He trips over a tent rope, gets back to his feet, weaves to stay out of firelight. Any moment, he thinks, someone will ask me my errand, which unit I belong to, why I’m walking in the wrong direction. Any moment one of the sultan’s military police with their long curved blades will pull up his horse beside me and call me a deserter. But men sleep or pray or murmur or brood over the coming assault, and no one seems to notice him. Perhaps they assume he’s on his way to the pens to check on an animal. Perhaps, he thinks, I am already dead.

He keeps the road to Edirne off to his right. At the edge of the encampment the spring grasses have grown chest-high, the broom tall and yellow, and it is easy to duck below their crowns as he walks. Behind him, the drummers reach the front of the lines, spin double-headed drumsticks above their heads in figure eights, and begin pounding their drums so quickly that they seem less a pulse of drumbeats than a sustained roar.

From soldiers all through the Ottoman camps rise the clash of weapons against shields. Omeir waits for God to send a streak of light through a rift in the clouds and reveal him for what he is: traitor, coward, apostate. Boy with the ghoul’s face and the demon’s heart. Boy who killed his own father. Who, on the night he was to be left exposed on the mountain to die, bewitched his own grandfather into bringing him back. Everything the villagers intuited about him coming true.

In the dark he draws no notice. The clamor of drums and cymbals and voices builds at his back. Any moment now the first wave will be sent across the moat.

Anna

Even a mile away, inside the house of Kalaphates, the noise of the drums penetrates: a weapon in itself, the forefinger of the sultan probing the alleys, searching, searching. Anna glances back toward the scullery, where Widow Theodora holds the mortar full of crushed nightshade. In the shadows she sees Kalaphates drag Maria by her hair down the corridor past her feet, sees Licinius’s mottled quires go up in flames.

One bad-tempered abbot, the tall scribe said, one clumsy friar, one invading barbarian, an overturned candle, a hungry worm—and all those centuries are undone. You can cling to this world for a thousand years and still be plucked out of it in a breath.

She wraps the old goatskin codex and the snuffbox in Maria’s silk hood and puts them in the bottom of Himerius’s sack. Then she sets the bread and salt fish on top and ties the bag shut. All she owns in the world.