Chapter Fifteen

FIFTEEN

Vitrine kept her word, mostly. For the first few years, she ignored the people who had come to the shores of Azril, and they, in turn, stayed out of her way. They looked upon the crumbling ruins with suspicious fear, instead building shelters down close to the river. Their songs and stories, when they were not too tired or grieved to tell them, were all about the places that they had come from, and Vitrine was not interested in that at all.

She was more concerned with a clowder of cats that had come to take residence that year. They were solid with muscle and large enough that at first she thought they were wildcats that had come down from the hills. When she walked cautiously among them, however, their tufted ears flickered towards her and their kittens pawed lightly at her feet, eager to resume the contract that cats had had with people for some time now.

“Where did you come from?” she asked, holding one calico kitten up to her face. “Did you come with that dull lot on the river? Did you descend from the northern mountains? What could you be?”

The cats acted as if the city was theirs from the beginning, but the angel was more wary. She thought that he might guide the newcomers through their wanderings in the haunted wilderness, but he was as shy of them as he was of her. Sometimes, when she was growing up some blackberry canes or rescuing a cat from some precarious perch, she saw the gleam of something holy out of the corner of her eye or glimpsed fog moving as though it were a man, but that was all.

He wasn’t always in the city, but he was there more often than he wasn’t, and slowly, in a way that she hadn’t previously, she grew used to him the way she grew used to the people on the river and the cats that she knew hadn’t lived in the city before.

Still several years went by before Vitrine saw him directly. One evening as she carried a bucket of clams from the water, there was a light among the apple trees that grew where the mansions had once stood. The fruit was at least what it had once been, or it was close enough that she couldn’t tell the difference. It was fall, and the apples, red streaked with gold, not much larger than a child’s fist, had started to fall to the ground. Soon the boars would come from the high ground to forage for them, growing fat on the fermentation in the rot, but tonight, there was only a soft green light bobbing among the trees. Vitrine tilted her head curiously and went to look.

Between the bent crowns of two trees almost beyond bearing, she found the angel knelt down, one hand touching the ground in front of him, the opposite arm around a lean and frowsy little child. The light she had seen was a clutch of lovestruck fireflies, gathered to adore the angel.

“See,” the angel said, “there was a crane girl once, who I made and who is gone now. She sleeps here, under the stone. Look, take your finger and trace the letters in the stone. They are almost too worn to see, but you can still feel them.”

The child, the wooden beads in her hair clacking as she lowered her head, traced the characters on the stone, her lips moving as she tried to give them voice.

“Before it sheltered a worthless crane, it was the grave marker of the fourth Malabec,” Vitrine said, coming out of the shadows. “He was a Mercer, one of my favorites. He loved so many men that he emptied the family vaults, and he had to turn pirate to fill them up again.”

The angel stood and turned, holding the child more tightly against his body, but the child only looked at her with curiosity. Her face was delicate and round, and there was a determined set to her chin that would incline her towards defiance.

“He said there was a demon in the ruins,” the child said. “Is that you?”

Vitrine laughed in surprise to be recognized after so long a time. It had never been very common even in the old days, and when she saw that she had given offense, she bowed to the child.

“I am the demon of Azril. Who are you, so that I may know who to curse if I should ever need to do so?”

The angel bared his teeth at her, and Vitrine observed that there was something desperate to him. He was ragged for all that he still wore a handsome man’s face, for all that dust and mud were ashamed to soil the hem of his robe. Here and there, his clothes were still stained with blood, as if water could not touch what she had put him through. Perhaps he wondered if she would ask him to kill this girl as well so that she could eat her over the fire.

The child had no such reservations, and she squirmed out of the angel’s arms to stand on her own two feet. She was even shorter than Vitrine had thought she would be, but fearless, and Vitrine grew more interested.

“I’m Jinan, daughter of Ghada and Zolah,” she said. “My eimi is a witch, and you can’t curse me.”

“Imagine that,” Vitrine said lightly, not agreeing or disagreeing. “But that headstone that belongs to Malabec Mercer rests over the body of the last girl who displeased me. Would you like to hear Malabec’s story instead?”

Story was the magic word, and when the girl nodded, Vitrine looked over her head to the angel, who was wary but calm. Perhaps he was even a little satisfied.

The darkness came on, and over the fire, as the clams she dug steamed in her bucket, she told the girl about Malabec Mercer and the real Avaline Demorsico, and once she had spoken about the Mercers and the Demorsicos, of course she had to speak about the Adebayos as well, who had brought sleek desert horses to the city, breeding them against the sturdy northern horses to make a mount of surpassing strength and beautifully sweet temperament. The Adebayos had lived in Azril until the very last, the night of the angels, but she never got that far in their story, instead telling the child about Kola Adebayo, who had swum his favorite mare out to sea to have her covered by one of the stallions of the sea king Bellam. The union produced the great mare Ba-Dalih, who Hanyo-from-Kittiwake rode to warn the coast of the coming of eastern raiders.

When the clams popped open in the steam, Vitrine plucked out the meat for Jinan, giving her the most savory, most delicate bits. The girl, she could see, was used to being fed thus by her parents and relatives. She accepted the choicest morsels as if they were her due, and she never troubled herself with feeding any to the angel, who watched from the shadows with patience.

“Come on,” he said, after the shells were empty and the girl had started to yawn. “Your parents will worry.”

“They should. What company their girl keeps,” Vitrine said, but the next evening, she went to find the angel.

He stood up to his waist in the water, staring out at the sea and the encroaching darkness. She knew he heard her steps, but he did not turn, and she sat on the shore, her knees drawn up.

“Why did you bring her to me?” she asked at last.

“What makes you think I did?”

Vitrine picked up a stone from the beach, throwing it at him lazily. She didn’t mean to strike him, and the stone hit the water by his side. The angel didn’t flinch from the small splash or turn towards her.

“You were not made to lie,” she reminded him, “and you do the trick of lying without lying very badly. I’ll ask you again. Why did you bring her to me?”

“Parents introduce their children to the dangers that they will face. In the southern seas, they teach their children to watch for sharks and squalls. In the north, it is bears and blizzards. Here, it is you.”

Vitrine considered, because it was an answer, even an answer that had some truth in it, but it was not the full truth, and she had already decided that she would not accept less.

She pitched another rock at him. This one landed closer and still he did not turn to face her.

“Try one more time,” she suggested, and the angel shifted. In her chest, his wings stirred restlessly. If he still had them, he would be aloft and gone from this discussion that he clearly did not want to be having, but he didn’t. They were hers, and he had to stay where he was.

“Jinan’s parent went into labor a week after you permitted them to land,” he said at last. “They gave birth to her under a shelter of woven branches while loons cried over the river and while they were still eating the food they had taken from home.”

Vitrine was silent, and the angel, unable to fly, traced a fidgety flaming pattern in the water at his side. It was gone almost as soon as it appeared, but if she closed her eyes, she could see an impression of the mark he had made in the darkness.

“You’re saying she’s mine,” she said at last.

“I’m saying she’s her own,” he said sharply, looking at her over his shoulder.

“But.”

“But she was born here, not in her parents’ home, not on the sea. She opened her eyes to see the sun shining over the ruins, and she knows not to eat devil’s daughter, no matter how pretty the berries.”

“She belongs to Azril,” Vitrine said, a pain like an iron spike through her heart.

“She belongs to herself,” the angel said sternly, and he walked back to the shore. Vitrine stayed where she was, her back straight as she sat on the sand. She had had a throne for a little while, some few ages ago. She did not care for it the way some of her siblings did, but she remembered what it was to sit with the weight of a nation on her head and the expectation of thousands hanging from her skirts.

“Well?”

“Well,” she said slowly. “They are not what I imagined, but I have imagined very little over the last while. I have been more occupied with memory than I have with what comes next.”

“It’s come now,” the angel said shortly. “Now what will you do?”

Vitrine climbed to her feet. She wondered, brushing the sand from her trousers, if she should gain a foot or so in height so she could meet the angel eye to eye, but it had never mattered before. She doubted it would matter in the time to come.

“Give me, oh, let’s say three months,” she said. “I am out of practice with people. Then bring them in.”

“And how shall I do that?” asked the angel with an overly solicitous tone that she chose to overlook.

Vitrine shrugged, already walking back towards the city. She could feel his eyes on her back, and she put a jaunty swing into her hips.

“I am sure you will figure it out, angel,” she said.

Three months later, just as the sun set behind the mountains, the people from Igomto raised their heads at the scream of an eagle sitting in the tree across the river. Its feathers were the white of blasted desert sand, and its eyes were two drops of black volcanic glass.

They came out of their homes to marvel at it, to debate in hushed voices whether it was a good omen or a bad one, but then Jinan shrieked with delight, hopping across the river by the broad stepping stones like a little goat. Her parents ran after her, and so did her aunts and her uncles, and after that, everyone left came along as well because it wasn’t a story that one cared to be left out of.

The white eagle screamed as Jinan drew near, and then it winged its way through the pines towards the ruins of the dead city. Some would have turned back when they saw where the eagle wanted to lead them, but Jinan was heedless, following it through the cleared rubble.

She followed the white eagle through the darkening city, her people behind her, and then they came to a plaza where the ground was mosaicked with river pebbles. Fresh water bubbled out of the ground, so clear and cold it made those who went to drink laugh in delight. The plaza was surrounded by a low wall, and set on the wall were stacks of fresh flatbreads, dusted with red salt and still warm as if they had come straight from some diligent baker’s oven. The people marveled at the wonder of it, tasting the sweet water and taking ravenous bites from the bread. Soon enough they found the baskets of apples as well as the barrel full of saltwater and clams, and a joyous wondering cry went up.

The eagle landed on the angel’s bare arm, her enor mous talons digging cruelly into his flesh as he preened her crown. He praised her skill and her beauty and then he threw her aloft before he came to stand next to Vitrine, who was showing Jinan how to sign her name in her book. He waited until Jinan’s eimi called her off, and he came to sit beside Vitrine on a fallen column somewhat back from the light.

“Bread and salt and water,” he mused. “Graveyard apples and fresh clams. This wasn’t what this place was before.”

“Well, we’re going to have to wait a while for the sweetbreads stuffed in songbirds stuffed in chickens stuffed in ducks stuffed in geese.”

“Is that really a thing you did?” asked the angel, momentarily distracted.

“Oh yes. That and strips of raw jellyfish and roasted eel and horse meat charred and served sizzling…”

“What I meant to say is, bread and salt and water. It means something, doesn’t it?”

Vitrine tasted ashes on her tongue, and abruptly she spat.

Together they watched as the people ate their fill. Fires were lit, giving them light to talk and to laugh. Jinan sat between her parents, her father picking in wonder at the iron-red salt, her eimi tearing off bits of flatbread to give her just as Vitrine had fed her steamed clams. They wondered out loud at the quality of the bread, how white it was and how free of grit, how it tasted just like what they had had at home and had not thought that they would have again.

They wouldn’t, either. Vitrine had contracted with some of the winds to bring the grains to her from overland, watching for weeks as they had filled an old brass casket for her. She found the jade mortar and pestle somehow untouched in a buried midden, and they wouldn’t put their own grit into the flour like granite would. The red salt she had gathered from a cove up the coast. It was the farthest she had gone from the city since, but coming back with fist-sized lumps of garnet-colored salt had been worth the dizzying nausea and the flood of tears.

“This isn’t their bread,” she said in defiance of Jinan’s parents who said that it was. “It’s mine. We made it in my old city. I had a mind to make it again.”

“The grains won’t grow here,” the angel said dubiously, breaking one of the flatbreads open. “They won’t be able to make it the same as it was.”

Vitrine wondered if this was some angelic trait, to find fault with every little thing. Everything where he was from was perfect—did they think it must be so on earth as well? She shook her head in pity. Good luck with that.

“This is where I decided that Azril would be mine,” she said. “This was Gallowscross. There were three dead people hung up right over there, and we danced together before they moved on. The Black Dog of Aile came for one of them, Jonavan-in-Fur for another, and the third went with Shining Grace just before dawn.”

“An unlucky beginning,” the angel said disapprovingly.

In response, Vitrine pointed into the crowd where there was another figure as unseen as they were, shrouded from head to toe in rags of burned linen and with a muzzy veil hiding the place where a face would be.

The figure passed through the celebrating crowd, and Vitrine and the angel both tensed as the fluttering rags brushed past Jinan’s cheek. Vitrine had never fought with a psychopomp before, and even if she won, it was widely reckoned a bad thing for demons to quarrel with death. Fortunately, the figure did not pause, instead coming to stand over a woman who sat at the edge of the spring, her face tilted up to the sky and her lips wet and red. The figure hovered there, waiting patiently, and Vitrine nodded.

“Not unlucky at all, angel,” she said. “One thing leaves, and another comes.”

One city falls and another rises? whispered an insidious little voice in her head, and she shook it off.

A sudden thumping made both of them look up. It was a likely looking young woman with a frame drum, an excited look on her face. The drum looked new, and the drummer did too, new again after what had come before.

She must have left her old drum behind, Vitrine realized. She should have new and better here.

There was no reluctance, no hesitation. The beat went on, two short and one long, and then the people from the ships were on their feet, taking hands in trios and dancing in small circles to the rhythm she set. One voice rose up, high and warbling, and others came to join it.

“I know this one,” the angel said unexpectedly. “They danced it in Alisar by the sea. I was there for a while after you told me to leave.”

“You went dancing? You?”

He frowned at her, but, she noticed with some interest, his fingers tapped out the rhythm against the column down by his hip, where perhaps he thought no one would notice it.

“There is no rule against it.”

“No, it is only that I can imagine you taking your place among the men with their leather trousers and the women in their embroidered dresses. You must have looked like a goose honking and flapping your way through the measure.”

“I did not. I am—”

He cut himself off, and Vitrine wondered what he had been about to say, whether it was that he was not a goose, or that he was above such taunts or even that he was quite a good dancer. He looked like he was going to be sullen at her, which she could never abide, so she nudged him shoulder to shoulder. There was something softly stinging where they touched, pain meant to admonish both of them to remember their places, but she ignored it, and so did he.

They watched the humans spin and dance, and Vitrine found herself thinking not of how they’d danced in Azril before the end but of the stars above them, their paths so fixed from night to night if you only had a human’s short span to watch them. From her vantage point and from his, however, they whirled like Azril’s new people did now, catching each other by the hand and circling one another until one or both extinguished, swelling redly before subsiding into coals or shedding their fire in one great breath that stunned the other dancers around them.

Vitrine tilted her head back, gazing up at the stars. They looked the same as they had before, and she pointed to one of the brightest.

“There. Do you remember that one before she took the north? Before every ship in the sea set their prows by her light?”

The angel glanced up, inspecting the star where she shone.

“I do, and I remember the ones that came before him. He has held the honor for some while now. He holds it well.”

He pointed in his turn at another star, sparkling modestly closer to the jagged black tree line.

“There. He’ll be the next to guide the world.”

Vitrine exhaled sharply with annoyance, edging back from him again. Of course he could not talk of such things as a normal person would.

“And when she does, I shall speak of her. Honestly, angel, can nothing be good enough as it is? Can we not love things for what they are while we have them?”

The angel started to answer her, but then there was some upset among the crowd, Jinan fallen down among the dancers and cutting her lip open. She started to cry, and her eimi came to scoop her up in their arms and wash the wound out with water. Jinan cried as if it was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, and Vitrine realized with amusement that it was.

“Do you love them?”

The question took her by surprise, and she looked at the angel narrowly, but he was only looking at Jinan, already done crying, already darting back among the dancers and taking their hands to make herself a part of their whole.

“Of course I don’t love them yet. Love takes more than just a good party and some apples. Love takes lifetimes.”

“It doesn’t. Not always.”

The bitterness rose up in his voice like the taste of clove through sugar candy, something sharp and significant. She liked him best with it, because sugar alone was so dull and plain and because once you have mixed a drop of clove oil into a vat of sugar, nothing in the world could take it out.

“No, not always,” she said peaceably.

The dancing continued, shifting to the rounds where everyone took hands, those who could stand and those who couldn’t, swaying and singing. Vitrine’s vision blurred, and she saw a time when the rounds would be larger with more people, and then larger yet, great enough to circle the whole of Azril-that-was and more.

The new people of Azril laughed, embracing one another, and someone came up with the last bottle of liquor they had brought from Igomto. They passed it around, and eventually it came to Vitrine’s hand. She took a curious sip, and then a deeper one at the green and herbal taste. They could duplicate it to some extent with the plants grown on the mountain slopes. Perhaps she would wander up tomorrow and see what she could find.

She passed the bottle on, and then the music changed again, and she jumped.

How did they learn the ganli, she wondered, but of course they hadn’t. The beginning measures were the same, but the tune hopped like a rabbit, becoming something other so quickly that she made a face. Still it was a good song, and she watched as the crowd rearranged itself, dividing into pairs before taking hands to face each other.

“Do you dance?” the angel asked.

She almost said yes, because this was close, so close to what she had danced before the fire. She would pick up the steps right away, she would kiss her partners and give them dreams and nightmares that would live in them forever. Then she shook her head proudly, leaning back as if the fallen column were a throne.

“Better than anyone you have ever seen,” she replied. “But not with you.”

The angel might have responded, but a girl came up to kiss his cheek, whirling the angel away. He was not quite as hopeless as Vitrine had guessed he might be. The girl made up for his lack of grace with her own, kindly slowing for him when he stumbled, muscling him through the paces where his knowledge was incomplete.

In the morning the girl would remember that she danced, but not with whom. The work of her hands would be good, and when a pot was thrown perfectly or a kid birthed healthy, she would think of that person she couldn’t remember and wonder.

Vitrine watched them spin, all of them, and her toe, all on its own, tapped on the ground. She refused to heed it. It wasn’t the ganli, and she wasn’t ready to dance something that wasn’t the ganli yet.