Page 11 of The City in Glass

You did not watch it well enough, his gaze told her. You did not protect it. You did not defend it, and so it is gone.

She would catch him. She would explain. She would bring it all back, from the chicken coops in the small tight yards of the clay workers’ quarter to the sapphires that were hidden in the Fleetfox well.

But please, I cannot do it without you, she thought, and it wasn’t just the young man with the immaculate beard anymore. She was talking to all of them, because it would not be, would never be Azril without them, and she could not bear it.

She ran after them, and just when she drew close, just when she knew that a lunge would let her catch his sleeve, would allow her to turn him so she could explain it all, both the destruction and his exile, strong arms wrapped around her waist, dragging her back and then, with a single flap of great gray wings, up into the air.

Vitrine stared down at the space where the ghost parade had been just a moment before, for they were gone as if they had never been. There was only ruin in front of her and an angel behind, and she dug her sharp nails into the arm that held her, drawing blood with a furious cat’s hiss.

The angel didn’t swear but he drew a hard breath at the pain of being torn. For a moment, Vitrine thought he was going to drop her, but instead, he wheeled around, clutching her harder to him as he turned.

“Put me down,” she shouted as he gained speed and height, but he ignored her even as she clawed him down to the bone. His blood, more gold than gold and more precious by far, spilled gleaming to the darkening ruins below. Where it fell the ground was blessed, and Vitrine howled at the thought of her city being in any way favored by the one that had destroyed it.

No matter how she struggled, she could not escape from the angel’s grasp, and her lungs strained as he ascended. It was his place and not hers, angels made for the thinner air of the condors and the bustards, carrion-eaters all. Vitrine gasped, unable to shout, and he went higher still, up into the empty blue of the sky. It was so empty, she thought, her head throbbing and her skin almost blistering with cold. Was this what he had come from? Was this what was inside him while her family filled themselves with a riot of wealth and pleasure? No wonder he was the thing he was.

“Look,” he called finally. “Look down, and see.”

And for a moment she did. He had gone so high that first her eyes could only fall on the sea that lapped the coast, how the line of the water met with perfect love the blue of the sky, and how in its vastness it curved down. The light was clearer than the glass of her cabinet and so bright it threatened to mend the cracks that ran her through. For a single moment, she could truly see the size of the world and how far it went. She could travel so far without ever seeing a thing that she had seen before. In a world so large, you could run from anything, and Vitrine’s grief threatened to flee.

She wrestled it back to her like it was a child running into a busy street, snarling and protective because now she could see the angel’s ploy.

She turned herself into a tiger, twisting her head to bite down on his shoulder, but he only took her by the loose skin at the back of her neck. She swung like a kitten in her mother’s teeth before she twisted into a serpent, looping her thick body up and over the angel’s shoulders, twining herself around him in an embrace that grew tighter and tighter yet. He bore her until he could no longer, and then he unwound her tail-first as neatly as he might untangle a child’s game of spiderwebs.

She was a human again, turning in his arms so that he had to hold her tight, chest to chest. They were no more their bodies than a jar of seawater is the ocean, but still their bodies were not nothing. His eyes, Vitrine saw, were as dark as hers liked to be. This close, she could see through them the fire that animated him, back to the forge where adamantine and obedience alike had been hammered into a divine weapon.

I could put it out, Vitrine thought, momentarily enchanted. I could reach through them to that fire and I could burn myself until my ashes mingled with what he was and he would never be an angel again.

Perhaps he understood her, because he shut his eyes, shuttered them behind bruised-looking eyelids and a fan of long, lush eyelashes. It would not have stopped her, but with that holy part of him hidden, he was beautiful, and her mouth went dry.

Not one in my family has ever kissed one of his.

Instantly, the thought revolted her, both for what it was and that she had thought it at all. She bit him instead, lunging forward like that tiger she had been. She bit him high on his right cheek, hard enough her teeth knocked against the bone underneath. It was a real bite, nothing behind it but teeth and muscle, nothing that could damage an angel, but still he cried out, surprised enough to let her go.

She spread her arms. In a moment, she would be an eagle or a bat, but now she was falling and free.

This time he had to stoop like a hawk to catch her before she struck the ground, and then she was in his arms once more, hissing and knitting her nails into the wounds she had made previously. It must have hurt a great deal, but he only kept falling, flaring his wings at the last moment to land and set her carefully on the ground.

“You must not follow the dead. You are not one of them, you must not walk as they do.”

She glared at him as only a city cat could glare, and then she exhaled, sitting tailor fashion among the ruins of a garden. She peered up at him from among the stalks of pennyweed and honeybelle gone tall and feral, lifting her chin proudly.

“There was no danger,” she said. “They were my people, all of them. They wouldn’t harm me. They couldn’t.”

“And do you keep your knives so dull that they would never cut you?” asked the angel sharply, but then he shook his head at once.

“That is not how I wished to begin,” he said, and she climbed to her feet, brushing the dust from her skirts.

“Do not begin at all,” she told him. “I might have walked after the dead and been very happy.”

“Their city is not your city,” the angel countered. “You wouldn’t have been.”

She ignored the fact that he was likely right, and looked around the garden, still bounded by the remnants of a high wall. The walls had been reduced to rubble, of course, but there was still a mostly intact column of green stone, the pedestal for some guardian statue. Vitrine remembered that it had been an angel; scattered on the ground, she could discern the fraction of a sword, a few fingers so carefully detailed and separate that they looked horrifyingly lifelike pushing out of the debris.

A few generations ago, it had been nothing but the humble greenhouse of a young woman who had come overland with a large store of seeds. She had absolutely no memory at all of where they or she had come from. She took her name from a ship she had sailed on, and that night, unpacking her bag with trembling fingers, she removed the bulbs wrapped carefully in paper, the seeds folded in paper packets, the small signature of pages sewn together and containing recipes for fertilizer and compost, lists of the seeds that loved winter and lists of the bulbs she would have to treat like the most delicate of southern princes. At the last, she pulled out a bloody knife wrapped in a scrap of stained green silk, and this she laid with the rest, wondering who she had taken it from.

She didn’t remember whose blood was on the knife, but she knew how to grow plants, so that was what she did. She grew them first in cracked pots and horse troughs, then behind the temple she cleaned for food, shelter, and the loan of a small bit of earth in its shadow. Finally, close to a well and in good sunlight, there was a patch of land that Vitrine cleared out for her. What had been there before failed to please, and after Vitrine carefully set it alight, the soil was left with a rich layer of ash and regret.

“This was a bookbinder’s once,” Vitrine found herself saying. “Then it was a greenhouse, and then it was a ruin.”