Page 39 of The City in Glass

“Well, that depends on what he likes. There’s plenty there. Perhaps you will get what you like as well.”

“I doubt it.”

“If only you could be pleased by something as simple as a brothel. Go on.”

The angel might have protested, but Alex looked around in confusion.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look like that before, old man. What moves?”

Vitrine, close enough she could have leaned in to kiss Alex’s mouth, smiled with all her teeth bared.

“I do. In the shadows, in the river. In that heart you’ll give away over and over again and the pride that you never will. I move, Alex.”

The angel snorted, taking him by the shoulder and turning him away from her decisively.

“Come on. You need a meal and some sleep.”

She watched them go, absently ducking under the dark winged thing that had come to collect Alex’s victim. What a wonder it might be if only the angel could be eased and comforted at a brothel. What the world might look like then.

At the mouth of the alley, Alex glanced over his shoulder, not for one last look at the sorry scene, but because he thought he had glimpsed out of the corner of his eye the motion of a hand, first tipped upright and then languidly laid down, palm up, like a drawbridge. It was a thrown kiss, and the place where the other man had cut him stung suddenly.

Then his priest tugged him back into line and he hurried after, and he never thought about that hand or that kiss again.

In truth, she never intended to look in on Alex as much as she did. She had matters to attend to as Azril grew tall again, ships to send out, building plans to inspect, people to keep or send away, but again and again, she looked around and there he was. It was hard to miss a young swordsman with an angel at his heels, and whenever she sent over a drink or a meal, she made sure it was carried by some interesting, dangerous thing that was sure to capture Alex’s attention and to make the angel despair of his charge’s chances of living until morning. By the end of Alex’s year, he was strong and swaggering, pretending to be the best sword for hire in the city and mostly getting away with it. These days, there was plenty of opportunity for swords and bloodshed. Gold poured into Azril, enough to pay for city guards and mercenaries alike, and Alex flirted with their company as if he was always on the verge of falling in love.

“Well?” asked the angel in exhaustion. He was so tired that he didn’t even protest the picture they made, the worn-out mendicant friar sitting down in the tavern with Vitrine in her fine courtesan’s dress. His hair was as dark as ever, but she liked to imagine gray threaded through the black, some outward sign of his harried, harrowed year.

“Well?” she echoed, sipping delicately at her drink.

“Well, will he do?”

“Do what?” she asked with interest. “I only asked Jinan for a year with her child. It’s been a year. And it looks like he’s going to pick a fight with that big man from Yfs. That’s going to go poorly for him.”

The angel rose from the table with a weary totter, but laughing, she sent the man from Yfs on his way.

Alex came strutting to the table, taking the third chair and giving Vitrine what he likely considered a seductive look. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good yet, either.

“Well hello, bright eyes,” he said, leaning in. “Is my old priest taking good care of you?”

“Let’s not talk about your dull old priest,” she said, giving him a slow and feline blink. “Let us talk about what you want instead.”

“Everything,” he said grandly, and it made Vitrine laugh, because she could tell he didn’t mean it. When she looked into the chambers of his heart, his wishes were homelier than those of either of his mothers. He wanted comfort and pleasure. He wanted people to know him as a dangerous man, one worthy of respect and fear. He wanted to come home over and over again and to find it just the same as when he left. That last was an impossible thing, and Vitrine set it aside to call for wine and for fish stewed in a clay pot with garlic, sugar, and imported ginger.

“I like the way you talk,” Alex said much later, the tavern empty and the pot of fish demolished between them. His dark head rested on the table, his nose just inches away from where the letters AEV were carved deep into the wood. AEV had been very bold and clever, gambling with the city cats for their secrets. She’d lost her right eye on the first throw of the dice, and the smallest finger on her left hand on the second, but on the third, she had won all their eyes for her own. Instead of taking them, she’d left them in the heads of the tabbies, the selves, the calicoes, and the tortoiseshells. Whatever they saw, she saw, and she made herself very rich and very dangerous with her hundred eyes.

“Do you? What else do you like?”

“Everything,” he said again, and this time it was somewhat closer to the truth. Heart with a wide-open door, poor thing, and as she held the fishbones up to tease the tavern cats, she considered.

“What do you think?” she asked the angel, who sat with his arms folded across his chest. In the light of the banked hearth, his head slightly bowed, he might have been drowsing, but of course he did not sleep. What wonders she might have seen if she had demanded his eyes instead of his wings, but she could not have borne to leave them where they were.

“I think he is drunk, and I think you already know what you want to do.”

She started to retort that she had merely asked for his thoughts, not his reproach, but it occurred to her that he was right.

She wanted Alex to have the city, and Vitrine decided that she would give it to him.

Alex took Juana’s family name, Lorca, and in a year or so, he managed to catch up to his own reputation. He recruited a mercenary company from his companions in the Mazes, and he fed them well enough that they were only occasionally tempted to bite him. They were savage, and Vitrine was often happier to see them out of the city than in it. Alex ranged inland where his mothers had gone to sea, offering his services to this city or that one, always returning to Azril, which he called the only woman who ever had his heart.