Page 32 of The City in Glass

“Are you going to see her go so easily?” the angel asked as they watched the mustard-dyed sail disappear over the horizon.

“Of course not,” Vitrine said, staring after them as if she could unbend the world and see them a little farther on their way. “The world is large, and she might be taken by pirates or an accident. She might drown or fall or falter. She might find some other place she thinks she loves as well as Azril.”

“What a shame that would be, to fall in love and be made to stay.”

“I love her,” Vitrine continued, still watching the empty horizon. “Her name is in my book.”

“And you let her go.”

“There are many ways to love someone.”

Ships bearing refugees and immigrants and traders and scoundrels trickled back along with messages from Jinan, and Vitrine and the angel read them avidly over her parents’ shoulders. She was in Johari where there were canals instead of roads, and then she was in Mato Lorno, where they danced with fire and sometimes married their brightest young man to the eternal flame.

Ten years in, she sent back a disgraced mercenary company, soldiers who had fought for the wrong king and now needed a corner of the world where they were not so famous. Vitrine found it at once comforting and disturbing to see swords carried in the city again. Azril-that-was had had navies, both formal and built piecemeal from pirate fleets. On the landward side, the great families had always maintained their own personal armies, both for fighting abroad and for fighting at home.

“She has dreams of empire,” the angel said dourly, and Vitrine frowned.

“It’s too early for that,” she said, “much too early by far. Azril isn’t ready to be an empire. It wasn’t even ready for that before.”

“What do you expect to happen when you tell a girl she can have the world?”

“I told her she could have Azril, which is better,” Vitrine said. “Anyway, have some faith.”

“In what?”

“In her. I do.”

Jinan sent back people who knew how to make fireworks, people who came with cocoons of sleeping mulberry worms sewn into their hats, people with broken hearts and broken heads, cracked just enough to let the light come in.

The first anchoress arrived, her hair cut to a glittering silver stubble and the words of a mad desert god on her tongue. It wasn’t quite the same as the god they had worshiped before, but it was close enough, even if it made the angel restless.

Vitrine had become accustomed to the angel coming and going. He might be in the city for a few years at a time, and then through some summons she could never detect or an instinct for wandering that angels unexpectedly possessed, he would be gone, hitching a ride on one of the traders that sailed up and down the coast.

She would oversee the great water wheels that the Attar family wanted to place on the river, and he would be gone. A while later, after trying to figure out what silkworms would eat, she would look up and see him sitting at the fountain or hovering over a blacksmith at the forge. Ten years after Jinan left, she found him standing on the cupola at the top of the new watchtower looking out to sea.

“However did you get up here?” Vitrine asked, shifting from a crane to a human. “Don’t tell me you found another set of wings.”

“I climbed,” the angel said. “Would you be jealous if I had found myself new wings?”

She ignored him, looking out over the water.

“Did you see her?”

“I’m not always on city business, you know,” the angel said with a touch of irritation. “I have my own work, and it takes much longer now since I must walk.”

She waited, and he sighed.

“She’s in good health though abysmal spirits. Juana left her in Padri.”

“Oh. Oh, hm.”

“I don’t think it will last. They’ve fought before.”

“And she’s in Padri. They have good food there, and a very fine tradition of assassins and perfumers. Maybe she’ll send some back.”

Vitrine sat on the edge of the cupola facing the town, her knees drawn up to her chest and her toes dug into the ridge of decorative copper stripping around the edge. It was so new that it had not yet had the chance to go green. So many things were new now.

“I don’t know about any of this,” she said, spreading her hand to encompass the city.