The oldest, at seventy, is Thekla. The youngest, at seven, is Anna. She perches beside her sister and watches Maria unroll a half-completed priest’s stole across the table. Down the borders, in neat roundels, vines twist around larks, peacocks, and doves. “Now that we’ve outlined John the Baptizer,” Maria says, “we’ll add his features.” She threads a needle with matching strands of dyed cotton, fastens an embroidery frame to the center of the stole, and executes a hail of stitches. “We turn the needle and bring the point up through the center of the last stitch, splitting the fibers like so, see?”

Anna does not see. Who wants a life like this, bent all day over needle and thread, sewing saints and stars and griffins and grapevines into the vestments of hierarchs? Eudokia sings a hymn about the three holy children and Agata sings one about the trials of Job, and Widow Theodora steps through the workroom like a heron stalking minnows. Anna tries to follow Maria’s needle—backstitch, chain stitch—but directly in front of their table a little brown stonechat alights on the sill, shakes water off its back, sings wheet-chak-chak-chak, and in an eye-blink Anna has daydreamed herself into the bird. She flutters off the sill, dodges raindrops, and rises south over the neighborhood, over the ruins of the basilica of Saint Polyeuktus. Gulls wheel around the dome of the Hagia Sophia like prayers gyring around the head of God, and wind rakes the broad strait of the Bosporus into whitecaps, and a merchant’s galley rounds the promontory, its sails full of wind, but Anna flies higher still, until the city is a fretwork of rooftops and gardens far below, until she’s in the clouds, until—

“Anna,” hisses Maria. “Which floss here?”

From across the workroom, Widow Theodora’s attention flickers to them.

“Crimson? Wrapped around wire?”

“No.” Maria sighs. “Not crimson. And no wire.”

All day she fetches thread, fetches linen, fetches water, fetches the needleworkers their midday meal of beans and oil. In the afternoon they hear the clatter of a donkey and the greeting of the porter and the tread of Master Kalaphates upon the stairs. Every woman sits a little straighter, sews a little faster. Anna crawls beneath the tables, collecting every scrap of thread she can find, whispering to herself, “I am small, I am invisible, he cannot see me.”