Bright We Burn by Kiersten White

Author:Kiersten White [White, Kiersten]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Young Adult
ISBN: 9780552573764
Google: BA70swEACAAJ
Amazon: 0552573760
Goodreads: 36356595
Publisher: Corgi Childrens
Published: 2018-07-04T23:00:00+00:00

25

One Day South of Tirgoviste

LADA HAD THIRTY minutes to topple an empire.

She doubted she would need that long. She walked confidently through the dark camp along the same path she had taken the night before. She still wore the uniform of a Janissary. Perhaps that was fitting. She would use everything the Ottomans had given her, right down to their own clothes, to destroy them.

Only outside Mehmed’s tent did she pause. The weight of history, everything they had been and done together, slowed her steps. She felt it, accepted it, let it settle.

Could she do what she had set out to? It was one thing to plan murder and another to follow through. And tonight she would not act out of rage or instinct. This had to be a choice.

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.

Her heartbeat even, her breathing calm, Lada used the cut she had made the night before and entered Mehmed’s tent for the last time.

“Hello, Lada,” her brother said.

Lada scanned the tent quickly, her heartbeat finally picking up.

“He is not here,” Radu said, leaning against Mehmed’s desk. “But I can oversee the signing of the new treaty.” He spoke in Turkish.

Lada’s lip curled in distaste around the language she, too, had spoken for years of her life. “I am not here to sign a treaty.”

Radu smiled. Truly looking at him for the first time, Lada saw in that smile how much her brother had aged since they had been apart. He was taller. Still lean, but with a hollowness to his face that threw his jawline and cheekbones into sharper relief. The too-large eyes were still just as striking. He was beautiful. And he was a stranger. The boy she had known, the boy she had loved and protected, was gone.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“Too many things.” Radu sat on one of the cushions, gesturing for Lada to join him.

She remained standing. “I told him he should not have sent you to Constantinople. I cannot believe he put you in harm’s way.”

“You would have done the same.”

“I would not have! You always needed protection, and I protected you.”

Radu tilted his head, a puzzled look on his face. She was reminded again how much he looked like their mother. And, with the weary sadness pulling at his mouth, she saw how life and its cruelty would break him. She had seen a glimpse into his future when she visited their own ruined mother.

“I think,” he said, “you and I remember our childhood much differently. You protected me from Mircea, but only because you liked him even less than you liked me.”

Lada snorted. “That is certainly true. But what about in Edirne?”

“I recall you refusing to do your studies even when I was beaten for your insolence.

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