Bright We Burn

Lada scoffed. “He has an empire.”

“And he has to be over and above all of it. He loved us—he needed us—because we were the only people he could be a person with. The only ones for whom he was just Mehmed, not the sultan.”

“That is the cost of power.”

She was a dragon.

She was a prince.

She was a woman.

It was the last that scared them most of all.

Radu had been wrong all this time. He had felt guilty for the way his heart yearned for other men. But it was not his own love that was poisonous and destructive. His love destroyed nothing, hurt no one. Lada loved Wallachia above all else, and this was the result. What Mehmed and Lada did—because of what they set their hearts on with both people and land—was far worse than anything Radu’s love could ever lead him to do.

It was an odd sort of thing to take comfort in, but he accepted it. Nazira was right. His love had no evil in it.

“You have what you wanted, but you are not happy. You lash out and make others suffer. Those are not the actions of a person at peace with their past and future.”

Lada snarled. “You know nothing about me or my past.”

“I know your brother’s past. And I know that he can still find happiness even in the darkest of circumstances, because his faith sustains him. What sustains you?”

“The blood of my enemies,” she said.

Just three bodies mattered. The same three that had always mattered.

Radu’s.

Lada’s.

And Mehmed’s.