“Vanhi, let me get a bandage.”
“Hush, child. It’ll close up soon enough.” A smile that took the sting out of the chiding. “But you can pour me another glass of wine.”
Mahiya did so, glad to see the vampire had indeed stopped bleeding.
“I’ve come to believe Eris courted Nivriti first because she was the more accessible,” Vanhi said, taking a sip of the crisp white wine. “Neha was already an archangel, but your mother was a power in her own right—I say to this day that she would’ve become Cadre had she lived. It was just that her development was a slow burn in comparison to Neha’s blaze.”
“Once Eris had her trust,” Mahiya guessed, having no illusions about the man who had fathered her, “he used that connection to reach Neha.”
“I don’t know if she knew he belonged to Nivriti at first.” Vanhi’s words were soft, poignant with love for the girls she’d helped raise. “I think Neha fell so deeply for Eris because she was unaware of the truth—had she been driven by the game, she would’ve made certain to armor her heart so she could discard him once he’d left Nivriti. As for Eris . . . love was an interchangeable token to him.”
Mahiya had nothing to say to that—she’d known her father too well.
“At the time,” Vanhi said, “Nivriti didn’t make any kind of a fuss. My poor child was heartbroken, even left the part of the territory she ruled as a powerful queen, and went away for many years to the lands Favashi now calls her own. I had never seen her so defeated. Neha, too, felt for her sister—I suppose she thought she had won the prize and could be the bigger person. The games stopped.”
Anger, clean and bright, bubbled under Mahiya’s skin. “My mother obviously decided to change the status quo long after Neha’s marriage.” Putting in motion events that had led to her daughter growing up motherless and trapped.
But Vanhi shook her head. “No, it was no game. Nivriti never felt about another man as she did about Eris.” The vampire put down her glass as if afraid she’d fracture it, too. “It is one of the world’s great injustices that he, of all men, had the keeping of two such strong women’s hearts.”
Mahiya’s anger shattered into a painful understanding for the mother she’d never known, because behind the ugliness of infidelity was an abiding love. Eris hadn’t been worthy of it, but that Mahiya had been conceived in love, at least on one side, it changed the very nature of her history.
“You cry.” Vanhi touched her fingers to Mahiya’s tears, wiping them away. “Ah, my sweet girl. I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
“I always wondered if she even cared I was taken from her,” Mahiya said, her vision blurred by the tears that kept falling. “Now I think that maybe she would have, that maybe I meant something to her.”
Distress bloomed on Vanhi’s face.
“You didn’t mean something to her. You meant everything.” Cupping Mahiya’s face, she said, “I have kept another secret from you, one I was enjoined by your mother to keep, for I was there at your birth.”
29
Mahiya blinked away her tears, her world a kaleidoscope. “I was not ripped from my mother’s womb?”
“No, no.” Vanhi’s distress grew. “I made sure Nivriti’s birthing was as easy as it could be for a woman who lay in a cell.” Fingers trembling, she brushed back Mahiya’s hair. “It was after the birth, when you’d been taken from her that I was alone in the room with your mother for a bare few moments. She whispered to me that she would leave her child a gift, and she made me promise to give you that gift at the right time.”
“What is it?” she asked, trembling at the idea of a link to her mother.
Vanhi’s laugh was waterlogged. “Mahiya, such a beautiful name, don’t you think? One I suggested to Neha.”
Mahiya had always taken her name to be a cruel joke on Neha’s part, for it meant happiness, joy . . . and sometimes, beloved. “My mother gave me my name?” It was a gift no one could ever take away from her.
“Yes, but the second part, I had to keep secret for Neha would not have permitted it.” The anguish of a woman who loved the archangel but saw the lack in her.
Mahiya leaned forward, a hundred butterflies in her blood. “What is the second part?”
“Geet,” Vanhi whispered. “Your name is Mahiya Geet.”
Joyous song . . . beloved song.
Her heart shattered from the inside out. Far from being a mockery, her name was a treasure, a last gift from a mother who hadn’t, she knew without asking, been allowed to hold her newborn daughter. “Thank you,” she whispered to Vanhi through a throat swollen with emotion.
“I thought to tell you earlier . . . but you weren’t ready,” Vanhi said, taking her into her arms. “Now you are. I think the world will tremble to hear your song, sweet girl.”
* * *
Beloved song.
Mahiya squeezed the railing of the balcony and turned to look at the man who was the only one other than Vanhi who knew her true name. She’d had to tell someone, and Jason . . . he would keep her secrets.
Close to midnight, the skies were empty aside from the sweep of the outer sentries. Here, within the walls of the fort, it was quiet but for the night insects, the wind still as a glassy pond, the air cool but not cold. The man beside her was a part of the night, his wings near indistinguishable from the shadows.
“It suits you,” he said, one of those wings brushing her own as he spread them behind her.
Biting back a responsive shiver, she laughed, the sound soft and intimate in the dark. “I am not the most gifted of singers, but I don’t care.”
A tug in her hair, Jason’s fingers unraveling the neat knot at her nape with exquisite patience, each golden pin put on the railing in order, until they shimmered in the dark and her hair tumbled down her back and over her wings. Mahiya trembled. She had been born in a time when a woman did not put down her hair in front of anyone but her lover, and some part of her was that girl still.
It was an intimacy they shared beneath the starlit sky.
When he slid his hand under her hair to close over her nape from behind, she expected him to tug her back for a kiss, but he just rubbed his thumb over her skin before running his knuckles down the centerline of her back and returning to lean on the balcony on his forearms, his wing lying heavily against her own. “I can sing.”