Page 8 of The City in Glass

“This is Azril, my girl, the greatest city of the age. You are never alone here, and the lights will never go out.”

In this room, in this one room left standing by chance and architectural luck, it was true, and Vitrine nodded. There was a moment where she doubted she could leave. She would only stay in the Green Room, sipping the memory of Viola’s smoky tea and listening to her talk about the warring merchant families and ghost ships coming into port. She could have.

Instead she climbed to her feet and went to kiss Viola gently on the cheek before she left, closing the door behind her with a final click.

After a moment’s thought, she touched the peeling walls and the room crumbled, a patch of green amid the paler stone. She didn’t need the reminder, and she didn’t need the temptation.

Viola and all her family were written in her book, and Vitrine went to rebuild the city for them as well as herself.

SIX

The winter freeze and the spring thaw had changed the city from char to rot. In some places, Gallowscross, the debtors’ prison, Camellia Street with its elegant galleries, and Carnelian Street with its elegant brothels, the muck was almost up to Vitrine’s knees. It was black, slimy with the spring runoff, and when she waded through it, it clung to her hems and stained her bare legs. Throughout the city, she could see sheaves of green grass and tiny white flowers coming up, and the insult to what had gone before almost made her dizzy with anger. It was new life, but not the life that had been there before, and she tore them up when she saw them, grabbing them in great handfuls to throw away.

It was a losing fight, however, as were the clouds of flies that descended when the weather warmed, and the enormous flocks of birds that came after them. There were her grief-stricken weavers, of course, but there were also rock doves come to nest in what was left of the tall narrow shops in Hyland Street and the dusky hawks that preferred the tanneries where mice and rats darted through the knobs of iron slag. The seawall along the lower districts had broken entirely, flooding out Capewell and Goresuch, and into the half-sunken quarters came the stilt-walkers, the herons and cranes that drifted the tips of their wings elegantly through the water and the black-legged kittiwakes that came to replace their red-legged cousins who had been destroyed in the blast. The gulls of course lived wherever they could, quarreling among themselves and laughing hoarsely in their new kingdom.

“It could be a city of birds, I suppose,” Vitrine said to herself one night. She sat on the beach at a small fire, curled in on herself against the cold that had returned. “I could have an eagle for the Lord Mayor, and a siege of cranes instead of a council. I could have plovers instead of children, and doves instead of market girls, and magpies instead of thieves.”

It was an interesting idea, but she hated it, missed her mayors and her thieves and her market girls too much to see them replaced with beaked faces and forms clad in feathers. It was almost enough to make her want to raze the city again, send great clouds of feathers flying into the air and streaks of thin blood down the towers, but she held herself back from it.

The next day, Vitrine went haunting the mansions that crumbled on the west side of the city, where the broad lawns had already begun to revert to thickets of trash pine. Vitrine pulled up the pines, throwing them down into the sinkholes formed by the hollow foundations remaining. The pines were fast and vicious, and if they were given a chance, they would choke out the beech and oak that she wanted there instead. It was hot and irritating work, and as she did it, she cursed softly to herself. It would be unlucky land after that, but it was fine. Unlucky people could live there, and they would make the people who saw them feel luckier by comparison.

A few times, Vitrine reached for a pine sapling only to find that it was a blackberry wand instead, studded with stickers and thrusting hopefully from the earth. They invariably bloodied her, but she allowed them to stay, along with the apple saplings that twisted from the ground. She didn’t know who would come for them when at last they bore fruit, but in the meantime they could feed the birds and the deer.

Close to evening, Vitrine looked up to see a figure darting through the ruins of the Demorsico estate, so fast that even her very sharp eyes were not certain what she had seen. A moment later, she was after them, a stray brier snagging the skin of her foot and scraping it terribly in her haste.

“Wait,” she cried. “Wait, just wait for me.”

The Demorsico were secret sorcerers and necromancers, and their walls, built with their dead enemies and strengthened with blood and curses against those who would wrong them, had survived somewhat better than their neighbors. Vitrine ran through the doorway and darted through rooms that were open to the sky, following the glimpse of her quarry through arcades where fallen stone statues left hands and arms grasping for the sky.

They’ve come back, she thought wildly. I knew they would, this city is theirs and they came back …

She came around the corner to the bedroom of Avaline Demorsico, fifteen last year when the angels brought down fire. There was still a trace of faint blue paint on the walls, and a latticed window, nearly whole, cast strange and twisting shadows around the place. There was a frantic cooing echoing off the walls, and for a moment Vitrine flashed to the dovecotes, where the birds would return year after year even when the bars had been shattered and the roof fallen in.

There were no birds in the room, however, only a form pressed to the rearmost darkest corner. The light showed Vitrine a pair of long dirty feet and the strangely pristine edge of a lacy white hem. Vitrine recognized the lace. It was a pattern of exceeding delicacy, wrought from an abstracted design of ram’s horns. She knew it well because it had been all the rage in Azril that summer, the one that she was trying very hard not to refer to as the last summer, and only the richest and most fashionable would wear it.

“Avaline,” Vitrine whispered, because she had been there when the girl was born, her mother attended by a goodwoman because Miao Demorsico did not trust the doctors that she was owed by her wealth and her position. Miao had been a raw girl from Kailin when she, along with a little help from Vitrine’s finest pair of enchanted slippers, caught the eye, the lust, and then the heart of the eldest Demorsico boy.

Miao had been just what Vitrine needed to shake the noble family to its foundations so that it could build up from the rubble, strong as it was before but with the foreign girl’s will and grace and unyielding temper. Even good blood would go to rot if it was allowed to stand stagnant, and from that ruin had come Avaline, the latest scion of the city to whom Vitrine had dedicated an entire page in her book.

She couldn’t come to the town, Vitrine thought, her breath coming fast and hopeful. She and Miao were fighting, and Miao had forbidden her from leaving. Has she survived here all this time, dressed in lace and eating bugs and frogs? Oh my poor darling.

With a soft cry, Vitrine came forward to take the girl in her arms, but instead she found herself beaten back by a flurry of hands thrown at her face. The blows were too fast to do real damage, open-palmed and panicked, and Vitrine stumbled away with a yelp. Then, eyes narrowing and regardless of the girl’s panicked cries and flying hands, she seized her by the soft arm and dragged her forward into the light coming through the broken roof.

There had been hopeful tears on Vitrine’s face, but they felt like salt in the wound when she saw the girl’s face. The year before, all the Demorsico, from patriarch to foreign wife to littlest baby, had been immortalized in marble busts. They were scattered through the house and the grounds, and of course the bust of the longed-for Demorsico princess had been kept in pride of place, the sheltered rose arbor. Avaline was a lively girl, but she had no special looks. She was sharp-nosed with eyes that were set close together and a wider mouth than was fashionable. Marble would never have captured her sly humor or her flashing temper, so instead the sculptor had had to make do with simply making her beautiful.

That was the face that the sculptor had given her, heart-shaped, sleek, and flawless. Like marble, there was something still about it, something fixed about the eyes, and it came to Vitrine that she had been made by someone without any talent for it.

“What are you?” Vitrine demanded, and the girl opened her mouth to let out a warbling chitter, swallowed to the back of her throat and fearful.

Vitrine stared, because she recognized that sound. It was the family cry of the sandhill cranes that nested in the ornamental ponds of the mansions. They had been terrible pests when the ponds were stocked with calico carp, but now they were their own kind of nobility, stilt-walking through the shallows with their beaks held like rapiers at the ready.

In surprise, her hand loosened slightly, but when the crane-turned-girl thrashed to get free, Vitrine tightened her grasp again because she had realized exactly who had made her without any talent for it or indeed any love.

Vitrine stalked from the Demorsico mansion, dragging the crane-girl by the arm and slamming the door closed behind her so hard that it fell off its hinges. She didn’t care about that because the Demorsico were dead, all of them, and it didn’t matter any longer if the sandhill cranes went stalking into their house or if the bats flew in to nest in what remained of the ceilings. None of it mattered.

The sun had gone down, setting a sudden chill across the land, and Vitrine raised her eyes to the clouded sky and the jagged peaks of the shattered buildings around them. The girl squalled helplessly, and the cranes picking through the pond nearby raised their heads in alarm. Perhaps as recently as a few hours ago, they had been her parents. Now they only looked at her with their small black eyes, unnerved and afraid of the thing that looked like a human but spoke like a crane.

“You think you’re funny?” Vitrine demanded. “You think this will hurt me? You think this will make me think twice?”