Page 13 of The City in Glass

“No, no, be joyous,” Vitrine whispered to them, her lips stinging with their polluted dew. “Be joyous, daughter of Chanda, and you will be a queen.”

“Such promises you make,” the angel muttered, and she would have been sharp with him if her eyes hadn’t been full, if she couldn’t hear the echo of a lost woman’s laugh in her chest.

Vitrine and the angel waited as the moon waxed and waned and grew full again on the dreams of broken towers. The flowers fell and were in their turn replaced by lunar-white berries, tinged with a becoming blue.

When she saw them, Vitrine started to cry. Her tears splashed to the soil and amended it with a sorrow that leached through the roots and gave the plant an extra dose of deadliness that it would carry ever afterwards.

“Oh, that Chanda could see you,” she whispered, stroking the leaves.

The angel, bored at the beginning of the rains and impatient by the time the flowers withered, looked at the plant with his nose wrinkled in disgust and confusion.

“Another poison in the world,” he declared finally, inspecting it from every angle. He had paced a track around Vitrine and the plant, round and even, but now he stood within the circle with them.

“Yes, angel?”

“Yes. Another wracken, another hellebore, another houndsdeath. You’ve only made another way for people to kill each other.”

“Oh, no,” Vitrine said sweetly. “We have made another way for people to kill each other. Chanda couldn’t do it on her own, and it would have taken me longer without your steadying hand, without your strength. What shall we name our daughter?”

Once she had watched a pair of maids kill a guardsman behind a tavern, on him like two weasels with the knives they used to pare vegetables in the kitchen. Afterwards in their room, they gazed at each other with wonder at what they had made, both the torn body in the alley and the changes they had wrought in each other with such a thing between them. Everything was new, and one reached out to touch the other’s parted lips.

The angel reared back with a fury, for an instant nothing more than a coil of light and a righteous rage older than the world. His sword—will and word and temper—flashed as quick as a snake bite over the plant, but then it froze as if he had driven it into the heart of a thousand-year pine tree.

Between his sword and the plant that would come to be known as devil’s daughter, there was Vitrine, standing straight as a spear, her eyes a dare and her mouth a cruel joke.

“Yes, angel?” she asked, and she saw the defeat in his eyes even before he would admit it.

He vanished his sword, baring his teeth and mostly a man again except for the way the light clung to his hems like mud. He spat on the ground between them and turned, wings opening to grab the air and throw him towards the cliffs where once the anchoresses lived and cried. She watched him ascend until he was grown as small and insignificant as a sandhill crane or a dropped seed, and then she turned back to their creation.

“You will remake the world a time or two, my darling,” she whispered, plucking up the lushest and most beautiful berry and popping it in her mouth. The taste of a thousand deaths stained her tongue, faithless husbands, vengeful daughters, kings and shepherds and librarians and duelists all coming to bow to their new conqueror.

It tasted very fine, and Vitrine smiled up at the darkening sky.

No one loves a city like one born to it, and no one loves a city like an immigrant. No one loves a city like they do when they are young, and no one loves a city like they do when they are old. The people loved the city of Azril in more ways than could be counted. Vitrine loved her city like demons and cats may love things, with an eye towards ownership and the threat of small mayhem.

Arvan Pilare, dark and gaunt with a neatly clipped beard and mustache, fastidious, distracted, and mostly silent, loved the city as it really was, which was to say he loved it as very few ever did.

“You know, I don’t understand you,” Vitrine said one early morning, sitting beside Arvan as he sketched the fishing ships leaving the harbor. Sometimes he thought she was a ragged man at the tavern near his apartment, and sometimes he thought she was a cockle seller who sometimes treated him to a paper packet of cockles steamed open and sprinkled with vinegar and horseradish. Today she was a knocker-up; the staff that she used to rap on windows and wake people for their morning shifts leaned by her side as she shared his perch on the walkway above the shore.

“What’s to understand?” he asked, not looking up from his drawing. It was a bad habit, one that would have gotten him robbed five or six times over if a demon hadn’t been curious about him and wanted to see how he turned out.

“You could make it more beautiful if you erased that one point off the rocks there,” Vitrine said, gesturing. “See? Then it would match the one on the other side, so they would be balanced.”

She had thought about doing just that. The spar of rock that aggravated her stood taller than most of the masts in the harbor, big enough she couldn’t budge it on her own. She was waiting for one of her siblings to pass through who might have the strength to do so. She could take them out for a dinner of fried oysters, buy them some new clothes, and then ask them to knock off that peak that had been bothering her for some time now.

Arvan made a humming noise, not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh.

“Well, it wouldn’t be real, then, would it? It wouldn’t be as good as what I am drawing now.”

“But it would be more beautiful,” Vitrine insisted, and he drew in the shadows off the sail of the small fishing boat belonging to the Umars, who had been here much longer than Vitrine herself. There was some trouble there this generation, an eldest son who didn’t want the family business, a younger daughter who did. Vitrine resolved to tend to that before it got too bad, but then Arvan spoke again.

“I don’t want it to be beautiful if it isn’t true,” he said, and she snorted, flicking the paper with her nail.

“You’re never going to sell anything,” she said, and his only response was a peaceable all right that made her frown and leave. Let the robbers have him if he couldn’t see sense.

She didn’t think about him again until her sibling Passim came to visit her the next summer. They loved the oysters and they adored the indigo skirts and light girdles hung with silver charms that were so popular that year. The two of them ended the night in the snug study of the city’s chief banker who slumbered all unknowing above, unaware that two demons were helping themselves to his sweetest wine and his strongest hashish.

They stretched out on the fine silk and wool rugs, turning the air blue with smoke, and they spoke of many things, which siblings they loved most, which they could not stand, and which they hated but also loved so much it was worse than simply hating them outright.