Their company halted a moment. Val heard Mehmet’s breath leave his lungs in a short, sharp gust beside him.
He held his own breath against the stench. The stink of putrid corpses rotting in the sun, bloating, and bursting, and spilling. Ravens dove and wheeled and cawed, feasting, a black cloud of them hovering above the grisly spikes.
Val’s stomach tightened, but he didn’t look away. “Vlad the Impaler,” he murmured.
Mehmet growled, and spurred his horse. “Keep going.” He smelled like sweat, and fear, though. And the horses didn’t like the gory spectacle any better than the humans.
Val’s mare balked, and he had to stroke her neck and whisper endearments until she calmed enough to heel forward.
Mehmet wrestled with his stallion, spurring him again and again, sawing at the reins when the beast tried to rear.
The army followed along as softly and silently as any army had ever moved. Awed. Frightened. They’d been to war, and they’d seen unspeakable things – but no one living had ever seen a thing like this.
Val guessed the bodies had been hanging about a week, faces blackened, great chunks of flesh eaten away by the birds. Still, there were flies, heavy droning clouds of them. And the heat mirages shimmered up from the road, baking skin to leather, worsening the stink.
But as they rode, the corpses became fresher. Still mostly intact. One even had its eyes.
And, here, it was easier to tell, from clothes and faces, that these were Ottoman dead. Prisoners of war.
Mehmet pulled to a stop, suddenly, gasping, and Val followed his gaze.
Timothée the mage. Mouth open in a silent scream, blood still wet on his lips. A raven landed on his graying head and reached down to pluck out a beady eye with one quick peck.
Val searched the other faces. He recognized envoys and viziers sent to treat with Vlad. Generals, and janissary captains. Everyone who’d gone missing, everyone presumed dead, they were all here.
And they were still a mile from the city walls, and the impaled stretched on and on, unending.
Val’s breath rattled in lungs gone empty and reverent as a cathedral. He waited for the fear, for the revulsion – but it wouldn’t come.
And then…
Slowly, gaze haunted, Mehmet turned his horse around.
Val started in his saddle. “What are you doing?”
Mehmet stared off down the road, back the way they’d come, past the ravaged bodies of his own men. A heartbeat passed, and then another. Very quietly, the sultan said, “Retreating.”
Val looked toward Tîrgoviste.
Retreating.
Home.
Retreating.
He smiled. It took him a long moment, his face aching, to realize that’s what he was doing. Then he wheeled his mare and followed.
The order went down the line: turn back, fall in, we’re leaving. Soldiers complied with relieved sighs.
Retreating.
The most beautiful word he’d ever heard.
