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.”
29