“I don’t hear anything, Maria.”

“Is the floor shifting?”

Anna wraps her arms around her. “Try to sleep, sister.”

“I hear their voices. They are talking directly below us.”

“It’s only the wind in the chimney.”

Yet, despite logic, Anna feels the fear slipping in. She imagines a platoon of men in caftans crouched in a hole just beneath their pallet, their faces black with soil, their eyes huge in the dark. She holds her breath; she hears the tips of their knives scratch against the undersides of the flagstones.

One evening at the end of the month, walking the eastern section of the city, scrounging for food, Anna is rounding the great weathered bulk of the Hagia Sophia when she stops. Between the houses, tucked against the harbor, the priory on the rock stands silhouetted against the sea and it is on fire. Flames flicker in crumbled windows, and a pillar of black smoke twists into the sky.

Bells ring—whether to urge people to fight the fire or for another purpose, she could not say. Perhaps they ring simply to exhort the people to carry on. An abbot, eyes closed, shuffles past carrying an icon, trailed by two monks, each with a smoking censer, and the smoke from the priory lingers in the dusk. She thinks of those dank, rotting halls, the moldering library beneath its broken arches. The codex back in her cell.

Day after day, the tall Italian said, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world.

A charwoman with scars on her face stops in front of her. “Get home, child. The bells are calling the monks to bury the dead, and this is no time to be out.”

When she returns home, she finds Maria sitting rigid in their cell in complete darkness.

“Is that smoke? I smell smoke.”

“It’s only a candle.”

“I feel faint.”

“It’s probably hunger, sister.”

Anna sits and wraps the blanket around them and lifts the samite hood from her sister’s lap, five of her twelve birds finished—the dove of the Holy Spirit, the peacock of the Resurrection, the crossbill who tried to pry the nails from Jesus’s crucified hands. She rolls Maria’s thimble and scissors inside it and retrieves the battered old codex from the corner and thumbs to the first leaf: TO MY DEAREST NIECE WITH HOPE THAT THIS BRINGS YOU HEALTH AND LIGHT.

“Maria,” she says, “listen,” and starts at the beginning.