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.
With a mixture of relief and disappointment, she decides that Himerius must have abandoned his scheme, but then he steps from the shadows. Over his right shoulder is a rope and in his left hand is a sack and he leads her without speaking through a fishermen’s gate and across the cobbled beach past a dozen upturned boats to a skiff hauled up onto the gravel.
So covered with patches, so rotted in the boards, it hardly qualifies as a boat. Himerius sets the rope and sack in the bow and drags the craft to the waterline and stands submerged to his shins.
“It will stay afloat?”
He looks offended. She climbs in, and he pushes the skiff off the gravel and swings his body neatly over the wale. He settles the oars into their locks and waits a moment and the blades of the oars drip drip drip and a cormorant passes overhead and both boy and girl watch it come out of the fog and disappear again.
She sinks her fingernails into the thwart as he rows them into the harbor. A carrack at anchor looms suddenly close, dirty and barnacled and huge, the railings impossibly high, black water sucking at its hull, at the weed-wrapped anchor chains. She had imagined boats were swift and majestic; up close they make her hair stand on end.
Every breath she waits for someone to stop them but no one does. They reach a breakwater and Himerius ships the oars and hangs two unbaited lines off the stern. “If anyone asks,” he whispers, “we are fishing,” and rattles one of the lines as though in evidence.
The skiff wobbles; the air reeks of shellfish; out beyond the breakwater, waves shatter onto rocks. This is as far from home as she has ever been.