Page 44 of The City in Glass

“Oh, Shani,” Vitrine breathed, and she took from the crate a volume wrapped in waterproofed paper to keep it dry. It was so new the pages had not been cut, so young that the ink seemed bled into the paper.

“A Natural History of the Glass-Winged Butterfly,” Vitrine read. “Oh my darling, is it real?”

“The book, yes,” Shani said with a smile. “The butterfly, I suppose you will have to take that up with the author.”

She pulled out one book after another, and then when that crate was empty, there was another, and another.

“How did you collect all of these?” she asked. “You must have sacked a city.”

“Nothing so exciting,” Shani demurred. “There are some people who are tricked, and two or three who are dead. Do you like your present?”

“Ever so much,” Vitrine said, drawing out another book, and then another. She forced herself to look away from the books, though she kept a volume on the war machines of Evelyn clutched to her chest.

“What a fine thing you have given me. Still, you must stay the year, though. I love the books immediately, but I would like to have the chance to love you for a while as well.”

“Of course,” Shani said graciously, and Vitrine warmed to her manners and her generosity, even if she suspected her of an abstinent streak and a set of scales and measures where other people kept their hearts. What a good thing it was that she had so much experience loving all sorts.

She found the angel a few hours later, seated on a crate at the rear of the apartment and reading a volume of alchemical theory. The book with its red leather cover and gold tooling looked delicate in his killer’s hands, and as she hovered in the door, bemused, he spoke without looking up.

“Surely they know it is a heresy,” he said, troubled. “Surely they know that if they did this, they would rend the world as we know it to flames and to dust.”

“I’m sure they don’t know,” Vitrine said, prying open another crate. This one held botanical treatises and, to her delight, romances as well, all mixed in with democratic abandon. If she had her way, all libraries would be arranged like this, promiscuous, free to mingle, and truth found everywhere and nowhere at all.

There was a family living in the apartment above, and a rather poor poet in the attic. They would have to go, she decided, though the frail new ghosts that had come to live in the house in recent years could stay. The new library in Azril was going to be beautiful, and if she thought of boarded-up windows and a young man too afraid to venture over the doorstep, it was only for a moment.

TWENTY-ONE

Shani did not stay in Azril, no matter what Vitrine promised her, and the angel went with her when her year was up, taking up a sailor’s kit bag and joining the crew as if he was meant to be there.

“I’ll stay with her at least until she gains Brid,” he said as Vitrine shadowed them down to the docks. They were full again, with pennants and flags from all over the world. It was not what it had been the night the angel and his brothers came over the water, but Vitrine noted absently that it was getting harder to remember that older harbor when this one was so very lively with sailors, smugglers, spies, and soldiers.

“And then where will you go?” she asked, only curious, but it made him smile, white teeth flashing in his dark beard.

“I haven’t been away from the city for a while. They surely must have built that basilica in Combes by now, and there’s that rumor of the horned white snake somewhere in the sacred springs of Soeur Martine. They say it can heal anything with just the touch of its horn.”

“Oh, if you find the snake, bring it back here. It can live in one of the Old Town wells,” Vitrine said, briefly distracted, and then she frowned, shaking her head.

“When should I come back?” he asked, and Vitrine shrugged, her shoulders sharp.

“Why in the world should it matter to me?”

“It has never been my lot to question why,” the angel said almost primly, and then, softer, “Will I be allowed back if I leave?”

Vitrine lifted her chin proudly, crossing her arms over her chest. In her pocket was a palm-sized treatise on the wild horses of Mato Lorno, who traveled the mountains in an enormous elliptical circuit. Every spring found them in the same sheltered valley. Foals born late in the peaks knew their way to this valley, and they continued to know it even when they had been broken to the saddle and the bridle, their shod hooves kicking up anxious and eager sparks when they were ready to go home.

“I don’t stand guard on the docks, barring the way to those who come,” she said haughtily.

“And if I come through the mountains?” There was a slight sway to his voice as if he had remembered something of the hypnotic nature of words, how a sung chant and reply could bury itself in your ear, and then your mind, and then your heart.

“Then you have come through the mountains,” Vitrine exclaimed. “What do I care?”

“But you will not bar my way?”

“It is not my business where you go.”

It looked for a moment as if the angel wanted to say something more, but then he shook his head, and turned, gaining the ship just as the sails unfurled and billowed out with a snap.

She watched Shani watching her from the deck, waving to each other until the ship was just a dark speck on the horizon. She was waving to Shani, who she knew she would never see again, and of course she was waving to no one else.