Chapter Six

SIX

The winter freeze and the spring thaw had changed the city from char to rot. In some places, Gallowscross, the debtors’ prison, Camellia Street with its elegant galleries, and Carnelian Street with its elegant brothels, the muck was almost up to Vitrine’s knees. It was black, slimy with the spring runoff, and when she waded through it, it clung to her hems and stained her bare legs. Throughout the city, she could see sheaves of green grass and tiny white flowers coming up, and the insult to what had gone before almost made her dizzy with anger. It was new life, but not the life that had been there before, and she tore them up when she saw them, grabbing them in great handfuls to throw away.

It was a losing fight, however, as were the clouds of flies that descended when the weather warmed, and the enormous flocks of birds that came after them. There were her grief-stricken weavers, of course, but there were also rock doves come to nest in what was left of the tall narrow shops in Hyland Street and the dusky hawks that preferred the tanneries where mice and rats darted through the knobs of iron slag. The seawall along the lower districts had broken entirely, flooding out Capewell and Goresuch, and into the half-sunken quarters came the stilt-walkers, the herons and cranes that drifted the tips of their wings elegantly through the water and the black-legged kittiwakes that came to replace their red-legged cousins who had been destroyed in the blast. The gulls of course lived wherever they could, quarreling among themselves and laughing hoarsely in their new kingdom.

“It could be a city of birds, I suppose,” Vitrine said to herself one night. She sat on the beach at a small fire, curled in on herself against the cold that had returned. “I could have an eagle for the Lord Mayor, and a siege of cranes instead of a council. I could have plovers instead of children, and doves instead of market girls, and magpies instead of thieves.”

It was an interesting idea, but she hated it, missed her mayors and her thieves and her market girls too much to see them replaced with beaked faces and forms clad in feathers. It was almost enough to make her want to raze the city again, send great clouds of feathers flying into the air and streaks of thin blood down the towers, but she held herself back from it.

The next day, Vitrine went haunting the mansions that crumbled on the west side of the city, where the broad lawns had already begun to revert to thickets of trash pine. Vitrine pulled up the pines, throwing them down into the sinkholes formed by the hollow foundations remaining. The pines were fast and vicious, and if they were given a chance, they would choke out the beech and oak that she wanted there instead. It was hot and irritating work, and as she did it, she cursed softly to herself. It would be unlucky land after that, but it was fine. Unlucky people could live there, and they would make the people who saw them feel luckier by comparison.

A few times, Vitrine reached for a pine sapling only to find that it was a blackberry wand instead, studded with stickers and thrusting hopefully from the earth. They invariably bloodied her, but she allowed them to stay, along with the apple saplings that twisted from the ground. She didn’t know who would come for them when at last they bore fruit, but in the meantime they could feed the birds and the deer.

Close to evening, Vitrine looked up to see a figure darting through the ruins of the Demorsico estate, so fast that even her very sharp eyes were not certain what she had seen. A moment later, she was after them, a stray brier snagging the skin of her foot and scraping it terribly in her haste.

“Wait,” she cried. “Wait, just wait for me.”

The Demorsico were secret sorcerers and necromancers, and their walls, built with their dead enemies and strengthened with blood and curses against those who would wrong them, had survived somewhat better than their neighbors. Vitrine ran through the doorway and darted through rooms that were open to the sky, following the glimpse of her quarry through arcades where fallen stone statues left hands and arms grasping for the sky.

They’ve come back, she thought wildly. I knew they would, this city is theirs and they came back…

She came around the corner to the bedroom of Avaline Demorsico, fifteen last year when the angels brought down fire. There was still a trace of faint blue paint on the walls, and a latticed window, nearly whole, cast strange and twisting shadows around the place. There was a frantic cooing echoing off the walls, and for a moment Vitrine flashed to the dovecotes, where the birds would return year after year even when the bars had been shattered and the roof fallen in.

There were no birds in the room, however, only a form pressed to the rearmost darkest corner. The light showed Vitrine a pair of long dirty feet and the strangely pristine edge of a lacy white hem. Vitrine recognized the lace. It was a pattern of exceeding delicacy, wrought from an abstracted design of ram’s horns. She knew it well because it had been all the rage in Azril that summer, the one that she was trying very hard not to refer to as the last summer, and only the richest and most fashionable would wear it.

“Avaline,” Vitrine whispered, because she had been there when the girl was born, her mother attended by a goodwoman because Miao Demorsico did not trust the doctors that she was owed by her wealth and her position. Miao had been a raw girl from Kailin when she, along with a little help from Vitrine’s finest pair of enchanted slippers, caught the eye, the lust, and then the heart of the eldest Demorsico boy.

Miao had been just what Vitrine needed to shake the noble family to its foundations so that it could build up from the rubble, strong as it was before but with the foreign girl’s will and grace and unyielding temper. Even good blood would go to rot if it was allowed to stand stagnant, and from that ruin had come Avaline, the latest scion of the city to whom Vitrine had dedicated an entire page in her book.

She couldn’t come to the town, Vitrine thought, her breath coming fast and hopeful. She and Miao were fighting, and Miao had forbidden her from leaving. Has she survived here all this time, dressed in lace and eating bugs and frogs? Oh my poor darling.

With a soft cry, Vitrine came forward to take the girl in her arms, but instead she found herself beaten back by a flurry of hands thrown at her face. The blows were too fast to do real damage, open-palmed and panicked, and Vitrine stumbled away with a yelp. Then, eyes narrowing and regardless of the girl’s panicked cries and flying hands, she seized her by the soft arm and dragged her forward into the light coming through the broken roof.

There had been hopeful tears on Vitrine’s face, but they felt like salt in the wound when she saw the girl’s face. The year before, all the Demorsico, from patriarch to foreign wife to littlest baby, had been immortalized in marble busts. They were scattered through the house and the grounds, and of course the bust of the longed-for Demorsico princess had been kept in pride of place, the sheltered rose arbor. Avaline was a lively girl, but she had no special looks. She was sharp-nosed with eyes that were set close together and a wider mouth than was fashionable. Marble would never have captured her sly humor or her flashing temper, so instead the sculptor had had to make do with simply making her beautiful.

That was the face that the sculptor had given her, heart-shaped, sleek, and flawless. Like marble, there was something still about it, something fixed about the eyes, and it came to Vitrine that she had been made by someone without any talent for it.

“What are you?” Vitrine demanded, and the girl opened her mouth to let out a warbling chitter, swallowed to the back of her throat and fearful.

Vitrine stared, because she recognized that sound. It was the family cry of the sandhill cranes that nested in the ornamental ponds of the mansions. They had been terrible pests when the ponds were stocked with calico carp, but now they were their own kind of nobility, stilt-walking through the shallows with their beaks held like rapiers at the ready.

In surprise, her hand loosened slightly, but when the crane-turned-girl thrashed to get free, Vitrine tightened her grasp again because she had realized exactly who had made her without any talent for it or indeed any love.

Vitrine stalked from the Demorsico mansion, dragging the crane-girl by the arm and slamming the door closed behind her so hard that it fell off its hinges. She didn’t care about that because the Demorsico were dead, all of them, and it didn’t matter any longer if the sandhill cranes went stalking into their house or if the bats flew in to nest in what remained of the ceilings. None of it mattered.

The sun had gone down, setting a sudden chill across the land, and Vitrine raised her eyes to the clouded sky and the jagged peaks of the shattered buildings around them. The girl squalled helplessly, and the cranes picking through the pond nearby raised their heads in alarm. Perhaps as recently as a few hours ago, they had been her parents. Now they only looked at her with their small black eyes, unnerved and afraid of the thing that looked like a human but spoke like a crane.

“You think you’re funny?” Vitrine demanded. “You think this will hurt me? You think this will make me think twice?”

“It was a gift.”

The angel stood in the doorway of the Celindo mansion, his arms crossed over his chest. The fading sunlight gave his skin a ruddy gold tone, and if Vitrine squinted, she could make out the great wings that fell from his shoulders like a conqueror’s cape. She shook the crane-girl’s wrist at him, making her cry out again.

“This is not a gift,” she snapped. “This is a travesty. It is a poorly done travesty.”

The angel flinched, his shoulders coming up as if to ward off a blow, and then he squared them again with irritated pride.

“I was not made for such tasks. I did the best I could.”

“Is that supposed to comfort me, angel?”

He was still, and she bared her teeth.

“It was, wasn’t it. You thought your little birdie was going to make me feel better, would soothe me after everything you did. Do you know what would soothe me, angel?”

He tensed, all the warning she got before he was between them. He turned to face her, herding the crane-girl back with a sweep of his arm, and Vitrine gave him a mocking look.

“Oh, I’m not you. I don’t need burning bodies and the screaming of children to put myself to sleep.”

“I don’t—”

He cut himself off when she stepped up to him, uninterested in the poor silly thing sheltering in his shadow. He was tall, slightly stooped over her, but she ignored the menace and unease that bled from him like juice from a ripe apple.

“I’m not you,” she repeated.

No angel would have reached up like she did to touch his chin, to run her finger in a straight line down to the hollow of his throat. No angel would have folded back the edges of the slit in his linen neckline, baring just a little more flesh. Certainly no angel would have stood up on his tiptoes as she did so she could press her lips to the skin revealed, and then lick it.

He bore her trespass with a kind of wary patience, and, Vitrine could tell, he would bear the rest of what she might do to him the same way. He would suffer her, as if whatever she did to his flesh could compare to what he had done to Azril, and she stepped back in disgust, turning her head to spit.

“I can circle the world ten times with a thought,” he said urgently. “I know the name of every sleeper under the sea. Uncounted armies have fallen under my sword, and I raised the mountains of Edah to the skies. Tell me what would soothe you.”

“You have nothing I want,” she told him, and he rubbed one hand hard over the center of his chest.

“The piece of you in me burns. I cannot remove it no matter what I cut, and my brothers will not allow me to return while I have it.”

“Good.”

She could feel his eyes on her, all of them, seeing her in every way he could. He could see the small body she inhabited, he could see her birthed form, a five-hundred- year storm that tore across the desert in a rage before it was bound in flesh by her crying parent. He could see the glass case inside her, and she guessed that he could see the book she kept inside it as well.

Perhaps he also saw the fury that ate at her ever-renewing flesh, and how if she allowed it to, it would consume her and even the memory of the city she loved. Perhaps that was why he nodded stiffly, defeated.

“Now you see. Let me take care of the stupid thing you have created, if you have not the strength to do it.”

She expected him to step aside ashamed, let her snap the poor crane-girl’s neck, but instead he straightened and shook his head.

“No. She is my mistake.”

Curious, she watched as he turned away from her, his wings coming up and spreading out to grant them some privacy. The crane-girl made a crooning hesitant sound that ended with a brisk wet snap, and then he turned with her in his arms. With her long hair covering her face, she looked more like Avaline, and the demon steeled her heart. One more dead thing, what was that? Her loved ones were gone, and she would waste no tears for an angel’s foolishness.

“Lay her down here.”

Deliberately, Vitrine turned away from him, going to gather the slats of dry wood that had once been elegant dulcimers and paintings bright with egg tempera. They had escaped his fire but not hers, and as the sun set down behind the hills, she built a tidy pyramid of wood and lit it with a tinderbox she found somehow intact in the rubble. Over it, she balanced some rocks and a window shutter of curlicue iron to serve as an impromptu grill.

The angel watched with hollow eyes as she stripped away the crane-girl’s muddied dress and bared white flesh to the emerging moon. She jointed her at the shoulders, the elbows, and the knees, laying her limbs on the iron so that the flesh crisped and the fat dripped richly onto the coals. The rest would require more careful butchering, which she did not care to do, and she left it to sit on the grass, still terribly recognizable for what it was: a mutilation and an angel’s error.

She tasted like crane, all fish and frog and snail rather than human, and to her, Vitrine added ramps and mustard that had grown in the angels’ despite.

She ate delicately, relishing the angel’s dark gaze, blotting the grease from her mouth with her fingertips.

“Will you be welcome to my fire, angel?” she asked, holding out the crossed bones of the crane girl’s forearm invitingly.

“You did not have to do this,” the angel said, and the smile fell from her face.

“Of course I did. Do you see? You can offer me nothing I want. You can give me nothing so precious that I will hesitate to destroy it. You will not be suffered in this city. You will not be welcomed, you will not be tolerated. The buildings will not shelter you and the fountains will run dry when you reach for the water.”

“Another curse?” asked the angel wearily, and she shook her head.

“Only a declaration. You already bear the worst of what I can give.”

He nodded, his eyes closing briefly from the pain of the truth, but he did not fade back into the darkness. Instead he sat with her at the fire; vigil, she supposed, for his poor misbegotten girl. Vitrine ate her slowly, watching the angel as she did so. She was grudgingly impressed when he did not flinch, not even when she took the girl’s long black plait and laid it neatly atop her remains.

“She deserves a burial.”

Vitrine shrugged.

“Then bury her if you like, or leave her for the harriers. You’ve made such a mess of her that one is as appropriate as another.”

A spasm of distaste crossed the angel’s face. Perhaps his kind did not have a great deal of experience with this end of things. They were the heralds of the dawn, when things awakened and were made new, and they came at the end. It occurred to Vitrine that they did not have experience with what came after the end, when everything was over and ruined.

“Don’t you know that sometimes you can walk away from the end?” she asked almost gently, and the look he gave her was dark.

Her belly full, Vitrine doused the fire and stood. There was nothing left to say to the angel, so she went off in the dark, but for some reason she did not entirely understand, she did not go far. Instead she slipped into the wind, hitching a ride with a firefly. The night lit up with strange colors, and she flew along behind the angel, who shone with cool blues and soft silvers. To the firefly, the angel had two enormous clusters of eyes on either side of his head, so numerous and small they looked almost velvety, and the colors he flashed, over and over again like a signal waiting for the one person who needed to see it, spoke holy and holy and holy.

She flew behind him as he made his way through the disintegrating mansions, and then greatly daring, she settled on the seam of his tunic, grabbing on to the linen. This close, with her borrowed eyes, she could see the sheen of sweat on his throat, and the crinkling hairs of his beard. He breathed uneasily as one unused to it, and there was a faint glow in the swirls of air leaving his lips.

He came to the small graveyard that had once been the sole provenance of the Mercer family. The wall that kept in their dead was gone, and with it the great compass that had been engraved upon it. The Mercers were wild, merchant princesses and razor-tongued diplomats bred from pirate stock, and the only reason that they were no longer buried in silk shrouds at sea was because generations ago, the first Malabec Mercer had fallen in love with Azril and committed her entire family to its gates.

Now the Mercers were gone, and though the family was far-flung with members on the sea as well as in the courts of Brokkslevan and Yfs, they were not her Mercers, and they did not matter. The mausoleums were shattered and the old dry bones, unmixed with flesh or fat, burned a pure layer of black charcoal into the ground. Settled on the spar of a broken pine sapling, Vitrine watched as the angel knelt in the dirt and hollowed out a hole with his broad hands. First he had to get through the broken bits of crypt, and then came the layer of bone. Underneath that was the clay soil, harsh and fit only for the planting of bodies and sorrow.

As he dug, Vitrine watched with interest as the angel’s shoulders shook. She wondered if his kind, so set on how perfect they were allowed to make the world, could cry, and if so, what emotion might move him to it. She wondered if he considered his crane-girl a murder or merely some failed experiment.

Finally, the angel lowered the bundle of ruin and hair into the hole and covered it up again. Against the odds, he found an intact slab of stone as large as a shield, part of the fourth Malabec’s own tomb. He laid it over the little grave he had made, tamping it down with gentle taps to embed it firmly in the clay, and then he climbed to his feet again, standing with his hands clasped before him.

He stood there long enough that Vitrine grew bored, winging her way through the night to haunt the ruined streets and broken squares.

Maybe he’ll stay there forever as her memorial, she thought spitefully. He can stand there for all of them if he’s really sorry.