She walked numbly past him, the door nearly slamming into her as he shut it.
Dazed, she found herself astride a horse an hour later. Mehmed, eschewing his grand carriage, rode beside her. He looked relaxed and happy, as though a weight had been removed from his shoulders.
It was not until they had entered the countryside that he looked around, puzzled. “Where is your brother?”
Lada thought how it would break Radu’s heart to know it had taken this long for his absence to be noticed by the person he valued most in the world.
Lada thought how Radu had broken her own heart.
“I have no brother,” she said, urging her horse into a gallop and leaving the party behind.
Amasya fit like a pair of boots she had outgrown. The contours hit at the wrong places, and it left her pinched, skin rubbed raw. Everything that had been comforting there, safe, was gone.
“Careful!” Nicolae shouted as Lada slammed her wooden practice sword into the side of one of the newly appointed Janissaries, a Serb her own age. But so much younger. She hated him for his youth, for his happy, easy laugh. She hated all of them. She spun and hit the boy again. He cried out and dropped his sword, backing away.
“Easy now.” Nicolae held up his hands. Lada threw her sword at him. He laughed, catching it. “I thought we agreed you would save the beatings for Ivan?”
The rest of the soldiers laughed. Ivan glowered, viciously kicking the Janissary he was sparring with in the corner.
Ignoring them all, Lada stomped out. She had been practicing more with the Janissaries, throwing herself into their routine, but it ended. It always ended. Every night they went to the barracks, and she went to her empty room.
Mehmed went to wherever Mehmed went when he was not with her, and he was never with her long enough to make everything feel better.
And Radu was nowhere.
She scaled the stone wall surrounding the fortress and dropped to the ground, then headed straight up the mountainside into the trees.
That still felt the most like home to her, the heavy scent of pine needles underfoot, sun-warmed dirt, cool shadows. She breathed in deeply, then choked on a sudden fear: What if this was nothing like what home smelled like? What if this had replaced her memories of her own land?
She stumbled to sit beneath a tree, hugging her knees to her chest, clutching the pouch around her neck. She was terrified to open it and find only dust, with no trace of a scent. Or, worse, a scent she did not recognize.
Maybe Radu was right. Maybe Amasya was home now, and she needed to accept that.
She heard the footfall a second before the sharp blow to the side of her head. Her vision spun as she sprawled on the ground, face pressed against a sharp rock and the rough, pungent needles. A kick to her stomach froze her breath, a creaking noise escaping her mouth. She panicked, begging her lungs to work as bright points of light swam lazily in her vision.
She reached for her wrist sheath, and a boot came down, pinning her hand to the ground. “I know your tricks, little whore.”
Her sluggish, aching head recognized the voice. She gasped, grateful her stomach muscles were working again. “Ivan?” He was a dark blot against the sun, standing over her. He dropped to his knees, straddling her, pinning her legs beneath his and holding both her wrists above her head. His face was so close to hers she could see the pocked scars covering his cheeks, the dark roots of hair beneath his skin.
“You think you are special? You are nothing.” He spat in her face, the warm, sticky saliva dripping down her temple and into her hair. “You are a whore, and whores are good for only one thing. You should know your place.” Backhanding her across the face, he grabbed both her wrists in one of his enormous hands, then reached down to his trousers.
Lada tried twisting away, but his weight pinned her legs. Disbelief warred with the disorientation of the blows to her head. She could not be here. This could not be happening. Ivan could not be beating her.
“You will never be one of us,” he said, putting his face right above hers so she could look nowhere else as he wrenched her tunic up and grabbed for her underclothes.
She slammed her head into his nose. In his momentary distraction, she pushed up, knocking him off-balance enough to free one leg. She brought it between his, and he howled in pain, rolling off her. He pushed himself to his feet, and Lada jumped on his back, fastening her legs around his waist and wrapping her arm around his throat. She grabbed her own wrist, pulling the arm tighter. Ivan staggered backward, slamming her into a tree, but she held tight. He clawed at her arm, trying to get a good enough grip to yank it away. She slammed her heel down into his stomach and groin, three sharp jabs.
Finally, he stumbled forward, falling to his knees.
“I am not one of you,” Lada said, her mouth right next to his ear. “I am better.”
Ivan pitched forward and Lada went with him, never relaxing her arm though her muscles screamed for release. Long after he stopped moving, she stayed there. And then she stood and walked away.
This was the third man she had killed.
This time, her hands were clean.
She found Mehmed in her room, waiting for her. Walking past him, she pulled off her tunic and dropped it into the hearth. The low-burning flames picked at it, a slow devouring as the cloth turned black and caught fire. “There is a body in the woods behind the fortress,” she said, watching the tunic contaminated by Ivan’s hands turn to ash.