Chapter Sixteen

SIXTEEN

Jinan grew up and grew well, if more reckless than anyone liked. From her father, she learned the writings of what he called their home, and from her eimi, she learned about the weapons that had been used to drive them away from it.

The bread and fresh water brought her people across the river to live in the city, but they did not wander within it, muttering about ghosts in the old lanes and peering at them from around strange corners.

Jinan, on the other hand, went running through the city as often as she could, and as the well-loved daughter of the whole community, the hope of a world to come and the first sign they had that they might be allowed to continue, she was indulged even when she came back with tales about a cat-eyed woman who told her the best stories.

When Jinan was sixteen and her people had built stone houses as well as ones from wood, three ships came up the coast, raiders who were sometimes traders, bearing wealth from cities across the sea. Vitrine followed them in the guise of an osprey, flitting from one bow to the next for almost four days before she made her decision.

The wind whipped up out of a calm night sky, and the sailors found their ships pushed across the rough waves as if by some giant hand. When they tried to sail crosswise out of the edge of the storm, the winds tore their sails to rags and the hulls shrieked as if the wood had learned to fear pain.

The storm broke the ships to bits, another world smashed to birth something new, and in the dawn, the sailors came dazed to shore, clinging to barrels, to spars, one to the mermaid figurehead that had broken cleanly from her ship.

On a sandbar, neither land nor sea, Vitrine stood next to a figure who loomed over her, his skin the cool gray of a sky wondering whether it should storm, his teeth the sharp splinters of broken masts.

“Well, will this do?” he asked as the woman clinging to the wooden mermaid stood up and stared warily at the people coming down from the ruined city.

“It might,” Vitrine said, ignoring the baleful glare of the angel who watched from up the beach. “They are good-looking people, don’t you think? And strong with the possibility of being generous.”

“I hardly trouble myself with such things,” her brother said loftily. “I have taken my allotment into my navy, and I am content. And you?”

“Oh, it’s a little early to be thinking about navies,” Vitrine said absently, but she was suddenly taken by the idea, ships in the harbor equipped with battering rams made from smoke-hardened wood and laminated bone, underwater spikes affixed to innocent-looking merchant vessels.

“No, I meant to ask if you are content or could see yourself to becoming so. You have been quiet for some time now, keeping too close to yourself.”

“Not everyone wants to be one face in a crowd,” she retorted, an old argument, and her brother laughed.

“Then come be one face at a coffeehouse or on a burning rampart,” he said. “I know I am not the only one who has wondered at how you have been.”

When she hugged him goodbye, she could hear the bells inside him, enormous sonorous things that rang even deep beneath the water. His own city had sunk, she remembered, and she hugged him a little tighter.

“Maybe,” she said.

The people from the sea were a motley lot, some from Combes, some from Mato Lorno, a scattering from the broken states of Brokkslevan, and one rather confused cleric from the distant land of Tuyet, a talking shrike their only companion. Some of them were eager to set off for home, the shores of Azril-that-was too strange and haunted for them, but more decided to stay. The goods on the ships had been promised to wealthy men who did not easily forgive, and Azril’s ghosts and her resident demon were not so very terrible.

Jinan took for her lover the woman who had come to shore clinging to the wooden mermaid. At first Juana’s stories of the sea and of the distant lands that lay beyond them were only meant to charm the laughing girl with the long braids into her bed. Soon enough, though, she was drawing maps and teaching her new woman the traders’ tongue, which would let her bargain for a bag of iron ingots and insult someone’s mother almost anywhere she could sail on the White Sea.

At first Juana thought Jinan’s interest was only a girlish fancy, and then she thought it was an obsession, and then one night as she slept on the beach, after a demon came to whisper in her ear, she caught the dream herself. Ambition was contagious, she decided, and she threw in with Jinan and some of the others, children of the first settlers who craved different skylines and different ghosts, people from her own ships who missed their homes.

They had no true shipwrights, but between logs hewn from the forest and the remnants of the ships that had brought them, they crafted something seaworthy. Juana’s mermaid was proudly placed on the prow of the ship, and before they set sail, Vitrine reminded one of the sailors that a sacrifice of a small life to the sea would smooth their passage. The sailor wrung a chicken’s neck and threw it into the water, and after that, they were on their way.

“Are you going to see her go so easily?” the angel asked as they watched the mustard-dyed sail disappear over the horizon.

“Of course not,” Vitrine said, staring after them as if she could unbend the world and see them a little farther on their way. “The world is large, and she might be taken by pirates or an accident. She might drown or fall or falter. She might find some other place she thinks she loves as well as Azril.”

“What a shame that would be, to fall in love and be made to stay.”

“I love her,” Vitrine continued, still watching the empty horizon. “Her name is in my book.”

“And you let her go.”

“There are many ways to love someone.”

Ships bearing refugees and immigrants and traders and scoundrels trickled back along with messages from Jinan, and Vitrine and the angel read them avidly over her parents’ shoulders. She was in Johari where there were canals instead of roads, and then she was in Mato Lorno, where they danced with fire and sometimes married their brightest young man to the eternal flame.

Ten years in, she sent back a disgraced mercenary company, soldiers who had fought for the wrong king and now needed a corner of the world where they were not so famous. Vitrine found it at once comforting and disturbing to see swords carried in the city again. Azril-that-was had had navies, both formal and built piecemeal from pirate fleets. On the landward side, the great families had always maintained their own personal armies, both for fighting abroad and for fighting at home.

“She has dreams of empire,” the angel said dourly, and Vitrine frowned.

“It’s too early for that,” she said, “much too early by far. Azril isn’t ready to be an empire. It wasn’t even ready for that before.”

“What do you expect to happen when you tell a girl she can have the world?”

“I told her she could have Azril, which is better,” Vitrine said. “Anyway, have some faith.”

“In what?”

“In her. I do.”

Jinan sent back people who knew how to make fireworks, people who came with cocoons of sleeping mulberry worms sewn into their hats, people with broken hearts and broken heads, cracked just enough to let the light come in.

The first anchoress arrived, her hair cut to a glittering silver stubble and the words of a mad desert god on her tongue. It wasn’t quite the same as the god they had worshiped before, but it was close enough, even if it made the angel restless.

Vitrine had become accustomed to the angel coming and going. He might be in the city for a few years at a time, and then through some summons she could never detect or an instinct for wandering that angels unexpectedly possessed, he would be gone, hitching a ride on one of the traders that sailed up and down the coast.

She would oversee the great water wheels that the Attar family wanted to place on the river, and he would be gone. A while later, after trying to figure out what silkworms would eat, she would look up and see him sitting at the fountain or hovering over a blacksmith at the forge. Ten years after Jinan left, she found him standing on the cupola at the top of the new watchtower looking out to sea.

“However did you get up here?” Vitrine asked, shifting from a crane to a human. “Don’t tell me you found another set of wings.”

“I climbed,” the angel said. “Would you be jealous if I had found myself new wings?”

She ignored him, looking out over the water.

“Did you see her?”

“I’m not always on city business, you know,” the angel said with a touch of irritation. “I have my own work, and it takes much longer now since I must walk.”

She waited, and he sighed.

“She’s in good health though abysmal spirits. Juana left her in Padri.”

“Oh. Oh, hm.”

“I don’t think it will last. They’ve fought before.”

“And she’s in Padri. They have good food there, and a very fine tradition of assassins and perfumers. Maybe she’ll send some back.”

Vitrine sat on the edge of the cupola facing the town, her knees drawn up to her chest and her toes dug into the ridge of decorative copper stripping around the edge. It was so new that it had not yet had the chance to go green. So many things were new now.

“I don’t know about any of this,” she said, spreading her hand to encompass the city.

“No?”

“They’re laying the streets all wrong. We used to have wide avenues, so broad and open that you could pass easily and still have plenty of space for vendors. These new streets, they’re so narrow, and people are going to start stopping them up in order to charge for passage. Do you know that they are building a wall to the west, a wall with four gates to protect the city? We never had a wall before, not like that.”

“They’re new. They’re just building as they need right now.”

Her hand hovered over the town. When she looked between her fingers, she could see the streets that were of course too narrow, the weavers’ square that had sprung up where they used to do bear baiting, the hundred and one little things that rubbed at her like a pebble in her boot.

“I just don’t know. Perhaps it would be better to start over now, while it would be easier to get it right.”

From behind her, the angel affected a cough.

“You know, where I come from, it’s widely held that this, all of it, is just beginning. Perhaps it might be forgiven for being only a beginning.”

Vitrine froze over like a lake in sudden winter. If she turned to look at him, she might go into a rage, the kind of fury that would rip and tear until it was forcibly stopped, because there was no longer any way for her to stop herself. The wind that blew in from the sea reminded her that he had come over the sea as well, and the warmth of the hearths of the town rose up to her hand, recalling flame.

Then she put her hand down. Without a word, she stepped over the edge of the cupola, letting her crane wings bear her skyward on the updraft.

Let him climb down, she thought . Let him crawl for all his days on this earth, and may they be long and terrible.

But she let the city stand as it was, with its misplaced quarters and its narrow crooked streets and the gods that were slightly different from what they had been.

It took Jinan twenty years, but she returned at the head of a small swift fleet laden down with a wealth of gold, an ark’s worth of seeds and sprouts, a few adventurous scholars, and a new baby.

To Vitrine’s delight, she brought with her a pair of Mercer siblings, boy and girl, barely older than Jinan had been when she left. They were darker than her Mercers had been, but Vitrine recognized their cleverness and their ambition immediately. She wondered if one of them would care to change their name to Malabec, because there were some things she missed no matter what came, but for the moment, she installed them in the rookery at the north end of the city, where they might grow up strong and bright and dangerous.

Jinan came back missing some of the optimism she had left with and her right arm above the elbow, and while her parents wailed over the loss, she was philosophic. Vitrine came to see her in the night, standing like a shadow by the hearth of the fine house her riches had built.

“Welcome home, dearest,” Vitrine said, and Jinan rose to meet her, pulling her into a hard one-armed hug.

“I thought I dreamed you,” Jinan said. “Where’s the other? I thought if you were real, he must be as well.”

Vitrine ignored her, pacing through the room to see the treasures mounted on the walls and stacked on the shelves. There were tapestries dyed bright gold and red and a sword she had taken from a robber king. There were the horns of a musk ox carved with the story of the great tiger of the Carcanet Mountains and a small box with a winding key that would play a preserved kind of music, never-changing and stale.

“You have gone so far and done so well, but I am so very happy to have you home.”

“For a while, anyway,” Jinan said, pacing in front of the fire. “It’s not as I remembered it. I am not sure it fits me any longer.”

Vitrine turned, the skull of a great jungle cat in her hands.

“Of course it does,” she said with surprise. “You were firstborn here. Your name is in my book.”

Jinan shrugged restlessly, rubbing the stump of her arm.

“It’s smaller. And colder.”

Vitrine drew back, unaccountably hurt.

“Well, it will grow greater. And it’s winter right now, of course. You’ve not had a proper Azril summer since you left.”

Jinan smiled at her, leaning back in her chair. She had a sailor’s roll to her walk now, and a broadness through the thigh and hip that Vitrine hadn’t even guessed at when she was a girl.

“I’ve lived more of my life away than I have at home.”

“But it’s still home,” Vitrine insisted. “It is. You sent back so many wonderful things, brought so much to this place.”

To me, she didn’t say.

“You’re home now,” Vitrine said, hating the hurt in her voice, but Jinan met her eyes with an almost uncanny steadiness. For perhaps the first time, it struck her how long Jinan had been gone, and further, how long it was for a human. Twenty years passed no more swiftly for a demon than it did for a human, but for a human, it was enough time to grow, to change, to learn to want entirely new things and to forget others.

“I’m in Azril now. I’m happy to be here. Juana wants a good place to raise little Elena, and my people are here.”

“But?”

“But my people are out there as well,” Jinan said, and the way she said it, kind but firm, reminded Vitrine of her gentlest sister, who slithered close to the earth and kept in her chest an apple of surpassing redness wound about with a long lock of black hair.

“They’re not so wonderful,” Vitrine said, and Jinan shook her head.

“They are. Come. I will tell you about them. When I was away, I wanted to tell you about everything I saw and everything I did. Will you let me?”

It was a bribe, Vitrine saw at once, a placation offered to an old auntie who had grown querulous as the sun went down. She should have spat and cursed Jinan, ungrateful girl with a city she didn’t want, terrible betrayer, but she took a deep breath and sat down at the chair opposite Jinan’s instead, holding the jungle cat’s skull to her as if it was a baby. She stroked the dome of the brain case, teased her fingertips over the sharp edges of the orbital bones that once cradled the great green eyes.

“Tell me about this one,” she said finally. “Then tell me everything.”

Jinan laughed and did as Vitrine demanded, spinning stories about tall towers that flung fire and fields of white flowers that grew only on the battlefields in the south, their very roots nurtured on the blood of the fallen.

“I want your child,” Vitrine said as Jinan’s stories drew to a close. It was almost dawn, the sky outside the window pane more gray than black.

“You can’t have her,” Jinan said with a shrug. “She belongs to herself.”

“Still. She has people here, your parents, people she hasn’t even met yet. Wherever you go, send her back here. Just for a year, or even less than that. Only make sure that she comes sometime.”

Jinan regarded her curiously. In a few hours, when the glamour had worn off the night, she would wonder again whether it was really the demon of Azril that she had talked to or if it was just a dream, vivid and drawn whole cloth from coming home.

“What will you give her?”

Vitrine laughed, happy and pained at once.

“What do you think I will give her?” Vitrine asked, waving towards the window.

“The city. You would give her Azril.”

“I gave it to you as well. It’s still yours,” Vitrine couldn’t help pointing out, and Jinan inclined her head graciously.

“All right. No matter how far we go. A year.”

Jinan opened her eyes, blinking in the faint morning light. She hadn’t been to bed all night, and a little guiltily, she went upstairs to find Juana still asleep, tiny Elena snug in the cradle by the bed. When Jinan came to settle beside her, Juana’s dark eyebrows relaxed into gentle curves and her mouth loosened, suddenly easier.

Jinan stroked Elena’s downy cheek before coming to rest behind Juana, who still slept badly. Something tugged at the back of her mind, itchy like bad wool, but then it was gone, and she fell into a deep sleep.

On the roof, Vitrine watched the sunrise, unblinking, and the angel climbed up the side of the house to sit next to her.

“It’s still her city,” Vitrine said mutinously, and the angel shrugged.

“It belongs to many people,” he said, and sighing, she nodded.