Bright We Burn Read online

  BOOKS BY KIERSTEN WHITE

  Paranormalcy

  Supernaturally

  Endlessly

  * * *

  Mind Games

  Perfect Lies

  * * *

  The Chaos of Stars

  Illusions of Fate

  * * *

  And I Darken

  Now I Rise

  Bright We Burn

  * * *

  The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Kiersten Brazier

  Cover art copyright © 2018 by Sam Weber

  Map art copyright © 2018 by Isaac Stewart

  Excerpt copyright © 2018 by Kiersten Brazier

  All rights reserved. Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Ebook ISBN 9780553522419

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  To Wendy Loggia, darling sunshine in human form, who saw what these books would be from the very beginning and helped me every step of the way

  Contents

  Cover

  Books by Kiersten White

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Chapter 1: 1454, Wallachia

  Chapter 2: Constantinople

  Chapter 3: Tirgoviste

  Chapter 4: Constantinople

  Chapter 5: Bulgaria

  Chapter 6: Constantinople

  Chapter 7: Tirgoviste

  Chapter 8: Constantinople

  Chapter 9: Tirgoviste

  Chapter 10: Constantinople

  Chapter 11: Tirgoviste

  Chapter 12: Bursa

  Chapter 13: Near Giurgiu

  Chapter 14: Edirne

  Chapter 15: Tirgoviste

  Chapter 16: Constantinople

  Chapter 17: The Danube, Ottoman Territory

  Chapter 18: Southern Border of Wallachia

  Chapter 19: Outside Bucharest

  Chapter 20: Wallachian Countryside

  Chapter 21: Tirgoviste

  Chapter 22: Three Days South of Tirgoviste

  Chapter 23: One Day South of Tirgoviste

  Chapter 24: One Day South of Tirgoviste

  Chapter 25: One Day South of Tirgoviste

  Chapter 26: One Day South of Tirgoviste

  Chapter 27: One Day South of Tirgoviste

  Chapter 28: Outside Tirgoviste

  Chapter 29: Outside Tirgoviste

  Chapter 30: Outside Tirgoviste

  Chapter 31: Poenari Fortress

  Chapter 32: Tirgoviste

  Chapter 33: Carpathian Mountains

  Chapter 34: Tirgoviste

  Chapter 35: Hunedoara

  Chapter 36: Tirgoviste

  Chapter 37: Hunedoara

  Chapter 38: Tirgoviste

  Chapter 39: Hunedoara

  Chapter 40: Snagov Island Monastery

  Chapter 41: Town of Arges

  Chapter 42: Tirgoviste

  Chapter 43: Poenari Fortress

  Chapter 44: Carpathian Mountains

  Chapter 45: Poenari Fortress

  Chapter 46: Poenari Fortress

  Chapter 47: Tirgoviste

  Chapter 48: Snagov Island Monastery

  Chapter 49: Tirgoviste

  Chapter 50: Three Years Later, Outside Amasya

  Epilogue: Snagov Island Monastery, Seventeen Years Later

  Dramatis Personae

  Glossary

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Excerpt from The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein

  1454, Wallachia

  LADA DRACUL HAD CUT through blood and bones to get the castle.

  That did not mean she wanted to spend time in it. It was a relief to escape the capital. She understood the need for a seat of power, but she hated that it was Tirgoviste. She could not sleep in those stone rooms, empty and yet still crowded with the ghosts of all the princes who had come before her.

  With too far to go before reaching Nicolae, Lada planned to camp for the night. Solitude was increasingly precious—and yet another resource she was sorely lacking. But a tiny village tucked away from the frosted road beckoned her. During one of the last summers before she and Radu were traded to the Ottomans, they had traveled this same path with their father. It had been one of the happiest seasons of her life. Though it was winter now, nostalgia and melancholy slowed her until she decided to stay.

  Outside the village, she spent a few frigid minutes changing into clothes more standard than her usual selection of black trousers and tunics. They were noteworthy enough that she risked being recognized. She put on skirts and a blouse—but with mail underneath. Always that. To the untrained eye, there was nothing to mark her as prince.

  She found lodging in a stone cottage. Because there was not enough planting land for boyars to bother with here, the peasants could own small patches of it. Not enough to prosper, but enough to survive. An older woman seated Lada by the fire with bread and stew as soon as coins had exchanged hands. The woman had a daughter, a small thing wearing much-patched and too-large clothes.

  They also had a cat, who, in spite of Lada’s utter indifference to the creature, insisted on rubbing against her leg and purring. The little girl sat almost as close. “Her name is Prince,” the girl said, reaching down to scratch the cat’s ears.

  Lada raised an eyebrow. “That is an odd name for a female cat.”

  The girl grinned, showing all the childhood gaps among her teeth. “But princes can be girls now, too.”

  “Ah, yes.” Lada tried not to smile. “Tell me, what do you think of our new prince?”

  “I have never seen her. But I want to! I think she must be the prettiest girl alive.”

  Lada snorted at the same time as the girl’s mother. The woman sat down in a chair across from Lada. “I have heard she is nothing to look at. A blessing. Perhaps it can keep her out of a marriage.”

  “Oh?” Lada stirred her stew. “You do not think she should get married?”

  The woman leaned forward intently. “You cam
e here by yourself. A woman? Traveling alone? A year ago such a thing would have been impossible. This last harvest we were able to take our crops to Tirgoviste without paying robbers’ fees every league along the road. We made two times again as much money as we ever have. And my sister no longer has to teach her boys to pretend to be stupid to avoid being taken for the sultan’s accursed Janissary troops.”

  Lada nodded as though hesitant to agree. “But the prince killed all those boyars. I hear she is depraved.”

  The woman huffed, waving a hand. “What did the boyars ever do for us? She had her reasons. I heard—” She leaned forward so quickly and with such animation half her stew spilled, unnoticed. “I heard she is giving land to anyone. Can you imagine? No family name, no boyar line. She gives it to those who deserve it. So I hope she never marries. I hope she lives to be a hundred years old, breathing fire and drinking the blood of our enemies.”

  The little girl grabbed the cat, settling it on her lap. “Did you hear the story of the golden goblet?” she asked, eyes bright and shining.

  Lada smiled. “Tell me.”

  And so Lada heard new stories about herself, from her own people. They were exaggerated and stretched, but they were based on things she had actually done. The ways she had improved her country for her people.

  Lada slept well that night.

  * * *

  “Did you know,” Lada said, scanning the parchment in her hand, “that to settle a dispute between two women who were fighting over an infant, I cut the infant in half and gave them both a piece?”

  “That was very pragmatic of you.” Nicolae had ridden out to the road to meet her. Now they were side by side, their horses meandering through the ice-glazed trees. This winter was preferable to last, though, oddly, she found herself missing the camaraderie of camping as a fugitive alongside her men. Now they were scattered. All doing important work for Wallachia, but any chance she had to reunite with them, she took. She had been looking forward to this time with Nicolae.

  He guided them toward the estate that had formerly belonged to her advisor, Toma Basarab. Before Lada’s rule, Toma had been alive and well, and these roads had been nearly impassable without an armed guard for protection. Now, Toma was dead and the roads were safe. Both of those—death of boyars and safety for everyone else—were patterns of Lada’s rule so far.

  The frigid air stung her nostrils in a way she found bracing and pleasant. The sun shone clear, but it was no match for the blanket of ice that Wallachia slept under. Perhaps that also contributed to the safety of the roads. No one wanted to be out in this.

  Lada preferred it to the castle with a fierceness that was as sharp and pointed as the icicles she passed beneath.

  She waved the parchment with the story of her unusual methods of solving family disputes. “The most offensive part,” she said, “is that the story is unoriginal. The Transylvanians got that one from the Bible. The least they could do is make up new stories about me, rather than stealing from Solomon.” She should print the stories the woman and her daughter had told last night. Spread those rumors instead.

  Nicolae gestured to the bundle of reports he had given her. “Did you see the new woodcut? Very skilled artist. It is the next page.”

  She was sorting through as best she could while riding, dropping each page to the road as she finished. None had been anything but slander. Nothing important. Nothing true. Her thick gloves were not suited to manipulating thin sheets, but she shuffled until she found the illustration. “I am dining on human flesh amid a forest of impaled bodies.”

  “You are! Meals in Tirgoviste have changed since you sent me out here.”

  Lada adjusted her red satin hat, a jeweled star in the middle representing the falling star that had accompanied her ascension to the throne. “He got my hair wrong.”

  Nicolae reached out and tugged one of her long, curling locks. “It is difficult to capture such majesty with simple tools.”

  “I have missed you, Nicolae.” Her tone was acidic but her sentiment sincere. She needed him where he was, but she missed him at her side.

  He gestured to the star in the center of her hat, beaming. “Of course you have. I dare say I am one of the brightest—nay, the very brightest—point of your existence. How have you scrambled in the dark these long six months without me?”

  “Peacefully, now that you mention it. Such blessed quiet.”

  “Well, Bogdan’s strength never has been conversation.” Nicolae’s smile twisted, puckering his long scar. “But you do not keep him around for talking.”

  Lada gritted her teeth. “I can kill you. Very quickly. Or very, very slowly.”

  “As long as the Saxons make a woodcut of my demise, I will accept it with grace.” He stroked his chin. “Please ask them to get my face right. A face such as this should never be poorly represented.”

  Nicolae was not wrong about Bogdan, though. Bogdan, her childhood companion and now most stalwart soldier and supporter, did not speak often. But lately even that had been too much. A break from him had been one of her motivations in making this trip alone. She was meeting him in Arges, but she had deliberately given him a task that took him from her before then.

  Bogdan was like sleep. Necessary, sometimes enjoyable. She needed him. And when he was unobtainable, she missed him. But she liked that she could take him for granted most of the time.

  Mehmed would never have tolerated such treatment. She scowled, pushing him from her mind. Mehmed deserved no place among her thoughts. He was a usurper there, just as he was everywhere.

  They passed a frozen pond, patterns of frost telling a story she could not read. The trees opened up ahead to rolling farmland softened with snow. “Why did Stefan not stay after delivering these letters? He knew I was due here soon.”

  “He wanted to get back to Daciana and the children. And he was probably worried if he saw you before that, you would send him away again and he would not get a chance to stop in Tirgoviste.”

  Lada grunted. That was true. She wanted him in Bulgaria, or maybe Serbia. Both were active vassal states of the Ottoman Empire, and likely staging areas for any attacks. She did not expect an attack. But she would be prepared, and for that, she needed Stefan. He had spent the last couple of months scouting in Transylvania and Hungary to get a feel for their political climates, whether there were any active threats toward Lada’s rule. She wanted to speak with him in person. Daciana should not take priority over that. Nothing should.

  Daciana ran the day-to-day business at the castle, all the details and mundanity that Lada could not begin to care about. Lada was grateful for her work. It had been a stroke of luck, finding her during their campaigning last year. But there was nothing at the castle that required Stefan’s attention. Daciana was safe and busy. He should know better than to waste all their time.

  Lada scanned the neatly ordered reports impatiently. Stefan had written his own observations and coupled them with the woodcut printings. In Hungary, Matthias was king. He did not go by Hunyadi, as his father did, but had styled himself Matthias Corvinus. Lada was not surprised. Matthias’s relationship with his soldier father had been fraught. Of course he would not honor the man who had cut the path to the crown for him. And Lada had helped, in the end. She had betrayed Hunyadi’s legacy and committed murder for Matthias.

  And then she had had to do everything by herself anyway, because the aid of men was never what they promised. It always came with hooks, invisible barbs to tug her back when she got close to her goals.

  Matthias was not having an easy time of being king, at least. According to Stefan’s report, he spent all his time and money flattering nobles and trying to buy back his crown from Poland. The Polish king had taken it for safekeeping years before when the previous king had been killed in battle. It was an important symbol, and Matthias was desperate for the legitimacy it would give his questionable claim to the thron
e.

  Lada skimmed that information. Matthias was a fool if he thought a piece of metal would give him what he wanted, and she did not particularly care about any of his machinations as long as they were directed toward other countries. It also served the benefit of keeping him distracted. As far as Stefan could tell, he had no designs on Lada despite her refusal to defer to his authority.

  The woodcut printings demonstrated Transylvania’s continued opposition to her rule, but aside from the artistic flair, they had no organized opposition. There did not seem to be any attempt to destabilize her militarily. Stefan mentioned the downside to losing them as allies—they had long served as a buffer between Wallachia and Hungary—but there was nothing to be done. She had, after all, spent much of the previous year burning their cities. But if they had not wanted her to do that, they should have allied with her sooner.

  All things considered, it was as good of news as she could have hoped for. But she had questions for Stefan. And concerns, now. Daciana was hers. Stefan was hers. She did not like them being each other’s before that.

  She tucked the papers into her saddlebag. “And how have you managed?”

  “I sleep well at night, and my appetite remains consistent. Some days I feel a touch of melancholy, but I combat it through long walks and deep barrels of wine.” He grinned at Lada’s exasperated look. “Oh, were you not asking about me, personally? I was born to be a lord. This much authority suits me nicely. My crops flourished, the fields are ready for the thaw, and the people on my land are happy. Revenues should be robust this year. Good news for the royal treasury, which is—”