"I'm sure you're right. Go tell Mama. I'll be there in a short while-I need to go do something."

Her older sister watched in openmouthed astonishment as Pelaya abruptly turned and darted across the hall toward the gardens. "What… where are you going?"

"Go to Mama, Teli! I'll be there soon!"

She cut through the Four Sisters Courtyard and very nearly ran head¬long into a colum of citadel guards wearing the Dragonfly on their sky-blue surcoats, the symbol of the old Devonai kings, still the touchstone for legitimacy in Hierosol centuries after the last of them had reigned. The guards, who in ordinary circumstances would have at least paused to let her by, hardly even broke stride, booted feet slapping on the floor as they hur¬ried on, their faces set in looks so firm-jawed and unrevealing it made her chest hurt.

Surely Babba's right-the autarch must know better than to try to conquer Hier¬osol. No one has ever managed in a thousand years! But she couldn't believe things would be quite so easy. She felt a disturbing thrill in the air, like a wind carrying scents from savage foreign lands. Even the bells finally falling silent did not make the world seem any less strange; if anything, the silence that followed seemed to quiver just as dangerously as it had while the bells clamored.

Olin Eddon was just being led back inside by his guards when she reached the garden. After a few moments' discussion, he managed to con¬vince them to let him linger for a moment at the wall on the side of the garden that looked out across the low western roofs of the palace and the seawall, out across the strait and, beside it, the wide, green ocean. The water, despite the chill wind that circled through the garden, looked smooth as the marble of a painted statue. She remembered what her father had said about the western forts and looked out toward the peninsula, but she could see nothing there except a bank of mist; the water of the strait and the gray morning sky seemed to blur together into a single vagueness.

"I did not expect to see you today, and certainly not so early." His smile was a little sad. He looked thinner than the last time she'd seen him. "Don't you have your lessons in the morning? Sor Lyris will be angry."

"Don't tease. You heard the bells-how could you not hear them?"

"Ah, yes. I did notice something ringing…"

She scowled. She didn't like him saying foolish things and pretending he was serious about them, treating her like a child who needed to be amused. She wondered if he had done that with his own daughter, the one he spoke of so sadly, the one he so clearly missed. (He didn't speak about his son very

much, though, she couldn't help noticing.) "Hnbugh,I have to hurry back to my family. What of you, Your Majesty?"

"A formal title. Now I am worried." He nodded his head, almost a how. "I will be well, my lady, but I thank you for your concern. Go with your family. I have a nice, safe room with bars on the window and a warm cov erlet." He stopped. "Oh, but you are truly frightened. I'm sorry-it was cruel of me to make sport."

She was about to deny it, but suddenly felt warmth in her face. She was terrified she might cry in front of this man who, for all their friendly con¬versations, was a stranger, a foreigner. "A little," she admitted. "Aren't you?"

For a moment something showed through his mask of charming manners-a deep, bleak wretchedness. "My fate is entirely in the hands of the gods." A moment later he had regained his composure and it Was as if the mask had never slipped.

Of course it is, she thought. And my fate is, too. Why should that be so fright¬ening, if we do as they want us to do? Aloud, she said, "But what do you think the autarch wants with us?"

"Who can say?" Olin shrugged. "But Hierosol has stood for a long time. Many kings have tried to pull it down and failed-many autarchs, for that matter. A hundred years ago Lepthis…" He paused, then frowned. "For¬give me, but I cannot remember which Lepthis, the third or fourth. They called this one 'the Cruel, as if that was enough to mark one Lepthis from another, let alone one autarch from the rest of the bloody-handed crew. In any case, this autarch swore he would shatter this city's walls with his can¬non, which were the mightiest guns in the world. Do you know about that?"

"A little." She took a shaky breath. Olin had seemed genuinely upset to have frightened her, and now she could not help wondering who was mak¬ing whom feel better. "He failed, didn't he?"

Olin laughed. "Evidently, for we are speaking Hierosoline and you see no temple of fiery Nushash or black Surigali here on Citadel Hill, do you? Lepthis the Cruel swore to destroy the temples of all the false gods, as he called them, and put all Hierosol's inhabitants to the sword. He pounded the walls with cannonfire for a year but could not even nick them. The flies and mosquitoes bit and bit down in the valley below the northern walls, and the Xixians died there in droves of fevers and plagues. Thousands more died of fiery missiles from inside the citadel. At last his men demanded he let them go back to Xis, but Lepthis would not hear of such a compromise

to his honor. So his men killed him and made his heir the autarch instead, then they all sailed back to the shores of Xand."

"His own men killed him?"

"His own men. Ultimately, even the most bloody-minded troops will not fight when they are hungry and exhausted, or when they understand their deaths will be for nothing except to glorify their commander."

She stared out at the expanse of blue-green water in the strait, then looked south toward the place where she knew the great city of Xis must lie somewhere beyond the mists, its long walls hot and dry and white as bones bleaching in the desert sun. "Do you think that will happen this time? That we will have to live through a siege of a year-or even more?"

"I do not think it will be so bad," Olin said. "I suspect that the present autarch mainly wants to keep Hierosol's fleet occupied and her defenders busy so that he can turn his attentions on other, less well-defended targets- perhaps the Sessian Islands, which still hold out against him."

For the first time since the bells had begun to ring Pelaya felt a little looseness in her chest, which had felt so tight she feared breathing too deeply. Both her father and Olin said that all would be well. They were grown men, noble and educated men: they knew about such things. "I hope…" she began, then stopped. Without thinking, she raised her hand to shade her eyes then realized that the sun was behind her. It was only the low-lying mist causing that glare on the water, making it so hard to see out into the southern strait.

"Pelaya? What is it?"

She realized after a moment that she was praying to the Three, mum¬bling words she had known since childhood but which had never seemed as desperately important as they did now. "Look," she said.

King Olin moved up to the wall and stood beside her, staring out across the strait toward the Finger. "I see nothing. Your eyes are young and strong…"

"No, not there. Toward the ocean."

He turned, following her finger, and even as he did the bells began to ring again, all across Citadel Hill, loud as the gods clanging spears against their battle-shields.

As it rolled toward them out of the southeast, the great, low-lying blan¬ket of spiky shadow seemed to Pelaya an immense thicket of trees and clouds-as though somehow an entire forest had torn free of the shore and floated out into the middle of Kulloan Strait and was now drifting toward

the walls of Hierosol. It was only when she chuld see the shapes more clearly that she realized they were ships. It took several moments more be-fore she understood that this was the autarch's fleet, hundreds upon hun-dreds of warships-thousands, perhaps, a snowstorm of white sailcloth bearing down upon Hierosol out of the fog.