Chapter Fourteen

FOURTEEN

Honey and the bees that made it came to Azril from Doufun province in Kailin and from the foothills of the Palas, the round-shouldered mountains to the west. The immigrants kept their hives jealously, guarding the secrets of their apiculture with locked lips and turned heads, refusing to let their charges mingle, and so there were two distinct populations, the great dozy bees from Doufun and the quicker bees from the Palas.

Their keepers were long gone, and the remnants of their hives had blended together in very little time, the queens mating with drones from both populations before flying, laden with potential, to the hollow places in the ruins, the empty logs, even the lowest anchoress cells.

The honey they produced was dark and thin with a bitter edge to it. It pleased Vitrine to call it mourning honey when she went to steal pieces of honeycomb from their hives, but it was sweet overall, strange and special.

This new honey would never have existed if Azril had not fallen, and Vitrine thought that properly she should hate it. She should curse the bastard descendants of the Doufun queens and the Palan drones, turn their vivid yellow stripes white, render them blind and deaf so that they would fall to the ground and signal endlessly for each other.

Her grief tired her out, however, and instead she walked up to their hives and broke off pieces of the comb to drink the honey and to chew on the wax and grubs within it. It tasted of something besides her memories, and sometimes, she was all right with it.

She had prised a handful of brood comb from the colony developing in the cell of Mona Delarova, who had been a poor anchoress but an excellent spy. She had dreamed of uniting the north and south of the Angives, and with her prodigious memory and her gift for languages, she might have done it if a sly narrow man had not come to her cell in the night to smother her. Now bees built vast and ponderous labyrinths of honeycomb where she had once rested her brilliant head, and Vitrine found a bracelet of red ceramic beads she had once worn at the join of the wall and the floor.

The beads clacked on Vitrine’s dark wrist, and she carried the brood comb to the beach to eat it. The sun was just rising over the horizon, and Vitrine sat on the dunes, staring out at the sun that had, against all decency, continued to rise despite everything.

The sun had barely escaped from the sea when there were sails on the horizon, and Vitrine rose to her feet with a frown. They gained the bay as she watched, and she saw that these were no towering merchant vessels, no fast pirate coursers. Instead there was a homely humiliated quality to these ships, their sails ragged, a list to their wake that made her think that their rudders must be damaged. There were not many, no more than twenty or so, and the wind that blew them to her smelled of fire and of misery, a hundred nights of bad sleep and more than a year of tears.

So what, Vitrine thought peevishly. I have had more.

She stood on the beach with her arms crossed over her chest, her chin tilted up, but to her surprise, they did not land. Instead, the ships turned away, their sails flapping as they drew into the bay but no closer.

A figure launched itself from the first ship, gray wings pearly in the spreading light, and her lip curled as the angel crossed the water and landed where the waves lapped up on the sand.

“Has it been fifty years already?” she asked.

“Fifty years and four days. I was kept back on the veld of Abyssos.”

“What kept you on the veld of Abyssos, and why did it not keep you longer?”

He shrugged, his broad hands spread open and his pale palms flashing in the light. He was tired, wavering a little on his feet. His wings weighed him down rather than carrying him up. He was missing some number of feathers on the right, the spaces between them ragged and accusing.

“What always happens when kings want more. It has to come from someone, and when it cannot come from their own people, it must come from other kings. They went to war. They burned down the cities, and the gardens of Igomto are salt fields where nothing will grow again.”

“I liked Igomto,” Vitrine said without thinking, and then she scowled because it had given the angel some kind of hope.

“I have people here,” he said, pointing towards the ships. With their prows turned away from Azril, they had the appearance of children, too nervous to ask for what they needed, tattered and shy in their own want.

“I see that,” she said cuttingly. “Is this the best of the lot? Did you winnow them for goodness’ sake and this was all that remained?”

“This is all that remained, good, bad, and indifferent,” the angel said. “Their families died and they were the ones who got to the harbor fast enough, who got lucky, who happened to be in a place where they could watch the invaders fall upon their families with farming scythes rather than falling under their scythes themselves.”

He paused, his throat working. If she tuned her ear to listen to him, she could still hear his praises, but she wondered if they were fainter than they had been before.

“They need a home, and every city needs people,” he said at last.

“Ask me.”

He bridled at that, because even among angels who were not used to asking, it seemed that this was a particularly unaccustomed act to him. He demanded, he ordered, he bargained, but asking was a new thing, and she stood immobile as he fought with himself.

“May these people land on your shores?” he asked finally. The words came out slowly, and then with greater speed, and it was not until the last that he was able to meet her eyes.

“May they be welcome here and find some shelter from the sea and the storm? May they stay for a while at least so that they can rest and remember how to be people again? May they be unafraid here, as they have not been for months? Many of them are nothing more than broken edges. Could you give them a place to grind those edges down so that they may sleep without cutting themselves?”

Vitrine bit her lip, her gaze traveling from the ships to the angel to the ruins behind her to the angel again. They weren’t her people, none of them. They were from somewhere else. They wouldn’t sing the same songs or dance the same dances, and she did not love them at all.

“Beg me,” she said obdurately. She needed time to think, and she certainly could not do so while he towered over her.

Despite everything that had gone before, the angel hesitated. They both knew that he could force the issue if he wished. He could protect the people aboard the ships from the mischiefs that a demon could do. He could bury her in the mountain to keep her cries from awakening them at night, he could simply bear her away to some distant land while they became the new people of Azril, and it would be another city entirely by the time she found her way back.

Instead he went down to his knees, his splendid wings spread flat to the sand and one hard fist planted on the ground in front of him. It made something in Vitrine stutter as she looked at him, her breath caught in her chest as he raised his eyes to her.

“Please,” he said. “Please let them come, please let them live.”

“They’ll only die on my shores. They’ll find the land too harsh since the city fell, the river still too stingy with fish. They’ll sicken from the still water in the city wells, and they will fall into the crypts that break open from time to time. They will sicken and die here.”

“It is what people do, I am afraid,” the angel said in a tone that was perhaps a little too respectful. “They die. I imagine the people of Azril did it as well, even before my brothers and I came.”

“They’re not my people,” she whispered, gazing at the ships. She tried to summon up the fury that had been so very easy to find in years past, where everything that was not what it had been had sent her into a fit. Where was that anger now that she needed it? It seemed to have abandoned her completely, and then the angel reached forward, greatly daring, to snag a fold of her loose trousers.

She flinched, but he did not reach for her flesh. He only looked up at her, eyes as deep as the most secret cisterns in the city, mouth as soft as innocence and likely as breakable.

“Please,” he repeated. “Let them stay.”

“What will you give me?” she blurted out, and he smiled as if he had won.

“What do you want?”

For you to have never come across the sea. For you to have remained away with your mouthful of praises and your heart like an empty hall of marble and light, sealed up and inviolate with nothing of me in you. For my city to be yet standing.

He knew that, however, and her eyes traced along the curve of his gray wings instead.

The angel hissed when he followed her gaze, his wings pulling instinctively towards his body before rising again in an overt threat. Even on his knees, he looked like the death of cities, the weeping of mothers and fathers.

“More like a goose than I would have given you credit for.”

His wings might have been gray, but there was a pearl iness to them, the very tips of his feathers translucent and gleaming a dull lilac. They weren’t like a goose’s wings, or even like the wings of the imperial eagle, the largest bird on the continent. Instead they were the wings of an angel, magnificent, strong enough to let him circle the world ten times in a thought, powerful enough to stun anyone who got too close. She got too close now, circling behind him to see.

Trembling a little at her own boldness, Vitrine reached out to run the flat of her palm, too intimate by far, along the broad feathers, making them twitch and stir. He is not made out of earthly stuff any more than I am, she thought. Why does it keep surprising me how familiar he feels?

She grew bolder, ruffling her fingers through the primaries, ticking her fingertips through the finer feathers closer to his shoulders. There were rents in the fabric where his wings pulled through his robes, and through them she could glimpse the dark skin of his back. She had some idea that that skin should be unmarked and clean, but this close, she could see how the salt sea air had cracked it and turned it ashen.

It gave her a pulse of pleasure she wasn’t looking for to see him like that, and her fingers tightened on his feathers, taking double fistfuls and making him shift on his knees on the sand. It must have hurt quite a bit even before she tugged, but he made no sound. When she opened her hands, the feathers were bent where she had touched him—one drifted free to the ground.

The angel shuddered silently, his shoulders hunching, his fingers digging into the sand. He wasn’t looking at her, and irritated, she came around to touch his chin, tilting his face up. She wanted to see tears, fury, something that would prove what a violation this was. Instead his eyes were wide, and there was something hungry there, something that had entirely forgotten the ships in the harbor and was instead only for her.

Vitrine swayed towards him. Another moment, and she would have seized his wings again, bent them, scattered feathers up and down the beach, drowned him in the water and washed the sand with his blood, and it would have had nothing to do with Azril before or the Azril that came after.

He’d let me, she thought exultantly, and that pulled her back, because she didn’t want him to let her do anything.

Without her hands on him, the angel looked startled, hunching down closer to the ground as if she might pass him by, a beggar ashamed of his circumstances. The word ashamed rang in her mind like a bell, and she reached out again.

“I want them,” she said, touching his wings gently.

“ Both of them?”

“What are you going to do with one?”

There was suddenly a tightness around his eyes, something slack and disbelieving in the hang of his jaw. He looked like he had when she had first cursed him, and the pleasure of that made her smile.

He started to rise. Vitrine could see that as proud as he was, and crafted as he was, most bright, most powerful, he wouldn’t, not for a pack of ragged humans, no matter what they had survived or what might become of them without a place to land.

No, the angel wouldn’t do it for them, but…

“ I want them,” she said. “I want them both. I want them to be mine, and look, I will put them in the glass case inside me, right alongside my book. They will be as important, as treasured.”

They would be treasured as war trophies. She would take them out on the longest night of the year to stroke. She would show them off to her elder siblings to make them proud of her. She’d let her younger siblings touch them. She did not know if he understood that that was what she meant, but then none of it mattered any longer because he nodded.

“They’re yours,” he whispered, and she was so delirious with delight and victory and vengeance that she bent down to slide her fingers through his hair and press her forehead against his. Their breath mingled, and when he closed his eyes, his eyelashes were long enough to graze her cheek as she nuzzled his face.

“Mine,” she said with something like reverence. “I will take such good care of them.”

She did it with a flake of flint she carved from a boulder on the beach. The waxy gray stone was struck with tiny, terribly keen crescents along the cutting edge, jagged like teeth, and the angel stopped breathing when she passed them over the place where his wings joined his flesh.

Angels, she thought as she did it, were tangles of sense and spirit, never sure if they were flesh or if they were something higher. He had wings sometimes, and sometimes he didn’t, and all that mattered to her was that after what she did, he would no longer have them at all. They would be hers, and a familiar greed overcame her as she cut them away carefully. It was like cutting clouds, like singing in sudden disharmony, like throwing precious jewels into the sea, and, towards the end, a great deal like deboning a chicken. It was flesh from fat from gristle from bone, and what was left behind was tears and a flood of golden blood on the sand.

The angel crouched down on all fours, his forehead pressed to the ground, giving the earth the soft cries that he didn’t want to give to her. Once, he struck the sand with his fist, and when he lifted it, a small crater of glass was left behind, smoking with his rage and his helplessness.

It was long, difficult work, slippery. She cast one wing down on the sand, and immediately went to the other because it seemed to her a worse mutilation to leave the work incomplete. When he would have raised his head to look, she cupped her hand over the back of his neck, pushing him down again.

He doesn’t need to see as well, she thought for some reason, and she went to work on the second wing.

It was almost sunset by the time she was done, and she was splattered with gold up to her shoulders and all down her front. She went down to the water to let saltwater clear away the worst of it, blinking at the ships that still lurked in the harbor. It felt to her as if they were ghosts from long ago. They were wraiths from the time when the angel still had both his wings and when she was not as satisfied as she was in this moment.

Why, they are survivors just as Azril is, she thought.

The angel lay curled on his side on the beach, so still she might have thought him dead except for the way his eyes were locked on her every move. His blood was, unexpectedly, drying black, and it soaked his clothes. A single rivu let had made its way over his shoulder and around his neck like a mourning ribbon around the throat of an unlucky girl. Without thinking, she reached to touch it, maybe to smear it, and his teeth snapped. She pulled back, because all right. She had not asked for his blood.

Some few steps away from him were his wings, still beating weakly without anything to glorify or gratify beyond her pleasure. If the rumors were true, they might join with the angel again if they were brought close. He might be whole again someday, but Vitrine doubted it. He might become whole again, but he would never forget that he had been torn or who had done it. Even now, his wings dimmed as she picked them up and placed them with care into her glass cabinet. They rested comfortably next to her book, the gray feathers curling gently against the sides, a drop of golden ichor hanging from a shining knob of bone.

“Well,” she said presently, turning to the angel.

“Well,” he echoed softly. He had staggered to his feet, and there was a sickness in his face, a tilt to his stance. He looked afraid to take the first steps without his wings, and Vitrine nodded with something like kindness.

“I will go tell them it is safe to land,” she said. “This cove is well sheltered from stones. They will be safe here.”

“Will they?” he asked hollowly, and to her own surprise, Vitrine reached out to squeeze the angel’s hand, pulling away as soon as she had done so.

“They will receive no harm from me. No help either, but no harm.”

In the guise of a crane, she turned away from the angel and winged across the water. As she circled the ships, she examined the brown faces that turned up to follow her flight. Soon enough, Vitrine thought, they would know her better, but right now, she was only a wonder, a messenger, a good omen when every hand in the world had been turned against them.

She circled their masts three times, and then with a high whooping cry, she flew back to the city. The ships turned to follow her, and by the time she returned to the bank, it was empty except for a few splatters of ichor and the honeycomb dropped carelessly from her hand.