Sometimes in dreams she is back in the embroidery house, where Maria and the others remain bent over their tables, plying their needles, faint, phantasmal, and when she reaches to touch them, her fingers pass right through. Sometimes pains flash through the back of her head, and Anna wonders if the affliction that took Maria will come for her too. But in other moments those thoughts are far away, and she can no longer remember the faces of the women who raised her, and it seems that her life with Omeir is the only life she has ever known.

One morning in Anna’s twenty-fifth winter, on a night cold enough to freeze the water across the top of the kettle, her youngest son descends into fever. His eyes smolder in their sockets, and he soaks his clothes with sweat. She sits on the stack of rugs where they sleep, puts the sick boy’s head in her lap, and strokes his hair, and Omeir paces, clenching and unclenching his fists. Finally he fills the lamp, lights it, and goes out, and returns covered with snow. From his coat he produces the bundle wrapped in waxed oxhide and hands it to her with great solemnity and she understands that he believes the book can save their son as he believes it saved them on their journey here more than a decade before.

Outside, the pines roar. The wind throws snow down the chimney, blowing ash around the room, and the two older boys crowd her on the carpets, dazzled by the glow of the lamp and by this strange new package their father has produced as though from nowhere. The donkey and goat stand close around them, and the whole world outside their door seems to bellow and seethe.

The oxhide has done its work: the contents are dry. One boy examines the snuffbox while the other runs his fingers over the samite hood, tracing the birds both finished and half-finished, and Omeir holds the lamp for Anna as she opens the book.

It has been years since she last tried to read the old Greek. But memory is a strange thing, and whether it’s fear for one son or the excitement of the other two, when she peers into the even, steady script with its leftward cant, the meanings of the letters return.

A is alpha is ἄλφα. Β is beta is βῆτα. Ω is omega is ὦ μέγα; Ἄστεα are cities; νόον is mind; ἔγνω is learned. Slowly, in the language of her second life, translating one word at a time, she begins.

“… the one they called birdbrain and nincompoop—yes, I, dull-witted muttonheaded lamebrained Aethon—once traveled all the way to the edge of the earth and beyond…”