more alone in the world than I am?_

In one night made hideous by the flames of the burning city and the
screams of the dying, she had lost her father, Demetrios Karaiannides,
the silversmith, and her mother, Danuta, and her two sisters, Euphemia
and Eirene. The people of the Polis had risen against the Franks, and
the Franks had retaliated by killing everyone they could lay hands upon.

The boy she was going to marry, the boy she loved, had fled with her to
the Marmara waterfront. There they found a small boat, and then the
crossbow bolt had torn through his back. Dying, he cast her adrift.

_Go, Sophia, go!_

From then on she was alone.

_What am I? What is a woman alone?_

Not a queen or an empress, not a wife or a mother, not a daughter, not a
nun. Not mistress, now that Michael and Manfred had each sent her away.
Not courtesan or even harlot.

Crossing the Bosporus to Asia Minor, she had survived. She did not care
to remember the means by which she survived. Of all of them, the least
dishonorable was theft.

She let herself be used, and she could be very useful. She found her way
to the Byzantine general Michael Paleologos, who wanted to take
Constantinople back from the Franks.

Her help had been important to Michael, and he had rewarded her after he
reconquered the Polis and made himself its Basileus by keeping her as
his favorite for a time. And she had rejoiced to see Constantinople
liberated from the barbarians, even though no one she loved was left
alive in it.

Then Michael had made her leave the one place she loved, sending her to
Manfred in Italy.

And now, just when she had begun to lose the feeling of not belonging
anywhere, just when she felt she had found safe harbor with Manfred, she
was cut loose again.

She felt the tears coming, and fought them. She turned her mind away
from the questions that plagued her and thought about her packing.

_Saint Simon should go into the chest next._

In the center, where clothing above and below would protect him.

She went to the table by the window, where the small icon stood between
two candles in tall brass candlesticks. She picked up the saint and
reverently kissed his forehead, then held the icon out at arm's length
to look at it. The eyes dominated the portrait, transfixing her with a
blue stare.

She had painted it herself a few years before, copying another, larger
icon that belonged to the Basileus Michael. Simon's cheeks were hollow,
h