Page 41 of The City in Glass

Alex gave her a wink, holding the youngest on his knee.

“They’re all my favorite.”

“Are they?” she asked archly. “I thought Azril was your favorite.”

“Of course it is. Just like every child is my favorite, and my wife is my favorite, and you are my favorite.”

He paused.

“You didn’t bring my old priest with you this time.”

“No, he is even less constant than you are. But tell me, if you wanted one of these children for your heir…”

“One of these children for Azril, you mean,” he said, and she nodded.

“All of them.”

“Well, of course all of them,” she said. “But is there any single one—”

He shook his head abruptly, and she saw the specter of his early years in him still, when she had told a sixteen-year-old that there was no one in Azril who loved him.

“If there must be one, then you choose,” he said. “And please never tell me.”

She climbed to her feet, taking his hand gently. It was his left, where the joints had grown stiff in the previous year. When he died, he would barely be able to move it at all.

“All right,” she said. “Thank you. You won’t see me again.”

NINETEEN

In the end, she didn’t choose, instead writing all their names in her book. They grew, one or two died, and the rest thrived in the streets and courts of the new Azril. More than once, Vitrine came across the angel hurrying after this one or that, sitting at a lawyer’s elbow as she argued, keeping a drunken mercenary captain from tumbling into the river.

“I’m not doing anything wrong,” he said before she could speak, and Vitrine covered a smile.

“You’re not doing anything right, either. That one’s a worse murderer than Alex could ever have dreamed of being.”

The angel looked perhaps a bit abashed, and Federico Lorca walked on, unaware of the demon and the angel on the bridge behind him.

“I knew him when he was small,” the angel muttered. “He was sweet then.”

“He’s sweet now, if you ignore the dead and the ones who loved them. You have grown strange in the past years, angel.”

“I have not. I am not meant to change.”

Alex had said the same thing, but it would be, Vitrine thought, cruel to bring him up. Alex had died the summer before, and the angel was more sensitive to such things than she was. Instead she hoisted herself up to sit on the bridge’s stone balustrade, dangling her bare feet over the rushing of the river water.

“It wouldn’t be so bad, would it?” she asked over her shoulder, and the angel regarded her warily. Still those same old robes. So dull.

“It’s inevitable,” she continued. “I had to learn it the hard way. I’m still learning.”

“And here I thought you knew everything.”

She made a face, turning to gaze at the river. They were preparing for Summersend again, though they called it by a different name. Paper lanterns lit up the banks, and bits of song drifted to them over the lapping water.

“Compared to you, I do.”

He came to stand beside her, and the distance between them was less than it had been in the previous decades. It struck her that they were both older than they had been, a rare concept for something as everlasting as they were.

“Is this what it was like before?”