Chapter Twelve

TWELVE

Vitrine first came to the city clinging to a dream of heavy-headed red flowers bleeding their sedative scent into the air. She remembered roots and leaves, trowels and garden knives and eyes keen for any sign of white rot or mites. She wanted to love her city like a gardener loved her garden, with work, with occasional curses, with puzzle-solving and strange fixes, and finally with wonder for what lifted its head up to the sun.

That was the dream, and it was a good one, but the experience was a little more like walking through the bazaars in her lost city in the south, not the grand markets, but the lesser street affairs, where every year the households brought out their old things, their dented tea-urns, their dead grandparents’ canes, their children’s outgrown clothes and their books of outdated poetry. You would mostly find junk there, though often it was junk that looked better than your own junk, but once in a while, you could also find treasures.

Vitrine rifled through the dreaming minds of her new home and found in an overly grand house on Clayborn Street the only daughter of a retired pirate king. When she was younger, she had played pirate herself in her father’s old salt-cracked coats in between lessons from tutors from all over the continent. Her father had stolen her from her mother on the Adani Islands, and that hurt, buried under a dozen years of good food and sweet tea and meticulous care, was still there, was just the kind of opportunity that Vitrine liked best.

She came to the pirate princess on moonlight and prised her fingers into the crack that neglect and brutal hurt had made. Vitrine smoothed the princess’s black and coiled hair back from her ear and whispered to her of many things. She nurtured the discontent and nursed the ambition. She winnowed out cowardice and guilt like weeds, and when the princess was ready, she told her of a certain key that her father left in the mouth of a gargoyle on their roof.

One slick and rainy night, while her father was seeing to his ships on the floating pier, the princess braved the widow’s walk in her bare feet, an old leather coat over her shift. When she reached into the gargoyle’s fanged and smiling mouth, she found the key that she somehow knew was there.

The key opened a box under her father’s bed, and she found within it a book bound in old boards and filled from beginning to end with the sins of the great and the powerful. The princess read her father’s book all night as the rain pattered for entry at her shutters, and over her shoulder Vitrine read as well.

The pirate king’s words were blunt and unsparing, and what he had done was written as clear as anything else. He had come to Azril with his fleet, turned them from sea raiders into an informal navy, and then, when things grew easy, into traders who never quite lost their taste for blood. He ruled the city like he had ruled his ships, with gold and kind words when they served, with knives and cunning when they would not, and it was all written down in his blocky script. The princess found her own mother in the pages, her fate finally clear after so long, and Vitrine rubbed soft soothing circles into the girl’s back as she lay silently with her face in her clean linen pillows.

“You could put the book back,” she murmured, her breath like the steam rising up from the kettle. “He won’t ever know that it was gone. He would still be your father. You could still be his daughter. You could choose for it all to stay the same.”

In truth, it was the last thing that Vitrine wanted. She could see the courage and viciousness in the princess like a splash of red in a line of white flowers, and she wanted it for her city. Still, she was clever enough not to build with weak timber, and she whispered excuses into the princess’s ear, love and comfort and the beauty of a life that continued as sweetly as it always had.

“He loves you,” Vitrine whispered, “and you love him. That is as true as the rest, isn’t it?”

Vitrine thought that that would be the end of it. Love so often was.

However, when the princess rose up from the bed, she was different from the raw girl who had lain down, and her mouth was set in a line that would be the despair of her comportment teacher. You cannot be pretty and hard, the teacher from Combes said over and over again, but the princess lost in a heartbeat any use for pretty .

“He loves me. He threw my mother to the sharks. These things are both true,” said the princess to the shadow in her room. In her memories, she would remember speaking to herself, to her mirror perhaps, or to the dress form where the silk gown for her seventeenth birthday celebration hung. She would not remember the shadow that drifted closer with a breath of pleasure and satisfaction, or the question it offered her.

“And what else is true?” asked the shadow, a little breathless.

“That he will regret both of these things.”

When the pirate king died on his daughter’s next birthday, his blood pooling around his head like some dark saint’s halo and the servants already moving to take his corpse away, it was not regret that he felt, but surprise and aggravation.

“Did I not love her?” he asked the demon, as the laundress sewed him into a shroud made from a scrap of old sail. “Did I not give her my heart and my courage and my wit and my eyes?”

“Mm,” said Vitrine, stirring the pot so that the neglected stew would not stick. “You gave her your viciousness, and then you threw her mother into the sea. That seldom works out.”

“Still, I gave her all of me, the best of me,” said the pirate king, his voice muffled now as the laundress stitched the sailcloth over his face.

Vitrine tasted the stew, enjoying the warmth of cayenne, cumin, and cinnamon before it was overwhelmed with the heat of the bird’s eye pepper. Even dried and shipped overseas, it was enough to make her fan her mouth and leave the rest.

“You did,” she said, because she could be kind. “And she will be magnificent, I promise, and so will the city.”

The pirate king might have had more to say about the matter, but then his shroud was sewn up, and he could speak no more. The princess had arranged for her father to be buried at sea, his bones cast from the ship only when there was no shore in sight. When his sail-shrouded body fell to the bottom of the sea, the wythen would clip the stitches with their sharp shell knives, and they would draw him out to serve them forever in their silent crewes. They said that the crewmen told each other stories in the endless nights of the abyssal depths, but it was not Vitrine’s concern, and he passed from the city and its story with the soft rasp of oars in their locks and the scrape of a needle through canvas.

Now Malabec Mercer was the richest woman in the city, young and savage, and she set out to conquer it with her embroidered pockets stuffed full of bloody gold. Her father the pirate had had pretensions of respectability. He had hoped one day to immigrate to distant Kailin or Madran, places far more civilized, to live out a genteel retirement. Malabec, on the other hand, had no interest in gentility or foreign lands, no love for sky-loving towers or a dozen generations of inter-city feuding.

Instead she opened her house on Clayborn Street to the world, inviting the scholars and artists that she had learned about through her distant and fearful tutors to come and stay. As she composed her letters, Vitrine sat at her elbow, reminding Malabec of names she thought she remembered, suggesting that this architect might be swayed by the promise of a house of his own, or that singer might appreciate a place where no one cared if he took other men to bed.

They came first in a trickle and then in droves, and when Malabec turned some of them away for being less than she hoped, many of those still went on to settle in the city because it wasn’t as if it had been easy for them to get there. Some fell in love with the city just as Vitrine had, and even the ones who didn’t gave it a kind of glamour with how much they despised it. It was a kind of hate that almost looped back to something like love, and Vitrine forgave them for it because she understood passion.

Vitrine rather thought that she could get nearly a century out of Malabec, turn her like a jeweled knife to carve the city into shape, but as it turned out, Malabec’s taste in lovers proved fatal, much as it had for her own mother. Her fine composer from Byleth slit her throat and then drank poison in a murder-suicide that would be turned into dozens of plays and songs in the next century.

Vitrine looked over the mess with dismay. The plays would never capture the stench of blood, the way the curtains had been half pulled down in the brawl, the graceless sprawl of limbs and the carpet half pulled over Malabec herself when her lover could not bear the sight of her dead.

Vitrine scowled, giving the composer a good hard kick as she went by. To Malabec, she was kinder, flipping the carpet off her surprised face, straightening her limbs to give her a dignity that she had never cared about in life.

The composer’s ghost fled to haunt the third floor for some while, and Malabec herself had flown on immediately. Her head, crowned with intricate braids that showed off her fine high forehead and fierce eyebrows, was as empty as a broken-barred birdcage, and the spirit inside had gone elsewhere. Vitrine inspected the inside of her eggshell skull, splashed with outrage and impatience, and with a sigh, she kissed the dead woman and straightened up, stepping neatly around the growing lake of blood.

As she turned, Vitrine took on a severe gown in rusty madder and neat shoes with wooden heels. Her hair, usually kept shorn close to her head, assumed a more demure series of braids than Malabec’s own. By the time she was facing the little girl hiding in the corner, her face barred and numb behind the strings of the great Madrani harp, Vitrine was wholly human, stern and protective as a nunnery. There were already strange things fluttering through the child’s heart, and they could turn into terrible shadows if they were left to themselves.

“Come out,” she said firmly. “That is over now, and you must come out.”

The child was still for a long time, long enough for the blood to get sticky, long enough for the composer’s limp arm to fall off the writing desk. Still Vitrine waited, because Malabec’s daughter needed to see that her new governess could wait forever if she needed to, would, if that was what it took.

Finally, she crept out from behind the harp and put her small sweaty hand in Vitrine’s, following her down the long midnight hall.

First they would need to call in the ashmen to take care of the composer’s body—she did not need to see him again—and then it would be time for Malabec’s wake.

Vitrine got a pang at that, more than just mild regret and irritation at the upset of her plans. Malabec’s wake would go on for a week, her body dressed in silk, and her glass coffin, so very like the glass cabinet where Vitrine kept her book, would be set in the hall to oversee all the fun.

Oh what a fine time my princess will miss, Vitrine thought, and she glanced down at Malabec’s daughter.

“Tell me,” she said. “Do you know how to dance the ganli?”

She waited as the answer swam up through the girl’s cotton-fogged mind, and when she shook her head, Vitrine took both her hands, facing her in the front hall.

“They will dance this to mourn your mother,” she said. “Best you know how to dance it as well. Look, toe touch the ground, heel touch behind, and left and right…”

Soon enough, the little girl was dancing with her, her face still so ashen but two bright smacks of color high on her apple cheeks. She did not smile, which Vitrine would not ask her to do, but her feet were as light as her mother’s and her grandmother’s had been. Demon and girl danced the ganli, and when they were done, Vitrine clasped her up in her arms and hugged her tight, for she had, all unknowing that night, exchanged her mother for the rule of the city.