“Perhaps you’ll prefer this.”
The pure taste of fine black tea touched his mouth when he lifted the cup to his lips, the leaves no doubt sourced from the plantations in Neha’s territory. “Thank you.” He didn’t tell Mahiya not to serve him, because it told him something else about her that she put down the plate she’d been making to create another one—one much more suited to his tastes, her decision based on nothing but his preference when it came to tea.
A smart woman with many facets . . . who preferred to give an impression otherwise.
Serving herself after passing across his plate, she said, “You wake early.” A penetrating look. “Or you do not sleep. Did you, perhaps, fly all the hours before dawn?”
“I’m not mortal.” Angels weren’t immune to the need for sleep, but the older they became, the less they needed. Jason slept perhaps two nights out of a month, and it was enough to maintain his strength. “However, you need more sleep than you’ve been getting.” Faint bruises marred the skin under her eyes, bruises that couldn’t be accounted for by a single night without sleep.
A genuinely startled look before her lashes veiled her expression. “I wake when you wake, my lord.”
“Jason.”
“Jason.”
It was no victory, he thought, the capitulation as meaningless as any of the other pretty words she said to him. This was not the woman who had talked of garrotes and offered to search a room for a hooked needle, shields of polite courteousness having risen to hide the truth of her in the hours since he’d flown into the vanishing night. “Tell me,” he said, deciding to use not brute force to get past those shields, but rather a subtle enticement to the inquisitive nature she’d earlier betrayed, “about Eris’s guards.”
Putting down her tea, she began to speak, her tone one that said she’d expected the question—which meant she had also worked out why he might need the information. It turned out there were twelve guards in total, a unit whose sole task it was to “protect” Eris by keeping him in his palace. “The unit is composed of highly trained angels, no vampires.”
A winged guard made sense for a prisoner capable of taking flight. “Who do you believe killed Eris?”
Another flash of surprise. This one, she made no attempt to hide, and he understood something else about the princess—she was unused to having her opinions solicited, much less listened to with the respect they no doubt deserved. No one saw more than a person others dismissed as beneath their notice. It was why Jason placed so many of his spies among servants.
However, Mahiya was not a servant, and he didn’t know her well enough to judge whether or not she played a very clever game with him, her “true” face as false as the obvious facade. Only one thing was for certain: Princess Mahiya, with the blade-pins even now hidden in her hair, had just become an even more fascinating creature to his spymaster’s mind.
“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.
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.
He might offer Neha his respect, but he would never worship her as a demigoddess, Mahiya thought, her eyes going to the hair in its neat queue at the nape of his neck . . . which was when she noticed he wore a sword in a black sheath along the centerline of his spine, the straps merging into the black of his shirt. “Neha does not allow weapons in her formal court but for the guard.”
Jason’s eyes locked with her own, and though she knew it for an illusion, it felt as if he was stripping her down to the soul, seeing things she’d never shared with another living being. “Neha,” he said, “understands how I work.”
Mahiya doubted very much if anyone understood the spymaster in truth, but she gave a small nod, taking the opportunity to end the disturbing eye contact. “Shall we go?”
Jason said nothing as they left the courtyard, his silence so profound she knew it must be a part of him, not something created to unsettle her. Strangely enough, she didn’t find it disquieting in the least—Jason’s silence was an honest thing, unlike the lies that came out of so many other mouths. “We’ll find my lady in the public audience chamber.”
Neha was always available on this day to those of her land who would speak directly to her, a paradoxically fair queen whether the constituent was an aristocrat or a farmer. “It’s early enough that we may be able to see her
