Page 17 of The City in Glass

“I remember when this one still had all her teeth. They gleamed in her mouth until a shying horse knocked them out, and then she had false ones carved for her from the tusk of a sea cow. Her jaw pained her for the rest of her life, the echo of that kick sounding in her dreams, but Huyen Lang was still one of the best drovers in the city, still led the wagons from the docks up to the stations in the west.”

She set down the skull to pick up another, crying out when the angel seized her by the wrist, causing the skull to strike the ground and shatter.

She reached down for the bone shards that scattered whitely at her feet, but he would not let her bend, instead keeping her on her feet. With a cat’s hiss, she clawed at his fingers, and when she went for his eyes, he took that hand too, holding her still.

“Stop it. They are dead as we will never be. Leave them here. Let them rest.”

“Like I should leave you? Do you believe that if I forget my city and all the people who made it my city that I would let you go?”

His fingers tightened painfully on her wrists, a warning perhaps, but what use were warnings when the worst had already happened?

“Oh, you do think that, don’t you?” she murmured. “If I left Azril, perhaps I would leave you as well. Or at least, I would pluck out that piece of myself that you bear with such tedious patience.”

“Not so patient.”

Her lips parted over her teeth, something that was once a smile.

“Show me.”

He let her go abruptly, shying back like the bay might have done, but he didn’t flee. The bay could go upriver, beyond her grasp, and the angel couldn’t. Instead, she watched fascinated as his hand ghosted up towards his chest and dropped again hastily.

“Show me,” she repeated, and with a soft, pained exhale, he lifted his shirt up to his throat, showing her the mass of scarring over his heart. It was an unnatural wound on impossibly perfect flesh, her curse given form. It made her stare, and without thinking, she came closer. She hadn’t done it, but she had caused it, and she pressed the ball of her thumb to the marks that rutted his flesh like a plow over the earth.

“You scar,” she said with something like wonder.

“I shouldn’t. I.”

Vitrine wondered vaguely what he had intended to say. She didn’t much care because it wasn’t true. Once you wounded a thing, it scarred if it didn’t die first. Perhaps he was the first of his brothers to have ever been wounded; it wasn’t impossible. Once you were wounded, if you were lucky, you scarred. He was lucky without being grateful for it, and she laid her hand over his marks, just barely covering them with her palm.

Under her touch, his breathing went shallow.

“This is all of you I care to touch. Just this part.”

“The ruined part.”

“The part that’s mine.”

She stepped back as if it meant nothing to her.

“You wear it well.”

“I don’t.”

It came out almost plaintive, and she went back to shoveling the bones underneath the dirt while he hovered close and then fell behind her.

It took another two weeks before she declared herself done, and as she washed her feet in a fountain filled with clean rain, it occurred to her that she had spoken to the angel in anger and not in grief. It was a thin difference, grieved anger and not angry grief, but it felt like an important one, and she nodded, pleased.

The rain washed away the clouds, leaving the sky a polished bronze platter, and far above, she could see the shape of the angel, wings wider than even an eagle’s or an albatross’s.

Or a crane’s, she thought, remembering the taste of the crane girl’s flesh in her mouth.

Vitrine wondered if he pretended that Azril’s broken towers were the peerless spires of his home. She wondered if it pained him to be apart from it, from his brothers and his work.

She did not wonder what was in his heart, because she knew, and as the sky shifted gold to lazuli, she smiled.

NINE

The rains came, and this year, they brought with them a cold that sank into Vitrine’s bones. She had come from much warmer places, where the rain was a blessing because it took over the world completely and deeply and only for a handful of days. In those lands, the rains came down as if they loved the land, and the land opened to take them, greedily draining the water until the cereus and the jade plants burst into bloom, unable to help themselves.