Page 30 of The City in Glass

The figure passed through the celebrating crowd, and Vitrine and the angel both tensed as the fluttering rags brushed past Jinan’s cheek. Vitrine had never fought with a psychopomp before, and even if she won, it was widely reckoned a bad thing for demons to quarrel with death. Fortunately, the figure did not pause, instead coming to stand over a woman who sat at the edge of the spring, her face tilted up to the sky and her lips wet and red. The figure hovered there, waiting patiently, and Vitrine nodded.

“Not unlucky at all, angel,” she said. “One thing leaves, and another comes.”

One city falls and another rises? whispered an insidious little voice in her head, and she shook it off.

A sudden thumping made both of them look up. It was a likely looking young woman with a frame drum, an excited look on her face. The drum looked new, and the drummer did too, new again after what had come before.

She must have left her old drum behind, Vitrine realized. She should have new and better here.

There was no reluctance, no hesitation. The beat went on, two short and one long, and then the people from the ships were on their feet, taking hands in trios and dancing in small circles to the rhythm she set. One voice rose up, high and warbling, and others came to join it.

“I know this one,” the angel said unexpectedly. “They danced it in Alisar by the sea. I was there for a while after you told me to leave.”

“You went dancing? You?”

He frowned at her, but, she noticed with some interest, his fingers tapped out the rhythm against the column down by his hip, where perhaps he thought no one would notice it.

“There is no rule against it.”

“No, it is only that I can imagine you taking your place among the men with their leather trousers and the women in their embroidered dresses. You must have looked like a goose honking and flapping your way through the measure.”

“I did not. I am—”

He cut himself off, and Vitrine wondered what he had been about to say, whether it was that he was not a goose, or that he was above such taunts or even that he was quite a good dancer. He looked like he was going to be sullen at her, which she could never abide, so she nudged him shoulder to shoulder. There was something softly stinging where they touched, pain meant to admonish both of them to remember their places, but she ignored it, and so did he.

They watched the humans spin and dance, and Vitrine found herself thinking not of how they’d danced in Azril before the end but of the stars above them, their paths so fixed from night to night if you only had a human’s short span to watch them. From her vantage point and from his, however, they whirled like Azril’s new people did now, catching each other by the hand and circling one another until one or both extinguished, swelling redly before subsiding into coals or shedding their fire in one great breath that stunned the other dancers around them.

Vitrine tilted her head back, gazing up at the stars. They looked the same as they had before, and she pointed to one of the brightest.

“There. Do you remember that one before she took the north? Before every ship in the sea set their prows by her light?”

The angel glanced up, inspecting the star where she shone.

“I do, and I remember the ones that came before him. He has held the honor for some while now. He holds it well.”

He pointed in his turn at another star, sparkling modestly closer to the jagged black tree line.

“There. He’ll be the next to guide the world.”

Vitrine exhaled sharply with annoyance, edging back from him again. Of course he could not talk of such things as a normal person would.

“And when she does, I shall speak of her. Honestly, angel, can nothing be good enough as it is? Can we not love things for what they are while we have them?”

The angel started to answer her, but then there was some upset among the crowd, Jinan fallen down among the dancers and cutting her lip open. She started to cry, and her eimi came to scoop her up in their arms and wash the wound out with water. Jinan cried as if it was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, and Vitrine realized with amusement that it was.

“Do you love them?”

The question took her by surprise, and she looked at the angel narrowly, but he was only looking at Jinan, already done crying, already darting back among the dancers and taking their hands to make herself a part of their whole.

“Of course I don’t love them yet. Love takes more than just a good party and some apples. Love takes lifetimes.”

“It doesn’t. Not always.”

The bitterness rose up in his voice like the taste of clove through sugar candy, something sharp and significant. She liked him best with it, because sugar alone was so dull and plain and because once you have mixed a drop of clove oil into a vat of sugar, nothing in the world could take it out.

“No, not always,” she said peaceably.

The dancing continued, shifting to the rounds where everyone took hands, those who could stand and those who couldn’t, swaying and singing. Vitrine’s vision blurred, and she saw a time when the rounds would be larger with more people, and then larger yet, great enough to circle the whole of Azril-that-was and more.