And I Darken
Page 81

Lada leaned forward, a hand outstretched. Then she curled it into a fist. She could not comfort him, could not fix this. He would need to be stronger. That was the only solution. “Get up. Stop pitying yourself. We are leaving, and things will go back to how they were before.”
“We can never go back.” Radu looked up at her with empty eyes, and the truth of his words rang through her like a bell. It was true. There was no going back from Radu’s feelings, no going back from what Lada had let happen between her and Mehmed. Perhaps this had all been a mistake.
“Get dressed!” she snapped, overwhelmed and angry.
“No.” A cold distance settled over his face as his square jaw tightened.
“We will not wait for you.”
“I am not coming.”
Exasperated, Lada began pulling clothes at random from the large armoire. “You are worthless. What will you do? Stay here?”
“Yes.” He stood—straight, taller than her—then stepped close enough so that she had to bend her neck back to look him in the eyes. He stared down at her, and the little brother she had dragged through life was now entirely gone. “You have both been so busy learning tactics and studying battles, you have failed to see the truth of where thrones are won and lost. It is in the gossip, the words and letters passed in dark corners, the shadow alliances and the secret payments. You think I am worthless? I can do things you could never dream of.”
Lada stumbled back. His words hit the precise tender spot she had been avoiding touching. “But—we have to stay together. We are all we have against this empire.”
Radu opened his door, looking above her head. “Your mistake is in assuming we both view them as an enemy.”
Rage and disgust spat from her lips. “You cannot mean that. We are Wallachian.”
“You are Wallachian. I am home. Get out.”
Lada could think of nothing else to say. She wanted to hit him, to pin him to the ground until he relented like when they were children. But this was not the child she had known. She did not know this man. She had lost Radu somewhere along the way, and she did not know how to get him back.
She walked numbly past him, the door nearly slamming into her as he shut it.
Dazed, she found herself astride a horse an hour later. Mehmed, eschewing his grand carriage, rode beside her. He looked relaxed and happy, as though a weight had been removed from his shoulders.
It was not until they had entered the countryside that he looked around, puzzled. “Where is your brother?”
Lada thought how it would break Radu’s heart to know it had taken this long for his absence to be noticed by the person he valued most in the world.
Lada thought how Radu had broken her own heart.
“I have no brother,” she said, urging her horse into a gallop and leaving the party behind.
Amasya fit like a pair of boots she had outgrown. The contours hit at the wrong places, and it left her pinched, skin rubbed raw. Everything that had been comforting there, safe, was gone.
“Careful!” Nicolae shouted as Lada slammed her wooden practice sword into the side of one of the newly appointed Janissaries, a Serb her own age. But so much younger. She hated him for his youth, for his happy, easy laugh. She hated all of them. She spun and hit the boy again. He cried out and dropped his sword, backing away.
“Easy now.” Nicolae held up his hands. Lada threw her sword at him. He laughed, catching it. “I thought we agreed you would save the beatings for Ivan?”
The rest of the soldiers laughed. Ivan glowered, viciously kicking the Janissary he was sparring with in the corner.
Ignoring them all, Lada stomped out. She had been practicing more with the Janissaries, throwing herself into their routine, but it ended. It always ended. Every night they went to the barracks, and she went to her empty room.
Mehmed went to wherever Mehmed went when he was not with her, and he was never with her long enough to make everything feel better.
And Radu was nowhere.
She scaled the stone wall surrounding the fortress and dropped to the ground, then headed straight up the mountainside into the trees. That still felt the most like home to her, the heavy scent of pine needles underfoot, sun-warmed dirt, cool shadows. She breathed in deeply, then choked on a sudden fear: What if this was nothing like what home smelled like? What if this had replaced her memories of her own land?
She stumbled to sit beneath a tree, hugging her knees to her chest, clutching the pouch around her neck. She was terrified to open it and find only dust, with no trace of a scent. Or, worse, a scent she did not recognize.
Maybe Radu was right. Maybe Amasya was home now, and she needed to accept that.