For all their talk of rescuing the voices of antiquity, of using the wisdom of the ancients to fertilize the seeds of a new future, were the scribes of Urbino any better than tomb robbers? They came and waited for what was left of the city to be split open so they could beetle in and scavenge whatever last treasures came spilling out. Then they ran for cover.

In the bottom of a bare cupboard something catches her eye: a little enameled snuffbox, one of the scribe’s collection of eight. On its cracked lid, a rosy sky braces over the facade of a palace, flanked by twin turrets and tiered with three levels of balconies.

Himerius is gazing out the window, lost in disappointment, and Anna tucks the box into her dress. Somewhere above the fog, the sun comes up pale and faraway. She turns her face toward it but cannot feel any warmth at all.

She carries the sack of wet books to the house of Kalaphates and hides it in the cell she shares with Maria and no one bothers to ask where she has been or what she has done. All day the embroideresses, bent like winter grass, work in silence, blowing on their hands or putting them inside mittens to warm them, the tall, half-finished figures of monastic saints taking shape on the silk in front of them.

“Faith,” says Widow Theodora as she walks between the tables, “offers passage through any affliction.” Maria hunches over the samite hood, drawing her needle back and forth, the tip of her tongue clamped in her teeth, conjuring a nightingale from thread and patience. In the afternoon a wind howls off the sea and glues snow to the seaward sides of the dome of the Hagia Sophia, and the embroideresses say that this is a sign, and by nightfall the trees freeze again, the branches jacketed in ice, and the embroideresses say that this, too, is a sign.

The evening meal is broth and black bread. Some women say that the Christian nations to the west could save them if they wish, that Venice or Pisa or Genoa could send a flotilla of weapons and cavalry to crush the sultan, but others say that all the Italian republics care about are shipping lanes and trade routes, that they already have contracts in place with the sultan, that it would be better to die on the tips of Saracen arrows than let the pope come here and take credit for victory.