Mara barely aged before Nic and Ayla pointed out he could. He still didn't ever really look as old as them, and he aged mostly in the ways Nic found cutest.
i decided a long time ago that bernie wound up marrying an asexual woman from the trading flotilla. considering bernie is "ayla's" (in the same way hari is mara's and lind is nic's) i then thought about what bernie's wife's relationship with ayla specifically might be. so here's raisa!
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Raisa was sitting in the courtyard, letting the water from the roof drip onto her legs before it reached the thirsty plants below. It was interesting, how every bit of the village seemed to have multiple purposes. Some of the roofs collected rainwater, some of the roofs charged heat-stones, some of the roofs were little gardens themselves. It didn't have a unified aesthetic, except for how it had all been built by the same hands.
Raisa loved this village. She had since the first time she was allowed to come, instead of hanging back with the nanny ship. It was so eclectic and alive and lived-in. This village had never been taken over by a gang of rich people and turned to their interests, or sucked dry by an entitled noble, or run ahead of its own resource production until it dried up and began to decay. It was a mish-mash of aesthetics and purposes, unified by the desire to help everyone.
She wasn't sure how much the villagers would want her around, after the fight she'd just had with Bernie. Bernie was one of the headwoman's kids, which meant she was also one of the Destroyer's kids. They were beloved by the entire village, but the anger of the two most important people in the village--one of whom was a literal god!--was the real danger. She didn't think they'd tell the fleet to fuck off, but they might ask the captains to not have Raisa come.
She was near tears again before she realized it.
She loved this village, of course, but she was really upset about Bernie. She'd tried so hard not to mess things up this time. She'd tried so hard.
"Hey, Raisa," someone called. Raisa looked up to see it was Bernie's mother, the village headwoman. Raisa couldn't help cringing a little.
The village headwoman, who, like the rest of her village, didn't seem to have a family name and therefore everyone simply called Ayla, didn't seem to notice. She beckoned Raisa and said, "Come take a walk with me."
She was in for it now, Raisa thought, but it wasn't like she didn't get it. She'd be pissed at someone for fighting with Bernie too, if she wasn't the one doing it. She glumly got to her feet and followed Ayla down the street to the fields.
They walked in silence for a few minutes. The moist ground smelled greener than the dankest parts of a ship. Some of the other members of the fleet didn't like it, but Raisa always had. Sure, it meant she wasn't on the sea, but it meant she was on good land, at least.
As they reached the far end of the fields, where they'd be able to see anyone approaching them from pretty far away, well before they could be overheard, Ayla said, "So Bernie told me you had a fight."
Raisa sighed. "Yes, ma'am," she said.
Ayla frowned at her. "I'm not going to yell at you," she said. "Or I don't intend to, at least. You've been to enough family dinners now, I think you know I'm not always prepared to get so...worked up."
"Yes, ma'am," Raisa said. "Thank you."
"Do you like having sex with Bernie?" Ayla asked.
Raisa hesitated, because Ayla would hardly be asking if Bernie hadn't told her about the fight. "I don't hate it," she said.
Ayla sighed. "Kiddo," she murmured. Which was a little condescending, Raisa was twenty-eight, but Ayla had been running this village since she was nineteen, and she was old enough to be Raisa's mother.
When Raisa started dating Bernie, people asked her if she was intimidated to be dating one of Mara's children, and did she worry about being smited if she fucked something up. Which was silly, because for all that Mara was the god of destruction, he was a harmless funny uncle as far as Raisa was concerned. She just couldn't square the idea of Mara the Destroyer with the man who used to toss rocks up into the air and disintegrate them with magic to entertain children. But it was also that Bernie wasn't Mara's kid. Like, she literally was, he was her father, there was no denying that, but Bernie was first and foremost her mother's daughter. Hari was the one stuck to Mara like glue, and Lind was very much Nic's. Bernie was Ayla's.
Anyway, Ayla did all the negotiating with the captains, and even though she never introduced herself as such, all the other villagers looked to her for decisions because she was the village headwoman. Raisa had the impression they made their decisions more collectively, much like a ship did, then had Ayla act as their captain to speak to outsiders and do business. And Ayla was a temperamental and stubborn leader. Raisa never wanted to get on her bad side.
"Kiddo," Ayla murmured. "Did it never occur to you that you don't have to have sex with your girlfriend?"
"Of course I do," Raisa said. "That's what being someone's girlfriend is."
"Oh, yikes," Ayla said. "Are you saying you're only dating my daughter to get in her pants?"
Raisa flushed. "No, of course not," she said.
"Then you think she's only dating you to get in your pants," Ayla said.
"No," Raisa said. "That's not what I meant at all."
"So sex isn't all there is to dating, then."
"No, but it's one of the things people expect," Raisa said.
"And you can tell people to stop expecting it," Ayla said. "It's actually pretty easy."
"Easy for you to say," Raisa muttered, aware she sounded sullen but unable to help it.
Ayla laughed. "Gods," she said. "Bernie really ought to have learned from Hari and Fatima's example," she said, shaking her head. "Raisa, do you know why Bernie asked me to talk to you? Instead of Nic or Mara, hell, even Hari or Lind?"
"She's your favorite," Raisa said. "Or...vice-versa, at least."
"Fair, but not why she came to me," Ayla said. If Raisa had said that about any of the parents in the fleet, they would have denied it, even when it was obvious. That was just one of the things she liked about the village, that they didn't deny obvious things just because they were distasteful. Usually, that made them less distasteful. Ayla went on, "When she calmed down, she realized what you were saying sounded a lot like things I used to say."
Raisa frowned. "What do you mean?" she asked.
"It sounded to her like you don't like having sex with her," Ayla said, "shh, I'm not done--because it sounds like you don't really like having sex with anyone."
"It's fine," Raisa said.
"Kiddo, I don't even have a sex drive and I don't think sex is supposed to just be 'fine'," Ayla said.
Raisa looked over at her, frowning. "What do you mean," she asked, "you don't have a sex drive?"
"I mean I have never in my life looked at someone and thought, ooh, I need some of that," Ayla said. "No, not even Mara or Nic. I didn't have sex at all until I was older than you are now, which was a good twelve years into our marriage. Or, twelve years into Nic and Mara's marriage, which none of us realized functionally included me too."
"What?" Raisa asked. "But you--I mean, I've heard you have sex with them."
Ayla chuckled. "Never say that around Nic," she said. "Ze'd die. Yes, I do have sex with them now. Not as often as they have sex with each other, because I still don't want it the way they do. I don't think about it all the time, which I'm pretty sure Nic would if ze wasn't always tinkering with something. I do it because it makes them happy, and it's fun, but it's also on my terms, which I'm pretty sure lots of people would think didn't even count as sex."
"What?" Raisa asked again.
Ayla was quiet for a few moments. Raisa waited for her to collect her thoughts. "For a long time," Ayla said eventually, "I thought the fact that I didn't want to have sex meant I could never be in a relationship. I figured it wouldn't be worth it to someone else. I thought they'd think I was childish, or selfish, or that I didn't actually like them."
Raisa found tears swarming her eyes again. "You did?" she asked.
"Gods, did I ever," Ayla said. She shook her head. "My first village, growing up--even though we were heretics because of the farming, it was very strict in other ways. I can't imagine anyone there ever accepting Nic wasn't a woman, or Lind not being a man. They'd only be alright with Hari and Fatima if they pretended Fatima was a man." For a second, Raisa couldn't even understand why they'd choose to think Fatima was a man instead of Hari; it had been so long since Fatima swapped. Ayla went on, "They told me for years that I was being childish and selfish, for not being interested in any of the village boys, and wishing my friends would stop pairing off."
"Oh," Raisa said. "I had no idea."
"Of course not," Ayla said. "If someone tried to say that in our village, we'd have Mara toss them into the ocean. Same as we'd do with anyone who tried to insinuate Nic is 'really' a woman, or that Chiamaka should settle down with a man and have kids of her own. But that's the sort of thing that made me think there was no point in even talking to Nic and Mara about how it made me feel when they started dating. Even if you discounted the fact that I was supposed to have feelings for one of them, not both of them--what was even the point, when they already had each other, and I couldn't offer the whole girlfriend experience anyway? Why would they even bother?"
"I really don't mind having sex," Raisa said. "I do like making Bernie feel good. It's just so exhausting."
"Then you should tell her that," Ayla said. "Because right now, she thinks you hate her."
"I could never!" Raisa said. "I love her, I want to be with her, I--" She just managed to stop herself from telling Bernie's mother that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with Bernie before she told Bernie directly. "It's just, sometimes it feels like that's all she wants from me, especially when we've been apart. And I know that's not true, it just...feels that way sometimes. And. You're right, I don't think other people feel this way about their girlfriends. I know most of the people in the Fleet are just as excited for that reunion sex when they get back to port as Bernie is. But she doesn't have another person to have sex with when I'm not there, and I don't know how I'd feel about that anyway."
"No, but you don't even know if that's something she would want or ask for," Ayla said. "Because you haven't actually talked to her about this."
"But--but what if it means she doesn't want me anymore?" Raisa asked.
Ayla set her hand on Raisa's shoulder. Quietly, she said, "If you had to lie to her to keep her interested, it wasn't a very good fit, then, was it?"
Raisa started crying. "I don't want to break up," she said. "I've never felt this way about anyone before. I don't want to lose it."
"There's a whole slew of things in between 'saying what you think she wants to hear' and 'breaking up forever'," Ayla said. "I don't know what she's willing to give up to keep you, but neither do you, huh? You should talk to her about it before you jump right to 'breaking up'."
Raisa sniffled. "Like what?" she asked. "I can't ask her to never have sex."
"Sure you can," Ayla said. "I went fourteen years sleeping with Nic and Mara without having sex with them. They still agreed I was the mother of their children and their wife."
"But like you said, they have each other," Raisa said.
"Sure, but you can still ask," Ayla said. "If that's something Bernie can't do, you look for the next compromise that might work for both of you. Say she can have casual sex with other people but not date them, or try and figure out a way to make sex less of a chore for you, or see if having sex less often helps you focus on the parts you like without the rest getting annoying. I'm sure there's other things I'm not thinking of that the two of you can come up with." She squeezed Raisa's shoulder. "At least then, you will have tried. Honestly, without trying to be something you're not."
Raisa wiped her eyes with the back of one hand. "I thought you'd be mad at me," she said.
"For what, trying to be what you thought a good girlfriend was?" Ayla asked.
"At least for lying," Raisa said.
Ayla sighed again. "Kiddo," she said. "There were times I wished I hadn't told everyone in the village I wasn't going to fuck them, so I could have tried to put up with it, for Nic or Mara's sake. Nic never told zeir parents ze wasn't a girl. Danny spent years trying to make himself be interested in women. It's not great for your relationship that you felt like you had to lie, but feeling like that, like you had to, makes it a lot harder to be mad about."
After a while, Raisa asked, "How do you do it? How do you...make yourself believe they don't mind?"
"It helps that they didn't for fourteen years," Ayla said. "But we've talked about it, when we first agreed we were all married, and since then. They gave me time and space to figure out what I might actually be okay with, and they didn't try to prod me into things for their sake. And they trust me when I say I like having sex with them even though I don't find them sexy and don't want them touching me, so the least I can do is trust them when they say they love me whether or not we have sex."
"That sounds terrifying," Raisa said.
Ayla laughed again. "Well, there is a reason it took fourteen years," she said. "I didn't even know where to start. Nic and Mara both tried, at least once, to let me know there was a place for me with them if I wanted it, but I couldn't believe they meant it, or knew what it sounded like. And they didn't want to push, since the first thing I said about it was that I wasn't interested and they shouldn't bother hitting on me." She nudged Raisa's arm. "You have the advantage that we tried really hard to make this a village where it was safe to be weird when it doesn't hurt anyone."
"But it could hurt her," Raisa said.
"Unfortunately, you already hurt her," Ayla said. "But also: you not wanting to fuck someone doesn't hurt them. It just doesn't. If they hear you don't want to fuck them and get upset about it, that's their problem, not yours. You hurt Bernie by not telling her the truth, and letting her think you weren't attracted to her anymore. Not by being less into sex than she is."
"Can I--" She cut herself off. She didn't have any right to ask that, not of Ayla. But then, who else could she ask? Any of the other villagers would ask Ayla her opinion anyway. Raisa took a deep, shaky breath, and then another that was less shaky. She asked, "If--if it doesn't work with Bernie, can I still come here? Can I still visit?"
Ayla stopped walking and pulled Raisa into a hug. "Oh, you little idiot," she murmured. "Of course you can."
Raisa's eyes filled with tears again. "Really?" she asked.
"You'd have to do a lot worse than just breaking up with my daughter to get kicked out of this village," Ayla said. She squeezed Raisa. "What matters is that you let people do their own thing and try to get along. And I know you can do that."
Raisa nodded into Ayla's shoulder, not quite trusting herself to speak.
Ayla took a step back, keeping her hands on Raisa's arms. "Now you go tell Bernie what you told me and figure out what you're going to try that's in between lying and keeping secrets and breaking up forever, okay? I know it's scary. But you deserve a relationship where you can be yourself."
this does not meaningfully affect the story in any way, because it is in a different part of the world and 1000 years later, but payment in kind happens in the same world as exciting new levels of heresy
this is mostly so i can conceptualize the magic system more easily. it might come up in passing because of the time mara un-clericed some arizedoan priests, which is the most recent/well-documented case of having divine magic revoked
(this is of course something mara did because an arizedoan cleric bothered him at home and embarrassed him)
