Clover brays; swallows cut overhead. The light, the violet-colored hills in the distance, the little cyclamens glowing like embers on either side of the road—Omeir feels like Aethon-the-crow spiraling down out of the stars, weary and wind-plucked, half his feathers gone. How many last barriers lie between him and Grandfather and his mother and Anna and the great rest to come?

He worries that gatekeepers will turn him away because of his face, but the town gates are open and people come and go freely, and as he and the donkey and the dog scale the maze of streets toward the palazzo, no one pays him much mind—there are many people about, and their faces are many colors, and if anything, it’s Clover who draws looks for her long eyelashes and her pretty way of walking.

In the courtyard in front of the palace, he tells a crossbowman that he has a gift for the learned men of this place. The man, uncomprehending, gestures for him to wait and Omeir stands with Clover and puts an arm around her neck and the dog lies down and immediately goes to sleep. They wait perhaps an hour, Omeir drowsing on his feet, dreaming of Anna standing beside the fire, hands on her hips, laughing at something one of their sons said, and when he wakes he checks for the leather bundle with the book inside and looks up at the high walls of the palazzo, and through the windows he can see servants moving from room to room lighting tapers.

Eventually an interpreter appears and asks his business. Omeir unwraps the bundle and the man glances at the book, chews his lip, and disappears again. A second man, dressed in dark velvet, comes down with him, out of breath, and sets a lantern in the gravel and blows his nose into a handkerchief, then takes the codex and leafs through it. “I have heard,” Omeir says, “that this is a place that protects books.”

The man glances up and back at the book again and says something to the interpreter.

“He would like to know how you came to possess this.”

“It was a gift,” Omeir says, and he thinks of Anna surrounded by their sons, the hearth glowing, lightning flashing outside, shaping the story with her hands. The second man is busy examining the stitching and binding in the lantern light.

“I assume you would like to be paid?” asks the interpreter. “It is in very bad shape.”

“A meal will suffice. And oats for my donkey.”

The man frowns, as though the stupidity of the world’s imbeciles never ceases to amaze, and even without translation, the man in velvet nods, delicately closes the codex with both hands, bows, and takes the book inside without another word. Omeir is directed to a stable beneath the palace where a groomsman with a tidy mustache leads Clover to a stall by the light of his candle.