“Rest!” His body flinched as if she had hurt him. “Every hour is precious. Do you not know the peril we are in?”

“I know, but your health still demands that you rest. What is happening in two weeks’ time?”

He smiled. “I am going to perform the marriage ceremony for Leonicus Strabomytes and Theodosia. It will be in the Hagia Sophia-a truly splendid occasion. An example to the people of the blessing and mercy of God. It will uplift everyone and fire a new piety in them.”

Anna assumed she must have misunderstood. “Theodosia Skleros?”

He looked at her steadily. “Does your largeness of heart not extend to her, Anastasius? I have given Theodosia a special icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary as a token of her absolution.”

Anna was amazed. “Theodosia and Leonicus committed real sin, and they did it knowingly, and with choice. They deliberately took what was not theirs, and they kept it. They haven’t repented a jot!” She said so to him harshly, her words tearing out of her all the loneliness and her own weight of guilt that she had carried through the years, knowing the fault was still in her. “It is a mockery of those who are truly sorry, and have paid long and bitterly.”

“I asked no payment of her, except humility and obedience to the Church,” he retorted. “You have sins also, Anastasius. It ill becomes you to judge when you yourself have neither confessed nor repented. I don’t know what your sins are, but they are heavy and deep. I know that, because I see it in your eyes. I know you ache to confess and find absolution, but your pride holds you prisoner, and you cling to it rather than to the Church.”

She said nothing, almost breathless with the accuracy of his blow, deep as the bone, shocking her with pain.

He sat up, his hand on her wrist, his face close to hers. “You are in sin, Anastasius. Come to me and confess, in humility, and I will give you pardon.”

She was frozen inside, as if he had in some profound way assaulted her. She could only remove his fingers from her arm and straighten the bottles on the table, then turn and leave, walking in a daze of misery and wild, twisting confusion. Never in her life had she felt more absolutely alone.

IT WAS AUTUMN OF 1280, A MONTH AFTER THE WEDDING, before Anna saw Theodosia again. They passed in the street without speaking, and Anna felt strangely snubbed, while being quite aware that it was foolish of her. They had not been friends; they had shared an experience of deep pain in Theodosia’s life, and it was easy to understand why she would avoid someone who had seen her at her most vulnerable.

She stood in the street, the wind harsh in her face. Perhaps Constantine was right. Did Anna fail to forgive Theodosia because she could not forgive herself, for Eustathius and the child she had not wanted because it would have been his? It was she who was wrong, not Theodosia. She should go to her and apologize. It would be galling, bitter to swallow, but nothing less would make it right.

She started to walk again, urgently, even up the steepening incline, needing to have the apology made before her resolve weakened.

Theodosia received her reluctantly. She stood looking toward the window. Anna barely noticed that the room was more ornate than before, the floor newly tiled in marble, larger torch brackets gilded at the top.

“Thank you for coming,” Theodosia said politely. “But I believe I told you last time you called that I have no need of your services.” She turned and looked momentarily at Anna, and there was a curious emptiness in her eyes.

“I came to apologize to you,” Anna said. “I presumed to think that you could not have been absolved for taking Joanna’s husband from her when she was dying. That was arrogant of me to the point of absurdity. It is none of my business, and I have no right even to think it.”

Theodosia shrugged slightly. “Yes, it is arrogant, but I accept your apology. I have the Church’s absolution, and that is really all that counts.” She half turned away.

Anna contradicted her. “Your face, your eyes, say that it doesn’t count at all, because you don’t believe it.”

“It isn’t a matter of belief, it’s fact. Bishop Constantine said so,” Theodosia replied tartly. “And, as you say, it is not your concern.”

“The Church’s absolution, or God’s?” Anna refused to be dismissed.

Theodosia blinked. “I am not sure that I believe in God, or resurrection and eternity in your Christian sense. Of course I can’t imagine time ending, no one can. It will go on, what else could it do? A kind of endless desert stretching without purpose into the darkness.”

“You don’t believe in heaven,” countered Anna, “but surely what you have described is hell? Or one kind of hell, if not the deepest.”

Theodosia’s voice was tinged with sarcasm. “Is there deeper than that?”

“The deepest would be to have held heaven in your hands and let it slip away, to have known what it was and then lost it,” Anna replied.

“And would the God you believe in do that to anyone?” Theodosia challenged. “It’s bestial.”

“God doesn’t do it,” Anna answered her without hesitation.

Theodosia’s voice was harsh with pain. “Are you saying I did that to myself?”

Anna opened her mouth to deny it, then realized it was dishonest. “I have no idea,” she said. “Did you have heaven, or only something that was good, and at least a belief in joy in some reachable future?”

Theodosia stared at her, anger, confusion, and grief in her face.

Anna felt a moment of pity so fierce, it took her breath away. “There is a way back,” she said impulsively, then instantly knew it was a mistake.

“Back to what?” Theodosia asked, surprise in her voice, as if she had taken a step only to find the ground beneath her was no longer there.

Now it was Anna who turned away, walking alone to the door and outside into the street. She moved along the cobbles slowly, up steps and down them.

Punishment was for society’s sense of order, necessary for survival. Theodosia executed her own punishment, and it was far more terrible than God would have given her, because it was destructive. God’s punishment should be for the healing of the sinner, freeing him from the sin, to move on without it. By denying Theodosia’s sin, Constantine had injured her in lying, and she had injured herself, because she knew better.

Anna turned the corner, and the wind was cold in her face.

She could not let the matter rest. She went to Constantine and found him busy ministering to supplicants of one sort or another.

“What can I do for you, Anastasius?” he asked guardedly. They were in his ocher-colored room facing onto the courtyard.

There was no purpose in trying to be tactful. “I have just visited Theodosia. She has lost the strength and comfort of her faith.”

“Nonsense,” Constantine said sharply. “She attends Mass every Sunday.”

“I did not say she has fallen from the Church,” Anna replied patiently. “I said she is without that inner light of hope, the trust that keeps us going even when we cannot see the way at all, but still feel the love of God… in the dark.”

She saw a flash of amazement in Constantine’s eyes, as if he had caught a glimpse of something he had barely guessed at before.

Anna went on with a surge of belief within herself. “She does not believe in a God who overlooks her offense without healing it, as if neither she nor it mattered. If she were to offer some deep penitence, a sacrifice of something important to her, she might be able to believe again.”

Constantine looked at her with a strange mixture of wonder and hostility. “What had you in mind?” he said coldly.

“Perhaps to part from Leonicus for a while-say, two years? It was being with him when Joanna was dying that was wrong. She could devote her time to caring for the sick, as Joanna was. Then she would come back from it whole, able to take up and treasure what she had paid for, albeit with pain. Then she could accept forgiveness, because she was honest.”