and let him ride on my back than join his harem and let him ride on my front.”
Radu felt his cheeks burn and he cleared his throat. “Then what do you need?”
“I have a proposition for him. I went to Constantinople first, and they would not see me, either.”
“You come from Constantinople?” If she was an assassin, she was a stupid one, admitting this up front.
She lifted one of the parchment rolls. “That ass of an emperor would not so much as let me show him my work. He laughed and said even if my claims were true, he could not afford me.”
“Afford you for what?”
She finally smiled, showing all her fine teeth. “I can build a cannon big enough to destroy the walls of Babylon itself. I would have done it for the sultan, if he would have seen me. Now it appears I have to go home, every bit as disgraced as my father and mother said I would be.” She shook her head bitterly and turned to walk away.
“Wait! What is your name?”
“Urbana. Of Transylvania.”
“I am Radu. And I think we may be able to help each other.” He took the bundle of parchments from her. “Go get your things, and I will introduce you to my wife.”
Urbana raised an eyebrow. “I have no intention of joining anyone’s harem.”
Radu held back a laugh. It might have been misinterpreted as mean. “I assure you that is the last thing on my mind. I was born in Transylvania, and I know what it is to be a stranger in a new land. Allow me to help you as I would want someone to help my own sister.”
“If you try anything unseemly, I am fully capable of blowing up your home.”
This time Radu let himself laugh. “My sister would accept help in much the same spirit. Come, I will take you to my home. You are going to love my wife.”
With Nazira’s help, he would be able to determine whether Urbana could be trusted. If so, Radu had a creeping, joyful suspicion he was about to once again prove to Mehmed just how valuable he could be.
4
February
LADA KNEW PUNISHING Transylvania for everything that had gone wrong in the past year did not make perfect strategic sense. But it felt better than anything else, and so Transylvania burned.
Lada was not happy, but she was busy, and that was almost the same.
“God’s wounds,” she whispered, trying to fasten binding cloth tightly enough around her breasts so that they would not chafe against her chain mail. It was difficult to dress herself in the woods. But this arrangement was far preferable to the one the governor of Brasov had proposed—before he sent an assassin after her. After agreeing to see what men and funds he could free up to support Lada’s bid for the throne, he had suggested she stay with him rather than going back “where no lady belongs.”