“The sparrow,” he murmured, “she actually grieves.” The rest indulged in theatre.
“Yes.” Sympathy in the single soft word. “Shabnam and she were both inducted into their positions at the same time, and rather than competing for Neha’s attention, they became friends who helped each other navigate the politics.”
“Why should there be politics? They occupy the same rarefied position.”
Mahiya shot him a frowning look. “Are you making fun?”
Jason hadn’t ever been accused of that, even by the irrepressible Illium. “Strange as it may seem,” he said, “I have never had reason to know about the inner workings of a group of ladies-in-waiting.” He had operatives who were far more capable in that arena and who kept him apprised of any necessary information from such quarters.
“A lady-in-waiting has certain access to Neha.” Mahiya appeared to have decided to take him at his word, though the suspicion in her eyes didn’t totally dissipate—and for some reason, that made a quiet amusement warm his blood. “None of them would be stupid enough to risk their position by actually asking for anything, but occasionally, if a lady is particularly favored, Neha will grant her a boon.”
Even a small boon from an archangel, Jason understood, could change the balance of power in a given situation. “Do they represent different groups in the court?” He looked at the women with new eyes, seeing iron butterflies, their wings edged with razors of ambition and greed.
“Not simply the court, but the territory.”
Thus, they all had puppet masters at their back, tugging strings, situating each for maximum gain . . . doing the dirty work.
“Lisbeth holds the most power at present.” She indicated the dark-eyed angel. “She’s very intelligent. They all are.”
He nodded in acknowledgment of the warning. “I take care to never underestimate an opponent, but I may have in this case.” Like the others around her, Lisbeth looked . . . frothy. Clothes of a gauzy fabric that caught the wind and glossy brown hair done up in an intricate mass of curls, jeweled combs in the strands, features painted with an artful delicacy that highlighted her ebony-skinned beauty. “I’ve seen enough.”
“Do you wish for me to organize interviews for you with the ladies?” Mahiya asked once they were back in the corridor.
“No.” He’d find them on their own when they didn’t expect to be questioned. Right now, he wanted the answer to a different kind of question. “You’ve become cooperative beyond the call of duty.”
A shallow court smile—one he realized he despised after having glimpsed a real one last night when she admitted to watching for him. “You,” she murmured, “are my best hope of escaping this hell.”
It made him wonder just how far she’d go.
16
“Tell me who gains from Shabnam’s death.”
Mahiya felt a sudden, frustrated urge to scream when Jason used the haunting clarity of his voice to speak those words. She’d deliberately baited him with her sweetly poisonous reply, wanting to incite a response, to shatter the obsidian ice that surrounded him until it felt as if she spoke to a black mirror.
“Is there a lady who waits to take her position?” he clarified when she remained silent.
“There are always those who wait.” She wrenched the strange madness under control, for what did it matter to her if Jason preferred to live a step distant from the world? “But Neha chooses who she will—an aspirant could kill off the entire group and fail to gain a place.” Her scarf lifted on the wind as they walked upstairs to take the high terrace path, flicked over Jason’s arm, his chest, before falling back neatly by her side.
I am jealous of a piece of fabric. Foolish when he does not even see me. “Sorry.” Last night on the balcony, when this deadly shadow of a man had made the clear effort not to hurt her feelings, her fascination with him had altered into something both tender and far more dangerous. The way he’d looked at her after his return, she’d hoped . . . but clearly, his actions had been nothing more than a quiet kindness.
The realization made her heart ache.
“You cannot leash the wind,” he said, his gaze an impenetrable depth she couldn’t fathom.
“No, I suppose not.” She broke the eye contact that was too much, too strong, too visceral. “It would’ve been better had Shabnam disappeared if this action was politically motivated,” she said, forcing herself to concentrate. “Her killing may well make Neha sympathize with her intimates and choose the next lady from within their ranks.”
“Might they gain an extra boon?” Jason’s wing was so close, she could see the fine black filaments that made up each midnight feather.
Her fingers curled into her palms. “No.” Though she was in no doubt that were such a thing a possibility, Shabnam’s “family” might well have sacrificed her with cold-blooded calculation. “Shabnam was worth more alive—she’d been with Neha a long time, had her trust and liking.”
“Your wings are dragging.”
“What? Oh.” Cheeks heating at the reminder one might give to a child, she raised her wings so that the edges no longer trailed on the red sandstone of the terrace.
Then he spoke again, and her embarrasment transformed into the most bittersweet of emotions. “You need to work on strengthening your wings in every detail. If Neha’s temper turns, it may come down to a race to a safe hiding place until I can work out a political solution to your freedom.”
“I am just over three hundred years old, Jason,” she said, using his name of her own volition for the first time, the small intimacy filling her mind with all the other fragile moments she’d dreamed of experiencing with the nameless, faceless lover she’d imagined in her darkest hours. One with whom she’d fly, see the world, build a life, build a home, fill it with laughter and love and happiness such as she’d never known.
“Even were I to have trained for endurance flying every day of my existence,” she said, holding onto that dream with every ounce of her strength in the face of harsh reality, “I couldn’t outfly Neha, even for the shortest flicker of time.” Neha was an archangel who had lived millennia, her power vast. She’d crush Mahiya like an insect and never notice.
“And a hiding place?” Mahiya shook her head. “I won’t let her bury me again. Better I die fighting for my freedom than to turn into Eris, dead in chains.” It was a fierce vow. “I will not allow her to pin my wings to the wall as Lijuan does to the butterflies she collects.”
Jason felt a dark wildness come to life within him at Mahiya’s impassioned declaration, but the response that came out of his mouth was almost icily calm, the words he’d wanted to speak hidden deep inside the silence that had been his existence for so long. “Lijuan would like to add me to her collection.”
Mahiya stumbled on a rough part of the terrace, would have fallen if he hadn’t shot out a hand and gripped her upper arm. Ignoring his hold, she stared at him. “Did she say that to your face?”
“Such unique wings you have, Jason. A pity if you should die in battle, those midnight wings destroyed. A quiet, measured death in the arms of a lovely girl ripe with her womanhood would be so much easier, do you not think?”
“She offered me a peaceful death.” He forced himself to release Mahiya, his need for touch a clawing thing inside him. “She’s been much more vocal about Illium.”
“Blue tipped with silver, yes, his wings are stunning,” Mahiya murmured. “I saw him once when he accompanied Raphael on a visit.”
Jason glanced down into eyes bright even in the shadows of an archway, and had the sudden realization the brilliance was an indication of emerging power. One no one had noticed because the change, like every aspect of Mahiya’s power, had to have been incremental. “Your own wings are just as unique.”
“No, they’re not.” Mahiya’s tone went flat. “My mother had the same.”
He hadn’t known that, and if wings of such beauty had been forgotten, it meant someone had buried the information. Neha, it seemed, had wiped her sister out of existence as well as out of life. Now she attempted to do the same to the child who bore wings the exquisite sapphires and emerald greens of a peacock’s spray.
“Did you . . . Have you seen Lijuan’s Collection Room?”
Jason halted, watched Mahiya rub her hands up and down her arms, as if they did not stand in sunlight thick as syrup. “Yes,” he said, “I have.” The Collection Room was located within the stronghold where Lijuan had first created her reborn, and kept permanently cold to preserve the bodies that hung on the walls, their wings spread out in magnificent display.
Some, Jason knew, had died in circumstances where their wings had remained undamaged, but others . . . others had simply vanished from the world. “If you saw that room,” he said, driven to touch a single finger to Mahiya’s cheek, “you’re lucky to be alive.”
She didn’t shrug away the touch. Flattening her hand over her belly, she said, “I thought I could bargain service for sanctuary. I convinced myself it would be akin to being a servant, that I’d be free aside from my duties.” A shiver wracked her frame. “I think the only reason Lijuan returned me to Neha rather than keeping me as a trophy was that she was deeply offended by the fact I would dare run from the archangel to whom I ‘owed duty.’”
“Were you a cat,” he murmured, his mind on the massive cold-storage room behind the Collection Room, filled with drawers big enough to hold angelic bodies, “I would say you are now poorer by at least seven of your nine lives.”
“What do you know?” It was a whisper dancing over his skin.
“Many things I cannot unsee.”
* * *
Jason’s words continuing to circle in her mind, heavy with a lingering darkness that tugged at the vulnerable core of her in spite of her conclusion that he felt no such need in return, Mahiya parted from him several minutes later. “I must attend to Neha,” she said. “I am meant to be spying on you after all.”
Jason’s response was as unexpected as the fleeting touch that had anchored her to the here and now when the nightmare of Lijuan’s stronghold threatened to suck her under. “You’re not hard enough for such a task”—almost gentle words—“and I honor the strength it must’ve taken to fight the bitterness, to refuse to allow your heart to petrify to pitiless stone.”
No one else had ever understood that truth, understood the conscious will it had taken to remain untainted and unbroken. Shaken at the way he could reach her so deeply when he remained so distant, she said, “I must go,” and turned to walk away.
When she looked over her shoulder seconds later, he was gone, the sky showing no sign of the spymaster who threatened to strip her to the soul. “Who are you, Jason?”
The wind held no answers for her.
Lowering her gaze from the sky, she took a deep breath and replaced the emotional armor Jason had disassembled with nothing but a touch, a few words. She could not go to Neha vulnerable and exposed.
