Page 26 of The City in Glass

“May these people land on your shores?” he asked finally. The words came out slowly, and then with greater speed, and it was not until the last that he was able to meet her eyes.

“May they be welcome here and find some shelter from the sea and the storm? May they stay for a while at least so that they can rest and remember how to be people again? May they be unafraid here, as they have not been for months? Many of them are nothing more than broken edges. Could you give them a place to grind those edges down so that they may sleep without cutting themselves?”

Vitrine bit her lip, her gaze traveling from the ships to the angel to the ruins behind her to the angel again. They weren’t her people, none of them. They were from somewhere else. They wouldn’t sing the same songs or dance the same dances, and she did not love them at all.

“Beg me,” she said obdurately. She needed time to think, and she certainly could not do so while he towered over her.

Despite everything that had gone before, the angel hesitated. They both knew that he could force the issue if he wished. He could protect the people aboard the ships from the mischiefs that a demon could do. He could bury her in the mountain to keep her cries from awakening them at night, he could simply bear her away to some distant land while they became the new people of Azril, and it would be another city entirely by the time she found her way back.

Instead he went down to his knees, his splendid wings spread flat to the sand and one hard fist planted on the ground in front of him. It made something in Vitrine stutter as she looked at him, her breath caught in her chest as he raised his eyes to her.

“Please,” he said. “Please let them come, please let them live.”

“They’ll only die on my shores. They’ll find the land too harsh since the city fell, the river still too stingy with fish. They’ll sicken from the still water in the city wells, and they will fall into the crypts that break open from time to time. They will sicken and die here.”

“It is what people do, I am afraid,” the angel said in a tone that was perhaps a little too respectful. “They die. I imagine the people of Azril did it as well, even before my brothers and I came.”

“They’re not my people,” she whispered, gazing at the ships. She tried to summon up the fury that had been so very easy to find in years past, where everything that was not what it had been had sent her into a fit. Where was that anger now that she needed it? It seemed to have abandoned her completely, and then the angel reached forward, greatly daring, to snag a fold of her loose trousers.

She flinched, but he did not reach for her flesh. He only looked up at her, eyes as deep as the most secret cisterns in the city, mouth as soft as innocence and likely as breakable.

“Please,” he repeated. “Let them stay.”

“What will you give me?” she blurted out, and he smiled as if he had won.

“What do you want?”

For you to have never come across the sea. For you to have remained away with your mouthful of praises and your heart like an empty hall of marble and light, sealed up and inviolate with nothing of me in you. For my city to be yet standing.

He knew that, however, and her eyes traced along the curve of his gray wings instead.

The angel hissed when he followed her gaze, his wings pulling instinctively towards his body before rising again in an overt threat. Even on his knees, he looked like the death of cities, the weeping of mothers and fathers.

“More like a goose than I would have given you credit for.”

His wings might have been gray, but there was a pearl iness to them, the very tips of his feathers translucent and gleaming a dull lilac. They weren’t like a goose’s wings, or even like the wings of the imperial eagle, the largest bird on the continent. Instead they were the wings of an angel, magnificent, strong enough to let him circle the world ten times in a thought, powerful enough to stun anyone who got too close. She got too close now, circling behind him to see.

Trembling a little at her own boldness, Vitrine reached out to run the flat of her palm, too intimate by far, along the broad feathers, making them twitch and stir. He is not made out of earthly stuff any more than I am, she thought. Why does it keep surprising me how familiar he feels?

She grew bolder, ruffling her fingers through the primaries, ticking her fingertips through the finer feathers closer to his shoulders. There were rents in the fabric where his wings pulled through his robes, and through them she could glimpse the dark skin of his back. She had some idea that that skin should be unmarked and clean, but this close, she could see how the salt sea air had cracked it and turned it ashen.

It gave her a pulse of pleasure she wasn’t looking for to see him like that, and her fingers tightened on his feathers, taking double fistfuls and making him shift on his knees on the sand. It must have hurt quite a bit even before she tugged, but he made no sound. When she opened her hands, the feathers were bent where she had touched him—one drifted free to the ground.

The angel shuddered silently, his shoulders hunching, his fingers digging into the sand. He wasn’t looking at her, and irritated, she came around to touch his chin, tilting his face up. She wanted to see tears, fury, something that would prove what a violation this was. Instead his eyes were wide, and there was something hungry there, something that had entirely forgotten the ships in the harbor and was instead only for her.

Vitrine swayed towards him. Another moment, and she would have seized his wings again, bent them, scattered feathers up and down the beach, drowned him in the water and washed the sand with his blood, and it would have had nothing to do with Azril before or the Azril that came after.

He’d let me, she thought exultantly, and that pulled her back, because she didn’t want him to let her do anything.

Without her hands on him, the angel looked startled, hunching down closer to the ground as if she might pass him by, a beggar ashamed of his circumstances. The word ashamed rang in her mind like a bell, and she reached out again.

“I want them,” she said, touching his wings gently.

“Both of them?”

“What are you going to do with one?”

There was suddenly a tightness around his eyes, something slack and disbelieving in the hang of his jaw. He looked like he had when she had first cursed him, and the pleasure of that made her smile.