Qinnitan woke to find Pigeon half underneath her. Although the mute boy himself remained happily asleep, his bony elbows and chin and knees were poking her in so many places she might as well have been trying to get comfortable on a pile of cypress branches. Despite the aches, though, it was hard to look at his face and be angry. His innocently gaping mouth with that piti¬ful stub of tongue behind his teeth made her ache with a love for him unlike anything she'd felt even for her own younger brothers and sisters, perhaps be¬cause she was responsible for Pigeon in a way she hadn't been for them.
It was odd to lie here.in this cramped, uncomfortable bed in a foreign land thinking about two people, one the child lying next to her (shivering slightly now that she had made some space for herself), the other entirely a creature of dream. How had her life come to this? Once she had been an ordinary girl in an ordinary street, playing with the other children; now she had traveled on her own to a far country, fleeing from the autarch himself.
Qinnitan still didn't understand it all. Why had Sulepis, the ruler of all the southern world, chosen her in the first place? It was not as though she were a rare beauty like Arimone, his paramount wife, or even much of a beauty at alclass="underline" Qinnitan had seen her own long features enough times, her thin lips pursed, her watchful, slightly suspicious eyes peering back at her from the polished mirrors of the Seclusion, to know that beyond question.
Enough worrying, she decided, and yawned. It must be almost dawn, al¬though she hoped the wheels of Nushash's great cart were at least an hour from the daylight track: she wanted a little more sleep. She arranged Pigeon so that she could stretch out; he made a scraping sound of annoyance through his nose but allowed himself to be prodded into a less painful configuration.
As she was drifting back down into the warmth of slumber she heard a dull tone so low that she could feel it rumbling in the floor. It was followed a moment later by another, pitched higher. The two notes sounded again, then a third tone joined them-bells, she finally realized, ringing in the dis¬tance. At first, in her sleepy confusion, Qinnitan thought it must be the summons to morning service in the Hive, then she remembered where she was and sat up, freeing herself from the complaining boy. Around her oth¬ers were beginning to stir. The ringing went on.
Qinnitan climbed out of bed and hurried across the dormitory room and out into the dark hallway. A few other women stumbled out with her, clumsy phantoms in their shapeless nightdresses. The bells were so loud and constant now that she could not remember what it had been like only moments before, in the silence of the night.
She clambered up to the passage window, the one that looked east toward mighty Three Brothers temple. The sun hadn't risen, but she could see lights in the tower windows where the bells were ringing. It was so strange-what
did it mean? She looked down to see if anyone was in the streets yet, and by the light of the lantern burning at the corner of the courtyard she saw a smear of pale-haired head as a man-the man she had seen the previous night, she felt certain-moved with a certain casual hurry from below the residence window into the shadows. Her heart felt squeezed in a cold hand Him again. Watching her, or at least watching Kossope House, the dormi¬tory 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 ass she hurried up the stairs. Already the stairwell and the land¬ings 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 with¬out sweetmeats and honey-bread."
"Stop! You are a beast!"
"But you'll get better at climbing stairs. Come on!" The jokes rang a lit¬tle 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, sur¬rounded 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."