Chapter Twenty

TWENTY

Shani left Azril with a hundred weight of silver deposited for her in the bank, easily accessed wherever she cared to roam, and Vitrine never found out why she needed it. The only thing she cared about was that Shani, who had earned her place in Vitrine’s book after one wild chase across the rooftops when she was fifteen, would return someday and spend a year in Azril. It was a deal Vitrine had struck several times now, and her returners were like presents, delightful things that opened to reveal all the world.

Shani returned to Azril alone, a solitary figure wrapped up in a rusty-red cloak, a pair of spectacles pinched to the bridge of her nose, making her dark eyes appear enormous and quizzical like the eyes of an owl.

Just short of twenty years after she left, Shani came back to the city with a heart half-open, wary of the world around her but ready, Vitrine thought, to love Azril if it would give her the chance to do so.

“She doesn’t look as bright as Jinan did. Do you think she is at least as strong?” Vitrine said, watching Shani pass by from one of the balcony cafes that were all over Eastside, which they’d built over Carnelian Street. Across from her, the angel warmed his hands on a mug of tea, considering.

“She reminds me a little of Alex’s daughter Zahara. I think she will be as strong as she needs to be.”

“As strong as I need her to be?”

The angel laughed, rising from the table and relying on Vitrine as usual to provide the gratuity.

“As she needs to be. They don’t have to be the same thing.”

“What do you know, anyway?” Vitrine said, laying down a smattering of small coins. Some of them bore dear faces long dead, others were clipped bronze, but one, only as large as her pinkie nail, was gold.

“I know that you have been waiting for her to come back. I know that you have missed her.”

Vitrine paused on the balcony railing, hesitating for a moment.

“Do you want to come meet her?” she asked, giving no indication of what she thought or whether she would allow such a thing.

The angel shook his head.

“No, I think I’ll go see about those crates that are being unloaded off at the rooms she rented. I’ll see her sooner or later.”

Vitrine followed Shani through the streets in the guise of a lanky black rooster, an enormous and self-satisfied tabby, and a small limping child, peering at her from around corners, from the doorways, and from the alleys. She nodded in satisfaction as Shani fended off a would-be mugger, frowned at how she chose the smallest, stingiest bun from the vendor.

“Hm, I do not know if I care for ascetics,” she mused, and Shani shrugged.

“Well, I do not know if I care for the city anymore, so we’re even.”

Vitrine drew back, woman-shaped, surprised and offended, and Shani smiled, drawing her cloak more tightly around herself.

“I suspected that you were no natural thing when I was a child. I’ve hardly grown less blind.”

Vitrine recovered from her surprise, and she stepped up to offer Shani her arm. Shani was half a head taller than she was, her hair going gray in badger-like stripes from her temples, and she took Vitrine’s arm as carelessly as a young girl.

“Well, you are a new thing,” Vitrine said as they walked down a street where she had once shoveled bones. “I did not expect someone like you.”

“Most don’t,” Shani said placidly. “I would have come sooner, but I would not come empty-handed. Demon of Azril, I have brought you a gift.”

“A gift,” Vitrine said, unaccountably flattered. “An offering, a bribe?”

“A gift . I will not try to get out of my year here—”

“Get out of!” Vitrine huffed, but Shani only laughed.

“Who knows, I may stay after all and find my true home, if there is such a thing. But I thought I would like to greet you properly, and perhaps to pay you back for a certain rescue on the rooftops.”

She led Vitrine back to the rooms she had rented on what used to be Law Street, where the scholars had once played at being fools and the fools had pretended to be scholars. Now it was a wealthy district, and Shani had rented out the whole bottom floor of one of the great houses. Rather luxurious for such a mousy woman, Vitrine thought, but then she saw that almost every room was filled with crates, straight wooden boards all smelling of brief, fast pine and nailed together with care. Shani took a pry bar to one of them, and when the lid was toppled over, Vitrine stared at the cargo inside, cushioned in wood shavings and closed as tightly upon themselves as secrets.

“Oh, Shani,” Vitrine breathed, and she took from the crate a volume wrapped in waterproofed paper to keep it dry. It was so new the pages had not been cut, so young that the ink seemed bled into the paper.

“A Natural History of the Glass-Winged Butterfly,” Vitrine read. “Oh my darling, is it real?”

“The book, yes,” Shani said with a smile. “The butterfly, I suppose you will have to take that up with the author.”

She pulled out one book after another, and then when that crate was empty, there was another, and another.

“How did you collect all of these?” she asked. “You must have sacked a city.”

“Nothing so exciting,” Shani demurred. “There are some people who are tricked, and two or three who are dead. Do you like your present?”

“Ever so much,” Vitrine said, drawing out another book, and then another. She forced herself to look away from the books, though she kept a volume on the war machines of Evelyn clutched to her chest.

“What a fine thing you have given me. Still, you must stay the year, though. I love the books immediately, but I would like to have the chance to love you for a while as well.”

“Of course,” Shani said graciously, and Vitrine warmed to her manners and her generosity, even if she suspected her of an abstinent streak and a set of scales and measures where other people kept their hearts. What a good thing it was that she had so much experience loving all sorts.

She found the angel a few hours later, seated on a crate at the rear of the apartment and reading a volume of alchemical theory. The book with its red leather cover and gold tooling looked delicate in his killer’s hands, and as she hovered in the door, bemused, he spoke without looking up.

“Surely they know it is a heresy,” he said, troubled. “Surely they know that if they did this, they would rend the world as we know it to flames and to dust.”

“I’m sure they don’t know,” Vitrine said, prying open another crate. This one held botanical treatises and, to her delight, romances as well, all mixed in with democratic abandon. If she had her way, all libraries would be arranged like this, promiscuous, free to mingle, and truth found everywhere and nowhere at all.

There was a family living in the apartment above, and a rather poor poet in the attic. They would have to go, she decided, though the frail new ghosts that had come to live in the house in recent years could stay. The new library in Azril was going to be beautiful, and if she thought of boarded-up windows and a young man too afraid to venture over the doorstep, it was only for a moment.