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.
She no longer cared. For all its beauty, Edirne was alien and cold, the earth beneath her foreign and uncaring. Five times a day a voice somewhere near her window called out a song in a language she did not know, its inescapable notes stabbing into her. Radu became excited whenever the singing happened. Lada plugged her ears.
Wallachia was out there, somewhere. Her Wallachia. Though she despised her father for his weakness, at least it would get her home again.
Several soldiers dragged two bound men into the center of the square. Lada noticed a series of holes in the ground, the tiles surrounding them stained dark. The prisoners were laid on the ground next to the holes. A man dressed in flowing lavender robes with a brilliant red plumed turban entered the square. More soldiers, carrying two long, sharpened planks of wood, followed.
“Ah.” Halil Pasha interrupted Vlad’s continued praising of the sultan. Though her father was a prince and Halil Pasha merely the Ottoman equivalent of a noble, the other man acted as though Vlad should pay him deference. And Vlad did.
Halil Pasha swept a hand toward the courtyard. “Here is the head gardener.”
Lada wondered if she had mistranslated. The man looked nothing like a gardener, and there were no plants in the empty square.
Halil Pasha kept his eyes on the courtyard. “As a further favor to you, our court will oversee the education of your children.”
The blood drained from her father’s face. “You are too generous. I could not accept such an offer.”
“It is our pleasure to teach them.”
Vlad looked at the square, where the two bound men had been stripped of their clothing. He met Lada’s questioning eyes, and his own widened with an expression she had never before seen in them.
“Radu, then,” he said, hurriedly. “The girl is due for a convent. She is far too willful and contrary to be taught, and anyway, education is wasted on women.”
Normally such a statement would have enraged Lada, but she was unnerved by her father’s face. Last year she had wandered out to the slaughterhouse, drawn by the noise of the pigs. She had expected them to scream only when being killed, but instead they began screaming, their eyes rolling back in terror, at the mere scent of their littermates’ blood.
That was the expression flickering beneath her father’s composed features, betrayed by the whites showing around his dark irises.
“Hmm.” Halil Pasha stroked his thick beard thoughtfully. “We would hate for an unfortunate marriage to shift your allegiances westward. You have a history of forgetting your promises. Besides, the girl speaks perfect Turkish; I have noticed that she understands all our conversations. Time and attention has been put into her education. A great deal of care. Our children are our most precious possessions, are they not? The sultan wanted Radu, but I insist we educate both of them.”
Her father swallowed roughly, eyes lingering on Lada’s. Then he turned away and nodded.
“It is settled, then,” Halil Pasha said. “We will keep Radu and Ladislav here with us so they will be safe while you remember to serve our interests on the Wallachian throne.”
Radu looked to Lada, trying to put together what he was hearing. Lada understood perfectly well what this man was saying. Their lives were valuable only insofar as their father did what he was told. And instead of just taking Radu, Halil Pasha had known what her father valued the most.
All those years working toward her father’s love and approval had led her here.
It had made her a prisoner.
The Ottomans held all the threads, and they had looped Vlad’s around his own neck. Lada had known that her marriage, her future, was a tool for bargaining, but she had never considered that the very spark of life itself was something to be traded and bartered. And that her father would be so willing to do precisely that.
“Ah! They are ready. Your education starts now, young ones. Behold, the gardener, pruning treason.”
They watched as the head gardener slit an opening into each man and then, with practiced efficiency, inserted the long, thick wooden stakes. The men were lifted into the air, and the stakes planted into the holes in the ground. Lada saw how the men’s own weight would slowly pull them down, forcing the stakes higher and higher along their spines until they finally exited through the throat.
She did not stop staring, but something behind her eyes shifted and changed the scene. She needed to see it differently. These men were not real. They did not matter. It was not real. Their screams were distracting. She was trying to think. She needed to focus on her threads. She clutched the pouch around her neck and stared at the men until they blurred into indistinct shapes. There. They were not real.
She felt Radu squeezing her hand, heard him gasping for breath through sobs. She saw the anguish written across their father’s face. Whatever underhanded dealings he had anticipated with this new treaty, he could no longer act. He had made the critical error of loving his children—or Lada, at least—enough that they could be used against him.
Love and life. Things that could be given or taken away in a heartbeat, all in the pursuit of power. She could not avoid her own spark of life. Love, however…