The Conqueror's Saga is a trilogy of young adult novels by Kiersten White set in the Ottoman Empire during the 1400s. The series follows Lada, a female version of Vlad the Impaler, and her brother Radu through their childhood in Romania and their teenage years as hostages in the Ottoman royal court.
The Conqueror's Saga series:
- And I Darken
- Now I Rise
- Bright We Burn
This series contains examples of:
- Action Girl: Lada. In the third book, she recruits women to fight in her army.
- All for Nothing: All of Lada's actions are in the name of Wallachia, who she considers her mother. By the end of the trilogy, however, she's come to realize that Wallachia does not care about her or anything she's sacrificed for it.
- Alternate History: A version of history where Vlad the Impaler is a woman.
- Ambition is Evil: Both Lada and Mehmed, who will commit any atrocity to get at what they want: Wallachia and Constantinople.
- Apologetic Attacker: Radu when stabbing Lazar.
- Arranged Marriage: Mehmed's father has him married to Sitti Hatun. He finds out when he receives an invitation to his own wedding.
- Lada avoids this fate by scaring the daylights out of her would-be husband.Lada: On our wedding night, I will cut out your tongue and swallow it. Then both tongues that spoke our marriage vows will belong to me, and I will be wed only to myself. You will most likely choke to death on your own blood, which will be unfortunate, but I will be both husband and wife and therefore not a widow to be pitied.
- Lada avoids this fate by scaring the daylights out of her would-be husband.
- Attempted Rape: Lada smothers a would-be rapist in And I Darken.
- In Now I Rise, Radu kills an Ottoman soldier who was trying to rape a child.
- Ax-Crazy: Lada, in the later part of Bright We Burn. She's positively gleeful at the thought of Mehmed seeing her stakes, destroys her own land to win their "game", and starts murdering people for the slightest offense. Thankfully, she eventually bounces back.
- Badass Boast: Lada delivers most of them, but Radu gets a few in as well:Radu: You may have been the one who stopped the dagger last time, but I am the one who will know before the dagger ever comes close to Mehmed.
- The Beard: Radu, who is gay, marries Nazira, a lesbian. Exaggerated when their love interests marry each other.Nazira: As your wife, I would expect only your friendship. Nothing more. And I would request that my maid, Fatima, be allowed to accompany me. Always.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Nazira is one of the kindest characters in the series. She also wants to burn Constantinople to the ground for what its crusaders did to her wife, something that shocks Radu when he realizes it.
- Big Brother Bully: Mircea.
- Big Little Brother: Radu is taller than Lada, much to her annoyance.
- Big Ol' Unibrow: Nicolae's defining feature.
- Blade Below the Shoulder: Lada wears knives strapped to her forearms.
- Break the Haughty: After Bogdan, her last friend, dies by Radu's arrow, Lada finally realizes that Wallachia is not her mother and her fanatical, brutal ways have destroyed everything she tried to build. She surrenders for the first time in her life, and works with Radu to reform her reign.
- Broken Pedestal: Lada loses all respect for her father when he lets her childhood friend Bogdan be taken by the Ottoman army. His indifference makes her realize how spineless he is and how little he truly cares for her.
- Brother–Sister Team: Lada and Radu can work well together under pressure, but their goals and loyalties are so different that they rarely manage to stay a team for long.
- Child by Rape: Daciana's first child. Almost certainly Lada and Radu as well, considering how their father treated their mother.
- Childhood Friend Romance: Lada with both Mehmed and Bogdan.
- Cincinnatus: After his experiences at Constantinople, Radu finds that he doesn't want anything to do with politics and empires, but keeps getting thrown into it anyway due to his bloodline, relationship to Mehmed, and because he's good at it. At the end of Bright We Burn, he finally manages to escape politics completely, living a quiet life with his family.
- Clothing Reflects Personality: Nazira dresses in bright colors that match her cheerful personality.
- Declaration of Protection: Lada to Radu after pulling him out of a frozen lake. Being Lada, she makes it sound more like a threat, but it's heartwarming by her standards.
- Deadpan Snarker: Loads of them, but especially Radu, Nazira, and Lada.
- Demolitions Expert: Tohan, Urbana.
- The Ditz: Halima.
- Domestic Abuse: Vlad beat his wife so badly she has broken teeth and a permanent limp, brutalized her for giving birth to a daughter and a "weak" son, and is implied to have raped her. Even Lada, who spent most of her life resenting her mother for not being strong enough, feels sympathy for her.
- Dragons Are Demonic: A running theme is how dragons in Slavic culture might as well be analogues for demons, giving more weight to Lada being identified (and identifying) as one. To the point where Radu even carves "dragon" on her tombstone.
- Dumb Muscle: Downplayed. Lada is a brilliant strategist, but she struggles with court intrigue and prefers brute force to anything else. This gets a lot worse when she becomes prince and kills the disloyal boyars, at which point she abandons any pretense of intelligent ruling and just tries to kill and torture her way through every problem.
- Evil Chancellor: Halil Pasha. It eventually gets him executed.
- The Evil Prince: Matthias. Lada is a genderbent version.
- Family of Choice: Radu, Cyprian, Nazira, Fatima, Oana, and Theodora have become one by the end of the series.
- Female Misogynist: Lada is contemptuous towards other women, especially feminine ones, underestimating them and blaming them for anything bad that happens to them. She gets somewhat better after spending time with Huma, Tohan, and Daciana.
- For Your Own Good: All three of the main characters repeatedly betray and attack each other, and the ones they love, for this reason.
- Happily Adopted: Theodora has no idea of her true parentage, and is far happier with her adopted parents than she would ever be with them.
- Hated Hometown: Radu dreads the thought of ever returning to Wallachia.
- Headbutt of Love: Radu to Cyprian at the end of Now I Rise.
- The Hero Dies: The epilogue has Radu and Mehmed visiting Lada's grave.
- Heroic Bastard: Cyprian.
- Heroic BSoD: Nazira breaks down screaming after her brother's death.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: A common execution in the Ottoman Empire, used to terrify and demoralize enemies. When they go to the empire as hostages, the first thing Murad shows them is people being impaled. Lada simply offers suggestions, and once she grows up, earns the nickname "Impaler" for how eager she is to use it.
- I Love You Because I Can't Control You: Deconstructed. Mehmed loves Lada primarily because he thinks he can conquer her, and every time she pushes him away makes him even more eager. It takes him a long time to realize that Lada cannot be controlled by anyone.
- Irony: Quite a lot of characters comment on how Lada's gender is to blame for her unpopularity, her brutality, her capture by Matthias, etc., when something bad happens to her. Many of these incidents come straight from historical accounts of Vlad.
- Kick the Dog: Lada's murder of Kumal.
- The Lancer: Nicolae is Lada's.
- Last Guy Wins: Radu ends up with Cyprian.
- Like Brother and Sister: Radu and Nazira, despite being married.
- Lada and Nicolae as well. He says as much in the first book.Nicolae: I think of you like a sister. Like a brilliant, violent, occasionally terrifying sister that I would follow to the ends of the earth, in part because I respected her so much and in part because I feared what she would do to me if I refused.
- Lada and Nicolae as well. He says as much in the first book.
- Lipstick Lesbian: Nazira is gay and very feminine.
- Lonely at the Top: Both Lada and Mehmed grow more isolated as they gain power.
- Mad Scientist: Urbana. Her only goal is to create the greatest cannon the world has ever seen.
- Man Bites Man: Lada excels at this. In Bright We Burn, she kills a man by tearing his throat out with her teeth.
- Manipulative Bastard: Radu and Nazira excel at this, being less combat-oriented than other characters.
- Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Lada and Radu. The time they're in makes it hell for them both.
- Men Are Strong, Women Are Pretty: Inverted. Lada is both stronger and uglier than Radu.
- Missing Mom: Lada and Radu's mother leaves when Lada is five after begging to return to her family. They never hear from her again until Lada tracks her down in Now I Rise.
- Moral Event Horizon: In-Universe, Mehmed and Radu consider Lada to have crossed it when they come to Tirgoviste to see no less than 20,000 corpses on stakes. Mehmed, up to this point, treated the whole exercise as a game between him and Lada and was assured he could convince her to come home, but seeing the stakes makes him realize she's become truly unhinged.
- More Deadly Than the Male: Lada eventually realizes that the women of Wallachia are more inclined to brutality than the men, due to having suffered more under the reign of the boyars and Turks. Notably, while pretty much every male advisor speaks against her mass staking at Tirgoviste, the women fully support it.
- Morning Sickness: Lada mistakes this for poisoning.
- My God, What Have I Done?: It takes her last friend dying for Lada to finally realize what a giant mess she's made of her life and her country. Once she sees that Radu is healing the land she carelessly destroyed in her war against Mehmed, she realizes that she was too brutal and decides to rule the fair way.
- The Nondescript: Stefan, Lada's spy.
- The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: After saving Radu from drowning in a frozen lake, Lada promises him that nobody will kill him until she does.
- Pregnant Badass: Being pregnant doesn't stop Lada from killing her guards and breaking out of prison.
- Pintsized Powerhouse: Lada is the shortest and most brutal fighter in the series.
- Promoted to Parent: Kumal raised Nazira after their parents died.
- The Quiet One: Fatima. As we later learn in Now I Rise, it's partially due to PTSD from her family's fate at the hands of Crusaders, and partially the fact that as a maid, Fatima's not expected to talk anyway.
- Reluctant Ruler: Radu during his brief reign in Wallachia.
- Royal Harem: As the heir to the throne, Mehmed has a lot of concubines. Neither Lada or Radu are wild about this. Lada is technically part of the harem, as any woman who enters the harem building becomes the sultan's, but neither she nor Mehmed see her as this.
- Sanity Slippage: Lada in the third book. Becoming prince and losing all the people that tempered her worst tendencies turns her more and more brutal and fanatical, destroying her own country for the sake of getting back at Mehmed and starting to refer to herself as Wallachia.
- Satellite Love Interest: Fatima to Nazira.
- Scary Teeth: Lada has small, pointy teeth and has killed at least one person with them.
- She Is the King: Lada is prince of Wallachia. Justified, in that prince is the title for a ruler.
- Sibling Triangle: Both Lada and Radu are in love with Mehmed. He chooses Lada.
- Silk Hiding Steel: Huma, Mara Brankovic.Huma: Ladislav Dragwlya, daughter of Vlad, who sent forces, including his own son, to fight at Varna, thus invalidating his treaty with the Ottomans and leaving his children's lives utterly forfeit. Ladislav, whom no one in the world other than her beautiful brother and a powerless sultan care about. Little Lada, who is in my house under my protection, sit down.
- Spare to the Throne: Mehmed is a third son who becomes heir to the Ottoman Empire after Huma orchestrates the deaths of his older brothers.
- Stringing the Hopeless Suitor Along: Mehmed is aware of Radu's feelings for him and uses them to keep Radu in line. Luckily, Radu wises up to this.
- Two Guys and a Girl: Both Lada and Radu fall in love with Mehmed as they grow older.
- The Unfettered: Lada will stop at nothing to make her vision of Wallachia come true.
- Urbana. In Nazira's words, her only loyalty is to creating the most stunningly large and effective means of killing people the world has ever seen.
- Wanted a Gender-Conforming Child: More like 'wanted a masculine child'. Vlad is proud of his tough, violent daughter but ashamed of his gentle, emotional son.
- Wanted a Son Instead: Lada's father. He comes to conditionally accept her as she grows into a tomboy and fighter.
- War Is Hell: The principal theme of Now I Rise, focusing on the horrific, prolonged siege of Constantinople. Poor Radu is nearly broken by the end of it. Also applies to the Wallachian invasion in the third book: Mehmed treats it like an amusing game right up until he sees the stakes at Tirgoviste.
- Would Hurt a Child:
- Huma arranges for Mehmed's infant brother to be murdered to prevent him from someday making a claim to the throne.
- Lada orders the boyars' children killed at the end of Now I Rise.
- Matthias kills his rival to Hungary's throne. Said rival is less than ten.
- Young Conqueror: Mehmed, Lada.
