Widow Theodora frowns on her stool; the other embroideresses glance up, then back at their work. Kalaphates is just downstairs, entertaining some diocesan. Maria knocks things off her table as she sweeps her arms around. A spool of thread rolls past her feet, slowly unwinding.

“Is there smoke?”

“There’s no smoke, sister. Come.”

Anna leads her down the stone steps to their cell and prays, Saint Koralia, help me be better, help me learn the stitches, help me make this right, and it is another hour before Maria can see her hand in front of her face. At the evening meal the women attempt various diagnoses. Strangury? Quartan agues? Eudokia offers a talisman; Agata recommends tea of astragalus and betony. But what the needleworkers do not voice aloud is their belief that Licinius’s old manuscript has worked some dark magic—that despite its destruction, it continues to blight the sisters with misfortune.

What witchcraft is this?

You fill your head with useless things.

After evening prayers Widow Theodora enters their cell with herbs smoldering in a brazier and sits beside Maria and folds her long legs beneath her. “A lifetime ago,” she says, “I knew a lime-burner who would see the world one hour and nothing the next. Over time his world went as dark as the darks of hell, and none of the doctors, local or foreign, could do a thing. But his wife put her faith in the Lord, and scraped together every piece of silver she could, and took him out the God-protected gate of the Silivri to the shrine of the Virgin of the Source, where the sisters let him drink from the holy well. And when the lime-burner came back—”

Theodora draws a cross in the air, remembering it, and the smoke drifts from wall to wall.

“What?” whispers Anna. “What happened when the lime-burner came back?”

“He saw the gulls in the sky and the ships on the sea and the bees visiting the flowers. And every time people saw him, for the rest of his life, they spoke of this miracle.”

Maria sits on the pallet, hands in her lap like broken sparrows.

Anna asks, “How much silver?”

A month later at dusk she stops in an alley beneath the wall of the convent of Saint Theophano. Look. Listen. Up she goes. At the top she squeezes through the iron grillwork. From there it’s a short drop to the roof of the buttery, where she crouches a moment, listening.

Smoke rises from the kitchens; a low chant filters from the chapel. She thinks of Maria sitting on their pallet right now, squinting to unknot and remake a simple wreath Anna tried to embroider earlier today. In the gathering darkness she sees Kalaphates seize Maria’s hair. He drags her down the hall, her head strikes the stair, and it is as though Anna’s own head is being struck, sparks exploding across her field of vision.