Toma cleared his throat, giving her a minute shake of his head and a small, disappointed frown. “This is all very bleak talk for the dinner table. We should speak of something else. How will you disperse your men?”
“You mean to clear the roads?” She had not had a chance to finalize her plans for making the roads safe for travel and commerce. Why was Toma pushing her to talk about those ideas now? “I had thought we would divide it by area, and—”
Toma held up a hand to cut her off. “No. You misunderstand. As prince, you are not allowed to have a standing military force. It is part of our treaties with Hungary and the Turks both. Matthias Corvinas specifically mentioned it in his most recent letter.” He smiled patronizingly. “I know this is all very new, and you were so young when you left us. Of course you did not know, but your men far outnumber a traditional guard. You may keep …” He paused as though thinking, stroking his beard. “Oh, twenty? That should more than meet your needs. The rest we will divide among our estates. Since I already have a relationship with them, I volunteer to house the bulk of your forces.”
Lada had more than three hundred men now. Good men. Men who had given up everything to follow her. “They are my men,” she snapped. “I have made no promises to Hungary or to the Ottomans, but I have made promises to my men.”
A dark-haired, rat-faced boyar near the middle of the table spoke up. “Promises you were never entitled to make. Princes,” he said with a sneer that made it clear what he thought of a woman holding the title, “cannot defend themselves. It is not done. A prince is the servant of the people. It is the duty of the boyars to hold soldiers to be called upon in times of need. If we decide the need is urgent, we will organize our men.”
Toma nodded, reaching out to pat Lada’s hand. “You have been gone too long. A prince is a vassal, a figurehead. Any attempt to build an army or even so much as a tower to defend yourself is seen as an act of aggression. You have nothing to fear now, though. The boyars are your support.”
“So your strength is my strength,” Lada said, eyes half closing as she let the sea of faces in front of her blur. “That is comforting.”
Some of the men and women laughed. Many went back to their conversations. None of this had gone as she thought it would. She had expected opposition, challenges, arguments. Instead, they all seemed perfectly willing to accept her as their prince.
And then she realized why. They were happy to have her because they were happy with weakness. The more pliable the prince, the more power they had. And who could be more pliable than a simple girl, playing at the throne? No wonder Toma had supported her. He could not have designed a better avenue to power for himself than a female prince. If Lada died, the Danesti line would put their own back on the throne. And until then, they would do whatever they saw fit.
If she had Radu, if she had a way to manipulate them, then maybe she could manage all this. But they worked with weapons she had no training in. Despair washed over her.
Toma leaned forward conspiratorially. “You did very well. I will stay on as your advisor. No one expects you to understand everything.”
All the change she saw sweeping the country in the shadow of her wings had been an illusion. These people ran everything, and nothing had changed for them.
“Which one will she marry?” a woman a few seats down asked.
The man sitting next to her snorted into his cup of wine. “Aron or Andrei, whichever one, what a pity for them. First they lose their father, and then they have to marry the ugliest murderess in existence.”
“Still, it will be good to get the Draculesti line under control.”
Lada stood. Her chair scraped back loudly. “Lada,” someone said from the door nearest her. She turned to see Bogdan. Something was wrong. She could see it in his pale face and downturned mouth. She hurried to him.
“What is it?”
“Come with me.”
No one called after her. She followed Bogdan down the hall and into the kitchen, where a large wooden table had been cleared of food. It was now laden with a body.
Petru’s body.
Lada stumbled forward. His eyes were closed, his face still. His shirt had been pulled up to reveal a ragged hole of a wound that was no longer bleeding, because his heart no longer pumped. Bogdan turned him gently on his side. The origin of the wound was his back. Someone had stabbed him from behind.
“How did this happen?” Lada touched Petru’s cheek; it was still warm. He had been with her since Amasya. She had watched him grow up, into himself, into a man. One of her men. One of her best.
“We found him behind the stables,” Stefan said.
“Were there any witnesses?”
Bogdan’s voice was grim. “Two Danesti family guards who were arguing with him earlier said they saw and heard nothing. They suggested perhaps he fell on his own sword. Backward.”
Lada clenched her jaw. She stared at the body on the table until her vision blurred. Petru was hers. He represented her. And he had been stabbed in the back by men who represented the Danesti boyars. “Kill the guards. All of them, not just those two. Then bring my first men—those who have been with us since before we were free—into the dining hall.”
Lada turned around. She walked back toward the room holding the Danesti boyars. Dining with boyars. Dealing with Hungary. Pleading with the Ottomans for aid. Had she become her father this quickly?
She slammed through the door, the noise drawing the attention of everyone who had not noticed her absence. “Someone’s guards killed one of my men. I want to know who allowed it.”
“Why?” Toma asked.
“Because an attack on my men is an attack on me, and I punish treason with death.”
Toma grimaced a smile at the table, then leaned close. “I am certain it was a misunderstanding. Besides, you cannot ask for a noble life in exchange for a soldier’s.”
“I can do anything I want,” Lada said.
Toma’s expression became sharp. “Sit down,” he commanded. “You are embarrassing me. We will talk about this later.”
Lada did not sit. “How many princes have you served under?”
Toma narrowed his eyes even more. “I would have to count.”
She leaned forward against the table, gesturing toward everyone. “I wish to know how many princes you have all served under.”
“Four,” the rat-faced boyar said with a shrug of his shoulders.
Many nodded. “Eight,” another said. “Nine!” someone else countered.
A wizened old man near the back shouted out, “I have you all beat. Twenty-one princes have I seen in my lifetime!”
Everyone laughed. Lada laughed loudest and sharpest. She kept laughing long after everyone else stopped, her laugh ringing alone through the room. She laughed until everyone stared at her, confused and pitying.
She stopped abruptly, the room echoing with the silence left in the wake of her laughter. “Princes come and go, but you all remain.”
Toma nodded. “We are the constants. Wallachia depends on us.”
“Yes, I have seen Wallachia. I have seen what your constant care has created.” Lada thought of the fields empty of crops. The roads empty of commerce. The hollow eyes and the hollow stomachs. The boys missing from the fields, their corpses against the walls of Constantinople now. The lands eaten away by Transylvania and Hungary.
So many things missing, so many things lost. And always, ever, the boyars remained exactly as they were.
She, too, had been lost. Sold to another land, for what? For her father to be betrayed and murdered by the men and women in front of her now, eating her food. Patting her hand. Calculating how long this prince would best serve their needs until they found another.
The Danesti boyars were a poison that would be her eventual end. In the meantime, they would try to marry her into their families, and would siphon the life from her Wallachia. She had promised the people a better country. A stronger country. And now, finally, she understood how to create it. There were no compromises, no gentle pathways. She could not keep power the way anyone else had before her, because she was like no one else before her.
“Your mistake is in assuming that because I have been far away, I do not understand how things work.” She reached over and plucked the knife from beside Toma’s plate. “I have been far away. And because of that, I understand perfectly how things work. I have learned at the feet of our enemies. I have seen that sometimes the only way forward is to destroy everything that came before. I have learned that if what you are doing is not working, you try something else.”