Page 34 of The City in Glass

“I’m in Azril now. I’m happy to be here. Juana wants a good place to raise little Elena, and my people are here.”

“But?”

“But my people are out there as well,” Jinan said, and the way she said it, kind but firm, reminded Vitrine of her gentlest sister, who slithered close to the earth and kept in her chest an apple of surpassing redness wound about with a long lock of black hair.

“They’re not so wonderful,” Vitrine said, and Jinan shook her head.

“They are. Come. I will tell you about them. When I was away, I wanted to tell you about everything I saw and everything I did. Will you let me?”

It was a bribe, Vitrine saw at once, a placation offered to an old auntie who had grown querulous as the sun went down. She should have spat and cursed Jinan, ungrateful girl with a city she didn’t want, terrible betrayer, but she took a deep breath and sat down at the chair opposite Jinan’s instead, holding the jungle cat’s skull to her as if it was a baby. She stroked the dome of the brain case, teased her fingertips over the sharp edges of the orbital bones that once cradled the great green eyes.

“Tell me about this one,” she said finally. “Then tell me everything.”

Jinan laughed and did as Vitrine demanded, spinning stories about tall towers that flung fire and fields of white flowers that grew only on the battlefields in the south, their very roots nurtured on the blood of the fallen.

“I want your child,” Vitrine said as Jinan’s stories drew to a close. It was almost dawn, the sky outside the window pane more gray than black.

“You can’t have her,” Jinan said with a shrug. “She belongs to herself.”

“Still. She has people here, your parents, people she hasn’t even met yet. Wherever you go, send her back here. Just for a year, or even less than that. Only make sure that she comes sometime.”

Jinan regarded her curiously. In a few hours, when the glamour had worn off the night, she would wonder again whether it was really the demon of Azril that she had talked to or if it was just a dream, vivid and drawn whole cloth from coming home.

“What will you give her?”

Vitrine laughed, happy and pained at once.

“What do you think I will give her?” Vitrine asked, waving towards the window.

“The city. You would give her Azril.”

“I gave it to you as well. It’s still yours,” Vitrine couldn’t help pointing out, and Jinan inclined her head graciously.

“All right. No matter how far we go. A year.”

Jinan opened her eyes, blinking in the faint morning light. She hadn’t been to bed all night, and a little guiltily, she went upstairs to find Juana still asleep, tiny Elena snug in the cradle by the bed. When Jinan came to settle beside her, Juana’s dark eyebrows relaxed into gentle curves and her mouth loosened, suddenly easier.

Jinan stroked Elena’s downy cheek before coming to rest behind Juana, who still slept badly. Something tugged at the back of her mind, itchy like bad wool, but then it was gone, and she fell into a deep sleep.

On the roof, Vitrine watched the sunrise, unblinking, and the angel climbed up the side of the house to sit next to her.

“It’s still her city,” Vitrine said mutinously, and the angel shrugged.

“It belongs to many people,” he said, and sighing, she nodded.

SEVENTEEN

Jinan and Juana left for Mato Lorno when Elena was two years old, and so they were gone when plague appeared in the city eight years later.

It began with one ship carrying a wealth of copper into port, and it spread like fire had through the streets, the richer parts of the city first, and then the poorer, trickling down as fast and as generously as money never did.

From the wall they had built to defend against raiders, Vitrine watched invisible imps racing through the streets, their faces red and ink on their fingertips, marking doors for the ones who would come after them. First the cough, then the fever, then the swelling at the throat and the eyes and the groin. A slow decline and then a fast one, and soon enough, the gravediggers had formed their own guild, fighting with the young Lord Mayor who demanded a grave and a shroud for each death, even against the swelling tide.

Vitrine, who had better eyes than most, saw the scrawny figures of the plague lords walking the streets, finding the doors that had been marked for them. They entered, and they performed their deadly business, and they bowed to the birds that let them in. Vitrine could see that as well, how the illness traveled in the flights of pigeons that were kept in the dovecotes. Pigeon meat was cheap and savory, and their eggs sold by the quarter- and half-hundred count. Their feathers filled mattresses, their dung nourished the gardens, and they passed the illness to their masters who in turn passed it back to them.

She watched grim-eyed and cold as the illness hid in first the pigeons and then the people. Just when it was isolated on one side, it leaped to the other, and within just a few cycles, the dead were piled high in the graveyards, and the gravediggers and the mayor left off their fight.

There could be no dignity for the dead when the living lived so close and in such fear of them, and so they were thrown into the deepest quarries. In the years to come, the old mines would be reckoned haunted, and from the depths would come terrible and ragged cries for help.