"My father is weak. Wallachia deserves better."
"Perhaps you deserve better than Wallachia."
"No." Lada felt the fire rekindling in her chest, burning away her fear and exhaustion. She had been away from her land too long. Sometimes she wondered if she remembered it rightly. But here, now, she knew she could never truly leave it behind. It pulsed in her veins, beating through her. "I love Wallachia. It belongs to me, and I belong to it. It is my country, and it should always be mind, and I hate any king or sultan or god or prophet that proclaims anyone else has any right to it."

Lada spoke with a quiet, clear voice, and the room hushed in surprise. No one expected a girl to speak. She was probably not allowed to. Radu knew Lada would not care either way. "On our wedding night," she said, "I will cut out your tongue and swallow it. Then both tongues that spoke our marriage vows will belong to me, and I will be wed only to myself. You will most likely choke to death on your own blood, which will be unfortunate, but I will be both husband and wife and therefore not a widow to be pitied."

"Ladislav gave the wrong answer." The tutor lifted his arm, fingers heavy with thick rings, and backhanded Radu sharply across his face. Radu`s head snapped to the side and he fell out of his chair with a cry of shock and pain.
Lada would kill him. She would cut this man`s hand from his body for striking her brother; she would—
She composed herself before the tutor looked at her, his chest heaving and his eyes bright. Waiting for her reaction. If she killed him, they would kill her, and no one would be here to protect stupid, fragile Radu. Her stupid, fragile Radu. And if she got angry, the tutor would know — they would all know — how to control her. The same way they had known to control her father. The same way the Janissaries had known to hurt her by taking Bogdan away.
She raised her eyebrows impassively.
"What are the five pillars of Islam?" he asked as Radu got back into his chair, tears in his eyes and a shocked expression on his face.
Lada smiled and shook her head.
The tutor hit Radu again.
Radu stayed on the ground, gasping out the answer, his words garbled by a split and swiftly swelled lip, but Lada did not look away from the tutor`s face. She kept a pleasant smile on her own, kept her hands loosely folded in her lap, kept control. Control was power. No one would make her lose it. And eventually the tutor would realize that she would let him hit Radu over, and over, and over.
And only then would Radu be safe.

She felt Radu squeezing her hand, heard him gasping for breath through sobs. She saw the anguish written across their father`s face. Whatever underhanded dealings he had anticipated with this new treaty, he could no longer act. He had made the critical error of loving his children — or Lada, at least — enough that they could be used against him.
Love and life. Things that could be given or taken away in a heartbeat, all in the pursuit of power. She could not avoid her own spark of life. Love, however...
Lada let go of Radu`s hand.
She took a step away from him and watched as the head gardener finished his work.

Late one afternoon, near the end of their journey, their father reached up to an evergreen tree that was growing sideways off a boulder. He broke off a sprig, smelled it, then passed it to Lada with a smile. It was a smile that made her feel as full and dizzy as the mountain air did. A peaceful smile. She had never seen such a smile on her father`s face, and being the recipient of it made her heart beat with a frenzied happiness.
"We are that tree," he said, then rode ahead.
Lada pulled on the reins to make her horse, a docile and dull-brown creature, pause. She studied the tree squeezing life out of stone. It was twisted and small but green, growing sideways in defiance of gravity. It lived where nothing had any business thriving.
Lada did not know whether her father meant the two of them, or whether he meant all of Wallachia. In her mind, the two had become indistinguishable. We are that tree, she thought, holding the richly scented sprig to her nose. We defy death, to grow.

Radu wiped his face on his sleeve, leaving behind a mess of blood and dirt. He looked at Lada, standing in the middle of a shaft of light that filtered through a gap in the thick branches. For once in his life, he was grateful for her vicious temper, for her strange instinctive knowledge of the best way to hurt someone with the least amount of work. He was so tired and so scared, and she had saved him. "Thank you." He stumbled toward her with arms outstretched. When he was hurting, his nurse folded him into herself, sealing him away from the world. He wanted — needed — that now.
Lada hit him in the stomach. He doubled over in pain, sinking to his knees. She knelt next to him, grasping him by the ears. "Do not thank me. All I did was teach them to fear me. How does that help you? Next time you hit first, you hit harder, you make certain that your name means fear and pain. I will not be here to save you again."