And I Darken (The Conquerors Saga #1)(5)
Radu smiled. “Would you like something to eat?”
The boy’s eyes widened in wonder. He nodded.
Radu knew the value in being overlooked, because he himself was so often unseen. He led Emil, a servant so lowly he was invisible to the boyars he worked for, to the kitchen.
A rash of thefts plagued the castle. After every feast attended by the boyar families, someone would notice a necklace, a jewel, a personal token of value missing. It reflected poorly on the prince, so Vlad declared that whoever was discovered to be behind the crimes would be publicly lashed and indefinitely imprisoned. The boyars muttered angry, ugly things beneath their breath, and Vlad skulked through the castle, eyes narrowed and shoulders stooped beneath the weight of his shame at being unable to control his own home.
Several weeks later, Radu stood on the inner edge of the crowd as Aron and Andrei, faces covered in tears and snot, were tied to a post in the middle of the square.
“Why would they have stolen those things?” Lada watched, her mouth turned down in curiosity.
Radu shrugged. “All the missing items were found under their beds by a servant.” A servant who was no longer painfully underfed, and considered Radu his best and only friend in the world. Radu smiled. There had been no real reason to wait as long as he had, delaying the punishment of his enemies and prolonging his father’s embarrassment. The anticipation had been delicious, though. And now, the reward.
Lada turned to look at him, suspicion drawing her brows together. “Did you do this?”
“There are other ways to beat someone than with fists.” Radu poked her in the side with a finger.
She surprised him by laughing. He stood up straighter, a proud grin at having surprised and delighted Lada bursting across his face. She never laughed unless she was laughing at him. He had done something right!
Then the lashings began.
Radu’s smile wilted and died. He looked away. He was safe now. And Lada was proud of him, which had never happened before. He focused on that to ignore the sick feelings twisting his stomach as Aron and Andrei cried out in pain. He wanted his nurse—wanted her to hold and comfort him—and this, too, made him feel ashamed.
Lada watched the whip with a calculating look. “Still,” she said. “Fists are faster.”
1446: Curtea de Arges, Wallachia
DURING THE HEIGHT OF the summer of Lada’s twelfth year, when plague descended with the insistent buzz of a thousand blue-black flies, Vlad took Lada and Radu out of the city. Mircea, their torment of an older brother, was in Transylvania soothing tensions. Lada felt gloriously visible riding by her father’s side. Radu and the nurse and Bogdan rode behind them, and her father’s contingent of guards farther back still. Her father pointed out various features of the countryside—a hidden trail up the side of a mountain, an ancient graveyard with long-forgotten people marked by smooth stones, the way the farmers carved out ditches to pull water from the river into their crops. She drank in his words with more thirst than the greedy soil.
Stopping briefly in the small green city of Curtea de Arges, they paid their respects at a church her father had bestowed his patronage on. Normally, Lada chafed under religious instruction. Though she attended church with her father, it was always a political duty of being seen, being observed, allowing one family or another to be closest to them as a matter of prestige. The priests sang soporifically, the air was cloying, and the light was dim, oppressively filtered through stained glass. They were Orthodox, but her father had political ties to the pope through the Order of the Dragon, so it was even more important that she stand up straight, listen to the priest, do everything exactly as it needed to look to others.
It was a performance that set Lada’s teeth on edge.
However, here, in this church, her father’s name was carved into the wall. It was covered in gold leaf and positioned next to a massive mosaic of Christ on the cross. It made her feel strong. As though God himself knew her family’s name.
One day she would build her own church, and God would see her, too.
They continued traveling along the Arges River, which sometimes was narrow and violently churning, sometimes as wide and smooth as glass. It snaked through the land until reaching the mountains. Everything was a green so deep it was nearly black. Dark gray stones and boulders jutted out of the steeply rising slopes, and beneath them the Arges wandered.
It was cooler here than in Tirgoviste, a chill that never quite burned away clinging to the rocks and moss. The looming mountains were so steep that the sun shone directly on the traveling company for only a few hours each day before shadows reclaimed the passes. It smelled of pine and wood and rot—but even the rot smelled rich and healthful, unlike the hidden rot of Tirgoviste.
Late one afternoon, near the end of their journey, their father reached up to an evergreen tree that was growing sideways off a boulder. He broke off a sprig, smelled it, then passed it to Lada with a smile. It was a smile that made her feel as full and dizzy as the mountain air did. A peaceful smile. She had never seen such a smile on her father’s face, and being the recipient of it made her heart beat with a frenzied happiness.
“We are that tree,” he said, then rode ahead.
Lada pulled on the reins to make her horse, a docile and dull-brown creature, pause. She studied the tree squeezing life out of stone. It was twisted and small but green, growing sideways in defiance of gravity. It lived where nothing had any business thriving.