“What I have always done. Protected you.”
“No. No. Tell me you did not— He is an infant.”
“He was a threat. And now he is gone.”
For the endless span of a single breath, Lada thought Mehmed would kill his mother. Then the tension fled his body. He staggered back, falling into a chair. “He was the same age as Beyazit.”
“I have done what you were not willing to. I have secured your legacy. You are now free to be the sultan you were born to be. The sultan I gave birth to. My son. My empire.”
“Get out.”
“We should discuss—”
Mehmed stood. Rage gone, despair gone, he stared down at his mother with all the icy authority he commanded. “Guard.”
Stefan, the Janissary on duty, stood at attention.
“Please escort Huma to her rooms. Bring as many men with you as you need. See that she does not speak with any of her attendants, and that the eunuchs are barred from communicating with her. I will send directions for where she is to be taken.”
Huma shook, her thin, yellowed lips pulled back to reveal gray gums and more black spaces than teeth. “What are you doing? You cannot send me away! I am the valide sultan, the mother of the sultan!”
“No,” Mehmed said. “You betrayed me. You are nothing.”
“Betrayed you? You have no idea what I have done for you. How many times I have saved your life. If going behind your back to keep you alive is betrayal, then they should be banished with me.” She pointed a bony, twisted finger at Lada and Radu.
Mehmed waved in disgust at Stefan. He took Huma’s arm and led her, wide-eyed and shaking, out of the room. Lada thought they had escaped, but then Mehmed turned on them. “What was she talking about? What did you two do?”
Radu looked like a rabbit caught in a trap. Lada understood his fear. Mehmed would never forgive them when he found out their role in his loss of the throne during his first rule. And Huma had no reason not to tell him, not now. She had no more leverage to employ, and Lada had no doubt she would try to burn everyone down with her.
Tears filled Radu’s eyes, despair pulling his head low. He was no longer the man Lada did not know. He was the boy on the ice, the boy in the forest, the boy in the thorns.
He was hers.
“Radu had nothing to do with it,” Lada said. “It happened when you first came to the throne. After I killed the assassin Janissary, I knew it would never stop. Radu was certain you could be sultan. He was stupid and shortsighted, so I went to Huma. It was my idea to have the Janissaries revolt then, to contact Halil and work with him to get your father back to the throne.”
Lada watched as shock and anger transformed Mehmed’s face from the one she knew and loved into something too distant to touch. It was physically painful to watch. She did not look away.
“How could you? All the power Halil gained! All the years I lost…”
Lada lifted her head higher. “I did it to save your life. I would make the same choice again.”
Mehmed sat, refusing to look at her. “I cannot—I cannot think about this right now. Not with what just happened. Ahmet. Little Ahmet.” A curtain came down over his face, as though he had cut off all thoughts of Lada’s betrayal until he could sort through them.
Radu put a hand on Mehmed’s shoulder, but he stared at Lada. “Thank you,” he mouthed.
She did not acknowledge it or the immense gratitude welling in his eyes. She owed him a debt. Nothing was more important to him than Mehmed’s trust. Perhaps it would have been kinder to break that trust and force a removal. Maybe then Radu could be free of the impossible love he carried. But she could not do that to him, not when it was so easy to take this blow on her own shoulders.
“They will think I ordered Ahmet’s death,” Mehmed said, oblivious to Radu’s feelings, as always. “Halima was with me when it happened. I will have to tell them, it was Huma, it was not—”
“No,” Lada said. “They
will think it was your order no matter what you say. If you claim it was your mother, it will make you look like a murderer and a liar.”
“What am I to do?”
Lada thought of what she would do. This was a time for power, not subtlety. No one could question that the sultan was in charge. “Make it law. You know what your father’s brothers did. The wars they fought are still raw wounds. Your father had to kill them all eventually. Make a decree that when a sultan is crowned, it is legal for him to kill his brothers for the security of the empire.”
Mehmed had never looked at her with genuine horror before, but he did now. She stopped herself from taking a step back and steeled herself against the fear that, between this and the revelation of her betrayal, she had lost his love.