Shadowplay

shadows. Her heart felt squeezed in a cold hand. Him again. Watching her, or at least watching Kossope House, the dormitory in which she lived. Who was he? What did he want?

She stood as the first sheen of dawn turned the sky purple, cold air on her face, her skin pebbled with goosebumps. Bells were ringing all over the city. Something terrible was happening.

The bells in Three Brothers began to peal while Pelaya was saying the Daybreak Prayer in the family chapel, ringing so loud that it seemed the walls might tumble down. She and her sisters, brother, and mother were all crowded into the chapel, and when Pelaya turned she almost knocked her brother Kiril off the bench.

“Zoria’s mercy!” Her mother hurried to the chapel door and handed Pelaya’s infant sister to the nurse as the bells continued to crash and clang. “It is a fire! Get the children to safety.”

“That’s not the fire bell,” Pelaya said loudly.

Despite her fear, Teloni was irritated. “How do you know?”

“Because the fire bell is only one bell, rung over and over. All the bells are ringing.”

Her mother turned to Kiril, Pelaya’s younger brother. “Go and find your father. Find out what is happening.”

“He’s not old enough.” Pelaya was too excited and frightened to stay with her mother and sisters. “I’ll go!”

She was up before her mother could stop her, heading for the chapel door. “You headstrong little beast!” her mother called. “Teloni, go with your sister, keep her out of trouble. No, Kiril, you’ll stay, now—I’ll not have all my children scattered.”

Pelaya was out the door just as Kiril’s bellow of dismay erupted, but it was still loud enough to hear even above the clangor of the bells.

“You’re wicked!” gasped Teloni, catching up to her on the first landing. “Mama said Kiril was to go.”

“Why? Because he’s a boy?” She pulled up her skirts so she wouldn’t trip over them as she hurried up the stairs. Already the stairwell and the landings were filling with people, some still half-dressed in their nightclothes, wandering out like sleepwalkers to see what the clamor was about.

“Slow down!”

“Just because you climb like a cow trying to go over a gate doesn’t mean I have to wait for you, Teli.”

“What if it is a fire?”

Pelaya rolled her eyes and began leaping the stairs two at a time. Didn’t anyone else take note of things but her? That was why she enjoyed talking to the foreign king, Olin Eddon: he paid attention to what was around him, and he complimented her cleverness when she did so too. “It’s not a fire, I told you. It’s probably the autarch attacking the city.”

Teloni slid to a stop and grabbed at the wall to keep herself from falling. “It’s what? ”

“The Autarch of Xis, stupid. Don’t you ever listen to what Babba says?”

“Don’t you dare call me that—I’m your elder sister. What do you mean, the autarch...attacking?”

“Babba’s been preparing for it for months, Teli. Surely you must have noticed something.”

“Yes, but...but I didn’t think it was really going to happen. I mean, why? What does the autarch want with Hierosol?”

“I don’t know, what do men ever want with the things they fight wars about? Come on—I want to find Babba.”

“But he can’t get in, can he? The autarch? Our walls are too strong.”

“Yes, the walls are too strong, but he might besiege us. Then we’d all have to go hungry.” She poked her sister’s waist. “You won’t last long without sweetmeats and honeybread.”

“Stop! You are a beast!”

“But you’ll get better at climbing stairs. Come on!” The jokes rang a little hollow even to Pelaya herself. It was hard to tease her sister, who was good and kind most of the time, with those terrible bells sounding all across the citadel hill, echoing and echoing.

They found their father in an antechamber to the throne room, surrounded by frightened nobles and patient guardsmen. “What are you girls doing here?” he asked when he saw them.

“Mama wanted to send Kiril to ask you what is happening,” Teloni said quickly. “But Pelaya ran quick like a rabbit and I had to run after her.”

“Neither of you should be here—you should be with your mother, helping with the little ones.”

“What is it, Babba?” Pelaya asked. “Is it the autarch...?”

Count Perivos frowned at her, not as if he were angry, but as if he wished she hadn’t asked him the question at all. “Probably. We’ve had a signal from the western forts that they are under attack, and also reports of a great army marching down the coast from the north toward the Nektarian Walls—the land walls.” He shook his head. “But it may be exaggerated. The autarch knows he can never break down our fortifications, so it may be he simply wishes to frighten us into giving him the right to navigate our waters on his way to attack someone else.”

Pelaya didn’t believe it, and she felt fairly certain her father didn’t either. “Well, then. We’ll tell Mama.”

“Tell her we should move the family down to the house near the market. Here on top of the citadel it may be dangerous, although even if the autarch manages somehow to take the western forts, the guns cannot reach us here. Still, better to spend your last dolphin on your roof, as my father used to say, just in case it rains. Go tell her to pack up. I’ll be back before the noon prayers.”

Pelaya stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. Only a few years earlier she could only reach his face if he bent almost double. Now she could put her arms around his broad chest and smell the pomander scent in his robes. “Go,” he said softly. “Both of you. Your mother will need your help.”

“We’ll be all right down in the city,” Teloni said as they trotted back down the citadel’s main staircase, weaving through distracted and fearful folk, all scurrying as if the bells were summoning them to the gods’ judgment. “Even if the Autarch does fire his cannons, they can’t reach that far.”

Pelaya wondered what Teloni thought armies carried heavy cannons around for if not to fire them. “Unless he brings that army up to the Salamander Gate and fires into the city from that side.” She felt almost cruel saying it.

Teloni’s eyes went wild and she stumbled as they reached the landing at the base of the stairs; Pelaya had to grab her sister’s sleeve. “He wouldn’t!”

Pelaya realized there was nothing she could do by talking, even about truthful things, except make life worse for her sister, and soon thereafter, for her mother and the little ones as well. She gave Teloni’s arm a quick squeeze.

“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 headlong 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 hurried 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 Hierosol. 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 convince 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