Lada could never decide what to think of Hunyadi. She sensed that he was a threat to her father’s power, but she could not help seeing that Hunyadi was the man her father was supposed to be. She listened in when she could, stole her father’s letters and annotated maps, and studied Hunyadi’s strategies. He was fascinating. He fought like a rabid dog at unexpected times, and then disappeared to harass the enemy again later. Even with inferior numbers and forces, he usually wore the Ottomans down.
He was the Draculestis’ ally, but he was also dangerous and did not look kindly on her father’s double-dealing. “I thought the boyars supported Ottoman ties. They encouraged Father to seek their help.”
“Most of the boyars are unhappy. They see how successful Hunyadi’s campaigns against the sultan are. They want to ally only with him now. There is talk of a betrothal.”
Lada stiffened. “Who?” she asked, though she knew the answer.
“Matthias, Hunyadi’s son.”
A sharp pain beneath her fingernails alerted Lada to the fact that she was scraping them against the rotting wood floor so hard that slivers were stabbing into her palm. She would be married to grant someone else an advantage. And when that alliance fell through, as all alliances did, she would be shuffled to the side. Left in a convent, abandoned and cut off.
An image of their mother, nearly forgotten since she had left them, crawled through Lada’s mind. She recoiled from the memory of that woman. Powerless. Broken. An abandoned alliance had left her a prisoner in someone else’s home, someone else’s country.
Lada squeezed her hand shut around the splinters, warm drops of blood pooling in her palm, covering the scar of her playacting with Bogdan. There would be no happy marriage of equals for her, no one who would agree to let her rule. “I will never marry.”
Radu pried her hand open and attempted to dig out some of the slivers. She let him. He was far gentler with her wounds than she had been with his.
“How do you know all this?” She considered him in wonder. She had assumed Radu spent his days dreaming. His big eyes had a way of looking pleasantly vacant, as though he were not even aware of conversations going on right in front of him. While Lada was fixated on tactics and Hunyadi, she had studiously ignored the intrigues of the boyars. She saw now that was an error.
“People forget I am listening. I am always listening.”
“We should tell father about Mircea’s plans.”
Radu went perfectly still, head down. Lada did not have to see his expression to know how he looked. Terrified. “He will be angry. And Mircea will kill me. I am scared to die.”
“Everyone dies sometime. And I will not let Mircea kill you. If anyone is going to kill you, it will be me. Understand?”
Radu nodded, snuggling into her shoulder. “Will you protect me?”
“Until the day I kill you.” She jabbed a finger into his side, where he was most ticklish, and he squealed with pained laughter. The look he gave her was one she recognized—the same hungry, desperate look she used to give their father. Radu loved her, and he wanted her to feel the same for him. For the first time since he had been introduced into her life, placid and beautiful and worthless, she found Radu interesting. Perhaps even useful. And more than that, in Bogdan’s absence, she felt like someone belonged to her again.
THE SCRATCHES ON RADU’S face and arms from Mircea’s garden attack had faded to thin red lines. He had lied to his nurse, told her that he tripped and fell into a bush. Reporting on Mircea never accomplished anything.
But this time…this time perhaps it would. Lada had told him to talk to their father. And he could.
He would.
Radu paced in their chambers. The information he had about Mircea conspiring with the boyars would hurt all Radu’s enemies. Mircea, first and foremost. Oh, Radu would love to see him fall from grace. And the Danesti family were the main aggressors behind the coalition, so if they were punished or ostracized, it would hurt Andrei and Aron.
Of course, Andrei and Aron avoided him now, avoided nearly everyone. They were already outcasts in the court after their false crime and real punishment. But Radu still feared that someday they would trace it back to him. He had made his nurse arrange for the servant boy who had helped him to be sent with a family to Transylvania, lest the boy reveal Radu’s deception. He lied to himself that Emil was better off, but Radu knew it had been entirely selfish.
But beneath every other motivation—the desire to hurt Mircea, to punish the Danestis—was this: if Radu heroically revealed the plot, his father would finally see him. He would know that Radu was smart, that Radu was valuable. And Lada would be proud.