Pelaya got her shoulder against the shutter and lifted it again, pushing so hard that she almost fell out as it began to open. Teloni gasped and Pelaya felt her own heart speed—the cobbled courtyard was three floors below, quite far enough to break her bones.
Her sister grabbed Pelaya’s arm. “Be careful!” “I’m fine, Teli. Look, come here, I’ll show you what Babba’s doing.”
“You don’t know. You’re just a girl—you’re younger than me!”
“Yes, but I pay attention when he talks.” She got the shutter all the way open and propped it with the thick wooden rod so she’d have her hand free to point. “There, by the Gate of the Fountain, do you see? That’s the place where the autarch’s cannons are trying to knock down the wall, but Babba is too clever. As soon as he realized what they were doing, he sent men to build a new wall behind it.”
“A new wall? But they’ll just knock that down too, won’t they?”
“Perhaps. But by the time they do, he’ll have built another... and another...and so on. He will not let them break through.”
“Truly?” Teloni looked a little relieved. “But won’t they dig under the wall? I heard Kiril say the autarch’s men would dig tunnels under the walls here by Memnos or Salamander where there’s no ocean—that they could come up in our garden if they wanted to!”
Pelaya rolled her eyes. “You don’t listen to me, but you listen to Kiril? By all the gods, Teli, he’s only seven years old.”
“But isn’t what he says true?”
“Do you see those?” She pointed to the strange shape by the nearest section of the citadel wall. “That’s a sling engine —a kind of stone-throwing machine. It throws stones almost as heavy as the ones that come out of the autarch’s big cannon. Whenever Babba and his men see someone digging a tunnel, they throw big stones at them and crush it.”
“With the autarch’s soldiers still inside?”
Pelaya snorted. Was she going to weep about the enemy who was trying to kill them? “Of course.”
“Good. I’m glad.” Teloni stared, eyes wide. “How do you know these things, Pelaya?”
“I told you—I listen. And speaking of listening, that’s how they find the tunnels if they ever come close to the walls. Or they use the peas.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Dried peas. Papa and his men dig special drums into the ground all along the walls and put dried peas on the drum heads. That way, if anyone is digging deep down in the ground under them, the peas jump and rattle and we know. Then we can drop stones and burning oil down on them.”
“But they have so many soldiers!”
“It does not matter. We have our walls. Hierosol has never been conquered by force—that’s what Babba says. Even Ludis Drakava could never have taken the citadel if the old emperor had an heir. Everyone knows that. The Council of Twenty-Seven was afraid of the autarch, so they opened the gates to Drakava instead.”
“What if they do that for the autarch now? What if he offers them some bargain to let him in?”
Pelaya shook her head. “The council may be cruel old men, but they aren’t fools. The autarch never keeps promises. He would execute them all and chew on their bones.” Her childhood dreams abruptly came back to her again—the giant Boots-of-Stone with blood spattered in his beard, his jaws grinding and grinding. It didn’t matter what she told her sister, the world was still going to end. She freed the wooden rod and let the window shutter down. “Let’s go help Mama. I don’t want to look anymore.”
“No! Don’t close it yet! I want to see some of the Xixians crushed or burned!” Teloni’s eyes were bright.
It was only when she was saying her midday prayers that Pelaya suddenly realized that although the plumes of foul smoke, missiles of burning pitch, and the incessant fall of hot cannonballs from the autarch’s ships might have driven the Lord Protector Ludis and his advisers out of the palace and into the safer lodgings of the great Treasury Hall in Magnate’s Square, nobody had said anything about evacuating the rest of the palace’s inhabitants. Which meant that King Olin of Southmarch might still be there, trapped in his cell.
None of the servants knew where her father had gone, and her mother was so worried about the count’s safety she practically burst into tears when Pelaya asked her, but she didn’t know either. Pelaya paced back and forth in the entry hall, trying to think of something, growing more certain by the moment that nobody else had even remembered Olin Eddon. She returned to her mother, but Ayona Akuanis had gone to comfort the baby, who had been fretful all night, and together they had fallen into exhausted sleep.
Pelaya looked at her mother’s face, so young and beautiful again now that sleep had for a moment soothed her fearful heart. She could not bear to wake her. She went to her mother’s desk instead and wrote a letter in such a careful hand that Sister Lyris would have been proud of the execution, if not the purpose. She closed it with wax and her mother’s seal.
She found Eril with three of the lower servants, trying to make order of the chaotic pantry. The Akuanis family never moved into the Landmarket house this early in the year and the household had not been prepared for their sudden arrival.
“I want you to take this letter up to the stronghold,” she told him. “I want you to bring someone back here.”
Eril looked at her with the full amount of hauteur he could afford to show to the daughter of his master. “To the stronghold, Kuraion? I don’t think so. It is not safe. What do you want so badly? We packed up everything.”
“I didn’t say something, I said someone. He is a king, an important man, and the lord protector has left him in the stronghold to die.”
“That is not a task for such as me—not unless your father himself asks me,” he said with the firmness of an aging servant who had been cajoled and tricked over the years in every way young girls could devise.
“But you must!”
“Really? Shall we go and see what Kura Ayona has to say about it, then?”
“She’s sleeping and can’t be disturbed.” Pelaya scowled. “Please, Eril! Babba knows this man and would want him saved.”
The servant draped his fingers across his forehead in the manner of one of the onirai ignoring his persecutors while communing with the gods. “You wish me to risk my life for some foreign prisoner? You are very cruel to me, Kuraion. Wait until your father returns and we will see what the master’s wishes are.”
She stared at him for long moments, hating him. She knew that even if she somehow forced Eril to go, there was no promise he would do what he was told, anyway—he was as stubborn as only a venerable family retainer could be. The citadel hill was in chaos and he could easily claim he had been prevented somehow.
Her heart was hammering—each crash of cannonfire might be the one that brought the stronghold roof down on poor Olin Eddon. She would have to go herself, but even in good times it would have been scandalous as well as dangerous to cross the city alone. She needed some kind of armed escort.
“Very well,” she said at last, then turned and stalked away. She had a plan, and in fact was rather shocked with herself for even thinking of it, let alone putting it into action, but if she hadn’t balked at forging a letter from her mother then she certainly wasn’t going to let herself be frustrated by one difficult servant.
At the bottom of the road she stopped at the front gate of their neighbors, a wealthy family named Palakastros. A group of beggars stood outside, as usual. Unlike Pelaya’s thrifty mother, the mistress of the Palakastrai was a rich old widow who worried about what would happen to her after she died, and so she made a practice of sending food out from her table nearly every day. This assured that there was almost always a crowd of the aged and infirm outside her gate, much to the annoyance of Ayona Akuanis and other householders on the long, wide street. Because of the siege there were two or three times as many as usual today and they quickly surrounded Pelaya.