The lead cup rises out of the trickling darkness, the water is mixed with quicksilver, and Maria drinks it down. On the walk home, sheets of snow sweep across the walls, erasing the road. Maria holds her shoulders back. “I can walk on my own,” she says, “I feel excellent,” but drifts into the path of a carter and is nearly crushed.

After dark she shivers in their cell. “I hear them whipping themselves in the street.”

Anna listens. The whole city is still. The only sound is of snow blowing down onto the rooftops.

“Who, sister?”

“Their cries sound so beautiful.”

Then come tremors. Anna swaddles her in every piece of clothing they own: linen undershirt, wool overskirt, cloak, scarf, blanket. She brings in coals in metal handwarmers, and still Maria shakes. All her life, her sister has been there. But for how much longer?

Above the city the skies remake themselves by the hour: purple, silver, gold, black. Graupel falls, then sleet, then hail. Widow Theodora peers out the shutters and murmurs verses from Matthew: Then shall appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn. In the scullery Chryse says that if the last days are upon them, they might as well finish all the wine.

The talk in the streets oscillates between the strange weather and numbers. The sultan, some say, is marching an army of twenty thousand from Edirne at this very moment. Others say his soldiers number closer to one hundred thousand. How many defenders can the dying city muster? Eight thousand? Others predict the number will be closer to four thousand, only three hundred of whom can properly use a crossbow.

Eight miles of sea walls, four miles of land walls, 192 total towers, and they’re going to defend them all with four thousand men?

Arms are requisitioned by the emperor’s guard for redistribution, but in the courtyard in front of the gates of Saint Theophano, Anna sees a soldier presiding over a sad pile of rusted blades. In one hour she hears that the young sultan is a wonder-worker who speaks seven languages and recites ancient poetry, that he is a diligent student of astronomy and geometry, a mild and merciful monarch, tolerant of all faiths. In the next hour he’s a bloodthirsty fiend who ordered his baby brother drowned in his bath, then beheaded the man he sent to drown him.