In something deeper than a dream she hurries again across the tiled floor of a vast atrium lined on both sides with tiers of books. She breaks into a run, but no matter how far she seems to travel, the hall does not end, and the light dims, and her fear and desolation deepen with every stride. Finally she approaches a light ahead where a lone girl huddles beside a candle with a single book on a table. The girl raises the book she’s holding, and Anna is trying to read the title when Himerius’s skiff grinds onto a rock and turns broadside to the waves.

She has just enough time to gather the sack against her dress before she is dumped overboard.

She thrashes, inhales seawater. A swell sucks her out, throws her forward, and her knee strikes a submerged stone: the water is only waist deep. She sputters to the surface and drives her body toward shore, the sack soaked through but still clutched to her chest.

Anna crawls onto a stony beach and huddles over her throbbing knee and opens the neck of the sack. The silk, the book, the bread: all drenched. Out among the dark seething waves Himerius’s skiff is nowhere.

The beach draws an arc in the predawn light: no cover here. She climbs through a storm-driven barrier of driftwood at the tideline into a land of devastation: burned houses, every tree in an olive grove hacked down, the earth rutted as though God has raked away soil with his hands.

At first light she ascends a gentle hillside terraced with grapevines. The rumble of the waves recedes. She takes off her dress and wrings it dry and puts it back on and chews a piece of sturgeon and runs a hand over her cropped hair as dawn traces a pink line over the horizon.

She hoped that over the course of the night she would be swept to a new land, Genoa or Venice or Scheria, the kingdom of brave Alcinous, where a goddess might conceal her in magical mist and escort her to a palace. But she has been carried only a few miles up the coast. The city is still visible in the distance, a saw’s blade of rooftops capped by the clustered domes of the Hagia Sophia. A few spires of smoke lift into the sky. Are armed men pouring through the neighborhoods, breaking into houses, herding everyone into the streets? Unbidden, an image rises of Widow Theodora and Agata and Thekla and Eudokia dead in the scullery, tea of nightshade in the center of the table, and she forces it away.