Page 27 of The City in Glass

He started to rise. Vitrine could see that as proud as he was, and crafted as he was, most bright, most powerful, he wouldn’t, not for a pack of ragged humans, no matter what they had survived or what might become of them without a place to land.

No, the angel wouldn’t do it for them, but …

“I want them,” she said. “I want them both. I want them to be mine, and look, I will put them in the glass case inside me, right alongside my book. They will be as important, as treasured.”

They would be treasured as war trophies. She would take them out on the longest night of the year to stroke. She would show them off to her elder siblings to make them proud of her. She’d let her younger siblings touch them. She did not know if he understood that that was what she meant, but then none of it mattered any longer because he nodded.

“They’re yours,” he whispered, and she was so delirious with delight and victory and vengeance that she bent down to slide her fingers through his hair and press her forehead against his. Their breath mingled, and when he closed his eyes, his eyelashes were long enough to graze her cheek as she nuzzled his face.

“Mine,” she said with something like reverence. “I will take such good care of them.”

She did it with a flake of flint she carved from a boulder on the beach. The waxy gray stone was struck with tiny, terribly keen crescents along the cutting edge, jagged like teeth, and the angel stopped breathing when she passed them over the place where his wings joined his flesh.

Angels, she thought as she did it, were tangles of sense and spirit, never sure if they were flesh or if they were something higher. He had wings sometimes, and sometimes he didn’t, and all that mattered to her was that after what she did, he would no longer have them at all. They would be hers, and a familiar greed overcame her as she cut them away carefully. It was like cutting clouds, like singing in sudden disharmony, like throwing precious jewels into the sea, and, towards the end, a great deal like deboning a chicken. It was flesh from fat from gristle from bone, and what was left behind was tears and a flood of golden blood on the sand.

The angel crouched down on all fours, his forehead pressed to the ground, giving the earth the soft cries that he didn’t want to give to her. Once, he struck the sand with his fist, and when he lifted it, a small crater of glass was left behind, smoking with his rage and his helplessness.

It was long, difficult work, slippery. She cast one wing down on the sand, and immediately went to the other because it seemed to her a worse mutilation to leave the work incomplete. When he would have raised his head to look, she cupped her hand over the back of his neck, pushing him down again.

He doesn’t need to see as well, she thought for some reason, and she went to work on the second wing.

It was almost sunset by the time she was done, and she was splattered with gold up to her shoulders and all down her front. She went down to the water to let saltwater clear away the worst of it, blinking at the ships that still lurked in the harbor. It felt to her as if they were ghosts from long ago. They were wraiths from the time when the angel still had both his wings and when she was not as satisfied as she was in this moment.

Why, they are survivors just as Azril is, she thought.

The angel lay curled on his side on the beach, so still she might have thought him dead except for the way his eyes were locked on her every move. His blood was, unexpectedly, drying black, and it soaked his clothes. A single rivu let had made its way over his shoulder and around his neck like a mourning ribbon around the throat of an unlucky girl. Without thinking, she reached to touch it, maybe to smear it, and his teeth snapped. She pulled back, because all right. She had not asked for his blood.

Some few steps away from him were his wings, still beating weakly without anything to glorify or gratify beyond her pleasure. If the rumors were true, they might join with the angel again if they were brought close. He might be whole again someday, but Vitrine doubted it. He might become whole again, but he would never forget that he had been torn or who had done it. Even now, his wings dimmed as she picked them up and placed them with care into her glass cabinet. They rested comfortably next to her book, the gray feathers curling gently against the sides, a drop of golden ichor hanging from a shining knob of bone.

“Well,” she said presently, turning to the angel.

“Well,” he echoed softly. He had staggered to his feet, and there was a sickness in his face, a tilt to his stance. He looked afraid to take the first steps without his wings, and Vitrine nodded with something like kindness.

“I will go tell them it is safe to land,” she said. “This cove is well sheltered from stones. They will be safe here.”

“Will they?” he asked hollowly, and to her own surprise, Vitrine reached out to squeeze the angel’s hand, pulling away as soon as she had done so.

“They will receive no harm from me. No help either, but no harm.”

In the guise of a crane, she turned away from the angel and winged across the water. As she circled the ships, she examined the brown faces that turned up to follow her flight. Soon enough, Vitrine thought, they would know her better, but right now, she was only a wonder, a messenger, a good omen when every hand in the world had been turned against them.

She circled their masts three times, and then with a high whooping cry, she flew back to the city. The ships turned to follow her, and by the time she returned to the bank, it was empty except for a few splatters of ichor and the honeycomb dropped carelessly from her hand.

FIFTEEN

Vitrine kept her word, mostly. For the first few years, she ignored the people who had come to the shores of Azril, and they, in turn, stayed out of her way. They looked upon the crumbling ruins with suspicious fear, instead building shelters down close to the river. Their songs and stories, when they were not too tired or grieved to tell them, were all about the places that they had come from, and Vitrine was not interested in that at all.

She was more concerned with a clowder of cats that had come to take residence that year. They were solid with muscle and large enough that at first she thought they were wildcats that had come down from the hills. When she walked cautiously among them, however, their tufted ears flickered towards her and their kittens pawed lightly at her feet, eager to resume the contract that cats had had with people for some time now.

“Where did you come from?” she asked, holding one calico kitten up to her face. “Did you come with that dull lot on the river? Did you descend from the northern mountains? What could you be?”

The cats acted as if the city was theirs from the beginning, but the angel was more wary. She thought that he might guide the newcomers through their wanderings in the haunted wilderness, but he was as shy of them as he was of her. Sometimes, when she was growing up some blackberry canes or rescuing a cat from some precarious perch, she saw the gleam of something holy out of the corner of her eye or glimpsed fog moving as though it were a man, but that was all.

He wasn’t always in the city, but he was there more often than he wasn’t, and slowly, in a way that she hadn’t previously, she grew used to him the way she grew used to the people on the river and the cats that she knew hadn’t lived in the city before.

Still several years went by before Vitrine saw him directly. One evening as she carried a bucket of clams from the water, there was a light among the apple trees that grew where the mansions had once stood. The fruit was at least what it had once been, or it was close enough that she couldn’t tell the difference. It was fall, and the apples, red streaked with gold, not much larger than a child’s fist, had started to fall to the ground. Soon the boars would come from the high ground to forage for them, growing fat on the fermentation in the rot, but tonight, there was only a soft green light bobbing among the trees. Vitrine tilted her head curiously and went to look.

Between the bent crowns of two trees almost beyond bearing, she found the angel knelt down, one hand touching the ground in front of him, the opposite arm around a lean and frowsy little child. The light she had seen was a clutch of lovestruck fireflies, gathered to adore the angel.