“It isn’t my place to say” was her smiling response to his question now, the self-deprecation in her tone so natural, most would have accepted it at face value. “I have none of your experience.”
Jason was used to waiting hours, days, weeks if he had to, to unearth a single truth. “I would see the rest of the fort,” he said, permitting her to believe he’d accepted her carefully calculated nonanswer.
“Of course.” Breakfast finished, she quickly cleared the table, then led him outside. “The fort is too big to walk—I can give you an overview as we fly, then—”
“No, show me directly to the area utilized for the formal court.” He would not make himself a target against the painful blue of the sky. Neha had no reason to shoot him out of it, but Neha was also an archangel. The only one of the Cadre Jason trusted was Raphael.
Mahiya hesitated. “If you will give me a moment, I must return to my rooms. My lady will be displeased to see me thus in the main court.”
When Jason nodded, Mahiya knew she was trapped. She’d have to leave the spymaster on his own while she changed, giving him a chance to throw her off once more—but going as she was, was not an option. Neha would deem it an insult, and attracting the archangel’s attention would be a very stupid move on her part at this stage of the plan. No matter what it cost her, she must swallow her pride, bite her tongue, bow her head, whatever it took to survive just awhile longer.
Thanking Jason for his forbearance, she walked upstairs and quickly undid the small row of hooks at her ankles that fastened the tapered cotton of her pants. Many of the younger generation in the city preferred to wear tight jeans below the tunics, but Neha was an archangel of old, preferred an adherence to tradition within the fort.
The buttons that closed the wing slits gave her a frustrating moment when they refused to open, but she managed to get them undone and shrugged the tunic to the floor. That done, she picked up not a sari, but another tunic set. Jason was apt to take to the skies at some point, and much as Mahiya appreciated the grace a sari bestowed a woman, it didn’t make for the most appropriate flight wear.
Of a soft yellow fabric heavily embroidered with white flowers set with tiny mirrors in their centers, the tunic was formal without breaching the mourning etiquette in force since Anoushka’s death. The fine cotton pants that hugged her legs were a contrasting white, as was the long scarf she folded lengthwise and placed over her left shoulder, attaching it to the tunic with a brooch from the jewels available for her to use but that belonged to the fort Treasury.
Her hair was easy enough—she pulled it back into a neat knot at the nape of her neck, anchoring it with the high-quality blade-pins she’d managed to buy from a traveling tinker without anyone being the wiser, bartering a richly embellished sari in exchange. The tinker believed he’d gotten the better of their bargain, but the pins had given Mahiya a priceless sense of safety in the darkness, a constant reminder that she wasn’t a broken, crushed creature, but a woman willing to fight for her right to live, to exist.
Her face, she left untouched. Her eyes already attracted too much attention—she wanted no more.
“Such pretty eyes you have.”
A half-grown child, Mahiya didn’t know why the words made her sick to her stomach. “Thank you.”
A slow smile from the archangel who she’d been told was her aunt. “They are your grandfather’s eyes. The line, it seems, breeds true.”
Shrugging off the chill of the memory, she slid her feet into flat slippers, her toes fitting perfectly into the crystal-studded leather, the strap around her ankle similarly bejeweled. No one could ever say Neha didn’t give the child she’d “adopted” every luxury.
Less than seven minutes after she’d come upstairs, she ran back down—to find Jason standing in front of the courtyard pavilion, his hands behind his back and his attention on the palace that had been Eris’s prison. Relief had her releasing the breath she hadn’t been aware of holding.
He didn’t fit here, she thought, caught by the starkly masculine beauty of him as she walked to the pavilion. He was too untamed a thing for the polished elegance and polite rules of Neha’s kingdom. From the wildness of the tattoo that covered the left side of his face, to the implacable black of his wings and the clean lines of his clothing—simple black pants, a shirt in the same dark shade, black boots, no jewelry—everything about Jason screamed that he was a man, an angel, who made his own way, forged his own path.