And so she cut out her heart and offered it as a sacrifice. She would pay whatever price her mother Wallachia demanded.

“Make me prince,” she said without feeling.

AFTER SHE WAS GONE, Radu held Mehmed as he wept.

Radu’s joy at cradling Mehmed was like a kick to the stomach, overpowering and destined to linger with bruises long after it was over.

“Never leave me.” Mehmed’s grief-choked voice still rang with command.

Radu closed his eyes. “I will never leave you.” Mehmed was in his arms, but he knew Lada was the only thing in Mehmed’s heart. Radu had thought his own heart was filled with nothing but Mehmed. But he now had an aching fissure, the portion Lada left bereft when she abandoned him once and for all.

He had said this was his home. He had told the truth, and he had lied. Because Lada was his home, too, and now she was gone.

The call to prayer drifted through the walls, and the two men fell to their knees. Radu released everything to God. His pain, his fear, his loss, his secrets. His vast, unfathomable loneliness.

When they had finished praying, Mehmed was calm. His face was as hard as the sword of his ancestors. Radu followed him onto the balcony, where he gazed intently into the darkness beyond the city. Mehmed was looking north, where Lada and her men traveled to claim Wallachia.

Radu put a hand on his shoulder. Mehmed needed focus to move past the pain. Radu gently turned them both to look east.

Toward Constantinople.

Wallachian border

THE STORM CLOUDS THAT had accompanied their long march finally broke. After the dark dynamics and constantly shifting palette of the clouds, the flat blue of the sky looked false somehow. A promise worth less than the papers and treaties Lada carried in her bags.

They gazed across a wide, frosted plain to the mountains threatening the countryside.

“Wallachia.” Nicolae’s voice was filled with wonder, all teasing gone.

“Home,” Bogdan grunted.

Stefan, Petru, Matei, the rest of her men—her men—joined them, staring at their past. It had become their future. Lada had made it that way.

Nicolae got past his reverence, grinning at her. “Well, are you ready, Lada Dragwlya, daughter of the dragon?”

Fire burned in her heart, and her wounded soul spread out, casting a shadow like wings across her country. This was hers. Not because of her father. Not because of Mehmed. Because the land itself had claimed her as its own.

“Not Dragwlya,” she said. “Lada Dracul. I am no longer the daughter of the dragon.” She lifted her chin, sights set on the horizon. “I am the dragon.”