Bright We Burn (The Conqueror's Saga 3)

It was a very lonely road.

He had not planned to return to Constantinople. The city was haunted for him, and forever would be. After Mehmed took it, Radu had returned to Edirne at the first possible opportunity. Both to escape, and to be with Fatima. The guilt he carried was nothing compared to the debt he owed her for losing her wife, and so, to ease some of Fatima’s suffering, he endured his anguish at being around her. There was nothing else he could do for Nazira.

All his letters—joined by Kumal’s and even Mehmed’s efforts—had yielded no news. Nazira, Cyprian, and the servant boy Valentin had disappeared. He had watched them sail away from the burning city, swallowed up by smoke and distance. He had sent them away so they could live, but he feared he had simply found another way for them to die. Every day Radu prayed that they had not joined the thousands sent to anonymous graves. He could not bear the idea that the people he longed for might not exist anymore.

And so he sent more letters, and waited at their home in Edirne, where he would be easy to find.

But then Mehmed had written. A request from the sultan was never a request—it was a command. Though Radu considered rejecting Mehmed’s invitation to join him in Constantinople, in the end he did what he always did: he returned to Mehmed.

Fatima had enough faith for both of them that all would be well. She waited at the window of their house in Edirne every day. Radu imagined her there now, in the same place she had been when he left. Would she wait there fruitlessly for the rest of her life?

A passing cart startled him from his gloomy reverie. The road to Constantinop

le had been empty last time, cleared by the specter of war hanging over the countryside. Now traffic flowed to and from the city like blood through a vein. Carrying life in and out in a constant pulse. The city was no longer a dying thing.

Like arms reaching out to welcome—or drag—him in, the gates were open. Radu tamped down the panic that arose at seeing them that way. He had spent so long both defending them and praying they would fall, his body did not know how to respond to seeing them function as city gates should.

Much had been done to repair the walls he had fought on. Shiny new rocks re-formed sections that had fallen during the long siege. It was as though the events of last spring had never occurred. The city healed, the past erased. Rebuilt. Buried.

Radu looked at the land in front of the wall and wondered what had been done with the bodies.

So many bodies.

“…Radu Bey!”

Radu crawled out of his memories of darkness, thrust back into brilliant day. “Yes?”

It took a few confused moments for Radu to realize that the young man who had addressed him had been only a boy a few months ago. Amal had grown so much he was nearly unrecognizable. “I was told you would be arriving sometime today. I am to escort you to the palace.”

Radu reached out his hands to clasp Amal’s. His heart swelled to see the young man here, alive, healthy. He was one of three boys Radu had been able to save from the horrors of the siege.

“Come,” Amal said, grinning. “They are waiting. We will ride between the walls and go straight there.”

Radu did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed. He had thought about riding through the city, but he knew where his heart would take him. An empty house where no one waited for him. Better to go straight to Mehmed.

“Thank you,” Radu said. Amal took the reins of Radu’s horse and led him through the space between the city’s two defensive walls. Radu did not want to be here. He would have preferred to visit ghosts that were, if melancholy, at least tinged with sweetness. Here at the walls there were only the ghosts of steel and bone, blood and betrayal.

Radu shuddered, dragging his eyes from the top of the wall and toward the gate they were heading for. The gate Radu had unlocked in the midst of the final battle, sealing Constantine’s fate and bringing the city down around himself.

Amal gestured to the walls on either side. “They finished repairs only last month.”

Radu glanced up at the nearest Janissaries. He wondered if these men had been part of the siege. If they had flooded the wall, spilling over it. What had they done when they got into the city after so many endless days of anticipation fueled with frustration and hatred?

Radu swallowed a bitter, acidic taste, unable to look at the walls any longer. “I would like to go the rest of the way alone.” Radu took the reins back.

“But I am to—”

“I know the path.” Radu ignored Amal’s panicked expression and turned his horse around. He entered at the main gate amid the press of humans, the crush of life. It was something, at least.

Once inside, he let his horse meander, guided by the crowds. He was desperate not to be alone. There was much to be distracted by. This portion of the city had been nearly abandoned before. Now windows were thrown open, walls repainted, early flowers planted in tiny pots. A woman beat a rug, humming to herself, as a child toddled on unsteady legs after a dog.

Where the spring had been unseasonably cold, the winter was moderate and pleasant. It did not feel like the same desperate, starving, suspicious city. Everywhere Radu looked, things were being built and repaired. There was no evidence of fire, no hint that any tragedy other than age had ever befallen this city.

Radu was so distracted that he missed the road he was supposed to follow and ended up in the Jewish sector. He had not spent any time there before. It, too, was humming with activity. He paused in front of a building under construction.

“What is this?” Radu asked a man carrying several large wooden beams.

“New synagogue,” the man said. He wore a turban and robes. He passed the beams to a man wearing a kippah on his head and ringlets at his ears.