Episode 115: Cornering Aadya (Indigo)

Somehow – Indigo was fuzzy on the details – Aadya had managed to peel herself away from Greg long enough to finalize the preparations for the summer festival.

Indigo joined her. She was feeling good about today: She’d helped her brother save his husband (and end his marriage in the process, but that was a minor detail). She’d had a very enjoyable breakfast picking apart the reality of Greg in their lives. And she’d had an amazing night with Zero.

She joined Aadya, stringing some kind of flowering vine all along the trellises that bordered the dining and dancing area for the festival. Mags must have grown the vines special just for this.

“How are you feeling about Spence’s campaign?” Aadya asked her, on a break between vines.

Yeah, that was why she was here…to talk about Spence.

“Ambivalent,” she said. “It could be really good, or…” she sighed, thinking of all the things that could go wrong, which she avoided thinking about because Bentley hadn’t warned anyone that Ach or Spence was going to die. “You’re not worried about Ach?” she asked.

“He was being protective,” Aadya said. Apparently she wasn’t here to talk about Spence either. Indigo looked away to hide her amusement. “I think he has a right to be.”

Nope, she needed to laugh. She let it out. “I meant about campaigning with Spence,” she teased.

Aadya laughed. It was one of the reasons they were such good friends – Aadya was capable of laughing at herself. Indigo needed that, even if she hated to admit it. “He’ll be protective,” Aadya said. “He loves Spence and he’s skilled. At times,” she amended. “But he’s capable. I trust the two of them together.”

Indigo did too. They’d been training with Konrad for years, and they’d grown up together, playing in the rift when they were younger. They knew their own abilities and limitations, except when Spence decided to take on too much. But he had Ach there, to keep him reasonable.

“And what about this new guy?” Indigo asked. “Greg?”

The best thing about this conversation was that Aadya was as eager to talk about Greg as Indigo was to ask about him.

Aadya grinned, like a little girl getting a pet pony. After a minute of that she managed to wrap her lips around her teeth again and answer, “He’s fun. We’re just having fun.”

“Fun?” Indigo clarified. She knew she wasn’t like most girls, and wasn’t really into casual fun without the emotional attachment, but she’d never thought Aadya was either.

Aadya giggled. “I don’t even know what that means,” she admitted. “He’s intense and exciting.” She looked out toward the empty enclosure, waiting to be filled with hundreds of revelers later today. “I don’t want to have people look at me with any sort of undeserved pity during the festival, or to draw any tension about Meldrick and my joint rulership. Greg will be a good symbol.”

That was a great justification made out of nothing. She was tempted to call Aadya on it, but maybe Aadya needed the denial right now.

She went a different direction instead. “Is he good?” she asked, conspiratorially.

“In bed?” Aadya asked, surprised. Indigo had never asked about Mel or Konrad, absolutely not about Drey. “Definitely.”

“How did you even meet him?” Indigo asked her. “You haven’t had time for any trips lately.”

Aadya shook her head at the mention of trips. “He irritated Meldrick in Babylon, and had Apa send for me to greet him. She wants us together. I’m just enjoying her opinions of my life.”

Aadya greeted plenty of people in the barn, but she’d never brought any of the rest of them as her date to breakfast. “Does she,” Indigo teased, about Apa, “think I need a summer dress or an autumn one?”

Aadya laughed. Her expression opened up. “Autumn,” she decided.

“I don’t think you’re going to make it that long before Emma steals him,” Indigo warned her. Emma seemed to like him. All the kids did, really.

Aadya’s voice hushed. “Carina, Nash, Merlyn, Eowyn, Ruskyn, and Landyn walked in on us this morning. I don’t know how to explain the lack of permanence. He’s so good with them.”

He was. “Zero thought maybe you hired him because Yishti quit. Why does it need to be impermanent?”

“If Yishti quits,” Aadya said, eyes lit with amusement, “you will all know because I’ll be caught skipping breakfast and work.” She took a moment to add another strand of vines around the archway trellis that framed the path to the herb garden. “I bonded to Cheyenna for a moment when she was staying here,” she confessed. “My price for covering for her.”

She’d bonded to Cheyenna, which meant she’d gotten luck magic.

She’d bonded to Cheyenna, which meant she’d probably picked up some of Cheyenna’s personality traits, like decisiveness and an ability to detach from emotions and examine them logically before reaching a conclusion.

She’d bonded to Cheyenna and then divorced Mel. Pieces of the intricate puzzle that was Aadya’s life fell a little more into place.

“I think,” Aadya said after another silence, “that Drey is coming home.”

Jaw-dropping was not the word. It wasn’t extreme enough.

“Drey,” Indigo said flatly.

“It’s just a feeling,” Aadya defended. “When Nell died, Drey visited too, but only in dreams. Somehow.”

If the dead could visit in dreams, why hadn’t Indigo’s dad ever found her, explained his suicide to her? Why had he left her alone, without understanding, lost and grieving for someone she could never fix?

She didn’t want to believe that the dead could visit in dreams, because if it was true then it meant that her dad had chosen not to come to her.

“I can ask Zero if it’s possible without a body,” she offered reluctantly.

“I can’t discern how, but I’m certain,” Aadya stated, about Drey. “Greg knows he is filling the time between when we met and when Drey comes home.”

That sounded like a convenient excuse, to Indigo. A way to push Greg away indefinitely while Aadya adjusted to the idea of him.

Fine, if that was what she needed.

“He did propose though,” Aadya told her.

“That didn’t take long.” It hadn’t taken long for Zero to propose to Indigo either. She remembered the night, right before she was kidnapped by the Caelum, when she and Zero had their talk about long-term plans.
It hadn’t been the world’s most romantic proposal, but that made it better to Indy. More real, and one hundred percent hers and Zero’s.

Done with the vines, Aadya sat on one of the stone benches that lined the walls of the area. “We have bonds,” she told Indigo. Casually, like the bonds had just fallen into place.

Indigo couldn’t resist. “I always suspected there was a group of undines hiding in San Francisco,” she joked.

She wondered why, if they were both bonded, there wasn’t another wedding tonight. It would send a powerful message to anyone looking for discord at the harvest festival, and it was obviously what Aadya wanted.

Indigo could remember being there, with Zero, no bonds necessary. Every part of her longing to be permanently connected to every part of him.

When she’d felt that way, they’d married, almost immediately. He’d taken her name, which still surprised her sometimes to think about. In the Dells, he was Zero Alandrial. In Sylem, he was Zero Lavesque. Their kids all followed the same pattern, except Camilla, who’d kept Linnaeus, Indigo’s last name before the war.

Drey had renamed her Alandrial, as a means of protecting her by willpower, incorporating her into the royal family rather than letting her become a commoner like the rest of the former nobility had done.

It was, she suspected, his last gift to Nell; protection for her, and her children, which as pixie king Nell had no real way of offering.

The only logical reason for Aadya to have the double-bond, to feel this connected, and not be getting married…was herself. She stood in her own way, probably out of fear or overwhelmedness or something that kept her from committing.

And Drey, it appeared, was her placeholder for all that uncertainty.

“What would you recommend I do?” she asked.

Marry him, before he figured out she had a million kids and a kingdom to run. “I don’t know,” she murmured instead. “Drey is…very dead. Almost two decades.”

Hanging onto him was understandable, but she was going to miss her chance with strangerman Greg if she wasn’t careful.

“He is,” Aadya agreed.

“Are you sure?” she prodded.

“About?”

About the idea of someone who’d been dead for almost two decades, who had no body to come back to, somehow finding his way home.

“Drey?” Indigo said. She tried to keep the sarcasm from her voice, she really did.

She missed him too. He’d been such a fixture for so long. She loathed the cliche statement, but he’d been so intense, so…alive.

Defensiveness, she expected from Aadya. It would have solidified Indigo’s suspicion that Drey was just a mechanism for Aadya to hide behind commitment from.

Honesty. “No,” she said, brow bent as she focused on sorting through the feeling. “I don’t understand the magic enough to be.”

Hell, it made her assertion immediately more real. She believed it, as a standalone.

Indigo wondered if Bentley had said anything about Drey, when he’d warned Zero that she and Talise would be dying soon.

She couldn’t lose Elliot and still be herself. She found her hand falling to her belly again, loving him. She wanted to hold him, to tell him he was loved, to speed up time so she could have him now, before anyone killed her and took away any chance he had at life.

Nope, not going down misery lane.

She was here for Aadya, so she focused on her. “Well,” she said. She plopped down on the bench next to her friend. “I wouldn’t push someone away who makes you grin like that, on a maybe that you don’t understand. I’m not saying marry him tomorrow,” except she so was, “but…you told him he’s temporary, and he’s still here?”

“Yes…” Aadya said, that same grin spreading across her face.

“You bonded to him naturally?” Indigo pressed her advantage.

“Yes,” Aadya said. She rested her hands on her belly too. The babies – impossibly, Nell’s babies – were probably kicking. She was far enough along to feel them. “I could feel it with the talisman, actually,” she said. That was a strong bond, not just a hint of a connection but something, from Indigo’s understanding, that would have fought to exist.

“And…” Aadya added, “maybe it was the drinks last night…” She sighed. “I gave him the bond. I took it away this morning, but he asked for it back.” She looked at Indigo’s face, searching for a reaction. “How bad of an idea is a temporary bond?”

Dumb. Indigo thought about Acheron, every visible effort he’d made to stay away from Spence, from staying physically away from him to forcing himself to focus on everything, anything, else. How intensely, immutably, they’d come together when he finally caved to his feelings and the bond.

Even if Drey came back, Aadya was hopelessly lost in someone else.

Indigo reached to the table with all the fruit, grabbed an apul, and took a crunchy, satisfying bite.

“I don’t think it’s temporary,” she told Aadya.

Aadya took one too, and they ate in mutual silence for a minute, presumably so that Aadya could gather her thoughts.

Indigo loved apuls. They weren’t sweet, like so many Babylonian and Ispitarian apples, but they weren’t bitter like the ones from Alder. They were tangy and strong, juicy and crunchy, perfect for tarts and pies.

And mass consumption. Indigo grabbed another one.

“Why not?” Aadya asked, when her apul was nothing but a husk.

“You don’t walk around with a mirror in front of your face,” Indigo pointed out, “so you haven’t seen the way you look at him.”

“Maybe,” she laughed. “But I can feel it. What about Drey, though? I love him too.”

She’d loved him sixteen years ago. Who knew what he’d done since then. Sixteen years, of someone like Drey being dead…if he had any say at all in things, Indigo would bet he’d found himself a nice depressing cave to brood in.

“Seventeen years is a long time,” she pointed out to Aadya. “People change.”

For instance, she couldn’t see her brother with Drey again. He’d outgrown the Drey she knew, and she didn’t like the idea of him being back, causing trouble for Nell.

“Even when they’re dead?” Aadya joked. “My biggest fear about him coming back is, although he loved me…I’m still.” she reached out in front of her, grasping for whatever word she wanted. “Not his preferred type. I’m a girl. Female. He attaches, but a lifetime together is a long time. What if we’d make better friends, and some male would fit him better romantically?”

Great, now she was going to end up campaigning for Drey just to make a point to Aadya. Drey, once he’d accepted the Nell loss and the forced marriage, had attached to Aadya, not to her body. “Do you know the term pansexual?” she asked Aadya, although she suspected the answer.

“No,” Aadya confirmed.

“It’s a term for someone who cares more about personality than appearance or gender. Drey didn’t care if you were a guy or a girl, as long as you were you.”

She hoped Aadya hadn’t spent the last almost two decades feeling deficient for being a girl, but she wouldn’t put it past her.

In some ways, Aadya and Drey had way too much in common. It was a miracle their relationship had ever worked.

“Then…” Aadya said. “I don’t know. Greg is fun though.”

Fun, intense, new, no baggage.

It made perfect sense why Aadya would want Drey instead.

“Yeah?” Indigo asked, pushing the fun line. “How?”

“He believes he is skilled at procurements,” she explained, “though he lost against the dragons.”

She bet he wouldn’t lose against the dragons next time. He had a watching mind.

“Funding allocations,” Indigo muttered. “I knew that was too boring for him.”

Aadya laughed again, warm and content. Indigo wished Aadya could see herself, and stop doubting.

“I want to get to know him better,” Aadya said. “How long did it take for that need to diminish with Zero?”

“Who says it has?” Indigo joked. She would never stop wanting Zero, even the surprises and revelations about his family. Everything she learned about him made him more to her.

“It hasn’t?” Aadya asked, pressing for more.

So much for this talk being about Greg.

“Not really,” Indigo admitted. “He still surprises me sometimes.” She thought about his plan for the incorporation of Elesarian and wicca to form a new branch of magic unique to their family, something it would be all but impossible for other wiccans to break through.

She thought about Rhyss, opening and closing his fist in that very Zero way.

There was still so much to know about Zero.

“How did you know,” Aadya asked, “that you wanted to spend forever with him? I can only recall twenty years, and they haven’t exactly been tied to one person.”

Or her choice, really. She’d had Drey, by force of or death and a nice pointy sword at Drey’s throat, and then she’d had Mel by force of it will unite the kingdoms.

This was Aadya’s chance to find someone and decide for herself. It was monumental.

She opted for openness and honesty, even though it wasn’t easy for her.

“I’d been…drawn to him,” she revealed, “and trying to sort out whether it was the body or me that wanted him.” And which one Zero looked at with all that craving and curiosity. “And then when Drey and Nell were there and everything was loud, he just slipped away. Just like I do, to be alone. So I found him.”

She couldn’t have kept away from him if she’d wanted to. When she’d seen him looking for quiet time, alone time, she’d known it was herself who wanted him; someone who she could understand and be understood by.

Back then, she’d been new to this body. She’d felt curvy and alluring and lost, used to her old pale string bean body. She hadn’t known what to do with this one.

She suspected, knowing him better now, that Zero had found her uncertainty more alluring than almost every other aspect.

She met Aadya’s eyes, with the realization that she’d gotten lost in thoughts about Zero, and grinned, guilty.

Aadya grinned back, with that fresh love happiness.

“You don’t think it’s too much to ask someone to be with you, when you have thirty-four kids?”

“Who all adore him?” Indigo teased. Even Aadya’s grandchildren adored him. She looked at Aadya, serious. “Would you want to see Talise guilty about the disruption to Niels’s life, or would you say it was his choice.”

Aadya fake scowled. “You’re right,” she said, resigned.

So, Greg then.

Indigo wondered how involved Aadya would have him…weekly meetings? Helping in villages? Or just an ornament for her to go home to at the end of the work day, the way Mel seemed to be tailoring Giana to be?

Or maybe Aadya still intended to step down.

She shouldn’t, with her heir probably about to die, unless she wanted Acheron to be king. “Did Zero talk to you about what Bentley said?” She had luck; she might already know. “Or did you figure it out on your own at all?”

“What did Bentley say?” she asked.

Indigo took a deep breath. She didn’t want Aadya to know or guess about her, so she kept it strictly down to the heir business. “He thinks something temporary will happen to Talise,” she said.

She watched Aadya’s expression go vague, the way Bentley’s and Shea’s sometimes did when they drifted into luck land, sorting through feelings and intuitions from the magic. She really did have it.

Wow.

Indigo…was extremely content without the bond.

Why would she want to be more like other people?

“Okay,” Aadya interrupted her thoughts. “Thank you for telling me.”

“Niels knows,” Indigo added. “He’s watching.”

“It’s temporary?” Aadya asked, rhetorical. She drew in a deep breath and let it out with a blast of air. “Hopefully the festival itself goes well.”

Like Aadya needed to worry, when she had the luck magic to guide her way. “Will it?” Indigo teased her.

“I think so,” she said. She relaxed against the back of the bench again, having navigated her way through the Talise information. “What’s an appropriate amount of torment, for Greg? If it were to be non-temporary?”

If she was sleeping with him on temporary terms – the life dream of the stereotypical guy, even though Indigo had only ever met one guy who actually behaved like that – the torment of waiting would be more on Aadya’s end than Greg’s.

But Aadya should make this decision without regrets, even if it was obvious to Indigo. It wasn’t obvious to Aadya yet.

“If Drey really is coming, at least that long,” Indigo told her.

Then she could choose, and stand by her decision without wondering.

“I think Drey knows who he is,” Aadya stated.

Indigo decided it probably wouldn’t be nice if she burst into laughter. Aadya had always been a little delusional about Drey, but really…knows who he is was a little over the top.

If you got a thousand people together and asked each of them to describe Drey in a thousand unique ways, not a single one of them would say he knew himself well.

Indigo didn’t laugh. She wanted a prize for that feat.

“I think I’m the one at risk of having changed,” Aadya continued.

“Have you?” Indigo asked.

Aadya looked down toward her hands, which she kneaded together. Ach had the same habit, despite being about largely Drey in personality.

“Greg,” Aadya said. She lifted her eyes to meet Indigo’s, uncertain. “He tempts a part of me I try to ignore.”

This was good stuff. “Which part?”

Aadya was silent for a moment, her eyes back on her very active hands as they prepped imaginary dough. Indigo always imagined she was making pretzels, because Indigo loved salt pretzels.

“A part,” Aadya mused, “that’s a little less innocent priestess and a little more used-to-be-Elaira,” she admitted. This frustrated her, for some reason. “Everybody hates her, so I’ve stuck to the Aadya parts. But it’s there. Not in a way that wants to hurt others, but more…something.”

Indigo understood. Wow, she understood.

Both of them trapped in bodies whose history they couldn’t remember, trying desperately to be themselves and not anyone else, trying to live down crimes their bodies had committed without either of them knowing.

Yeah, she got it.

For her part, Indigo hid from the wicca magic and any sign of ambition or ruthlessness.

For Aadya’s part, Indigo guessed… “Adventure? Challenges?”

“Something a little devious,” Aadya clarified. “Playful. Nothing too bad.”

“Good,” Indigo said. She had a little bit of envy there, which she tried to ignore. She was happy with her life; she wasn’t about to mess that up chasing down things she missed. “You need that.”

“Do you know how much Drey despised her?” Aadya pointed out, in a suddenly sharper voice. “It’s been frustrating, trying to imagine what to do with that. It’s undeniably there.”

That was why she pushed Greg away. Because he helped her to be someone Aadya was afraid Drey wouldn’t like.

Mel had adored Elaira. He’d risked everything, given up so much, for her. It was something Indigo only guessed at, something Aadya would never understand. The extent of what Mel had been through, much of it for her…

“He despised what she represented,” Indigo said carefully, “more than who she was.”

“Which was?” she asked. “The forced marriage or something else?”

Indigo tried to remember which things she’d heard Drey gripe about most, over the years, besides Mel’s attachment to Elaira which irked him more than Indigo thought made sense.

“The control of the arrangement,” Indigo told her. Specifically, that the marriage would have forced him to be in his mom’s, or her dad’s, control for the rest of his life. “The alliance it formed wasn’t one he wanted.” He never cared about the sea kingdom. He loved land, books, light, travel and adventure. Not being trapped at the dark bottom of the ocean. “And,” she said with a knowing smile at Aadya. “He always hated water.”

She laughed, as Indigo hoped she would. Drey was theatric about his feelings towards water, splashing and always desperate to get away from it. He’d gotten more vocal about it since his marriage to Aadya. Indigo suspected that was his way of avoiding water magic, of changing any more than he already had.

Aadya, of course, knew none of this. To her, Drey was just a fire prince who hated water.

“And shapeshifting,” Aadys added with amusement. “Which I hated too for a while.”

There was something in her tone, something telling… “What?” Indigo asked.

Aadya looked out towards the garden, with a massive grin that consumed most of her face. “I’ve come to realize it can be fun,” she said. “Greg fun.”

Indigo wasn’t sure she wanted more details on that count, so she laughed and scrambled to think of something else to ask about.

Aadya solved the problem for her: “It’s going to be next to impossible to give him up,” she confessed.

Then why was she trying so hard to make him temporary? Girls made no sense to Indigo.

“Nell says Drey has someone, wherever he is,” she told Aadya.

“Maybe they can come here together,” Aadya said with a lighthearted tone Indigo suspected didn’t match her emotions.

Indigo laughed anyway. “Wouldn’t that just solve all your problems for you,” she teased.

“It might,” she agreed. “I have something for you, by the way.” She reached into the canvas work bag she usually wore when working and pulled out a small box wrapped in an olive green paper with gold pineapples emblazoned in a diagonal pattern.

She passed it to Indigo. “Autumn,” she said, with a smile.

Indigo unwrapped the box, to reveal a matched hook earring and necklace set. The decorative pieces were tiny dried flowers pressed between miniature plates of glass

Indigo would have to look their meaning up later. She could imagine the dress she’d wear with it: Something cream and flowy with salmon flowers and dark brown vines.

She hoped a fabric like that existed somewhere.

“It will be perfect with the dress I’ll wear,” she said. She pulled Aadya into a hug. “Thank you.”

Aadya smelled different, like cedar and sunlight on hot dirt. Greg’s scent, Indigo guessed.

“Thank you,” Aadya said. “For cornering me. At least someone appreciates your efforts.”

Time to call in a favor, maybe? “What is Greg planning with Zero?” she asked, just in case Nell hadn’t been messing with her this morning.

She got a very Nellish smile, which she tried fruitlessly to smother. “I can’t tell you that.”

Of course not. At least it wasn’t anything bad. Probably.

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