“What witchcraft is this?”

Ice tumbles through every channel in her body. She creeps to the threshold: Maria is kneeling on the floor, bleeding from her mouth, and Kalaphates is stooped under the low beams, the sockets of his eyes lost in shadow. In the long fingers of his left hand are the leaves of Licinius’s quires.

“It was you? All along? Who helps yourself to candles? Who causes our misfortunes?” Anna wants to open her mouth, to confess, to wipe all this away, but the fear is such that it has stopped her ability to speak. Maria is praying without moving her mouth, praying behind her eyes, retreating to some private sanctum at the very center of her mind, and her silence only infuriates Kalaphates more.

“They said, ‘Only a saint would bring children who are not his own into the house of his father. Who knows what evils they’ll bring?’ But did I listen? I said, ‘They’re only candles. Whoever steals them only does so to illuminate her nightly devotions.’ And now I see this? This poison? This sorcery?” He seizes Maria by the hair and something inside Anna screams. Tell him. You are the thief; you are the misfortune. Speak. But Kalaphates is dragging Maria by her hair into the hall, right past Anna as though she were not there, and Maria is trying to scramble to her feet and Kalaphates is twice their size and Anna’s courage is nowhere.

He hauls Maria past the cells where other needleworkers crouch behind their doors. For a moment she manages to get a foot under her, but stumbles, a great fistful of hair tearing away in Kalaphates’s fist, and the side of Maria’s head strikes the stone step leading to the scullery.

The sound is that of a hammer passing through a gourd. Chryse the cook watches from her wash pot; Anna stays in the corridor; Maria bleeds on the floor. No one speaks as Kalaphates grabs her dress and drags her limp body to the hearth and pitches the pieces of parchment into the fire and holds Maria’s unseeing eyes to the flames while the quires burn to ash one two three.

Omeir

Twelve-year-old Omeir is sitting on a limb of the half-hollow yew, gazing down at the bend in the river, when Grandfather’s smallest dog appears on the road below, running hard for home with its tail between its legs. Moonlight and Tree—resplendent two-year-olds, heavy through the neck and shoulders, cords of muscle rippling across their chests—lift their chins in tandem from where they’re grazing among the last of the foxgloves. They sniff the air, then raise their eyes to him as though awaiting instructions.

The light turns platinum. The evening becomes so still that he can hear the dog pounding toward the cottage, and his mother say, “What’s got into that one?”

Four breaths five breaths six. Down on the road, heralds with mud-spattered banners come round the bend three abreast. Behind them come more riders, some carrying what look like trumpets, others with spears, a dozen at first, and behind them still more: donkeys pulling carts, soldiers on foot—more men and beasts than he has ever seen.

He leaps down from the tree and sprints the trail home, Moonlight and Tree trotting behind, still chewing their cud, pushing through the tall grass like the prows of ships. By the time Omeir reaches the byre, Grandfather is already limping out of the house, looking grim, as though some unpleasant reckoning he has delayed a long time has finally arrived. He hushes the dogs and sends Nida into the root cellar and stands with his spine rigid and his fists at his sides as the first riders come up the track from the river.

They ride tasseled ponies with painted bridles, and wear red bonnets, and carry halberds or iron rods or have compound bows strapped to their saddles. Little powder horns dangle from their necks; their hair is strangely cut. A royal emissary with boots to his knees and his sleeves bunched in ruffles at his wrists dismounts and picks his way between the boulders and stops with his right hand resting on the pommel of his dagger.

“Blessings on you,” says Grandfather.

“And on you.”

A first few raindrops fall. Farther back along the procession Omeir can see more men turn off the road, a few with skinny mountain oxen hitched to carts, others on foot with quivers of arrows on their backs or swords in their hands. The gaze of one of the heralds stops on Omeir’s face and his expression twists in disgust, and the boy gets a flicker of what he and this place together must present: a rude dwelling carved into a hollow, home to a gash-faced boy, hermitage of the deformed.

“Night is coming,” says Grandfather, “and rain with it. You must be weary. We have fodder for your animals, and shelter for you to rest out of the weather. Come, you are welcome here.” He ushers a half-dozen heralds into the cottage with stiff formality and perhaps does so genuinely, though Omeir can see that he brings his hands to his beard over and over, plucking at hairs with a thumb and forefinger as he does whenever he is anxious.

By nightfall rain falls steadily, and forty men and almost as many animals shelter beneath the limestone overhang around a pair of smoky fires. Omeir brings firewood, then oats and hay, hurrying about in the wet dark between the byre and cavern, keeping his face hidden inside his hood. Every time he stops, tendrils of panic clutch his windpipe: Why are they here and where are they going and when will they leave? What his mother and sister distribute among the men—the honey and preserves, the pickled cabbage, the trout, the sheep’s cheese, the dried venison—comprises almost all of their food for the winter.

Many of the men wear cloaks and mantles like woodsmen but others dress in coats of fox fur or camel hide and at least one wears ermine with the teeth still attached. Most have daggers attached to girdles around their waists and everyone speaks of the spoils they are going to win from a great city to the south.

It’s after midnight when Omeir finds Grandfather at his bench in the byre working in the light of the oil lamp—an expense Omeir has rarely seen him be so reckless with before—fashioning what looks like a new yoke beam. The sultan, may God keep him, Grandfather says, is gathering men and animals in his capital at Edirne. He requires fighters, herders, cooks, farriers, smiths, porters. Everyone who goes will be rewarded, in this life or in the next.

Little whorls of sawdust rise through the lamplight and melt back into shadow. “When they saw your oxen,” he says, “their heads nearly fell off their necks,” but he does not laugh and does not look up from his work.

Omeir sits against the wall. A particular combination of dung and smoke and straw and wood shavings make a familiar warm tang in the back of his throat and he bites back tears. Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

Images of the city to the south speed through his consciousness, but he has seen neither a city nor a likeness of one and does not know what to imagine, and his visions intermingle with Grandfather’s tales of talking foxes and moon-spiders, of towers made of glass and bridges between stars.

Out in the night a donkey brays. Omeir says, “They’re going to take Tree and Moonlight.”

“And a teamster to drive them.” Grandfather lifts the beam, studies it, sets it back down. “The animals won’t follow anyone else.”

An axe falls through Omeir. All his life he has wondered what adventures await beyond the shadow of the mountain, but now he wants only to crouch here against the logs of the byre until the seasons have turned and these visitors are a memory and everything has gone back to the way it was.