Page 33 of The City in Glass

“No?”

“They’re laying the streets all wrong. We used to have wide avenues, so broad and open that you could pass easily and still have plenty of space for vendors. These new streets, they’re so narrow, and people are going to start stopping them up in order to charge for passage. Do you know that they are building a wall to the west, a wall with four gates to protect the city? We never had a wall before, not like that.”

“They’re new. They’re just building as they need right now.”

Her hand hovered over the town. When she looked between her fingers, she could see the streets that were of course too narrow, the weavers’ square that had sprung up where they used to do bear baiting, the hundred and one little things that rubbed at her like a pebble in her boot.

“I just don’t know. Perhaps it would be better to start over now, while it would be easier to get it right.”

From behind her, the angel affected a cough.

“You know, where I come from, it’s widely held that this, all of it, is just beginning. Perhaps it might be forgiven for being only a beginning.”

Vitrine froze over like a lake in sudden winter. If she turned to look at him, she might go into a rage, the kind of fury that would rip and tear until it was forcibly stopped, because there was no longer any way for her to stop herself. The wind that blew in from the sea reminded her that he had come over the sea as well, and the warmth of the hearths of the town rose up to her hand, recalling flame.

Then she put her hand down. Without a word, she stepped over the edge of the cupola, letting her crane wings bear her skyward on the updraft.

Let him climb down, she thought. Let him crawl for all his days on this earth, and may they be long and terrible.

But she let the city stand as it was, with its misplaced quarters and its narrow crooked streets and the gods that were slightly different from what they had been.

It took Jinan twenty years, but she returned at the head of a small swift fleet laden down with a wealth of gold, an ark’s worth of seeds and sprouts, a few adventurous scholars, and a new baby.

To Vitrine’s delight, she brought with her a pair of Mercer siblings, boy and girl, barely older than Jinan had been when she left. They were darker than her Mercers had been, but Vitrine recognized their cleverness and their ambition immediately. She wondered if one of them would care to change their name to Malabec, because there were some things she missed no matter what came, but for the moment, she installed them in the rookery at the north end of the city, where they might grow up strong and bright and dangerous.

Jinan came back missing some of the optimism she had left with and her right arm above the elbow, and while her parents wailed over the loss, she was philosophic. Vitrine came to see her in the night, standing like a shadow by the hearth of the fine house her riches had built.

“Welcome home, dearest,” Vitrine said, and Jinan rose to meet her, pulling her into a hard one-armed hug.

“I thought I dreamed you,” Jinan said. “Where’s the other? I thought if you were real, he must be as well.”

Vitrine ignored her, pacing through the room to see the treasures mounted on the walls and stacked on the shelves. There were tapestries dyed bright gold and red and a sword she had taken from a robber king. There were the horns of a musk ox carved with the story of the great tiger of the Carcanet Mountains and a small box with a winding key that would play a preserved kind of music, never-changing and stale.

“You have gone so far and done so well, but I am so very happy to have you home.”

“For a while, anyway,” Jinan said, pacing in front of the fire. “It’s not as I remembered it. I am not sure it fits me any longer.”

Vitrine turned, the skull of a great jungle cat in her hands.

“Of course it does,” she said with surprise. “You were firstborn here. Your name is in my book.”

Jinan shrugged restlessly, rubbing the stump of her arm.

“It’s smaller. And colder.”

Vitrine drew back, unaccountably hurt.

“Well, it will grow greater. And it’s winter right now, of course. You’ve not had a proper Azril summer since you left.”

Jinan smiled at her, leaning back in her chair. She had a sailor’s roll to her walk now, and a broadness through the thigh and hip that Vitrine hadn’t even guessed at when she was a girl.

“I’ve lived more of my life away than I have at home.”

“But it’s still home,” Vitrine insisted. “It is. You sent back so many wonderful things, brought so much to this place.”

To me, she didn’t say.

“You’re home now,” Vitrine said, hating the hurt in her voice, but Jinan met her eyes with an almost uncanny steadiness. For perhaps the first time, it struck her how long Jinan had been gone, and further, how long it was for a human. Twenty years passed no more swiftly for a demon than it did for a human, but for a human, it was enough time to grow, to change, to learn to want entirely new things and to forget others.