Interrupted, she released the red-faced, coughing boy, who ran away sobbing and never played with them again. But thinking about the focused, thoughtful look on Lada’s face, Radu had occasionally wondered whether, if he had not happened upon the scene, she would have continued to see how long it took for the boy to die.
Comparing her unruffled reaction then with her rage now, Radu’s curiosity grew tenfold. He hid it with a placating look of combined fear and confusion. “I did not know you were here until you shouted,” he said. Big eyes, round mouth, palms up. It was an expression that had gotten him out of trouble too many times to count. His eyes were so large anyhow, when he widened them like this, no one believed him capable of guile. Stealing food from the kitchens, being caught eavesdropping, forgetting Janissary protocol: the big eyes and confused apology worked for everything.
Lada should have known better than to fall for it, but her shoulders relaxed and she tucked the knives away. “What are you doing skulking around?”
He held the branches for her. She hesitated, then climbed under the tree with him. It was snug, but they both fit, backs curled against the trunk. The air was cooler, damp with the smell of young green things and old wizened growth. “It is nice here,” he said.
Lada nodded, her mouth grim with the concession. “It feels…secret. Safe.” She spoke in Wallachian as she toyed with the small leather pouch she always wore around her neck. Radu had heard her speak their language with Nicolae, but after she let him be beaten by their first Ottoman tutor all those years ago, he almost always refused to speak it with her. They spoke only other tongues to each other. Hearing the language of their shared childhood now was a strange and startling intimacy.
“I have never been to these gardens,” she said.
Radu tapped the dagger strapped to her wrist, trying to keep the gesture light to avoid puncturing this precarious and precious moment that had descended between them. “Well, it is good you came prepared, because the gardens are frequently populated by assassins and thieves.”
Lada elbowed him sharply in the ribs. From her, it was almost like a hug. They had grown closer in the months of Mehmed’s absence. Now, wrapped in leaves and the language of their childhood, Radu wondered at how they had let so much space expand between them, and whether it was possible that they were finally closing it.
A voice drifted along the path.
“Mehmed,” Radu whispered.
Lada glared in exasperation, switching to Turkish, their moment gone. “Of course it is Mehmed. But where is he going? He told me he had a council today about province taxes.”
Radu frowned. “He told me he was meeting with the Janissary leaders to go over budgets.”
They waited, two pairs of eyes peering out, searching for the object of their desire. He walked past in the company of a man Radu did not know. But he recognized the clothes, the white robes and the shaved head. A eunuch. Mehmed laughed as he drew even with the tree, and for a breath Radu thought he had spied them and was amused at the strangeness of their hiding spot. But he continued on with the eunuch, the comfortable match of their paces and the ease of space between them speaking of familiarity.
When the two men passed out of the garden, Lada lunged out from under the tree and followed. Radu ran to catch up with her. He had never been through the gate at the far side of the gardens. Lada paused, peering carefully over, then opened the gate. A path wound along the back of the fortress, still walled in but narrow and unusually private.
They turned a corner and Lada stopped so abruptly that Radu ran into her. Ahead of them was a building, one Radu had never seen before. Judging from Lada’s expression, he assumed she was equally surprised by its existence. The walls around it were high and crawling with ivy, but the two heavy entrance gates were thrown open. Through them they saw a section of sumptuous garden, vibrant to the point of garishness, trees dripping fruit and flowers painting every surface in a riot of color.
Radu felt a flare of resentment that Mehmed had kept the most beautiful part of the grounds from them, until he realized that waiting in the garden were several women. They mirrored the flowers, petaled and swirling with color, beautiful with the same temporary vibrancy. And one of them, standing in the center, held an infant.
In the time it took Radu to process that it was Mehmed who walked confidently forward and took the baby, Mehmed who laughed and held the infant up as though it were a piglet at a market, Mehmed who placed a wondering kiss on its forehead, the gates swung closed and sealed them off from the bright dream within. Radu could not say whether the gates actually made a deep clanging sound, or if he merely felt it inside.