Mehmed frowned. “But that is the title for a prince.”
“Make me prince, then. You know I am capable. Send me with my Janissary troops, give me the backing of the empire.”
Mehmed raised a hand dismissively, but he sounded unsure. “They will never accept you.”
“I will make them.” She waited for another dismissal, but none came, so she pressed her advantage. “Send me as prince, as a gesture of peace. No one will see it as a show of strength or aggression. They will see that you want stability, not conquest. I will deliver treaties to Hunyadi, to everyone who has opposed you. I will spread news of peaceful Mehmed who wants only what he already has and nothing more. And you will be free to focus on Constantinople.”
Mehmed’s voice was soft, tortured. He did not turn to face her. “But I will lose you.”
Though she had always known returning home would mean leaving Mehmed, until that moment she had never considered the reality of it. It was not fleeing, or being forced away. It was choosing to lose him. It felt impossible. Radu finally met her gaze, and she silently implored him, holding out a hand. She could not, would not lose both of them.
He shook his head.
Huma’s words from all those years ago slipped beneath her armor, piercing her heart. What must be sacrificed to secure a future where no one can touch you? Lada knew now exactly how much she had to lose, because she was about to cut out her heart and leave it.
The two men—the only two people—who had been constants in her life would be left behind. Radu and Mehmed had both given her something she could not give herself, had seen her in a way no one else had and no one else ever would. They looked at her, ugly Lada, vicious Lada, and saw something precious. And she looked at them and saw Radu, her brother, her blood, her responsibility, and Mehmed, her equal, the only man great enough to be worthy of her love.
One future—bleak and unknowable, filled with violence and pain and struggle—unfurled before her. Another, with her brother and the man who knew her and still loved her, shone like a beacon.
And so she cut out her heart and offered it as a sacrifice. She would pay whatever price her mother Wallachia demanded.
“Make me prince,” she said without feeling.
AFTER SHE WAS GONE, Radu held Mehmed as he wept.
Radu’s joy at cradling Mehmed was like a kick to the stomach, overpowering and destined to linger with bruises long after it was over.
“Never leave me.” Mehmed’s grief-choked voice still rang with command.
Radu closed his eyes. “I will never leave you.” Mehmed was in his arms, but he knew Lada was the only thing in Mehmed’s heart. Radu had thought his own heart was filled with nothing but Mehmed. But he now had an aching fissure, the portion Lada left bereft when she abandoned him once and for all.
He had said this was his home. He had told the truth, and he had lied. Because Lada was his home, too, and now she was gone.
The call to prayer drifted through the walls, and the two men fell to their knees. Radu released everything to God. His pain, his fear, his loss, his secrets. His vast, unfathomable loneliness.
When they had finished praying, Mehmed was calm. His face was as hard as the sword of his ancestors. Radu followed him onto the balcony, where he gazed intently into the darkness beyond the city. Mehmed was looking north, where Lada and her men traveled to claim Wallachia.
Radu put a hand on his shoulder. Mehmed needed focus to move past the pain. Radu gently turned them both to look east.
Toward Constantinople.
Wallachian border
THE STORM CLOUDS THAT had accompanied their long march finally broke. After the dark dynamics and constantly shifting palette of the clouds, the flat blue of the sky looked false somehow. A promise worth less than the papers and treaties Lada carried in her bags.
They gazed across a wide, frosted plain to the mountains threatening the countryside.
“Wallachia.” Nicolae’s voice was filled with wonder, all teasing gone.
“Home,” Bogdan grunted.
Stefan, Petru, Matei, the rest of her men—her men—joined them, staring at their past. It had become their future. Lada had made it that way.
Nicolae got past his reverence, grinning at her. “Well, are you ready, Lada Dragwlya, daughter of the dragon?”
Fire burned in her heart, and her wounded soul spread out, casting a shadow like wings across her country. This was hers. Not because of her father. Not because of Mehmed. Because the land itself had claimed her as its own.
“Not Dragwlya,” she said. “Lada Dracul. I am no longer the daughter of the dragon.” She lifted her chin, sights set on the horizon. “I am the dragon.”