Chapter Seven

SEVEN

Vitrine knew in a practical way that Azril was not special. Perhaps a thousand years ago, it would have been, the triumph of some horselord or seaqueen, some wonder of resources and accord and luck that managed to get that many people living in one place without tearing each other to pieces. A city took all those things and then time, and it wasn’t as if there was any shortage of that.

Azril was not special, but it was unique just like all the rest, and so Vitrine cleared the streets, taking up a spade and beginning by the shore. The buildings had fallen like so many careless drunk girls, casting glass that glittered like jewels into the broad avenues, obscuring the white pavers that divided the boulevards down the center.

Azril’s first streets were narrow and haphazard, like a handful of straw thrown onto the ground. There had been a revolt some decades ago, a surprise, but not, Vitrine thought in retrospect, a terrible thing, for all it had briefly turned Gallowscross into a killing floor. The blood there ran three fingers deep, and the severed heads slowly mummified in the salt air.

Those that came after learned their lessons well regarding rule of law and how far a people could be pushed, and also about how easily a single household could be turned inside out to barricade a street. They rebuilt after the fires with an eye for wide roads, the main ones broad enough at least to allow two coaches to pass side by side, the small ones large enough for a vegetable cart.

It was an architect from Gao who had designed the city as it was now, the streets as straight as virtue, the squares built on some astrological design rather than on where someone’s mule had died or where they hung their thieves. He had come to Azril after doing the work of a king too well, and he loved the city, old and new, almost as much as Vitrine did. When he died, Vitrine honored his last wish and stole his body from where it lay in the small Gaoese cemetery to bury it under Palavar Square, where he could rejoice forever in the tight fit of the paver stones and the feet walking his streets.

Vitrine didn’t need to sleep or to eat, and before the fall came again, she had cleared the way from the shore up to the doors of the Lord Mayor’s house. Sitting on the steps with her back to the ruin, she could see the way she had come, and if she half-closed her eyes, she could imagine the people in the streets still, the setting sun giving them shadows as long as mourning veils. She did not imagine them decked out for Summersend, but instead as they were through the centuries since she had come to Azril, passing through on their way somewhere else or, like her, finding the place where they would stay.

The longer she sat, the clearer their faces became, and she smiled to see her old friends, the rogues, the strange ones, the geniuses, and the criminals. Some of them had done very well for themselves by the end, others not so much. Some of them smiled and waved at her, while others spat on the ground between them, making the sign against the evil eye with their thumb thrust up between their fingers. Most of them blinked at her as if they recognized her from some dream or vision, something that faded as soon as they awakened.

The parade of ghosts continued, as long as the history of Azril was long and as short, and at the very end of it was a tall and gaunt young man, his beard and mustache cut perfectly, and his eyes piercing like arrows into a saint’s body. He glared at her, and Vitrine rose up in shock from the sight of him, for he had loved the city almost as much as she had, and he had been sent away from it, never to return.

Oh, he came back, she thought in shock, running after the procession. He came back and he found it as dead as he was.

She ran after them as they went before her, their languid movements somehow entirely outpacing her legendary quickness. Sometimes, the man at the end would turn to look at her, and she could see there a fury identical to her own.

You did not watch it well enough, his gaze told her. You did not protect it. You did not defend it, and so it is gone.

She would catch him. She would explain. She would bring it all back, from the chicken coops in the small tight yards of the clay workers’ quarter to the sapphires that were hidden in the Fleetfox well.

But please, I cannot do it without you, she thought, and it wasn’t just the young man with the immaculate beard anymore. She was talking to all of them, because it would not be, would never be Azril without them, and she could not bear it.

She ran after them, and just when she drew close, just when she knew that a lunge would let her catch his sleeve, would allow her to turn him so she could explain it all, both the destruction and his exile, strong arms wrapped around her waist, dragging her back and then, with a single flap of great gray wings, up into the air.

Vitrine stared down at the space where the ghost parade had been just a moment before, for they were gone as if they had never been. There was only ruin in front of her and an angel behind, and she dug her sharp nails into the arm that held her, drawing blood with a furious cat’s hiss.

The angel didn’t swear but he drew a hard breath at the pain of being torn. For a moment, Vitrine thought he was going to drop her, but instead, he wheeled around, clutching her harder to him as he turned.

“Put me down,” she shouted as he gained speed and height, but he ignored her even as she clawed him down to the bone. His blood, more gold than gold and more precious by far, spilled gleaming to the darkening ruins below. Where it fell the ground was blessed, and Vitrine howled at the thought of her city being in any way favored by the one that had destroyed it.

No matter how she struggled, she could not escape from the angel’s grasp, and her lungs strained as he ascended. It was his place and not hers, angels made for the thinner air of the condors and the bustards, carrion-eaters all. Vitrine gasped, unable to shout, and he went higher still, up into the empty blue of the sky. It was so empty, she thought, her head throbbing and her skin almost blistering with cold. Was this what he had come from? Was this what was inside him while her family filled themselves with a riot of wealth and pleasure? No wonder he was the thing he was.

“Look,” he called finally. “Look down, and see.”

And for a moment she did. He had gone so high that first her eyes could only fall on the sea that lapped the coast, how the line of the water met with perfect love the blue of the sky, and how in its vastness it curved down. The light was clearer than the glass of her cabinet and so bright it threatened to mend the cracks that ran her through. For a single moment, she could truly see the size of the world and how far it went. She could travel so far without ever seeing a thing that she had seen before. In a world so large, you could run from anything, and Vitrine’s grief threatened to flee.

She wrestled it back to her like it was a child running into a busy street, snarling and protective because now she could see the angel’s ploy.

She turned herself into a tiger, twisting her head to bite down on his shoulder, but he only took her by the loose skin at the back of her neck. She swung like a kitten in her mother’s teeth before she twisted into a serpent, looping her thick body up and over the angel’s shoulders, twining herself around him in an embrace that grew tighter and tighter yet. He bore her until he could no longer, and then he unwound her tail-first as neatly as he might untangle a child’s game of spiderwebs.

She was a human again, turning in his arms so that he had to hold her tight, chest to chest. They were no more their bodies than a jar of seawater is the ocean, but still their bodies were not nothing. His eyes, Vitrine saw, were as dark as hers liked to be. This close, she could see through them the fire that animated him, back to the forge where adamantine and obedience alike had been hammered into a divine weapon.

I could put it out, Vitrine thought, momentarily enchanted. I could reach through them to that fire and I could burn myself until my ashes mingled with what he was and he would never be an angel again.

Perhaps he understood her, because he shut his eyes, shuttered them behind bruised-looking eyelids and a fan of long, lush eyelashes. It would not have stopped her, but with that holy part of him hidden, he was beautiful, and her mouth went dry.

Not one in my family has ever kissed one of his.

Instantly, the thought revolted her, both for what it was and that she had thought it at all. She bit him instead, lunging forward like that tiger she had been. She bit him high on his right cheek, hard enough her teeth knocked against the bone underneath. It was a real bite, nothing behind it but teeth and muscle, nothing that could damage an angel, but still he cried out, surprised enough to let her go.

She spread her arms. In a moment, she would be an eagle or a bat, but now she was falling and free.

This time he had to stoop like a hawk to catch her before she struck the ground, and then she was in his arms once more, hissing and knitting her nails into the wounds she had made previously. It must have hurt a great deal, but he only kept falling, flaring his wings at the last moment to land and set her carefully on the ground.

“You must not follow the dead. You are not one of them, you must not walk as they do.”

She glared at him as only a city cat could glare, and then she exhaled, sitting tailor fashion among the ruins of a garden. She peered up at him from among the stalks of pennyweed and honeybelle gone tall and feral, lifting her chin proudly.

“There was no danger,” she said. “They were my people, all of them. They wouldn’t harm me. They couldn’t.”

“And do you keep your knives so dull that they would never cut you?” asked the angel sharply, but then he shook his head at once.

“That is not how I wished to begin,” he said, and she climbed to her feet, brushing the dust from her skirts.

“Do not begin at all,” she told him. “I might have walked after the dead and been very happy.”

“Their city is not your city,” the angel countered. “You wouldn’t have been.”

She ignored the fact that he was likely right, and looked around the garden, still bounded by the remnants of a high wall. The walls had been reduced to rubble, of course, but there was still a mostly intact column of green stone, the pedestal for some guardian statue. Vitrine remembered that it had been an angel; scattered on the ground, she could discern the fraction of a sword, a few fingers so carefully detailed and separate that they looked horrifyingly lifelike pushing out of the debris.

A few generations ago, it had been nothing but the humble greenhouse of a young woman who had come overland with a large store of seeds. She had absolutely no memory at all of where they or she had come from. She took her name from a ship she had sailed on, and that night, unpacking her bag with trembling fingers, she removed the bulbs wrapped carefully in paper, the seeds folded in paper packets, the small signature of pages sewn together and containing recipes for fertilizer and compost, lists of the seeds that loved winter and lists of the bulbs she would have to treat like the most delicate of southern princes. At the last, she pulled out a bloody knife wrapped in a scrap of stained green silk, and this she laid with the rest, wondering who she had taken it from.

She didn’t remember whose blood was on the knife, but she knew how to grow plants, so that was what she did. She grew them first in cracked pots and horse troughs, then behind the temple she cleaned for food, shelter, and the loan of a small bit of earth in its shadow. Finally, close to a well and in good sunlight, there was a patch of land that Vitrine cleared out for her. What had been there before failed to please, and after Vitrine carefully set it alight, the soil was left with a rich layer of ash and regret.

“This was a bookbinder’s once,” Vitrine found herself saying. “Then it was a greenhouse, and then it was a ruin.”

The angel looked around with a frown, taking in the pipeweed and jewelknot that grew up out of the ground around them. They were common plants and hardy. Though angels might sing a blessing for every blade of grass and every pebble, it was hard to imagine an angel patient enough to sing for weeds.

“This isn’t my work,” he said gruffly, and Vitrine shook her head.

“No, it wasn’t. This was spoiled before you came. You were too late for this one.”

“Who ruined it?”

“The woman who built it up and then set it on fire when she remembered what it was for. She did, eventually. My precious Chanda could not forget forever. If she had, what a wonder she might have made.”

“What did she grow here?”

In response, Vitrine knelt where the greenhouse workbench had been, where Chanda had used small matchsticks wrapped in scraps of wool to transfer pollen from one blossom to another, where she had slit the shells of long-dormant seeds to see if they might be encouraged to grow. She had been careful, so careful, but the most careful human in the world was never proof against the flick of a demon’s finger.

Vitrine sought through fifty years of neglect, picking through the clay and the rock and the wood ash until she found what she was looking for: a double-lobed seed that slumbered in a shell too thick to easily pierce. With one sharp thumbnail, she split the purplish-black skin to reveal the white flesh inside. It released a quick green odor, and encouraged, she set it in the ground, covering it with her hand.

Chanda’s name was written in her book, and so was what Chanda wanted to call this plant, before she remembered and broke every precious pane of glass and returned her success to the fire where it had come from. For Chanda, she could wait for a little while, some few months, perhaps even the full run of the year, to see if anything could be made of the seed she had dropped.

The angel did not move. Instead he paced the perimeter where the walls had fallen, bending down to pick up the fingers of the stone angel briefly before throwing them down again.

“What are you doing now?” he asked, and she shrugged.

“I am waiting.”

“For?”

“For something to change.”

She thought he might fly off then, too frustrated at her strangeness and the blasted barren quality of ground that had been three times scourged, but instead he knelt opposite her, placing his hand over hers. His hands were broad and squared, the nails pristine. They were entirely without lines or calluses, and she wondered for a moment what it would be like to cleave them joint from joint, cleaning them and separating the bones of his fingers. They would rattle like ivory dice on the broken pavers of Azril, or perhaps they would chime. She angrily jerked her eyes away to meet his.

“This isn’t yours,” she hissed, but he only shook his head.

“May the light forbid that it should be,” he retorted, and under her hand and his, something happened.

It was a twitch, so small that it barely budged more than a few grains of soil, and then another, and another. She looked down at his hand, and she would have pulled away if it were not for what she was protecting underneath.

Another day passed, another day after that, and she drew a quick breath as something came up to tickle her palm, first shyly, and then more insistently, and then he pulled away, standing up, his face impassive. She gave him a haughty look and waited another day to show him that she had no regard for what he did or did not do.

When she did lift her hand, it was to reveal a tender pale sprout coming from the earth, the two tiny leaves curling like the horns of a ram.

“Oh Chanda ,” she said, full of the woman who had come from Johari with a half-dozen deaths on her head.

She watched, breath held, as a month passed, then another, and another. The plant was not meant to be a fast grower, but this one was, and she would have roared at the angel to quit with his tricks if her eyes hadn’t been full of this new life, the thick straight stalk, the frilled leaves that looked too pale to be healthy.

“She would have had it far earlier, if only she could have borne for it not to be beautiful,” Vitrine said without thinking, and the angel, who had never looked at the plant growing at all, frowned.

“Was it meant to be a beautiful plant?”

“A mother wants her child to have every advantage,” Vitrine said, and then she remembered Avaline Demorsico and the crane that would never be her. She shut her mouth and refused to open it for another four months.

They waited together in the ruins of the greenhouse, the angel as properly upstanding as the statue had been, Vitrine perched on the pedestal, her feet swinging above the earth. When the rains came, she stretched a fold of sailcloth over her head like a courtesan with a fringed veil. The angel was too proud to heed the rain. He let it soak his clothes and run off his body as if he were a building, a guardhouse or perhaps some fine municipal thing clad in marble and glass. She would have liked him better if he was, but instead he was an angel, and sometimes she amused herself by shying rocks at his feet, at the broken walls behind him.

Between them, Chanda’s plant ceased growing taller, but Vitrine could tell that it was still growing, the secret alchemy of its heart searching and waiting for what it needed to mature.

Come along, little one, Vitrine mouthed. Come out. The world is so wide and wonderful, and it cannot do without you.

On the third day after the rains stopped, when the sun shone like a new gold coin with the world for the buying, the first flowers appeared. They were tiny and crimson, the red of carmine rather than of blood, and they rolled out like tiny delicate tongues from a tight bud, spreading open to devour the world.

Vitrine touched the half-dozen flowers in wonder, and when she bent her head to kiss them, they trembled with some remembered fragment of Chanda’s love of dark things and a bit of her fatal despair as well.

“No, no, be joyous,” Vitrine whispered to them, her lips stinging with their polluted dew. “Be joyous, daughter of Chanda, and you will be a queen.”

“Such promises you make,” the angel muttered, and she would have been sharp with him if her eyes hadn’t been full, if she couldn’t hear the echo of a lost woman’s laugh in her chest.

Vitrine and the angel waited as the moon waxed and waned and grew full again on the dreams of broken towers. The flowers fell and were in their turn replaced by lunar-white berries, tinged with a becoming blue.

When she saw them, Vitrine started to cry. Her tears splashed to the soil and amended it with a sorrow that leached through the roots and gave the plant an extra dose of deadliness that it would carry ever afterwards.

“Oh, that Chanda could see you,” she whispered, stroking the leaves.

The angel, bored at the beginning of the rains and impatient by the time the flowers withered, looked at the plant with his nose wrinkled in disgust and confusion.

“Another poison in the world,” he declared finally, inspecting it from every angle. He had paced a track around Vitrine and the plant, round and even, but now he stood within the circle with them.

“Yes, angel?”

“Yes. Another wracken, another hellebore, another houndsdeath. You’ve only made another way for people to kill each other.”

“Oh, no,” Vitrine said sweetly. “ We have made another way for people to kill each other. Chanda couldn’t do it on her own, and it would have taken me longer without your steadying hand, without your strength. What shall we name our daughter?”

Once she had watched a pair of maids kill a guardsman behind a tavern, on him like two weasels with the knives they used to pare vegetables in the kitchen. Afterwards in their room, they gazed at each other with wonder at what they had made, both the torn body in the alley and the changes they had wrought in each other with such a thing between them. Everything was new, and one reached out to touch the other’s parted lips.

The angel reared back with a fury, for an instant nothing more than a coil of light and a righteous rage older than the world. His sword—will and word and temper—flashed as quick as a snake bite over the plant, but then it froze as if he had driven it into the heart of a thousand-year pine tree.

Between his sword and the plant that would come to be known as devil’s daughter, there was Vitrine, standing straight as a spear, her eyes a dare and her mouth a cruel joke.

“ Yes, angel?” she asked, and she saw the defeat in his eyes even before he would admit it.

He vanished his sword, baring his teeth and mostly a man again except for the way the light clung to his hems like mud. He spat on the ground between them and turned, wings opening to grab the air and throw him towards the cliffs where once the anchoresses lived and cried. She watched him ascend until he was grown as small and insignificant as a sandhill crane or a dropped seed, and then she turned back to their creation.

“You will remake the world a time or two, my darling,” she whispered, plucking up the lushest and most beautiful berry and popping it in her mouth. The taste of a thousand deaths stained her tongue, faithless husbands, vengeful daughters, kings and shepherds and librarians and duelists all coming to bow to their new conqueror.

It tasted very fine, and Vitrine smiled up at the darkening sky.

No one loves a city like one born to it, and no one loves a city like an immigrant. No one loves a city like they do when they are young, and no one loves a city like they do when they are old. The people loved the city of Azril in more ways than could be counted. Vitrine loved her city like demons and cats may love things, with an eye towards ownership and the threat of small mayhem.

Arvan Pilare, dark and gaunt with a neatly clipped beard and mustache, fastidious, distracted, and mostly silent, loved the city as it really was, which was to say he loved it as very few ever did.

“You know, I don’t understand you,” Vitrine said one early morning, sitting beside Arvan as he sketched the fishing ships leaving the harbor. Sometimes he thought she was a ragged man at the tavern near his apartment, and sometimes he thought she was a cockle seller who sometimes treated him to a paper packet of cockles steamed open and sprinkled with vinegar and horseradish. Today she was a knocker-up; the staff that she used to rap on windows and wake people for their morning shifts leaned by her side as she shared his perch on the walkway above the shore.

“What’s to understand?” he asked, not looking up from his drawing. It was a bad habit, one that would have gotten him robbed five or six times over if a demon hadn’t been curious about him and wanted to see how he turned out.

“You could make it more beautiful if you erased that one point off the rocks there,” Vitrine said, gesturing. “See? Then it would match the one on the other side, so they would be balanced.”

She had thought about doing just that. The spar of rock that aggravated her stood taller than most of the masts in the harbor, big enough she couldn’t budge it on her own. She was waiting for one of her siblings to pass through who might have the strength to do so. She could take them out for a dinner of fried oysters, buy them some new clothes, and then ask them to knock off that peak that had been bothering her for some time now.

Arvan made a humming noise, not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh.

“Well, it wouldn’t be real, then, would it? It wouldn’t be as good as what I am drawing now.”

“But it would be more beautiful,” Vitrine insisted, and he drew in the shadows off the sail of the small fishing boat belonging to the Umars, who had been here much longer than Vitrine herself. There was some trouble there this generation, an eldest son who didn’t want the family business, a younger daughter who did. Vitrine resolved to tend to that before it got too bad, but then Arvan spoke again.

“I don’t want it to be beautiful if it isn’t true,” he said, and she snorted, flicking the paper with her nail.

“You’re never going to sell anything,” she said, and his only response was a peaceable all right that made her frown and leave. Let the robbers have him if he couldn’t see sense.

She didn’t think about him again until her sibling Passim came to visit her the next summer. They loved the oysters and they adored the indigo skirts and light girdles hung with silver charms that were so popular that year. The two of them ended the night in the snug study of the city’s chief banker who slumbered all unknowing above, unaware that two demons were helping themselves to his sweetest wine and his strongest hashish.

They stretched out on the fine silk and wool rugs, turning the air blue with smoke, and they spoke of many things, which siblings they loved most, which they could not stand, and which they hated but also loved so much it was worse than simply hating them outright.

Finally, Passim turned their head to look at Vitrine, and in the light from the many candles, it occurred to Vitrine that there was something sweet in Passim’s wolf face, where the teeth were so long they couldn’t properly close their mouth.

“Tell me, sister. You have been so kind. Is there anything I can do for you before I leave tomorrow? I should not like to see you struggle with anything too large when you are only so gentle.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to say that Passim should knock the spar of rock off the harbor cliffs as they headed out to sea, but for some reason, she stopped herself.

“No, only remember to kiss Obla for me and to tell her that I miss her, that is all.”

Vitrine saw Passim off the next day, and then she took on the seeming of a very wealthy woman from the mansions in the west. The old woman at Arvan’s boardinghouse squinted at her suspiciously, torn between fawning and spitting on her well-made shoes, but she called Arvan down and Vitrine whisked him away to a restaurant on Camellia Street. The waiter brought them a large platter of snails and a tiny cushion studded with silver needles to dig out the meat.

“I want you to do some work for me,” Vitrine said. “I want you to capture this city, all of it.”

Arvan blinked, twisting his needle delicately so that the flesh popped out of the snail shell in a complete spiral.

“But of course,” he said cautiously. “I can do the spires and the harbors, and the great houses…”

“Well, of course you will do all of those. But I said I want all of it. I want the shops and the taverns. I want the starving children along the river and the courtesans in their beds. I want the faces of the men at the grain share markets, and the ships, every ship in the harbor, I want that.”

Arvan considered her. He would come to know what she was, or at least he would have a better guess than almost anyone else would. That was probably when he started to suspect.

“That will be very expensive,” he said, and she waved an impatient hand.

“Of course you will be paid. I shall pay you whatever you like.”

Still he hesitated.

“My work is not always beautiful.”

“Then make it true, and I will content myself with that.”

She put a golden coin on the table between them, barely clipped, and then set down another two beside it.

“What does this get me?” she asked, and he stared.

“That’s six months of my life on the table, you know.”

Vitrine pouted, warming to her role as Lady Plenty. She passed her hand over the gold, and it doubled.

“There, a full year,” she said, rising from the table in a swish of marigold skirts. “Meet me here in a year with what you have to show me. No paintings, I think, just drawings in ink. I suggest that when you come, you impress me.”

“Or what?”

She showed him her teeth, white as any aristocrat’s and sharper than a lion’s.

“Or you will disappoint me,” she said, and she left.

Single days could be very slow, but weeks passed very quickly. That year there was a new method for straightening wood that made for stronger ships, and someone discovered the bones of a magnificent dragon bedded in the cliffs down the coast. A team of clerics from Sui and faraway Tuyet arrived with delicate chisels and makeup brushes to painstakingly dig it out, and Vitrine went to join them, spending the high summer poring in fascination over the ancient past emerging from the stone. At night, she went to sit beside the dragon’s jaws, still blackened with soot from the furnace of its belly.

“Who were you?” she marveled. “Who did you love?”

Sui claimed the bones of one foreclaw and Tuyet took the other. The rest was carefully transported to Azril where Vitrine had replacements for the missing parts carved from light wood and then gilded. The dragon posed magnificently in the city’s hall of records, overseeing the deeds and contracts with its great empty eyes.

By then, Vitrine was almost late getting back to the restaurant to meet up with Arvan. He had ordered the snails again, but before they came, he passed her a leather folder filled with ink drawings.

She was silent as she flipped through them, nibbling on her lower lip as she took in her city in a new way, through the eyes and the skills of another.

Oh, it is rather dirty and shabby down by the river, isn’t it? Perhaps I shall whisper to the mayor to put more money there.

“I do not know how I like these,” she complained. “Azril is not at all flattered, and neither am I.”

“It is too late to reclaim your money,” Arvan started stiffly, and she waved him off.

“Of course it is. I do not particularly like these pictures, but you have given me exactly what I have asked for. Here.”

She put down twelve gold coins.

“Two years?”

“No, just one. I’ll see you again in a year.”

“Ah. But… will you stay for snails?”

Vitrine blinked slowly, catlike.

“I think I shall.”

She visited his new studio a few times the next year, lurking in the shadows as he turned his light sketches into completed ink drawings for her. This year, there were more portraits in the mix, some important, most not. Even Vitrine could not be everywhere at once, and she congratulated herself on buying his gaze for her own. She came to enjoy their yearly meetings, finding out what she had missed and what had caught his interest.

So it continued, but on the thirteenth year, there was only a note waiting for her at the appointed place: an apology and a request that she come to his residence, now a fine apartment close to Verdant.

She could smell the sickness immediately upon entering. When the solemn-faced boy servant escorted her to the bedroom, she pulled back the bedcurtains to reveal a rail-thin body with a bulging belly and a staring face yellowed with illness.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have had better days.”

“You have,” she said, taking her seat by his side. “Show me my drawings.”

There were fewer that year, but she studied them as avidly as she ever did. The scenes depicted were closer to his home, and then finally they were only what Arvan could see from his bed, the faces of his servants, the bowl of geraniums, his chamberpot, and the silver tray stacked with sticky dark pills for when the pain grew too great.

“These are excellent,” Vitrine said finally. “It is not beautiful, but it is true.”

She almost stood to go, but for the first time, Arvan took her hand.

“I have more drawings to make for you, far more. Can you keep me a while longer?” he asked, and she winced at the hope in his eyes.

“No.” She wished she could. She had always wished she could.

He nodded, letting his hands fall from hers.

“After I’ve gone on, there is something that is yours held in trust with my men of business, Li and Staten on Law Street. It is yours no matter what, but I wonder if you will do me a favor.”

“I like presents. What favor?”

“See the city for what it is as well as what you want it to be. Be… be kind, if you can.”

Vitrine nodded. It was a rather big favor. Demons were not kind as a matter of course, but she could be kinder than not. There was a great deal of mischief in that balance, especially the sort she liked best.

He breathed his painful last three weeks later, and in widow’s black, Vitrine went to see Li and Staten on Law Street, who handed her a fat leather folder. They told her it had been added to frequently, starting with just a few sheets and then, in the last years, the additions coming in a flurry.

She took the folder and went to sit on the roof of Arvan’s house to inspect it. Below her, his servant boy wept over him, and she absently promised him another love if he would only be quiet. He agreed without realizing he had, and now she was able to open the folder.

Inside, it was her.

The pages of her book fluttered in wonder at the shock, that she had been seen and seen so often. It looked like he had only managed it by accident a few times in the first year, catching glimpses of her among the dragon dig crews and in the hurried rushing at the flower market. As the years went on, he developed the trick of finding her in the most unlikely places, chattering with the women at the pumps, napping among the colony of cats at Dise, dancing the ganli for the death of the last Lord Mayor.

By the last few years, she suspected he was seeking her out. Over and over again, he found her, and he put her in the city, not beautiful, but true, as true a thing as there ever was, the demon of Azril.

Her tears ran down her face to splash on the page, where she argued with a fishseller over the price of sturgeon, and it was only then she realized that she had no picture of Arvan himself. There were the dockmen, the goldsmiths, the courtesans, the beggars, the sick and the well, the vicious and the gentle, the loved and those lost, but Arvan wasn’t there, and she wept harder.

Finally, she pulled out her book, and pressing so hard she dented the page and the one underneath it, she wrote his name. Suddenly she wished she could draw too, but that was never one of her talents and she closed her book again.