“You fill your head with useless things,” whispers Maria. But knotted chain stitches, cable chain stitches, petal chain stitches—Anna will never learn it. Her most consistent skill with a needle seems to be accidentally pricking a fingertip and bleeding onto the cloth. Her sister says she should imagine the holy men who will perform the divine mysteries wearing the vestments she helped decorate, but Anna’s mind is constantly veering off to islands on the fringe of the sea where sweet springs run and goddesses streak down from the clouds upon a beam of light.

“Saints help me,” says Widow Theodora, “will you ever learn?” Anna is old enough to understand the precariousness of their situation: she and Maria have no family, no money; they belong to no one and maintain their place in the house of Kalaphates only because of Maria’s talent with a needle. The best life either of them can hope for is to sit at one of these tables embroidering crosses and angels and foliage into copes and chalice veils and chasubles from dawn until dusk until their spines are humped and their eyes give out.

Monkey. Mosquito. Hopeless. Yet she cannot stop.

“One word at a time.”

Once more she studies the muddle of marks on the parchment.

πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

Ἄστεα are cities; νόον is mind; ἔγνω is learned.

She says, “He saw the cities of many men and learned their ways.”

The mass on Licinius’s neck quakes as his mouth curls into a smile.

“That’s it. That’s it exactly.”

Almost overnight, the streets glow with meaning. She reads inscriptions on coins, on cornerstones and tombstones, on lead seals and buttress piers and marble plaques embedded into the defensive walls—each twisting lane of the city a great battered manuscript in its own right.

Words glow on the chipped rim of a plate Chryse the cook keeps beside the hearth: Zoe the Most Pious. Over the entrance to a little forgotten chapel: Peace be to thee whoever enterest with gentle heart. Her favorite is chiseled into the lintel above the watchman’s door beside the Saint Theophano gate and takes her half of a Sunday to puzzle out:

Stop, ye thieves, robbers, murderers, horsemen and soldiers, in all humility, for we have tasted the rosy blood of Jesus.

The last time Anna sees Licinius, a cold wind is blowing, and his complexion is the color of a rainstorm. His eyes leak, the bread she has brought him remains untouched, and the goiter on his neck seems a more sinister creature entirely, inflamed and florid, as though tonight it will devour his face at last.