Page 29 of The City in Glass

“But she was born here, not in her parents’ home, not on the sea. She opened her eyes to see the sun shining over the ruins, and she knows not to eat devil’s daughter, no matter how pretty the berries.”

“She belongs to Azril,” Vitrine said, a pain like an iron spike through her heart.

“She belongs to herself,” the angel said sternly, and he walked back to the shore. Vitrine stayed where she was, her back straight as she sat on the sand. She had had a throne for a little while, some few ages ago. She did not care for it the way some of her siblings did, but she remembered what it was to sit with the weight of a nation on her head and the expectation of thousands hanging from her skirts.

“Well?”

“Well,” she said slowly. “They are not what I imagined, but I have imagined very little over the last while. I have been more occupied with memory than I have with what comes next.”

“It’s come now,” the angel said shortly. “Now what will you do?”

Vitrine climbed to her feet. She wondered, brushing the sand from her trousers, if she should gain a foot or so in height so she could meet the angel eye to eye, but it had never mattered before. She doubted it would matter in the time to come.

“Give me, oh, let’s say three months,” she said. “I am out of practice with people. Then bring them in.”

“And how shall I do that?” asked the angel with an overly solicitous tone that she chose to overlook.

Vitrine shrugged, already walking back towards the city. She could feel his eyes on her back, and she put a jaunty swing into her hips.

“I am sure you will figure it out, angel,” she said.

Three months later, just as the sun set behind the mountains, the people from Igomto raised their heads at the scream of an eagle sitting in the tree across the river. Its feathers were the white of blasted desert sand, and its eyes were two drops of black volcanic glass.

They came out of their homes to marvel at it, to debate in hushed voices whether it was a good omen or a bad one, but then Jinan shrieked with delight, hopping across the river by the broad stepping stones like a little goat. Her parents ran after her, and so did her aunts and her uncles, and after that, everyone left came along as well because it wasn’t a story that one cared to be left out of.

The white eagle screamed as Jinan drew near, and then it winged its way through the pines towards the ruins of the dead city. Some would have turned back when they saw where the eagle wanted to lead them, but Jinan was heedless, following it through the cleared rubble.

She followed the white eagle through the darkening city, her people behind her, and then they came to a plaza where the ground was mosaicked with river pebbles. Fresh water bubbled out of the ground, so clear and cold it made those who went to drink laugh in delight. The plaza was surrounded by a low wall, and set on the wall were stacks of fresh flatbreads, dusted with red salt and still warm as if they had come straight from some diligent baker’s oven. The people marveled at the wonder of it, tasting the sweet water and taking ravenous bites from the bread. Soon enough they found the baskets of apples as well as the barrel full of saltwater and clams, and a joyous wondering cry went up.

The eagle landed on the angel’s bare arm, her enor mous talons digging cruelly into his flesh as he preened her crown. He praised her skill and her beauty and then he threw her aloft before he came to stand next to Vitrine, who was showing Jinan how to sign her name in her book. He waited until Jinan’s eimi called her off, and he came to sit beside Vitrine on a fallen column somewhat back from the light.

“Bread and salt and water,” he mused. “Graveyard apples and fresh clams. This wasn’t what this place was before.”

“Well, we’re going to have to wait a while for the sweetbreads stuffed in songbirds stuffed in chickens stuffed in ducks stuffed in geese.”

“Is that really a thing you did?” asked the angel, momentarily distracted.

“Oh yes. That and strips of raw jellyfish and roasted eel and horse meat charred and served sizzling…”

“What I meant to say is, bread and salt and water. It means something, doesn’t it?”

Vitrine tasted ashes on her tongue, and abruptly she spat.

Together they watched as the people ate their fill. Fires were lit, giving them light to talk and to laugh. Jinan sat between her parents, her father picking in wonder at the iron-red salt, her eimi tearing off bits of flatbread to give her just as Vitrine had fed her steamed clams. They wondered out loud at the quality of the bread, how white it was and how free of grit, how it tasted just like what they had had at home and had not thought that they would have again.

They wouldn’t, either. Vitrine had contracted with some of the winds to bring the grains to her from overland, watching for weeks as they had filled an old brass casket for her. She found the jade mortar and pestle somehow untouched in a buried midden, and they wouldn’t put their own grit into the flour like granite would. The red salt she had gathered from a cove up the coast. It was the farthest she had gone from the city since, but coming back with fist-sized lumps of garnet-colored salt had been worth the dizzying nausea and the flood of tears.

“This isn’t their bread,” she said in defiance of Jinan’s parents who said that it was. “It’s mine. We made it in my old city. I had a mind to make it again.”

“The grains won’t grow here,” the angel said dubiously, breaking one of the flatbreads open. “They won’t be able to make it the same as it was.”

Vitrine wondered if this was some angelic trait, to find fault with every little thing. Everything where he was from was perfect—did they think it must be so on earth as well? She shook her head in pity. Good luck with that.

“This is where I decided that Azril would be mine,” she said. “This was Gallowscross. There were three dead people hung up right over there, and we danced together before they moved on. The Black Dog of Aile came for one of them, Jonavan-in-Fur for another, and the third went with Shining Grace just before dawn.”

“An unlucky beginning,” the angel said disapprovingly.

In response, Vitrine pointed into the crowd where there was another figure as unseen as they were, shrouded from head to toe in rags of burned linen and with a muzzy veil hiding the place where a face would be.