“I…I am sorry…” Olin let go and took a clumsy step backward. “Truly. It is just…you said something about the autarch trying to bargain…for me…?”

“Hah!” Count Perivos stared at him carefully. “I assumed your sources had told you already. Sulepis offered the lord protector some piddling promises in exchange for you. Drakava was not interested.”

“But that makes no sense!” Olin held up his fists before him, not as someone who planned to use them, but as a man searching for something to grasp to keep himself from falling. “Why would the autarch be interested in the king of a small northern federation who has never even met him? I am no threat to him.”

The count stared at him for a long moment, then sheathed his knife. “Perhaps he thinks you are. Can you guess at why? Perhaps there is something you have forgotten—something I can use.” The weariness and desperation of Count Perivos became evident for the first time. “Otherwise we will have the siege, and fire, and starvation, and perhaps worse.”

Olin sagged back onto his bench. “Forgive my behavior, but it seems I am to suffer one shock after another. It makes no sense. I am nothing to him.”

“Think on it. I will send you what I can find of your family. As for your kingdom, I hear it is safe despite all these mad rumors of fairies. Your relatives the Tollys hold a regency as defenders of your infant child, or so I am told.” He looked suddenly stricken. “You did know you had a new son, King Olin, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” He nodded heavily, like a man who can barely keep awake after a day’s exhausting labor. “Yes, I had a letter from my wife. Olin Alessandros, he will be named. Healthy, they say.”

“Well, that is one small blessing, anyway.” Perivos Akuanis bowed his head. “Farewell, Olin. The gods grant we can talk again in days ahead.”

Olin laughed sourly. “The gods? So you fear that Drakava will sell me to the autarch after all?”

“No, I fear that the autarch will find a way over the walls and kill us all.” He made the sign of the Three, then sketched a mocking salute. “At which point, I will be home in Siris, waiting to die with my family, and you will be meeting your own fate. If it comes to that, the gods grant us good deaths.”

“I would prefer that the gods help protect you and your family instead, Count Perivos. And mine.”

The two men clasped hands before the Hierosoline nobleman went out.

It was actually the middle of the afternoon before the first of the great guns had been assembled and mounted on its mighty carriage behind the walls of the captive fortress. The air was still putrid with the eggy stench of the sulfur, and Vash was just as glad he had only managed to nibble a bit of food here and there—some flat bread, a few olives, a single tangerine.