“He will drown! Let me go!”
She picked him up by his collar, shaking him. “You could have died!”
“He will die!”
“He is nothing! Your life is worth a hundred of his, you understand? Never, ever risk it again for someone else.”
She was still shaking him, jarring his head, so he could not see the river, could not see whether or not Costin had made it. He could hear the other children shouting, but they sounded far away and indistinct over the pounding of his pulse. Radu finally looked at Lada, expecting to see fury, but instead she looked…unfamiliar. Her eyes were brimming with tears she would have mocked him for.
“Never do that again.” She stood and pulled him up beside her. Bogdan took his other arm, and they dragged him away. Radu tried to look back, but Lada grabbed his neck and forced him to keep his gaze forward. He expected her to walk ahead of him on the long, cold trek home, or to yell at him. Instead, she stayed at his side, silent.
“He was fine,” she finally said, after several minutes of listening to Radu sniffle. “He climbed out.”
“He did?” Radu shivered with hope, trembling all over.
Lada pointed to the shield. “Sit.” She made Bogdan pull Radu on it. She called Bogdan so many terms for an ass that Radu forgot Costin’s face and fell over laughing. That night, she sat close to him while they ate supper in front of the fire, picking at him, fussing over him in her way.
When she thought he was sleeping, she crept into his room. Radu did not sleep much, always awake and worrying over something. But he lay as still as possible, keeping his breathing even, curious as to what she would do.
She sat beside his bed for a long while. Finally, she put a hand on his shoulder and whispered, “You are mine.”
Radu had been thinking about the way Lada sounded when she told him that Costin had escaped the river. The tone of her voice, the lack of an edge. He was almost certain she had lied. He fell asleep, wrapped in the secure warmth of her next to him and nagged by guilt over how happy the day had made him.
Still made him.
THE SPRING AFTER SHE had nearly lost Radu to the icy river, Lada lay on her back, staring at the leafy branches overhead, boughs laced together so tightly everything was filtered through vibrant green. Their tutor droned on—Latin, today—and Radu dutifully repeated everything. He was almost twelve years old, and she nearing thirteen. Something about the passage of time and the addition of years to her name filled her with dread. She was not enough. Not yet. All this time and still she had so far to go.
But after seven years of study—seven years in this city, in the castle—she could read, write, and speak Latin as well as anyone. It was the language of contracts and letters and God, formal and stiff in her mouth. Wallachian was considered a low language. It was a spoken language, rarely written.
But oh, how lovely it tasted on the tongue.
“Ladislav,” the tutor prompted. He was a young man, clean-shaven because he did not own land and thus was not allowed to grow facial hair. Lada found him insufferable, but her father insisted she be educated alongside Radu. In fact, her father’s exact words had been It is a waste to educate the mewling worm, but at least we can include Lada, who has a brain worth shaping. Pity she’s a girl.
Smarter, stronger, bigger. She had never forgotten the reasons her father listed that she could not have hoped to beat him all those years ago. Her goal since then had been to earn his love, to show him that she could be all those things. It was a challenge she chased relentlessly. Because on the other side of that challenge—when she had achieved smarter, stronger, bigger—she was certain her father would look at her with more pride and love than he ever directed at her older brother, Mircea. He was twenty now, a grown man, and her father’s heir. Mircea campaigned when battles called for it, soothed tension between boyar families, ate with her father, planned with her father, rode with her father. He was the right hand of Wallachia; it was his hand that was always pulling hair, pinching skin, finding little ways to hurt someone that no one else could see.
And someday he would be prince.
If he lived that long.
But before then, before it was too late, Lada would take Mircea’s place in their father’s heart. That day he had returned the knife to her and pronounced her the daughter of Wallachia had been the first time he had ever truly looked at her, and the memory of that was both a pleasure and an agony she had been nurturing ever since.
She repeated the last sentence her tutor had said in Latin, then said it in Hungarian and Turkish for good measure.
“Very good.” The tutor shifted uncomfortably on the wooden stool he carried with him. “Though we would all be better served learning indoors.”
Her last tutor had slapped her for demanding to go outside. She broke his nose. This tutor never did more than make gentle suggestions, which were summarily ignored.
“This is my country.” Lada stood, stretching her arms over her head, stiff sleeves straining against her movements. She did not like staying in the castle to study. Every day she made them ride out from the walled inner city, past the smaller homes and then the hovels and then the filthy, seedy outskirts of life clinging to the capital, into the fresh, green countryside. The horses were left in fields brilliant with purple flowers, while she and Radu studied in the shade of dense, pale-barked trees.
“The country is not yours.” Radu scraped a stick against the ground to write out his Latin verbs.
“Is this not Wallachia?”
Radu nodd
ed. He had a smudge of dirt on his nose. It made her brother look small and ridiculous. It irritated Lada. He was always with her, an appendage to her life, and she never could decide how to feel about him. Sometimes, when a smile broke across his face like sun reflecting off a stream, or she saw him relax into sleep, she was filled with an unaccountable sort of ache. It terrified her.
“Sit up straight.” She tugged on his chin and wiped his nose with her shirt so viciously that he cried out and tried to get away. She gripped his chin tighter. “This is Wallachia, and I am the daughter of Wallachia. Our father is the prince of Wallachia. This is my country.”