Aethon has managed to become a bird at last: not the resplendent owl he hoped, but a bedraggled crow. He flags across a limitless sea, searching for the end of the earth, only to be swept up by a waterspout. So long as Anna keeps reading, Maria seems to be at peace, her face calm, as though she sits not in a damp cell in a besieged city listening to a silly tale, but in a garden in the hereafter listening to the hymns of the angels, and Anna remembers something Licinius said: that a story is a way of stretching time.

In the days, he said, when bards traveled from town to town carrying the old songs in their memories, performing them for anyone who would listen, they would delay the outcomes of their tales for as long as they could, improvising one last verse, one last obstacle for the heroes to overcome, because, Licinius said, if the singers could hold their listeners’ attention for one more hour, they might be granted one more cup of wine, one more piece of bread, one more night out of the rain. Anna imagines Antonius Diogenes, whoever he was, setting knife to quill, quill to ink, ink to scroll, placing one more barricade in front of Aethon, stretching time for another purpose: to detain his niece in the living world for a little longer.