Shadows go in front of you leading into your future, and trail behind you, leaving a part of you in the past. They are clearest when we are in the light, and disappear when we lose ourselves in darkness. When a shadow elects to jump to another person, it is an indication that they are your your present and your future, that in light you will find them, in darkness you will lose them. It is highly unusual and very important and, might I add, extremely dangerous for the owner of the shadow.
Lada had always known exactly what shape she would take. She had never let it be determined by the people around her. But Radu could not escape the need for love, the need for people in his life to help him see what he should – and could – be. Lada shaped herself in spite of her environment. Radu shaped himself because of it.
She would walk into that tent, and she would stab her first friend, her first lover, her only true equal through the heart. She did not want to, she found. But she would do it anyway. It was what Wallachia needed, what it demanded, and Wallachia came before Mehmed. It always would. It had to.
His lips are soft and warm and fit mine like the answer to an equation I didn’t know I was trying to solve.
What a luxury honesty was.
Women are strongest when bearing one another’s pain. We each take a little on ourselves. No one dies, and we all heal together.
It makes a soul lonely when even your tongue has no home.
Marry me, Lada. It is the perfect solution.” Lada laughed. Mehmed’s smile grew, until he realized her laugh was not a sweet breeze of delight, but a brutal desert wind carrying stinging sand in its wake. “I will never marry.
I would lie silent and still, like a corpse, as he studied me. His careful, delicate hands explored all the bones and tendons, the muscles and tracings of veins that make up a person. “But where is Elizabeth?” he would ask, his ear against my heart. “Which part makes you?” I had no answer, and neither did he.
He was not sure. Or at least there was no way for him to be sure. But he could not imagine that Lada would die alone and in secret. Or that she could be dead and he would not somehow know. Surely her death would be marked by something. A comet. A great hole opening in the earth. A tempest, a flood, a fire. A force such as Lada could not depart this world without leaving one last mark.
And that was why she would win in the end. Because she would offer up everything on the altar of sacrifice, so long as she kept her country.
To let you stay here until everyone has forgotten you. Until your only legacy are the lurid woodcuts and terrifying nighttime stories of the Saxons. You will fade into a monster, a myth.
If you ever try that again,” I say, taking a sip of chocolate to wet my suddenly parched throat, “I will beat you silly with your own cane.
We saw everything that was not ours, and we hungered. Do not lose that hunger. You will always have to fight for everything. Even when you already have it, you will have to keep fighting to maintain it.
Lada imagined she was climbing to Mehmed’s side to fight next to him. And then she imagined she would be aiming the cannon at his heart instead.
All she had was how she felt, and that was such a mixture of anger, bitterness, jealousy, desire, and affection that she knew she would never untangle it to see what was at the center.
And how do you find the school?” he asks. “Well, seeing as it’s always in the same location, it’s never very difficult to find.
She had always thought getting married would be the death of her. She had not expected that fear to be realized quite so literally.
It felt like fighting. It felt like falling. It felt like dying.
Images of being empress next to Mehmed haunted her when she closed her eyes. It was the worst part of everything, knowing that, on some level, she wanted that much power, even at that cost.