Seeing all this with my own two eyes, I stood and said, “Why stay here when I could be there?” I let fall my wine jug and set straightaway on the road to Thessaly, a land, as everyone knows, notorious for sorcery, to see if I might find a witch who could transform me…

CONSTANTINOPLE

1439–1452

Anna

On the Fourth Hill of the city we call Constantinople, but which the inhabitants at the time simply called the City, across the street from the convent of Saint Theophano the Empress, in the once-great embroidery house of Nicholas Kalaphates, lives an orphan named Anna. She does not speak until she’s three. Then it’s all questions all the time.

“Why do we breathe, Maria?”

“Why don’t horses have fingers?”

“If I eat a raven’s egg will my hair turn black?”

“Does the moon fit inside the sun, Maria, or is it the other way around?”

The nuns at Saint Theophano call her Monkey because she’s always climbing their fruit trees, and the Fourth Hill boys call her Mosquito because she won’t leave them alone, and the Head Embroideress, Widow Theodora, says she ought to be called Hopeless because she’s the only child she has ever known who can learn a stitch one hour and completely forget it the next.

Anna and her older sister, Maria, sleep in a one-window cell barely large enough for a horsehair pallet. Between them they own four copper coins, three ivory buttons, a patched wool blanket, and an icon of Saint Koralia that may or may not have belonged to their mother. Anna has never tasted sweet cream, never eaten an orange, and never set foot outside the city walls. Before she turns fourteen, every person she knows will be either enslaved or dead.

Dawn. Rain falls on the city. Twenty embroideresses climb the stairs to the workroom and find their benches and Widow Theodora moves from window to window opening shutters. She says, “Blessed One, protect us from idleness,” and the needleworkers say, “For we have committed sins without number,” and Widow Theodora unlocks the thread cabinet and weighs the gold and silver wire and the little boxes of seed pearls and records the weights on a wax tablet and as soon as the room is bright enough to tell a black thread from a white one, they begin.