Chapter 14
I tapped my fingers impatiently on the steering wheel, waiting for the car in front of me to parallel park so I could get around them.
I doubted they’d be able to do it.
That was an uncharitable thought , I chastised internally, albeit weakly.
It felt increasingly difficult to remind myself to be sweet all the time.
Maybe because Riot was making me question everything about who I was meant to be.
Whether or not it mattered if the thoughts in my head were sweet or not.
Maybe in asking La Nuit for guidance, I had fundamentally changed my makeup. Or maybe I had always been this way, but was feeling less uninhibited about it now. Everything in my life felt like a series of unanswered questions.
Or maybe it was because my parents and my boss had conspired with the Elders to send me away with zero regard for my wishes.
Sighing in irritation at the car in front of me, I quickly hit ‘call’ next to Mercy’s name on the dashboard.
We usually spoke every day, but I hadn’t been great about it this past week, and she’d been so supportive last night at dinner.
Guilt churned uneasily in my stomach at that realization.
I should make more of an effort. Mercy was still a kid—for a couple of months at least.
“Hi,” she greeted, sounding far less peppy than usual.
“Hi. Everything okay?” I asked cautiously.
“I’m tired,” she laughed, though it didn’t have that carefree, airy quality that Mercy’s laugh normally had. “I had that regeneration project at the community center today, remember?”
“Of course,” I replied, annoyed with myself for forgetting. “How did it go?”
I remembered doing hundreds of such community projects when I was a teenager. They were often weak excuses to bring in young agathos women from other cities who may have been feeling the call to that area. I’d never felt the call to travel to one, and so far neither had Mercy.
Anesidora, please don’t let Mercy be alone for as long as I was.
I couldn’t quite bring myself to pray that she meet four nice agathos soul bonds, though. Because I loved Mercy, and I wanted her to have the kind of meaningful connection I had with Riot, even though it was a lot more complicated than what a normal soul bond would be.
I felt like he and I were happier than my parents had ever been, but maybe that was just the stress of time and raising children, rather than the fact that they were all agathos.
“We had to work extra hard to finish it today because the memorial is tomorrow. It would usually be a two-day project,” Mercy replied eventually and I frowned at the dashboard. That wasn’t really an answer to my question.
“Was everyone nice to you?” I pressed. Sometimes her peers looked down on Mercy because she’d basically been shipped to her family in Auburn to raise her prospects like a Regency-era young woman.
“I’m stressed because my emergence is in a couple of weeks,” Mercy deflected again, though it was a reasonable excuse.
“Of course,” I murmured sympathetically. All agathos were required to take a test with the Elders when they turned 18, before being led down to the basement altar in the temple for the emergence rites that awakened their gift.
Hopefully hers wouldn’t end in Eutychia like mine had. It had been a very quiet drive home.
“I remember how stressful that day was,” I volunteered.
“I’m sure you passed with flying colors,” Mercy muttered, an unexpected hint of bitterness in her tone. The car in front of me finally gave up on the parking spot, and I began moving slowly down the street towards home again.
“Not at all,” I assured her, frowning to myself.
Maybe she was angry that I was being sent away?
She hadn’t brought it up, and I wasn’t particularly willing to talk about it.
“I aced Knowledge and Wisdom, passed Self-Restraint and Justice, but barely scraped through Moral Virtue and Piety. Mother didn’t tell you that? ”
“No,” Mercy replied after a long pause. It wasn’t like Mother would brag about my dismal results, but I thought she would have used it as motivational material for Mercy.
Get low results on your Moral Virtue test, be alone forever, or something along those inspiring lines.
“That should make me feel better...” Mercy said nervously.
“But it doesn’t,” I finished with a grim smile she couldn’t see.
“I admire everything you’ve accomplished in your life,” she said hurriedly. “Getting your degree, moving out, buying your own place…”
“But you don’t want to end up like me. That’s understandable, Mercy. You don’t need to explain.”
The words hung in the air in the ensuing silence, and I tried not to let the hurt and failure burrow in like it usually did.
I had my bond with Riot. I wasn’t alone.
Maybe no one else would ever understand what we had, maybe they would never be able to know about it, but it meant everything to me.
I could feel his emotions when he was around me—his desire, his concern for me, his awe and admiration for me— and I felt all those things and more for him.
That tether to him, knowing what I meant to him meant the sting of not meeting everyone else’s expectations hadn’t been as sharp as usual lately.
Mercy wasn’t everyone though. She was the one person in my family who I felt like I hadn’t disappointed yet.
“I’ll leave you to study,” I said softly, blinking back the uncomfortable rush of tears threatening to fall. “See you tomorrow, Mercy.”
I pressed the disconnect button before she could reply, and for once I didn’t care if I was being rude. It wasn’t like I ever expected to be anyone’s role model, but it was still disheartening to realize I was the exact opposite. A cautionary tale, even.
Of course she didn’t want to end up like me. She’d sat there at dinner and watched my parents explain that my future was in exile. No one would want to end up like me.
Usually Mercy and I had a great relationship, and a pain shot through my chest at the idea those days were behind us. She was in a bad mood, I reminded myself. She’s been painting all day and she’s worried about her emergence. Don’t take it personally.
I’d see her tomorrow at Joy’s memorial anyway. We could talk about it then and try to get back on steadier ground.
Riot wasn’t back yet when I let myself into the apartment, making multiple trips to transport bags of groceries up from my car, finally able to restock the pantry properly after a chaotic week.
For a while, I pretended that I wasn’t going to have to defy the will of my parents and the Elders and every other agathos I knew.
I pulled out the unfamiliar ingredients I’d purchased so I could try some vegetarian dishes—I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure what I was supposed to do with tempeh, but I’d give it a shot—and pretended that Riot and I were just a normal couple, newly living together and merging our lives.
We hadn’t talked about the future at all, but we’d both admitted we thought we were soul bonds, so I was sort of hoping that meant he wasn’t planning on going anywhere. I liked him living here.
I paused in the middle of refilling the soap dispenser, frowning to myself. What if he wanted to leave?
It wasn’t something I’d ever contemplated.
In my mind, when I’d eventually meet my soul bonds, we wouldn’t need to have conversations like that because they’d already know what to expect.
Still, even now my body was growing exhausted and achy from the distance between Riot and I.
I doubted either of us would survive living apart.
Just consummate the bond, a dark voice in the back of my mind whispered almost gleefully. The thought was almost immediately followed by a crippling level of guilt. It was easy in the moment to let go and just feel with Riot, but if I actually thought about it…
My entire life, I’d had the importance of purity and chaste thoughts pushed on me, and I’d always struggled with the latter more than other agathos seemed to.
I’d tried to do things that I knew were forbidden, and punished myself by using my gift as much as possible to help others, hoping it would balance the scales for my bad actions.
Would I always feel guilty when it came to intimacy? Would I always feel like I was impure now? I couldn’t imagine sex would improve those feelings.
Mood thoroughly ruined by my own thoughts, I let myself outside to give my roses some much needed attention.
Gardening wasn’t a usual agathos hobby beyond having an impeccably manicured lawn, and even that was usually outsourced to humans.
I’d managed to get away with a few houseplants in my parents’ house, but I couldn’t properly indulge my fascination with botany until six months ago when I moved here.
I rearranged the pots, cutting back the longer stems to protect them from the wind and adding a layer of mulch around the base of each plant to protect them from cold snaps. I was relying on the internet for instructions, but I hadn’t killed anything yet.
By the time I was done and showered to get the smell of mulch off me, I was missing Riot too much to get up and cook.
Instead, I poured myself a glass of sparkling grape juice and went back out on the deck with a blanket to sit and admire my hard work while I ordered vegetarian Chinese food on my phone.
It wasn’t until I was sitting down with all my jobs out of the way that the conversation with my parents snuck back into my mind again.
I had been doing my best to avoid thinking about it because I wasn’t going to go on the ridiculous outreach trip anyway, no matter what they’d decided, but I hadn’t actually given any thought as to how .
Serenity, one of my agathos friends growing up, had a brother who was sent on an outreach trip, but she never talked about him. It was announced at a temple gathering that he was going, and all of a sudden, he was gone .
Had he protested? Did anyone ask him what he wanted?