“Mehmed will not let them kill us. He is the sultan now.” Radu sounded as though he was trying to convince himself.
Lada hissed, nearly laughing at the irony. “We engineered this whole situation to get his father to be sultan again. Mehmed may not have a say for long. We are running. Right now. We can slip out during the confusion of troop movements.”
“With what supplies? With what money? Even if we make it out of the city, we have no way of getting back to Wallachia.”
Lada skidded to a stop in front of the door to their small apartments within the palace. Mehmed paced there, hands behind his back, forehead creased in worry. With him was a contingent of guards, and Halil Pasha, the main advisor he had inherited from his father. The man responsible for Lada’s stay as captive. If Halil Pasha was here, Mehmed must have lost the argument to protect Lada and Radu. Her fingers twitched toward her wrist sheaths, where she had not removed the daggers.
Mehmed looked up, his expression unchanging. Lada lifted her chin in defiance. If she and Radu were to be punished for their father’s actions, she would not let it happen without a fight. The first man to touch Radu would die.
“There you are!” Mehmed hurried forward, waving for Lada and Radu to join him. “You are excused, Halil Pasha.” Then the guards were not here for Lada and Radu. Lada did not relax her posture.
The older man narrowed his eyes. “We still have much to discuss.”
“I said you are excused!”
Lada noted with interest the look of derision that crossed Halil Pasha’s face, and the petulant tone to Mehmed’s voice. It was not the tone of someone in power.
She met Halil Pasha’s shrewd eyes. As he walked away, she could practically see the threads trailing from him, snagging on everything he passed. Mehmed was sultan, but he was not in power.
They were escorted to Mehmed’s new chambers, which were even more opulent and dizzying than his previous ones. He instructed his guards to remain outside, then slammed the doors shut and threw himself onto a pillow.
“He will not come.”
“What?” Lada walked the borders of the room, tracing the gold patterns painted onto the walls.
“My father. He has refused to come lead the armies. He says that I am sultan now, and it is my job. I will do it if I must, the best I can. But I am not ready to face Hunyadi!”
Radu spoke up, voice high and fast with the relief that they were still safe. For now. “Lada could tell you about Hunyadi’s tactics. She studied him.”
Lada’s eyes cut at Radu like a knife. “Yes, and I can tell you that he and his forces have the blessing of God and the fervor of a renewed crusade. That he uses wagons as mobile barricades, that he is organized and swift and brutal. That they have been waiting for this opportunity to unify them for years, and they will descend on your holdings like a swarm of locusts. And I can tell you that your Janissaries—the soldiers you need to obey you without question—call you names behind your back and complain of poor wages and treatment. I can only imagine you are equally popular with the spahis.” Spahis had even more to lose under an unsuccessful sultan. They had land and wealth, prestige and influence. All the Janissaries had were their lives and their salaries.
Mehmed threw his hands up in despair. “I know I am not ready to face Hunyadi! That was never the plan. I need my father!”
His voice broke at the end of the sentence, and Lada realized with a pang that he had been thrown to the wolves just as she and Radu had. His father had abandoned him, sacrificed him, as assuredly as their own had. If this war did not devour him, men like Halil Pasha would.
Lada sighed, sitting down near Mehmed and leaning back to look at the grandeur of the ceiling’s carved geometrics. “Your father says you are the sultan.”
Mehmed clicked his tongue in annoyance. “Yes, that is the problem.”
“That is the solution. If you are the sultan, he must obey your command to come and lead your armies. And if you are not the sultan, he must come back and lead his armies.”
A slow smile spread across Mehmed’s face. “Lada, I think I love you.”
She slammed her fist into his shoulder, and he slouched away, looking at her in outrage. “How dare you strike me!”
“I dare perfectly well. Now go write your missive. The crusade is not waiting, and neither should you.”
While Mehmed went to gather his writing tools, Radu stood in the middle of the room, wringing his hands. “What about our father? What should we say?”
“We say nothing. We do nothing. You do not poke a sleeping bear to ask what it will do when you wake it up.”