“You mean a good impression?”

“Yes, exactly.”

Oana surveyed her with a critical eye, then threw her hands up in surrender. “This is the best we can hope for, at least as far as your looks. As far as everything else, tonight, pretend you are Radu.”

A small pang hit just above Lada’s heart. Did Oana wish that it were Radu and not Lada she had been reunited with? Everyone always loved Radu best. And now Radu and Mehmed had each other, and all Lada had was this woman who wielded a comb as a weapon.

Well. Lada could be Radu for one night. She grimaced, then smiled broadly and opened her large eyes as wide as she could. It was her best imitation of him.

Oana recoiled. “That is terrifying, girl. I was wrong. Be yourself.”

Lada let her hooded eyelids drop low. She had never been able to be anyone else.

The castle at Hunedoara was small compared with anything in Edirne, but bigger than Tirgoviste. A moat surrounded it, with a hill on the back side of the castle that dropped off steeply. Lada liked looking out over the wall at the winter landscape stretching into the hazy distance. She pretended she could see Wallachia from there.

But tonight there was no time for that. She left her tiny room and traversed the back tower’s serpentine stairs. For a few terrifying moments she thought the dress would actually be the death of her, but she managed to make it to the bottom. Stefan met her there. He was the only one of her men who spoke Hungarian—though no one else knew it. He would gather information as he always did, snatching pieces and organizing them into a whole for her.

They walked across the open courtyard in the center of the castle, then through a massive wooden door into the throne room. The floor was brightly tiled—though no tile was impressive to Lada here. After Edirne, everything except churches seemed drab. The walls of this castle were whitewashed and hung with elaborate tapestries and gilded, framed paintings of mournful-looking Hungarian royalty.

Lada had gotten used to large, lovely windows during her time in Edirne. She had forgotten that castles elsewhere were not for ornamentation, but rather for defense. To compensate, chandeliers dripped with light, and two fireplaces roared cheerily.

If her room had been freezing, the throne room was stifling. Lada had always thought it weakness when women fainted, but now she understood. It was not their bodies—it was their clothes.

She was not the only thing on the schedule for the evening. After interminable droning speeches in Hungarian, it was finally her turn. Kneeling in front of the king was a relief, if only to get off her feet. As she knelt, there were some tittering laughs and shocked whispers. The man who went before her had knelt. What was she expected to do instead? To her horror, she realized there was nothing she could do. In her dress, she could not get up again on her own. Her face burning, she looked up at the king.

Ladislas Posthumous, the painfully young replacement for the previous monarch, trembled. At first Lada had thought him cold or frightened, but the trembling continued unabated. He was stricken with some sort of palsy, his illness showing in his every movement. Lada did not have to be ruthless to see that this was a king who would not last.

Younger than her, physically weaker than her, and still he was more important than her. So she bowed her head and murmured the words. She vowed to protect the Transylvanian frontier—no one objected that she had come directly from terrorizing it—and to keep the borders safe from the Ottoman threat. Finally, she swore her fealty to him and the crown of Hungary.

The crown that was nowhere to be seen. Certainly not on Ladislas’s trembling head.

When Lada had finished, she stayed where she was, utterly humiliated. She could not get up, and she could not ask for help. A hand at her elbow rescued her. Stefan smiled wanly at her as he steadily guided her back to her feet. Hoping her expression hid her relief, she nodded at him as gracefully as she could manage. They walked back to their position at the rear of the room.

After the official business ended, everyone remained. Apparently there was always an informal reception afterward. Lada leaned against a wall for support. Every part of her hurt from being held in an unfamiliar position by her dress. No one spoke to her. She knew she should try to strike up conversations, try to gain allies, but she could not smile. She was gritting her teeth too hard to manage it. She was as likely to kill anyone who talked to her as she was to make a friend.

No. She was far more likely to kill someone than to make a friend.

Only when she could not place her source of vague disappointment did she come to a horrible realization. She had thought if she looked like a noblewoman, men would talk to her. Of course she would have rejected their flirtations, but she had been preparing herself to do that.

She had not prepared herself to remain utterly invisible while wearing a dress and with her hair combed. Or maybe she was so unbelievable in a dress, or had humiliated herself so completely by kneeling, that no one would ever believe she belonged among nobility.

Lada was taken back to Mehmed’s wedding. Standing alone, always alone, without a place and without worth. She drew a ragged breath. This was not the same. She was not that person. She had more than just Mehmed and Radu now.

But she did not have them anymore. Tonight, she felt the full weight of that loss. The loss of a brother who would have stood at her side and fought this battle of manners and politics for her. The loss of a man who would have laughed at her dress and her hair but also been desperate to be alone so he could undo it all for her.

Perhaps she had never stopped being that girl lost in a place where she could never have power.

It took Lada several minutes to realize Stefan had returned from his rounds. “What did you find?” she asked, relieved and grateful for a familiar face. Even one as anonymous and blank as Stefan’s.

“The crown,” he said, nodding toward where Ladislas spoke with several priests and a tall, confident-looking older man. The rest of the royalty revolved around two men and a regal woman. The woman was glorious, Lada had to admit. She truly wore her elaborate clothes as armor, not something to wilt under like Lada did. The way she commanded the attention of everyone around her, shooting frequent sharp glances at the king, reminded Lada of Huma, Mehmed’s mother. Huma had been so sick when Lada left, surely she was dead by now. The thought of Huma’s death made Lada oddly mournful. The woman had been a threat, and a murderer, too. But she had been so good at everything she did.