“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, mumbling 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 blanket 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 could see the shapes more clearly that she realized they were ships. It took several moments more before she understood that this was the autarch’s fleet, hundreds upon hundreds of warships—thousands, perhaps, a snowstorm of white sailcloth bearing down upon Hierosol out of the fog.

“Siveda of the White Star preserve us,” said Pelaya quietly. Her own name had become a horrid jest—the ocean was now the city’s worst enemy. “Three Brothers preserve us. Zoria and all Heaven preserve us.” So many ships filled the strait that surely the gods themselves, looking down, would not be able to see water between them. “May Heaven save us.”