Page 46 of The City in Glass

She looked up from her reverie to find that two weeks had passed. Azril captured the general’s son, a dreamy- eyed youth who they hanged from the walls in fury and vengeance. It was a quick thing, ill-considered and hasty. In apology, she waited with him on the wall until his mother, dead of devil’s daughter poison delivered by a jealous mistress, came to pick him up.

The youth and his mother were exactly what she would have wanted for Azril in better times, and she would have written their names in her book with such beautiful inks if her hand, shaking all the time now, could remember how to write at all.

It was too loud and too bloody for her to take her book out. Her book was too fragile, her hand too unsure. Instead as the war tumbled on, she left it locked inside glass, refusing to add more to it, refusing to let it remind her of what she had written in its pages. She watched in slight befuddlement as the observatory came down, one terrible enemy cannon seeming to seek it out for malicious destruction.

“What a shame,” Vitrine said out loud, walking barefoot over the shattered glass and melted brass. The astronomers were covered up with the heavy felt cloths that had once protected the great lenses. The lenses didn’t need them anymore, and Vitrine wondered at the water on her face that fell with no rain in the sky.

The war continued. People died, terribly and easily, both those who were mourned and those who were not. Soon enough, the weight of grief blotted out everything that was not rage, and the balance of the two fueled each other, kept up with the dreary cannonade and made the slow starvation of the people of Azril a little more bearable until of course it wasn’t. Vitrine could have told them that they could eat only rage so long before it was fatal, but by then, she had stopped talking, even to herself.

Help was coming from Padri. It arrived in the form of a single ship of mercenaries and expectations of extravagant thanks should Azril survive.

Help was coming from Combes, but it was blown off course, or perhaps it was never sent at all.

Vitrine knew that help never came, and as the cold winds descended, the invaders breached the city wall, streaming through the break five hours before dawn.

By then, Vitrine had been sitting on the front steps of the library ruins for three weeks, crouched in on herself, wondering if the sea would take Azril like the sand had taken Saqarra, wondering if this time it would take her too. She curled around the book inside her, still not daring to take it out, and the blood in the streets rose up to lap at her bare toes.

She barely noticed when the most recent Malabec Mercer used what was left of the library for a last stand, and she didn’t look up when a gentle hand touched her shoulder, tugging back the wool scarf she had pulled over her head to make sure it was really her.

The angel had to come overland, because no ships would sail to Azril, and coming into the city, he had picked up a sword. He swung it in an arc that reflected his terrible light, and he took the burning fumes of the city into himself with a deep breath, eyes kindling dragons.

“Tell me I can,” he said, and for an instant, he thought she was too far gone, too sunk in horror and pain to respond, but she rose, moving like a statue would move if it could.

Vitrine stood on the last intact and unbroken part of the library stairs, and she pointed towards the fighting, her arm as straight as a spear. She could no longer speak, and it was only dirt and blood on her face because her tears had gone somewhere else, but it was enough, and the angel turned.

Vitrine felt his wings beating frantically against the glass, and she wrapped her arms around her chest as if they might escape. She watched as he dropped his human guise, stood up bright and burning as he had so long ago.

Will you give way? he had asked her, and she never had.

He could not soar above the city, but she could no more take away his faculty for destruction than she could take the breath out of the air or the salt from the sea. The sword he carried was nothing more than will sharpened, and death ran after him like a child trying to keep up.

The screams went up, and the tides of the people in the street turned. Vitrine knew that he had been too long away, that he would not always be able to tell invader from citizen, her people from those who had come to conquer them.

The angel walked fast in Azril, and those who were faster than he was gained the wall. They escaped through the breach and through gates both common and secret, they escaped to sea, and he let them go. Those who saw him pass remembered different things, and afterwards they dreamed of him, love without mercy and fury without holiness.

An hour before dawn, an eerie quiet swept over Azril like a velvet cloth over a half-finished game of dominoes. It had never been so silent before except that terrible morning after Summersend, but it was not dead. It was only that ev eryone who still lived in the city, citizen and invader alike, was crowded as still as stone in cellars, in midden heaps, in belfries, and in barrels. They were made all alike by terror, and in the years to come, it would bind them together until they could imagine no allegiance save what was forged under the fear of the angel’s terrible love.

The angel made three rounds of the city, and finally he returned to the library, where Vitrine stood waiting for him.

“It’s done,” he said, gesturing to the ruin behind him.

Vitrine nodded, because whatever other flaws the angel was prey to, dishonesty was not one of them.

“All right. Do you want to be free?”

She spread her hand, and his wings, faintly pearly even in the darkest part of the night, rose up over her head, as perfect as the day she had taken them.

The angel looked away.

“I don’t want you to ask me that.”

She folded his wings away again as neatly as a conjurer disappearing a dove or a cartographer erasing a road or a town.

“What do you want?”

It was not, Vitrine imagined, a question that was often asked of angels. She waited and waited, patient as she could be for things that mattered.

“I want,” he said carefully, “for you to love me as I love you.”