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The words were a fist punching against her ribs. “Neha was the one who committed the initial betrayal?”
“It was never that simple. ” Vanhi’s eyes shut, opened again to display steely resolve. “I never before spoke to you about this, because what good would it have done? The past is gone, buried. ” Finishing her wine, she played the stem of the glass between her fingers. “Now I see I was wrong. You must know where you came from if you are to take charge of your own destiny. And if I will not share these secrets with you, who will?”
Mahiya’s skin felt as if it would burst with all the questions she had inside her, but she kept quiet, intent on listening with every cell in her body.
“Everyone,” Vanhi murmured, “always calls Nivriti the younger sister, and she was . . . by five heartbeats. ”
Her silence shattered. “Twins? How can that be? No one ever mentions it. ”
“Neha was always stronger, until Nivriti was thrown into the shade. She was also the more innocent of the two, and as the centuries passed, people forgot the truth and just thought of her as younger. ” Vanhi’s voice was grave with age, with history, as she continued. “As children, they didn’t fight or compete—Neha used to take great care of Nivriti, and theirs was a bond I thought nothing would break. ”
Mahiya could barely absorb what Vanhi was telling her. “What changed?”
“Age, time, life. ” A shake of her head. “Maybe it was jealousy on Nivriti’s part, arrogance on Neha’s, or maybe it was simple sibling rivalry, but they began to play a game. It started out as a battle of wits and devolved into something so ugly it hurt my heart to stand witness. ”
Vanhi’s eyes shone wet. “First, if Nivriti asked the seamstress to make her a special dress, Neha would steal the design, get an identical one made in a shorter time and wear it prior to Nivriti’s big event. Nivriti would retaliate by hiding Neha’s gems so her sister would be forced to appear drab, while she glittered. After a while”—a hitching breath—“they began to play the game with people as their chess pieces. ”
Mahiya’s gnawing curiosity twisted into a knot in her stomach.
“If one of them made a friend, the other would either charm that friend away or seed the relationship with vitriol until it curled up and died. It was such a foolish, foolish waste of their talents and gifts. ”
Mahiya rubbed a fisted hand over her belly, for she knew it was about to get much worse. “I’ve heard my mother’s strongest ability had to do with things that flew?”
“Yes. ” The shadow of a smile, lush red lips curving in memory. “She assured me the birds spoke to her and that she could see through their eyes. Falcons came to roost on her shoulders without aggression or anger . . . though as her bitterness grew, she no longer took joy in admiring their wild beauty, but began to use them as weapons. ”
The wet spilled from Vanhi’s eye to trickle down to her lips. “I once saw her send a falcon down to claw the eyes out of a vampire’s head. He’d been her lover, had taken a position in Neha’s new-formed court. When I reached him, his face was a mask of red, his screams of agony piercing me to the bone. ”
The adult Mahiya had never believed her mother a fairy-tale maiden who’d been wronged . . . but she’d had hopes—that Nivriti had been better than Neha, that Mahiya’s birth hadn’t been an act of ultimate hate. However, shatter her dreams though they might, she craved the truth, would hear all of it. “So Eris wasn’t their first battleground. ”
“But he was the first they both loved. ” Vanhi’s wineglass cracked under the force of her grip, sending a trickle of blood down her palm. Waving off Mahiya’s cry, Vanhi put the broken pieces on the coffee table and dabbed at the wound with a handkerchief. “I am sorry to say Eris was not worth either one of my girls—or of the daughters he helped create. ”
“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. ”
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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.
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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. ”
It was the last thing she’d expected to hear from him, this man who threatened to splinter her defenses until she repeated her mother’s tale of love unrequited. Yet now that he’d spoken, her mind whispered with half-remembered fragments of conversations overheard.
“A voice more beautiful than Caliane’s they say. ”
“. . . made my heart break. ”
“Purity, that is Jason’s voice. ”
The speakers had all been more than four hundred years old. “I would hear you,” she whispered.
“I have not sung for many years. ”
“Did something happen to still your song?” she asked, unwilling to back away when this was the first time he’d spontaneously offered her a glimpse into the mystery of him.