text: Lilia sent out word to the armies that they wanted to parley, but received no response. The parajistas pummeled their defenses relentlessly for six days.
  
  Lilia had Tulana, Voralyn, Laralyn and Amelia running shifts, taking turns managing the jistas on the walls. Their faces were haggard after three days. On the fourth, Tulana had a screaming fit, throwing plates and cups in Lilia's vicinity and telling her this was a fool's enterprise, and they were lost, and to just let her drop the barrier. Lilia slapped her, a woman almost twenty years her senior.
  
  But they held out.
  
  On the sixth day, Lilia walked down to the defenses herself. She surveyed the massive ring around the refugees, and stared into the faces of their enemy. From the ground, the army was even more horrifying. The refugees had all pushed as close to the walls of Kuallina as they could. The latrine ditches were overfull. Foodstuffs were still coming in by line, but it was heavily rationed. The people called at her as she passed, and she stopped to press her hands to people's heads and hearts and murmur courageous words.
  
  She strode right up to the barrier with exhausted Voralyn at her side while her people looked on. She supposed she looked like a fearless woman as she did it, but in truth she felt nothing as she pressed her nose to the barrier. The misty forces that assaulted them were invisible to her. With all the parajistas from the temples funneled into Kuallina, and the Seekers keeping discipline, they could hold out for a good long time.
  
  But Tulana was the only omajista on the wall now, with Taigan gone and Lilia burned out. Tulana was powerful, but it was the relentless volleys from the parajistas that kept them all safe.
  
  Lilia leaned forward and gestured to Voralyn. Voralyn raised a hand. The air around her compressed a bit more. It was already a bit like soup, here at the front.
  
  "Empress Kirana," Lilia said. "I request an audience."
  
  Her voice thundered out across the army, and met resistance as it encountered various tangles of parajista offenses.
  
  She repeated it twice more. Waited. The first line of infantry on the other side of the barrier raised their heads from their shields. They stood in long rows, waiting for a break in Kuallina's defenses that they could stream through, ever alert.
  
  But no one came forward.
  
  Lilia put her hands in the broad pockets of her tunic.
  
  "They know they can crush us," Voralyn said. "Why should they care to parley?"
  
  Why, indeed?
  
  Lilia chewed her lip. She took another pinch of mahuan root. Long use killed people, she knew. Her mother warned her against it, and the Oras, all of her doctors. But it took twenty years to do it, and Lilia knew she would not make it the twenty years.
  
  She slogged upstairs to speak with the Kai. She entered the great dining hall without announcing herself, and found him speaking in low tones with a broken-nosed woman smoking what smelled like a Tordinian cigarette.
  
  "Their Kai isn't answering," Lilia said.
  
  "Yisaoh has another idea," Ahkio said.
  
  "Yisaoh?" Lilia said. She had heard of the woman, but didn't realize she was in Kuallina.
  
  Yisaoh put out her cigarette on the table. Lilia thought it very rude. "We've held here three weeks," Yisaoh said. "It's the Feast of All Souls in just a few days. I suggest we ask for a cessation of hostilities, and a parley over a banquet."
  
  "Isn't that what I already asked for?"
  
  "We're going to remind her we have something she wants more than Kuallina," Ahkio said.
  
  "What's that?" Lilia asked.
  
  Yisaoh said, "Me."
  
  When Lilia went out onto the plain this time, Voralyn at her side to give her words strength, she said, "Empress Kirana. I am the daughter of Navaa Sona, speaking for Kai Ahkio Javia Garika. We propose a parley on the Feast of All Souls. We have news of Yisaoh Alais Garika."
  
  Three hours later, Kirana sent a messenger to parley.