The nurse paused, her fingers on Lada’s temple. She stroked once, so lightly Lada wondered if it had been intentional. “Oana.”
“Fine. Oana, when will you be finished?”
The nurse—no, Oana—laughed. She had lost most of her teeth in the years since they had parted. Lada had always thought her old, but now she realized Oana must have been a very young woman when she began taking care of her and Radu. In truth, Lada could not believe the woman was still alive. In Lada’s mind, she had ceased existing once they were taken to Edirne. But Oana was strong and sturdy, as capable as ever.
Tonight, Lada both loved and hated her for that.
“It is easier to destroy than to build,” Oana said. “And you have been destroying your looks for a long time now.”
Lada could not enjoy the irony of hearing her nurse’s—Oana’s—favorite phrase used in relation not to the burning of Transylvania, but to the styling of hair.
“What does it matter? I am swearing loyalty to a foreign king as a soldier, not as a girl.”
“These things matter, little one. Now hold still.” Oana smacked the hard wooden edge of the comb against Lada’s temple. Lada was certain it had been intentional.
The tiny room they had been given in the castle at Hunedoara had no fire. The stones themselves seemed to have been carved out of ice. Twice Oana had had to break the frozen top layer of the water bowl. Lada shivered violently, but not as violently as her thoughts were turning under the continued assault of the comb.
Finally satisfied, Oana helped her dress. The replacement king, Ladislas, had gifted her with a dress. Lada knew it would be disrespectful and even dangerous to reject it. Still, it was a good thing the room had no fire. Otherwise the dress would be feeding it.
Lada slapped Oana’s hands away when she tied the underclothes too tight. Oana slapped Lada’s hands away in return. By the end, they were both red-faced and sweating, having fought a more intense battle over getting Lada into the dress than Lada had ever endured.
“I cannot breathe in this damnable thing.” Lada tried to lift her arms, but the sleeves were not made for her broad shoulders or thick arms. She could barely move. Oana had had to let out the waist some, and Lada’s breasts still spilled out from the top of the bodice. Oana tucked extra fabric in there, trying to cover the soft mounds.
“This weighs more than my chain mail.” Lada tugged at the layers of material that made up the skirts, and something stiffer sewn in to keep their shape.
“Think of it as armor.”
Lada’s lip curled in a sneer. “What could this possibly protect me from?”
“Mockery. Ridicule. Your men are used to you, but this is a court. You have to do things a certain way. Do not mess this up.” Oana yanked on one of Lada’s curls as she tucked it back into the elaborate style. A lacy kerchief went over the top of it all.
“Radu should be here.” Lada stared down in despair. “I do not know how to talk to these people.”
“He was always better at that. How did he fare when you left? I worried for him. I thought they would kill you, and break Radu’s heart.” There was a wistful tenderness in Oana’s voice.
Lada took a deep breath. Or tried to—she could not manage it in this abomination of a dress. She and her nurse had not really spoken of Radu since Oana had asked where he was. The truth was as cold and brittle as the ice in her water bowl. “He grew into a new man. Smart. Sly. Too handsome. And, eventually, into a stranger to me.” She had had no word from Radu, no news. She wanted to tell Oana that Radu was coming, but it had been so long. What if he was not? “When I left, he chose the Ottomans. So you were wrong. I survived, and Radu grew a new heart.”
“Did you have nothing in common, then?”
A strangled laugh escaped the prison of her bodice. “Well, one thing.” Lada wondered, yet again, whether her absence had granted Radu the portion of Mehmed’s attention and love that he so desperately craved.
And, yet again, she forced herself not to think on it.
Lada tugged at the bodice, trying to shift it to make it more comfortable. She missed her Ottoman finery. At least those draped layers of tunics and robes were comfortable. “I am going to give the wrong impression, wearing this.”
“You mean a good impression?”
“Yes, exactly.”
Oana surveyed her with a critical eye, then threw her hands up in surrender. “This is the best we can hope for, at least as far as your looks. As far as everything else, tonight, pretend you are Radu.”
A small pang hit just above Lada’s heart. Did Oana wish that it were Radu and not Lada she had been reunited with? Everyone always loved Radu best. And now Radu and Mehmed had each other, and all Lada had was this woman who wielded a comb as a weapon.
Well. Lada could be Radu for one night. She grimaced, then smiled broadly and opened her large eyes as wide as she could. It was her best imitation of him.
Oana recoiled. “That is terrifying, girl. I was wrong. Be yourself.”
Lada let her hooded eyelids drop low. She had never been able to be anyone else.
The castle at Hunedoara was small compared with anything in Edirne, but bigger than Tirgoviste. A moat surrounded it, with a hill on the back side of the castle that dropped off steeply. Lada liked looking out over the wall at the winter landscape stretching into the hazy distance. She pretended she could see Wallachia from there.
But tonight there was no time for that. She left her tiny room and traversed the back tower’s serpentine stairs. For a few terrifying moments she thought the dress would actually be the death of her, but she managed to make it to the bottom. Stefan met her there. He was the only one of her men who spoke Hungarian—though no one else knew it. He would gather information as he always did, snatching pieces and organizing them into a whole for her.
They walked across the open courtyard in the center of the castle, then through a massive wooden door into the throne room. The floor was brightly tiled—though no tile was impressive to Lada here. After Edirne, everything except churches seemed drab. The walls of this castle were whitewashed and hung with elaborate tapestries and gilded, framed paintings of mournful-looking Hungarian royalty.
Lada had gotten used to large, lovely windows during her time in Edirne. She had forgotten that castles elsewhere were not for ornamentation, but rather for defense. To compensate, chandeliers dripped with light, and two fireplaces roared cheerily.
If her room had been freezing, the throne room was stifling. Lada had always thought it weakness when women fainted, but now she understood. It was not their bodies—it was their clothes.
She was not the only thing on the schedule for the evening. After interminable droning speeches in Hungarian, it was finally her turn. Kneeling in front of the king was a relief, if only to get off her feet. As she knelt, there were some tittering laughs and shocked whispers. The man who went before her had knelt. What was she expected to do instead? To her horror, she realized there was nothing she could do. In her dress, she could not get up again on her own. Her face burning, she looked up at the king.
Ladislas Posthumous, the painfully young replacement for the previous monarch, trembled. At first Lada had thought him cold or frightened, but the trembling continued unabated. He was stricken with some sort of palsy, his illness showing in his every movement. Lada did not have to be ruthless to see that this was a king who would not last.
Younger than her, physically weaker than her, and still he was more important than her. So she bowed her head and murmured the words. She vowed to protect the Transylvanian frontier—no one objected that she had come directly from terrorizing it—and to keep the borders safe from the Ottoman threat. Finally, she swore her fealty to him and the crown of Hungary.
The crown that was nowhere to be seen. Certainly not on Ladislas’s trembling head.
When Lada had finished, she stayed where she was, utterly humiliated. She could not get up, and she could not ask for help. A hand at her elbow rescued her. Stefan smiled wanly at her as he steadily guided her back to her feet. Hoping her expression hid her relief, she nodded at him as gracefully as she could manage. They walked back to their position at the rear of the room.
After the official business ended, everyone remained. Apparently there was always an informal reception afterward. Lada leaned against a wall for support. Every part of her hurt from being held in an unfamiliar position by her dress. No one spoke to her. She knew she should try to strike up conversations, try to gain allies, but she could not smile. She was gritting her teeth too hard to manage it. She was as likely to kill anyone who talked to her as she was to make a friend.