Several of the robbers scattered for the trees. “Kill them all,” Lada said. She paused, thinking. One of the robbers had curled into a ball on the ground, arms over his head. “Leave this one.”
She dismounted. Kicking him in the side, she pushed him over so he was forced to look up at her. His face was covered with the angry red spots of youth. He was probably only a couple of years younger than her.
“Are there any other thieves?” she asked, jerking her head down the road.
“No. No. Just us in this part.”
“And in other parts?”
He nodded desperately. “Yes, miss. All over.”
She leaned close, resting her sword against his throat. “Would you like a job?”
He could not nod. He could not even swallow. He whispered a tortured “Yes.”
“Go down this road ahead of us. Find every thief, every robber, everyone preying on my people, and give them a message. These roads belong to Lada Dracul now. I declare them safe. And anyone who defies that will die.”
She eased her sword away. The boy scrambled to his feet, bowing. “Yes. Yes, miss. I will.”
She thought for a moment. Words were one thing. Evidence was another. She bent down and cut the ears off the nearest bodies. The first she mangled. The second she found the right place to slice. Nicolae blanched. The sound and sensation was unpleasant, but Lada rolled her eyes at him. “Take these.” She held the ears out to the boy.
He looked as though he would lose his stomach, but he took the ears in trembling hands.
“Tokens of my sincerity. If you run, if you fail to deliver my message, I will know. And I will find you.”
The boy squeaked an assurance that he would not fail, then, stumbling once, ran down the road away from them.
Bogdan returned a few minutes later, wiping his sword clean. “We got them all.”
“Good.” Lada stared at the quickly receding silhouette of the fleeing boy. It was a good message. But it was not quite enough. She had spent years in a land where every road was safe. The Ottomans were free to travel and trade, and their country flourished. She had not forgotten her lessons on the subject.
She had learned something from her tutors there, after all.
“These roads need clearer directions. Hang the bodies from the trees. Write ‘thieves’ on them.” Several of the recent recruits looked worried. Most of them could not read or write. “Nicolae will write it,” she said.
“This all seems excessive.” Nicolae paused, halfway through dragging one of their scouts’ bodies to the side of the road, where another soldier had started on a shallow grave.
Lada shrugged. “They are already dead. They may as well serve a purpose in death, as they did nothing with their lives.”
After a full day on the road and with Tirgoviste within reach on the morrow, they set up camp. Daciana had not yet moved into Stefan’s tent, but Lada had no doubts it would happen soon.
Stefan watched Daciana move around camp with a sort of confused fear tightening his eyes. He was so twitchy and nervous that Lada worried about sending him ahead to scout. Daciana paid him only the barest attentions, occasionally pausing in her work to comment to him, or to straighten his vest, or to remark on the color or length of his stubble, casually brushing her hand against it.
Lada did not understand the strange dance Daciana was performing. It seemed deeply inefficient. But seeing the way Stefan watched the girl, Lada became twitchy herself.
The place between her legs nagged at her at the strangest times, reminding her of how it had felt and could feel again in the future. She cursed Mehmed for introducing her to those sensations. Before, she had not known they existed. Now, she longed for them.
Daciana leaned close to Stefan, whispering something in his ear and then laughing.
Bogdan joined Lada at her fire. He was thick and menacing where Mehmed was lithe. Bogdan was a hammer to Mehmed’s graceful sword. But hammers had good qualities, too. Lada looked at him, narrowing her eyes. “You would do anything for me.” It was not a question.
He looked at her as though she had taken the time to inform him the sky was blue. “Yes.”
“Come with me.” She stood and walked into her tent. Bogdan followed.
It was much more efficient than Daciana’s methods. And if she did not feel the same with Bogdan as with Mehmed, if the spark and the fire and the need were not overwhelming, Bogdan was as he had always been: loyal and serviceable.
Their second day on the road they met with no further thieves. They found evidence of campsites, hastily abandoned. Lada felt a stirring of something like what she imagined maternal pride to be. Her little robber boy was obeying her.
Bogdan rode closer to her than before, and occasionally in the midst of his inelegant protectiveness she caught a hint of newfound tenderness. It made her deeply uncomfortable. She knew Bogdan felt more for her than she did for him. She had always accepted it as natural, good even. He belonged to her, but she did not belong to him. Perhaps she had crossed a line she should not have.
Her discomfort was soon replaced with an inconvenient relief when she felt a gush of warm blood between her legs. She nearly prayed, she was so grateful. But she doubted that God cared one way or the other about the continued emptiness of her womb.
Lada pulled her horse to a stop and dismounted. In her bag she had extra strips of cloth. She peeled off her chain mail and draped it across her saddle.
“What is it?” Bogdan asked, halfway through dismounting.
“No!” She gestured impatiently for him to stay. “I will be back.”
“You should not go alone,” Nicolae said.
Lada glared at all of them. She could feel the blood still flowing. If she did not catch it soon, her trousers would be stained. Daciana, who rode on Stefan’s horse with him, looked at how Lada walked with stiff legs. “Let her go. Lada is more frightening than anything in the forest.”
Lada turned her back and marched toward the trees. “God’s wounds, you are all ridiculous. Rest. Eat. I will be back.”
She moved quickly through the trees, putting as much distance as possible between the massive party of men and her immediately pressing, deeply private needs.
She found a clear stream and squatted next to it. The water was freezing, but at least there was some warmth in the air. While she cleaned herself, she cursed the fact that she had to deal with this at such an important time.
But the blood was a welcome sight. Perhaps Bogdan had been a lucky thing, dislodging whatever had blocked her since being with Mehmed. She took it as confirmation that Daciana’s thoughts were correct. Her body was not made for carrying babies. She hummed to herself as she rinsed out her underclothes and set them on a rock to dry next to her trousers. She took care to place the extra strips of cloth in her new underclothes to absorb the blood. Then, because she was happy and the day was warmer than any had been for a long time, she pulled off her tunic and rinsed it as well.
That was when she heard the sound of furtive footsteps. She froze, ready to curse Bogdan or Nicolae or whoever had disobeyed her. And then she realized the footsteps were coming from the opposite direction where her men were. For a moment the memory of other trees in another place, of another man sneaking up on her, paralyzed Lada. Her breath would not come. The memory of Ivan’s weight on her, his hands …
She snatched her tunic out of the water, looking around desperately for somewhere to hide. The trees were too thin to climb, the stream was open and exposed. And she was alone, because of her stupid woman’s body. She looked down at her arms clutching the dripping tunic against her chest. Her woman’s body. Ivan had seen it as a weakness, as something he had power over.
The footsteps were getting closer.
Ivan was dead. Her body was a weapon. She could kill whoever approached, but … Unbidden, Huma drifted across her mind’s eye. The way she draped herself across furniture. The way she moved. Lada tried to recall everything about it, because Huma had been a weapon just as much as Lada was.
Lada picked up a knife where it lay next to her boots, holding it hidden behind her back. And then she let her tunic fall as three men appeared at the opposite end of the stream. Their tense grips on their weapons relaxed as their jaws dropped in shock.