“Of course they will be safe. I will make them part of my household. They will be given the finest tutors and raised to be part of my empire. This is my city now, and they are part of my city. I never wanted to destroy Constantinople, or anything in it.”

“We cannot always get what we want.”

Side by side but further from Mehmed than he had ever been, Radu watched as the sun rose on the broken city. He shifted to look at Mehmed. Rather than pride, a slow expression of despair crept across Mehmed’s beloved features. What he had sought for so long as the jewel of his empire was finally laid out before him in all its crumbling, dying glory. Even without the looting, the city was devastated, and had been for generations.

Perhaps, looking out over it, Mehmed saw what the beginning of his legacy would eventually lead to. Whatever Mehmed did, whatever he built, the greatest city in the world was irrefutable evidence that all things died.

“I thought this would feel different,” Mehmed said, melancholy shaping his words like a song. He leaned against Radu, finally giving him the contact he had craved for so long.

“So did I,” Radu whispered.

After a single day of looting, rather than the traditional three, Mehmed declared an end. He kicked all the soldiers out of the city, banishing them to the camp to go over their spoils and leave what remained of the city unmolested. The camp itself swelled to accommodate the nearly forty thousand citizens taken captive to be ransomed or sold as slaves.

Most of the churches had been protected by the guards Mehmed sent in, and all the fires that had been set were already extinguished. Mehmed himself had killed a soldier found tearing up the marble tiles of the Hagia Sophia. Then he had brought in his own holy men, and the jewel of the Orthodox religion was gently and respectfully converted into a mosque.

Orhan had died fighting in his tower, as had all the men who attempted to hold out. One other tower had fought so long and so determinedly, though, that Mehmed visited and granted the soldiers there safe passage out of the city.

Two communities within Constantinople survived without harm. One was a fortified city within the city that had negotiated its own terms of surrender; the other, the tiny Jewish sector. Mehmed met with the leaders there and asked them to write to their relatives in Spain and invite all the Jewish refugees to relocate and settle their own quarter of the city. He even offered to help them build new synagogues.

Once the soldiers were back at the camp, word was sent throughout the city that anyone who had not been captured had full amnesty. Whether driven out by hope or starvation or simply exhaustion, slowly the survivors appeared.

Mehmed vowed to build something better, and Radu knew that he would.

He simply could not shake the cost of what it had taken to get there.

In the days that followed, Radu wandered the streets in a daze, listening to Turkish in the place of Greek and finding he missed the latter. Over and over he returned to Cyprian’s house, but he could never bring himself to go inside. It would not be the same. He would never see Cyprian again, and Cyprian certainly would never want to see him again. Not now, not after what he had done.

In a city filled with the dead, where tens of thousands now suffered horrible fates outside its walls, Radu knew it was horrendous to mourn the loss of his relationship with Cyprian. And yet he could not stop.

Kumal found him sitting outside the Hagia Sophia. His old friend ran up to him, embracing him and crying for joy. Then he looked around. “Where is my sister?”

Radu felt dead inside as he answered. “I do not know.”

Kumal sat heavily next to Radu. “Is she …?”

“I sent her from the city on a boat with a trusted friend. But whether they got out, and where they went if they did, I do not know.” He had inquired after the boat and received no concrete word of its fate. His only hope was that once news traveled that Constantinople was open to Christian refugees and Ottoman citizens alike, Nazira would return.

“God will protect her.” Kumal took Radu’s hand and squeezed it. “We have fulfilled the words of the Prophet, peace be upon him. Her work in helping us will not be forgotten, nor go unrewarded by God.”

“How can you say that? How can you be so sure of the rightness of this? Did you not see what it cost? Were you not at the same battles I was?”

Kumal’s kind smile was sad. “I have faith because I must. At times like this, it is only through God that we can find comfort and meaning.”

Radu shook his head. “I despair that my time here has cost me even that. I do not know how to live in a world where everyone is right and everyone is wrong. Constantine was a good man, and he was also a fool who threw away the lives of his people. I have loved Mehmed with everything I am since I was a child, and I have longed to enter this city triumphant with him. But now that we are here, I cannot look at him without hearing the cries of the dying, without seeing the blood on my hands. Nazira and I—we ate and dreamed and walked and bled with these people. And now they are gone, and my people are here, but I do not know who I am anymore.”

Kumal said nothing, but he held Radu close as Radu cried.

“Give yourself some time,” Kumal whispered. “All will come right in the end. All these experiences will lead you to new ways to serve God on earth.”

Radu did not see how that was possible. He loved Kumal for trying to comfort and guide him, but he was no longer a lost little boy in a strange new city. Now he was a lost man in a broken old city, and no amount of prayers and kindness could undo what had been done.

Two weeks after the city fell, Mehmed asked Radu to meet him in the palace. He had set up a temporary residence there, already beginning construction on what would be his grand palace. A home to rival all others, a refuge from the world.

Radu passed a woman in the hallway.

“Radu?”

He blinked, focusing on her. “Urbana? I thought you were dead!”

Half her face was shiny with new scars, but she smiled. “No. And I got the forges at Constantinople, after all. I won!”

Radu tried to meet her happiness, but it was too large a task for him. “I am glad for you.”

“You are welcome to help me any time you want.” She patted his arm, already distracted and doubtless planning her next cannon. Radu watched her walk away, glad she had survived.

Then he saw two other familiar faces. Aron and Andrei Danesti. “Radu,” Andrei said. “I know you now.”