ONE
From the topmost tower of the observatory to the floating docks on the beach, the city of Azril lit up with paper lanterns, with candles, with girls throwing flaming knives and boys in firefly crowns, with passion, with desire, with hatred, and with delight.
When Vitrine first arrived, Summersend had been a fast, a time when the people of Azril kept indoors with black flags hung over their windows and ate dry bread dusted with salt as a reminder of flesh and the sea. Perhaps some, particularly devout, stood in the squares and mortified themselves with grief and goat-hair shirts, but it was a lackadaisical kind of fervor even then. Vitrine had looked into the dour heart of the penance and found within it sparks she could coax to life, nursing them over the glass cabinet in her chest until they glowed. As tender as a demon could be, she nourished them on good years and bad, on silks brought from Kailin and barrels of oysters from Brid. She fed the festival on her own blood and her own laughter until it bloomed like a bonfire.
Now, right before the end, the city threw up towering light and shadows as long as dragons, and the only remnant of the black mourning flags were the colorful veils that the celebrants wore. The veils were too sheer to hide their faces, but they spun as the people danced the old dances and the new dances and of course the ganli, so fast that they might leave death and sorrow far behind them. As Vitrine passed through the crowds, bells on her ankles and her dark skin gleaming under the torches, she thought of what she would write in her book.
Tonight, my Azril beats like the heart of the world.
She allowed a mischievous girl to loop a strand of coral beads around her neck, and she smiled at the grinning boy who offered her a skewer of grilled chicken studded with brined olives. It wasn’t given to demons to bless those they favored, so instead she gave them gifts: an eye that would see through lies for the boy and the knowledge to tell good from evil and the ability to ignore it for the girl. They would not be good, but they would be interesting, and Vitrine reminded herself to write their names in her book.
She spent a brief while cooling her bare feet in the fountain where a half-dozen children caught the sleeves of passersby for candy and coins. When she tired of that, she went to rap on the boarded-up windows of the green house on Malaki Street, where there lived a shivering young man, the grandson of a courtesan she had cared for a great deal. Vitrine still had hopes for him, but they were of a different sort than what she had nurtured before he started to fear the open avenues and the broad sky and sea.
“Darling, my darling,” she whispered through the boards. “Are you well tonight? Are you safe?”
A moment later, a voice came from within, guarded but supple, entirely without cracks.
“I am. Yesterday I received a book of stories from Valnesse and a pamphlet about the glass-winged butterflies of Noor. It’s amusing—they seem to think the butterflies are real.”
“Who knows but they might be,” Vitrine said cheerfully. “Have a good night.”
“You as well. Blessed Summersend to you.”
The neighborhood speculated ferociously on what treasures the young man kept behind his boarded windows and his thick walls. Some guessed a fortune in pearls, others supposed ingots of gold gotten from his grandmother’s estate. No one even suspected that he had kept more books in one place than any other on the continent, holiest and heresies and art and trash.
Five years ago, he had learned that he could not tolerate people, and so the stacks of books grew to keep him company. There were the slender towers of botany treatises as short and delicate as children, the fat stacks of romances that seemed buxom despite their corners, the stalwart disquisitions of war that could be used to build a fortress themselves. Soon, she hoped, he might open at least a window to the outside; if he would not leave himself, perhaps his books would fly out and live in the hearts of those who needed them, just as she needed the book that lived in her own chest.
Vitrine wanted that collection for the city, but the young man would not be young and healthy forever. She could wait for her library.
In the meantime, Vitrine amused herself on Law Street, where tonight the fools and the beggars wrote the rules while the august advocates borrowed their motley and rags to run drunk down the lane.
Vitrine whiled away some time encouraging the wise fools and the foolish solicitors, and then she followed a pack of masked women on their way to one of the manors in the western district, their smiles as plush and red as fox tails.
It was Marius Cantavi commanding their presence, and Vitrine fell to the end of the line as the women circled his private chamber under his critical eye. The women were from the one of the finest houses on Carnelian Street, black velvet roses pinned to their breasts, cheeks dusted with glittering mica, and they were like music given form as they waited for the wealthy man’s decision.
Marius walked among them, enjoying the selection more than he would what came later, and Vitrine cast her blacker than black eyes at him, a sting of desire making him pause. Vitrine stood as docile as stone as he reached for her mask, but when he removed it, he found not the face of a woman but instead something beaked and snapping, the feathers crawling with lice and the eyes rimed with rheum and fury.
He shrieked with dismay, and Vitrine laughed as she left the women from Carnelian Street to sort out the rest. They might soothe their patron or they might rob him blind, and it was all the same to the demon of Azril as she tripped back into the streets.
She picked out the son of the Lord Mayor among a group of maskers, and sent after him a footpad with a lump of iron in a stocking. She had been on the tightrope about him for a while, weighing his courage against his temper, and in the spirit of the festival, she decided to let him stand the test. If he survived the footpad, well and good; she would see what might be made of him. If not, there were plenty of other exciting prospects to be found.
She rested for a while on a rooftop off of Marrowbones Square, the green slate cool against her bare back and one ankle propped jauntily on the opposite bent knee. A lithe gray cat came to investigate her business in his territory, and satisfied, he climbed up on her chest to purr his approval. Vitrine grunted as his heavy little feet sank into her breasts and her belly, but she scratched him behind the ears as his eyes drifted shut.
“Well, well, little lord rat-catcher. I remember your many-times great-grandmother, don’t I? She would be so proud to see how far her family has come, and what a fine sir you look…”
Vitrine turned her head to the side as the cat butted his forehead too hard against her chin, and when her ear touched the roof, she heard the sound of crying below. It wasn’t such an uncommon thing for someone to cry through Summersend, but giving the cat one last scratch, Vitrine wound her way like smoke into the house underneath her.
It was a heartbreak, and Vitrine examined the sharp edges of the fight, the hard words that lay strewn on the girl’s floor like shards of glass, the way her tears tasted of hurt and of fury and perhaps just a little of relief.
“You are all made quite badly,” Vitrine complained to the girl who lay face-down in her bed. “If you were like us, you would never bother with hearts that broke or took on poison like this.”
In the end, because she could not take out the girl’s broken heart and replace it with something more suitable, she only sat on the edge of the bed to stroke the girl’s box braids. They were lovely, beaded with tight copper coils, and with every stroke of her hand, the girl’s memories fell away, dissipating into the air like grave dust. Soon enough, the girl rested easily, and Vitrine kissed the crown of her head before slipping out.
The pleasure in Azril, she thought as she walked past a savage beating in the alley, was that it was not done yet. She had arrived clinging to the dreams of a refugee woman from the south, and at first, all she could do was hurry the city along, longing for the great spires and the royal greenhouses and the grand bazaars she had left behind her.
It had taken a hundred years before she was willing to slow down, another hundred after that before she went back and tore out some of her early efforts and refined others. It would never be lost Saqarra, which was empty even of revengers and scavengers by now, and Vitrine had come to realize that it never could be.
I don’t need it to be, she thought with some satisfaction and pride. It is Azril. It may never be finished, and yet it is still enough.
Vitrine wove through the riot like a light-footed cat, and as she passed, people grew rosy with desire, drunk with love, wild with need for something that surely danced just beyond their fingertips. They did not know it, but they loved her, and she brushed her fingertips over their cheeks and their lips and their brows, promising them that she loved them too.
Before it was anything else, before it had a name or an observatory or the beginning of a library or a mayor or a demon, Azril had been a port town, and the tradition of the ghost ship was sacred. At midnight, Vitrine made her way to the floating docks with a torrent of people in veils, dancing and laughing and shouting with joy for they were no longer the dour fishermen and raiders they had been.
Copyright © 2024 by Nghi Vo
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