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.”
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.
His reply was slow in coming, but she didn’t take his silence for anger, knowing Jason was a man who felt no need to clutter the air with words. Instead, tempted by the way his head was below her own as he leaned down, she reached out to undo the tie that held his hair in its usual queue. It fell like black water around his face, and he didn’t stop her when she began to smooth it back to lie over his shoulders. “You have such beautiful hair.”
“I prefer yours.”
His hand fisted in her hair, his lips on her throat.
Thighs clenching, she ran her fingers over his scalp. “Then we are well matched.”
He arched a little into her touch. “The only songs in my heart were ones that made the Refuge drown in tears. So I stopped.”