“Anna, I cannot see.”

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.

She lowers herself off the roof, enters the laying house, and grabs a hen. It squawks once before she breaks its neck and shoves it into her dress. Then back onto the roof of the buttery, back through the iron pickets, down through the ivy.

Over the past weeks she has sold four stolen chickens in the market for six coppers—hardly enough to buy her sister a blessing at the shrine of the Virgin of the Source. As soon as her slippers touch the ground, she hurries down the alley, keeping the nunnery wall on her left, and reaches the street where a stream of men and beasts moves in both directions through the failing light. Head down, one arm folded over the hen, she makes her way into the market, invisible as a shadow. Then a hand falls on the back of her dress.

It’s a boy, about her age. Bulge-eyed, huge-handed, barefoot, so skinny he seems all eyeballs—she knows him: a fisherman’s nephew named Himerius, the kind of boy Chryse the cook would say is as bad as a tooth-pulling and as useless as singing psalms to a dead horse. A heavy shank of hair lies across his forehead and the handle of a knife shows above the waistband of his breeches and he smiles the smile of someone who has the upper hand.

“Stealing from the servants of God?”

Her heart booms so loudly that she is surprised passersby cannot hear it. The gate to Saint Theophano is within sight: he could drag her to it, denounce her, make her open her dress. She has seen thieves on gibbets before: last autumn three were dressed as harlots and seated backward on donkeys and driven to the gallows in the Amastrianum and the youngest of them could not have been much older than Anna is now.

Would they hang her for stealing fowl? The boy looks back up the alley at the wall she just descended, calculating. “Do you know the priory on the rock?”

She gives a wary nod. It’s a ruin on the edge of the city, near the harbor of Sophia, a forbidding place surrounded on three sides by water. Centuries ago it might once have been a welcoming abbey but now it seems a frightening and desolate relic. The Fourth Hill boys have told her that soul-eating wraiths haunt it, that they carry their chamberlain from room to room on a throne of bones.

Two Castilians, wrapped in brocaded coats and doused liberally with perfume, pass on horses and the boy bows lightly as he steps out of their way. “I’ve heard,” Himerius says, “that inside the priory are many things of great antiquity: ivory cups, gloves covered with sapphires, the skins of lions. I’ve heard the Patriarch kept shards of the Holy Spirit glowing inside golden jars.” The bells of a dozen basilicas begin their slow toll and he looks over her head, blinking those huge eyes, as though seeing gemstones twinkle in the night. “There are foreigners in this city who will pay a great deal for old things. I row us to the priory, you climb up, fill a sack, and we sell whatever you find. Find me beneath the tower of Belisarius on the next night the sea smoke comes. Or I will tell the holy sisters about the fox who steals their chickens.”

* * *

Sea smoke: he means fog. Every afternoon she checks the workshop windows, but the autumn days stay fine, the sky a crisp, heart-aching blue, the weather clear enough, Chryse says, to see into the bedroom of Jesus. From the narrow lanes, between houses, Anna sometimes glimpses the priory in the distance: a collapsed tower, soaring walls, windows blockaded with bricks. It’s a ruin. Gloves sewn with sapphires, the skins of lions—Himerius is a fool and only a fool would believe his tales. Yet, beneath her apprehension, a thread of hope rises. As though some part of her wishes the fog would come.

* * *

One afternoon, it does: a swirling torrent of white pours off the Propontis at dusk, thick, cool, silent, and drowns the city. From the workshop window she watches the central dome of the Church of the Holy Apostles disappear, then the walls of Saint Theophano, then the courtyard below.

After dark, after prayers, she crawls from beneath the blanket she shares with Maria, and slips to the door.

“You’re going out?”

“Only to the toilet. Rest, sister.”

Down the corridor, through the side of the courtyard so as to skirt the watchman, and into the lattice of streets. The fog dissolves walls, reshuffles sounds, transforms figures to shades. She hurries, trying not to think of the nightly terrors she has been warned about: roving witches, airborne maladies, rogues and wretches, the dogs of night slinking through shadows. She slips past the houses of metalworkers, furriers, shoemakers: all settled in behind barred doors, all obeying their god. She descends the steep lanes to the base of the tower and waits and trembles. Moonlight pours into the fog like milk.