“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.