Page 22 of The City in Glass

They sat like statues, and for the long hours of the night, she slid from one to the other, the thing in the darkness, the thing with claws, and she sat on their backs and hovered over their heads.

“Azril was set to fire by angels who came from the east. Azril fell because the angels spoke,” she insisted, and no one was foolish enough to ask her again what sin deserved her crumbled towers and the silence after the festival.

She picked through their minds as the stars spun overhead, the Carriage carrying the Weaving Girl chased by the Demon who loved her. There were one or two men with cracks inside them enough that she could lever them wide if she wished, opening up chasms into which whole families could fall.

Vitrine toyed with the idea, let them feel the whisper of her passage and the depth of their own frailty, and then she let it go. It was enough that they knew, and so long as they remembered that Azril fell because the angels spoke, they could continue as cracked men instead of broken ones.

Finally, the sun slipped a gleaming edge over the horizon, and the hold she had on them broke. She slid into a shadow of driftwood, and the men, casting many glances behind them towards Azril, hurriedly packed to return to their ship.

“Wait,” she said, looking at them from the top of a dune, and with dread scored on their faces, they turned to her.

They will not forget that night in a hurry, she thought with satisfaction. They will not forget me so soon, even if I am not Horu or Bavion.

“Leave your clothes on the beach,” she said, and though they looked back and forth between each other, they stripped to the skin and set off again for their ship.

This time, she let them go, and when the striped sail disappeared over the horizon, Vitrine went down to the beach to pick through the piles of discarded garments.

The clothes were rough, of course, wool and linen rather than the silk that had once flowed into Azril like a shining road, but they had been gaily dyed with madder and woad and barberry, set with salt and iron whose savor she could still taste in the threads.

Since the fall of the city, she had gone around in rags when she even thought of it, and in the long days of bury ing the dead and clearing out the stone, her skin served to cover her as well as anything else.

Now she walked among the pile of clothes as if she were at Folade’s on Weave Street, with the smart girls bringing her a dish of pink sugar with her tea and a dozen grades of silk at her fingertips. Folade’s had closed well before Azril went up in flames, Vitrine recalled. Folade had had designs on dressing the Lord Mayor’s family, exclusively and in perpetuity, but her head was turned by an immortal mercenary from Phyrros. The mercenary sailed east with a sail patched with silk and the most talented dressmaker on the continent beside her, not to mention a king’s ransom of silk in the hold, and that had been that.

She will be venerable in her tomb now, if she did not meet with some accident before, Vitrine thought. I wonder if she had children to carry on her trade, if they were half so clever as she was, as ambitious and as skilled.

She had decided that the Mercers, the ones who left, weren’t hers, and they weren’t. She paused, however, thinking of the children of Folade. Folade always wanted children, if not from her own body than of her heart and her wits. It was tempting, seductive even, to imagine one of those children in a workroom on what might someday be Weave Street again, their head bent over a cutting table as their dressmaker’s shears snipped through wool and silk, a tape measure dyed in cochineal thrown carelessly around their neck.

Folade will never return, but perhaps her grandchildren might, Vitrine thought, and a queer shiver ran down her spine. Instead of looking back at the broken city behind her, she looked out over the sea as well, a sailor’s wide orange sash clutched in her hands.

Where had Folade and her mercenary gone? Vitrine’s throat suddenly closed with an almost hundred-year worry about whether that mercenary had taken good care of her, if she was as careful with her mortal dressmaker as she wouldn’t be of her own nearly indestructible body.

Immortal or not, I will tear her into bits so small that not even Folade’s ghost will be able to stitch her back together if she hurt her.

Folade had left so quickly, even for a demon who reckoned a generation a small enough amount of time to spend enjoying a holiday by the river. Phyrros, likely, and then perhaps on to Muying? To the wet paving stones of Brid or the ever-burning towers of Binh Hoa? Who knew?

Vitrine glanced back at the city behind her, the stab of pain inevitable, but rueful frustration coming to live with it as well.

No fine patrons for their skills, no litters or carriages, no streets, no lights, and no one to dress.

She put on a large ocher shirt and a pair of indigo trousers spangled with white rings from where the fabric had been tied tight before dyeing. The orange sash, the best of the lot even to her inexpert fingers, she wrapped around her waist tightly, letting the fringed end hang down to her knees.

Vitrine turned to the horizon where Folade and her mercenary had gone.

“Come back,” she said. “Please. Come home.”

Newly dressed, she walked back to the fallen buildings to make sure they had a home to come back to.

TWELVE

Vitrine first came to the city clinging to a dream of heavy-headed red flowers bleeding their sedative scent into the air. She remembered roots and leaves, trowels and garden knives and eyes keen for any sign of white rot or mites. She wanted to love her city like a gardener loved her garden, with work, with occasional curses, with puzzle-solving and strange fixes, and finally with wonder for what lifted its head up to the sun.

That was the dream, and it was a good one, but the experience was a little more like walking through the bazaars in her lost city in the south, not the grand markets, but the lesser street affairs, where every year the households brought out their old things, their dented tea-urns, their dead grandparents’ canes, their children’s outgrown clothes and their books of outdated poetry. You would mostly find junk there, though often it was junk that looked better than your own junk, but once in a while, you could also find treasures.

Vitrine rifled through the dreaming minds of her new home and found in an overly grand house on Clayborn Street the only daughter of a retired pirate king. When she was younger, she had played pirate herself in her father’s old salt-cracked coats in between lessons from tutors from all over the continent. Her father had stolen her from her mother on the Adani Islands, and that hurt, buried under a dozen years of good food and sweet tea and meticulous care, was still there, was just the kind of opportunity that Vitrine liked best.

She came to the pirate princess on moonlight and prised her fingers into the crack that neglect and brutal hurt had made. Vitrine smoothed the princess’s black and coiled hair back from her ear and whispered to her of many things. She nurtured the discontent and nursed the ambition. She winnowed out cowardice and guilt like weeds, and when the princess was ready, she told her of a certain key that her father left in the mouth of a gargoyle on their roof.

One slick and rainy night, while her father was seeing to his ships on the floating pier, the princess braved the widow’s walk in her bare feet, an old leather coat over her shift. When she reached into the gargoyle’s fanged and smiling mouth, she found the key that she somehow knew was there.