Edirne (Adrianople), Early August 1436
The heat had turned the city to brass. It pressed on the stones, on the tiled roofs, on the men who moved through the palace courts with that particular late-summer reluctance, as if every step sent a wave of warm dust through the veins. Halil sat alone in the side chamber off the inner portico, not yet armoured in ceremony. He preferred these few minutes of solitude before the Divan, the last breaths of honesty a man was allowed before he put on titles like armor.
The parchment rested on his knee, seal broken, creases worn from too many readings. The Karaman truce. Ibrahim's cramped flourish, the secretary's neat hand, the marks of mountain beys who hadn't bowed even as their fields burned, recorded triumphs. In truth, merely a ceasefire between two exhausted animals clawed half-blind.
His fingertip rested on a blot of run ink. Ankara reclaimed. Amasya lost. Karaman driven to the ridges but unbroken. Blood spilled for the privilege of starting again.
He could picture the dust well enough: staggering horses, corpses humming with flies, Murad's old timariots lying stiff and heat-gnawed. He had seen too many fields like it in other years. That "win" bought a single breath, months at most.
They had stopped the Karaman advance, taken back Ankara, and bought nothing sturdier than a line on a map.
Halil folded the parchment along its old seam, as if honoring the crease might restore some scrap of order. He set it aside and murmured, not quite a prayer, not quite a curse:
"No more wars. Not yet."
The words had the taste of wishful thinking. The taste of lies a man told himself to keep breathing. A footstep at the threshold drew his attention: a young servant stood there, eyes lowered, hands folded.
"Pasha. The Sultan is in the audience hall. Ali Beg and Karaca Bey have taken their places."
Halil slipped the truce parchment into his sleeve. "Tell the Sultan I come."
The servant bowed and withdrew. Halil drew a breath, rolled his shoulders, and rose. His back caught, a quiet reminder of years spent holding this empire together by the seams. Too old for a child's crises; never old enough to be spared them.
He stepped into the corridor's white glare and walked toward the Divan.
The audience hall shimmered with heat. The great carpets had been beaten that morning; their dust still hung faintly in the air, catching the sunlight in thin, lazy streaks. On the dais, the boy Sultan sat stiffly, his feet not quite touching the floor, the embroidered cushion swallowing half his small frame. Ali's face was composed in what he must have believed was gravity. To Halil, it looked like a child trying on his father's boots.
Around him, the notables waited on low stools: Ali Beg, lean, hard-eyed, his brutal efficiency in the Karaman war now the stuff of barracks rumor; Karaca Bey, heavy-shouldered and scarred, wearing the weary pragmatism Halil valued; the Janissary agha; a qadi with a thin, worried mouth; scribes with reeds poised.
Halil bowed, slow and deliberate, his body reminding him to move with care rather than haste. When he met the Sultan's eyes, he saw the flicker of uncertainty and offered the boy what he could: steadiness.
"Your Majesty," Halil said. "Shall we begin?"
Ali straightened. Someone, Halil suspected the tutor with the overlong beard, had coached him. He spoke a blessing, the words memorized, a little too evenly spaced. Halil listened with the soft inner smile of someone who had guided a boy through this ritual before. Boys grew into sultans. If they lived long enough.
When Ali finished, Halil gently turned ceremony into business.
"Ali Beg," he said, "tell His Majesty what we bought in Karaman."
Ali Beg's shoulders stiffened. He preferred to speak of triumphs, not stalemates. But he delivered the truth, stripped of decoration:
"We held them, Your Majesty," Ali Beg said, voice angled toward the dais. "Ibrahim fell back behind his old ridges. We took Ankara back and broke his army. After that, he asked for terms, and we made truce in your name."
The boy shifted forward on the cushion. "And Konya?" he asked. "Did they run from there too?"
There was a thin pause. Everyone in the hall knew the answer; this was its polished version.
Ali Beg bowed his head a little lower. "No, Majesty. We did not go to Konya's walls. To take it now would have cost you too many men. Ibrahim keeps his city, but he has sworn your peace and keeps his riders behind their hills."
Ali's mouth pinched; for a moment he looked exactly his age, a boy annoyed that the city was still someone else's and all he had was a scrap of ink.
Halil stepped in before the feeling could harden.
"His Majesty has heard where the lines stand," he said mildly. "Let him hear how they stood. Ali Beg, tell him about the day at the river, when Ibrahim sent his finest horse against your center. The Sultan has been eager for that tale."
Ali Beg shot him a brief, irritable glance, then turned back to the throne. "As you wish, Pasha. Majesty, Ibrahim gathered his best riders and drove them straight at us at the ford. Our horses were spent. The dust was so thick we could barely see our own banners. But your Janissaries and sipahis stayed in place. We cut his riders down in the water. After that, he knew he could not break your army and began to speak of peace instead."
As Ali spoke, the boy's sulk loosened. His feet, which had been worrying at the edge of the cushion, stilled as he pictured it.
"And Amasya?" Halil asked then, keeping the tally for him.
Ali Beg inclined his head toward the dais. "Majesty, the bey of Amasya sent his seal to lie beside Ibrahim's," he said. "He keeps his city and his cushion, but he has set his name to your peace. While the truce holds, he does not ride against you and he sends you tribute when we call for it."
The boy's eyes brightened a little at the thought of another seal under his name.
Halil nodded. "So Your Majesty has peace along that line of the map," he said. Then, a shade quieter, more for the men than the child: "A frontier, not obedience."
Karaca scratched his jaw. "And neighbours who've taken our measure," he added. "They'll test it again when we seem weak."
The words hung in the hot air. No one debated them.
On the dais, the boy's shoulders had begun to sag, the careful dignity of the blessing giving way to weariness. His heel nudged at the cushion's edge, the small, restless movement of a child who had heard enough grown men's words for one morning.
"Your Majesty has heard how your eastern borders stand," Halil said, letting a thread of gentleness enter his formality. "The rest is ledgers and ink. Allow your servants to trouble themselves with it."
Relief flickered across the boy's face before he remembered himself. He inclined his head with practiced gravity.
"We thank our beys," he said, the phrase clearly learned, "for guarding our lands."
The Pasha stepped forward at once, bowing. "The Sultan will retire," he announced.
The councillors bowed as the boy slipped from his cushion and followed his tutor out, the rustle of silk fading behind the door-hanging. When the cloth settled, the last trace of ceremony seemed to leave with him.
Halil let the room exhale with him, dread tapping beneath his ribs. A house full of cracks. A wind rising.
He opened his eyes. "Now," he said, "we speak plainly. The City."
The men straightened instinctively. The word needed no clarification.
"Karaca Bey, since our men walked through the Gate, how many do we hold there now?"
Karaca rubbed thumb and forefinger together, as if feeling unseen beads. "Eight hundred, perhaps nine," he said. "Enough for the gates, the barracks, the harbor towers. Not enough if the whole city rises on the same night."
The Janissary agha gave a low murmur. "We hang a few when they paint symbols on the walls. It discourages the rest."
Halil's mouth tightened. "Yes. So I am told."
He let his gaze settle on the agha. "We ordered restraint in the City. No martyrs in the fora, no flayed hides on the Mese. Quiet ropes in alleys, walls scraped before dawn. Let them curse each other in the wine-shops, not us. So far, Kasım Bey has understood this."
The agha dipped his head, chastened.
Ali Beg broke in, blunt as ever. "We hold their throat and their keys. Why keep the Greek puppet at all? Strip him, send him to Brusa in chains, raise our standards on the palace and call the City what it is—ours. Why pretend otherwise?"
Halil saw the heat in his eyes and smothered it with calm. "In truth, it is ours," he said. "In name, let it remain his, for now."
Ali Beg's jaw worked. "To what use? He stuffs his rooms with grain while our men count their rations by seed. He signs whatever we push under his nose and weeps into the ink. Why wear his stink a day longer than we must?"
"Because he is useful," Halil replied. "A fool, yes. But our fool."
He shifted on the stool so that his words rolled toward the empty dais as much as toward Ali Beg. "If we depose him openly," he said, "Constantine gains a perfect slogan: 'The infidel has taken the Queen of Cities.' The West regains a rallying cry. Every Latin priest with an empty sermon box will bless himself and shout for ships. Every hungry monk in Italy will pound his chest and demand a crusade."
His lip curled. "We have given them enough songs already."
Karaca grunted. "Put our name openly on Constantinople now and they'll have another hymn to hang beside it."
Halil went on. "Tell me, Ali Beg, why buy the burned house when we already hold its keys and collect its rent?"
Karaca rolled his shoulders until they cracked. "Let the Greeks curse one of their own a little longer," he said. "If we need a gesture later, we can always hang him then."
A few men huffed quiet amusement. Even Ali Beg gave a reluctant shrug of agreement.
The qadi, who had been silent, cleared his throat. "And the truce?" he asked softly. "Some will say we broke the Serres peace the day our men stepped inside those walls."
"They will say it," Halil replied. "They would say it whether we had ten men there or none." He flicked an imaginary speck from his sleeve. "The truce did what it was meant to do: held Constantine's sword while we put out fires in Karaman and took Ankara back, even if Ibrahim still preens behind his hills."
He settled his gaze on the jurist, voice still mild, words harder. "Do not fool yourself that ink in Serres ever bound his hand. When he was weak, the truce was 'God's mercy'. Now he thinks himself strong; it is 'the Turk's trick' and can be torn like old cloth."
Halil's eyes went briefly to the blank wall where north lay. "If we had left Constantinople to rot under Demetrios with no garrison at all, he would still find a banner to march under. The same song, only a different verse."
He shifted slightly, letting the weight of the next thought settle.
"Our men at the gates give him a prettier excuse, nothing more. And since spring, every trader and wanderer out of Thessaloniki brings the same restless talk—movement, gathering, purpose. Enough noise to know he does not mean to sit quiet behind a scrap of Serres parchment."
His hand lowered to his knee. "If he marches, it will be because he believes the wind favors him. Parchment never moved an army. Pride does."
Halil's last words settled over the room like dust. For a moment no one spoke.
Then Karaca shifted, the leather of his belt creaking. "Pasha… whatever the Greek intends, our edges are thin. Albanians worrying the west, Fruzhin stirring on the Danube, none of it a great war, but enough to keep every border captain awake." His fingers tapped once on his knee. "Best we hold our footing and watch. Late summer tells a man more than rumors do."
Halil gave the faintest nod, approval without triumph. "Caution is its own strength, Karaca Bey. We take the measure of him before we offer him a field."