Page 15 of The City in Glass

“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.