THE ASHES OF THE village were as cold as the dawn around them. Everywhere the ground was dusted black instead of white, like some hellish snow had fallen.
Lada, wrapped in furs, crouched down. She took off her gloves and ran her hand through the ashes that remained of the village. Her village. Wallachia’s village. Her hand came away stained with dull black.
“How many people were killed?” she asked. They had ridden here immediately after seeing Mehmed’s envoy off. She had come straight down the border to make certain no other villages had been attacked. Along the way, she had picked up witnesses.
A peasant from the next village scratched his head, eyes wandering as he mentally calculated. “Three hundred?”
“Who is the boyar in charge of this region?” She should know. But she had never been able to care about the boyars unless they were giving her trouble.
He shrugged. “Never met him.”
Lada looked at Stefan. He nodded, slipping away. He would find out. And there would be consequences for the boyar, both for failing to protect the people in his care and for failing to report this attack to Lada. She should not have heard about it from Mehmed’s people. She closed her eyes, letting herself imagine Mehmed’s reaction to her message. It filled her with something sharp and hot, like anticipation.
“What are you smiling about?” Bogdan asked.
Her eyes snapped open. “Nothing.” Standing, she brushed her hands off on her trousers, the ash that had looked black against the snow now showing up gray against the black cloth. A shift in perspective changed everything. “When will Nicolae be here?”
“Within the hour.”
Nicolae had been gathering all her soldiers. When he arrived, it would be with over three thousand men. And the special supplies she had been stockpiling.
Lada squinted at the rising sun, let its brightness warm her face. “Three hundred. Very well. We will kill three thousand of them. Every Wallachian death will be answered tenfold.”
“We will have to go deep into Bulgaria to kill that many,” Bogdan said.
“Then we will go deep.” No one would be able to doubt her ferocity, her commitment to her people. And no one would attack Wallachia without thinking very carefully about the consequences from now on. It would be a lot of bodies, but she looked at them as an investment. Kill thousands to save thousands.
* * *
Two days later, the boyar who had failed his people clutched his chest with his torn and bleeding hands. The hole he had dug—one of hundreds since Stefan brought him to their camp—was ready. Two men took the stake and leveraged it into the hole, tipping it up. The body slumped at the top, a gruesome coat of arms for Lada’s push into Bulgaria.
Lada looked down the road lined with a forest of bloody reminders.
“How many is that?” she asked Bogdan, who rode next to her.
“Fifteen, sixteen hundred.”
They had broken through the border villages as swiftly as a river smashing through a dam. Everyone was swept up in their wake, no one spared. But it was not quite right. So few of them had been her actual enemies. She spared no love for Bulgars—they were too weak to break from Ottoman rule, and were thus as culpable as anyone—but they were not Turks. Her point that her borders were inviolable had been made. But…she wondered if she could make another point, too.
A point that the protection of the Ottomans was no protection at all.
A point that her way was better.
Nicolae eyed the stakes with weary distaste. “Only a handful of casualties among our men.”
“Good. And does word spread?”
He shook his head. “No one is left to send out warnings. My scouts report no mobilization of the Turkish forces at any of the nearby fortresses.”
Lada rubbed her eyes. They were irritated from the smoke of burning cottages and fields. “This is all the protection their loyalty to the sultan buys them. How can they not see it? How can they not see that all their bowing and scraping to Mehmed benefits them nothing?”
“Onto the next village?” Bogdan asked.
Lada shook her head. “Where are the Turkish troops?”
“There is a stronghold two hours’ ride from here. Perhaps a thousand men are stationed there for easy deployment around the region. Another one, with five hundred men, is half a day’s ride from there.”
Lada nodded, turning her horse from the corpse-lined road. “No more Bulgar deaths. I want the rest of my stakes baptized in the blood of Mehme