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The courtyard is loud with the sound of boys becoming dangerous. Most of them are ten, eleven, twelve - the Sultan's son among them, moving through the forms with the slightly self-conscious competence of a boy who knows he is being watched and has learned to perform well under that condition.
The sword-master calls and corrects.
The morning is bright and the stone is white and the sound of wood on wood fills the air with a rhythm that is almost musical.
Ottoman Empire is not watching the Sultan's son.
He is watching the Wallachian child.
He is eight years old, perhaps nine. He checks the documents again, and they confirms that he is eight of age, but there is something in the set of that small face that makes him want to check again just to be sure. Children of eight are still mostly body, more appetite than intention, in the process of discovering that the world extends beyond the radius of their own wants. They look outward with bright, unfocused attention.
This child... This child does not look like that.
Ottoman Empire watches him stand at the edge of the training yard, slightly apart from the others;0 not excluded, not shy, simply apart, and feels something shift in his chest that he doesn't immediately have a name for. It's not political instinct nor the ordinary wariness he carries toward all hostages, which is professional and mild and mostly administrative.
It's something else, something that arrives before thought, in the part of him that is older than strategy.
The sword-master gestures the child forward.
He goes.
He is small - of course he is small, he is eight years old, what does he expect an eight year old to look like? - and the practice sword is slightly too large for him, and the first thing Ottoman Empire expects to feel watching him pick it up is the ordinary nothing of watching a child do something children do.
He has watched thousands of boys train like this, watched them become soldiers, then som of them generals, the cutting edge of his will.
The child lifts the sword.
Something shape comes instead, located in his sternum like a hand pressing inward. He watches the child move through the basic form and there is nothing technically remarkable about it, not yet, the form is clumsy and the grip is wrong and the sword-master will correct both.
But there is something in the eyes. Dark, long-lashed eyes that belong to the face of a child and yet are not distracted like a child's would be.
The eyes move across the courtyard with the slow, patient thoroughness of something taking inventory. The gate in the south wall. The guard at the gate. The distance between the arcade and the outer wall. The sword-master's position relative to the Sultan's son relative to the exit. All of it catalogued, quietly and continuously.
Ottoman Empire has lives long enough to know what he is seeing. He is not sure he if is supposed to be able to see it in a child of eight who arrived three months ago in a travelling party from Wallachia and stepped onto Ottoman soil with the expression of resolute determination.
Ah, but wait. Captive is not the word the court uses.
The court uses guest.
He stands in the shadow of the arcade and watches the child's eyes move to the gate again, quiet and unhurried and absolutely certain.
The unnamed thing in his chest presses harder.
He turns away from the courtyard.
The Sultan receives him in the tiled room that overlooks the gardens. It's afternoon, the correspondence has been reviewed and set aside, the tea is poured.
"The Wallachian child," he begins after removing his mask.
The Sultan looks up. His expression softens, the corner of his mouth moves in the direction of amusement, like when a trusted advisor says something that reveals an unexpected and endearing blind spot.
"Prince Vlad."
"He's very... Observant."
"Children watch things, it's what children do," the Sultan reaches for his tea with unhurried movement, "He is curious. He is in a new place. Of course he looks around."
"Indeed but-"
"He is a child," the other says it kindly, which is almost worse than if he said it with impatience, - the kindness means he finds no argument worth the respect of a serious tone, "He is a child of eight who has been taken from his home and brought to a foreign court and told to train with boys he doesn't know in a language he is still learning. He's just..." he pauses, considers, "Adapting."
Ottoman Empire doesn't answer. He looks at the garden, at their immaculate controlled growth, the redirected water, the wildness made to behave.
He cannot explain a feeling to the Sultan, all he would hear is an empire of many centuries talking itself into anxiety over a child, and the he will be kind and patient about it, which is the worst possible response.
"His father," Ottoman Empire tries, "If the father's loyalty shifts-"
"The father's loyalty is secured precisely by the boy's presence here. That is the function of the arrangement," the Sultan sets down his tea, "The child is surety and surety holds. And in the meantime he eats at my table and trains with my son and receives an education that Wallachia could not give him. He is not mistreated. He is not unhappy."
The warmth in his voice is genuine. He is convinced of what he is saying.
This is not a matter of happiness or unhappiness though. What he saw is a child who has moved past unhappy into something that does not have a child's face at all, something that has found a room in the back of itself and locked the door and begun, quietly and without urgency, the work of filling that room with everything it needs for a future it has decided, without consulting anyone, to claim.
"Of course."
He cannot say this, in the end.
He makes his bow and takes his leave, and the Sultan is already reaching for his correspondence again, the matter closed.
He passes through the courtyard on the way back.
Training is over. The boys are dispersing in the loose loud way of boys released from discipline. The Sultan's son is laughing at something, head thrown back, and around him the others orbit attentive and easy and not entirely unconscious of the advantage of proximity.
Vlad Dracula is not in that orbit.
He stands at the far edge of the courtyard with the practice sword hanging at his side, not moving, looking at the south gate. He is a child and he has paint on his fingers from the morning's lesson and his hair is slightly too long and he is standing in an Ottoman courtyard in the afternoon sun looking at a gate with the absolute, unhurried, devastating patience of someone who is going to leave.
Not today, of course.
Not for years.
But the decision is not in the future. The decision is already made.
Ottoman Empire stands in the middle of the courtyard. He does not try to name the feeling anymore, that something that cannot yet be proved, that will not be believed. He has carried things like this before. He is an empire. He is used to being the only one in the room who reads the map the right way, used to being right too late for it to matter.
"Vlad, let's go."
Vlad turns, looks at him for along moment, then nods and follows him inside.