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Caramelinda is eighteen, curled up crying on a small stone bench in the gardens of Castle Candy, and someone is calling her name.
“Hello? Duchess of Meringue?”
It’s coming from somewhere outside the dark curtain of peppermint ivy that hangs over the bench, its leaves rustling softly in the evening breeze. Caramelinda’s nose is too stuffed up to appreciate the sharp scent of the plant, but its long tendrils brushing against her ankles are comforting, like a prickly embrace. The plants don’t care about her dress, or her speech, or her total lack of court etiquette. The plants are conspiring to keep her mistakes secret. The plants are better friends than anyone here.
“Caramelinda?” The voice again, closer now, accompanied by the slow crunch of footsteps on the gravel path outside. “Some of the Tartguard said they saw you run this way. Are you all right?”
For a long moment, Caramelinda closes her eyes, wraps her arms around her knees, and wonders what will happen if she hides in the garden forever. No marriage to her as-yet-unmet betrothed. No precarious place in the Candian court. No eyes watching her, waiting for her to slip up somehow. Just her and the plants. That would be such a good life.
But it would also be shirking her duty. It doesn't matter that she's only eighteen, not really. Fantasy is beautiful, and she can never, ever let herself give in to it - it can never be her option. The daughter of a small, unknown Candian lord cannot afford to shirk her duty to the crown. The daughter of a small, unknown Candian lord is disposable if she does that, and her family is too.
“I’m in here,” Caramelinda finally says, stiffly, just loud enough to be heard. She scrubs the tears away from her reddened eyes, furiously swallows them down as Prince Amethar Rocks pokes his head hesitantly through the curtain of ivy. He is a few years younger than her, but he looks as if he's already been at the center of a hundred hurricanes of his own making, every bit the chaos she can't afford to be. His purple collar is askew, his hair flopping wildly into his eyes. A training sword is strapped haphazardly on his back; his doublet is embroidered with the Candian crest, words stitched in gold below the vibrant purple and pink. In sweetness there is strength.
Fear lances through Caramelinda's chest, the same pang of fear that paralyzes her every time a member of the Candian royal family so much as looks at her. She forces a polite smile to her face, folds her hands primly in her lap. "Prince Amethar. I'm so sorry for my delay in responding. I did not hear you at first."
Amethar lingers midway through the ivy curtain, fidgeting, as if afraid to enter a space that belongs far more to him than it ever will to her. “No, it's fine, I didn't mean to - Are you all right? You didn’t turn up for dinner, and everyone’s worried.”
Caramelinda feels her stomach drop. “I’m - my Prince, I am sorry, truly. I didn’t mean to - to make the king and queen upset -”
“No, no, they’re not upset! We just wanted to make sure you hadn’t gotten hurt.” Amethar finally pushes his way through the ivy, brushing tendrils from his hair as they try to invade, and gingerly lowers himself down onto the ground beside the bench. He crosses his legs, resting his chin on his hand. “And you don’t have to call me Prince, remember? I’m just Amethar around friends and family.”
“I suppose we are going to be family, one day.” The thought still strikes Caramelinda with new and fresh ferocity every time it crosses her mind. She's going to be married in this castle - living here, maybe raising children here, when all's said and done. The prince and the princesses and the king and the queen are going to be family somehow, as close as her mother and father. It's years away - the betrothal to Lazuli Rocks a new arrangement, one meant for the future of Candia, not its present - but it still pulls at her fraying edges, rubs sharp against her bones. Like a stiff new outfit, one that hurts every time she moves but which she still has to wear.
“I mean...I’d like you to be a friend, too,” Amethar says. “I’m friends with all my sisters, along with them being my sisters. And you’re going to be another sister to me, right? A sister-in-law? So we could be friends as well.”
Have I spoken to any of the royal family like this before? In the weeks since arriving at Castle Candy, life has been a whirlwind of banquets with confusing cutlery and balls with confusing customs. The noble lords have received Caramelinda with icy eyes, with snide comments about her lack of decorum before she even says a single word. The King and Queen have talked to her frequently, but fear has clamped its hands so tightly around her throats that she's never been able to stammer out responses. The Princesses Rococoa, Sapphira, and Citrina have all been busy every day, and Princess Lazuli is still on her trip to the Jawbreaker family up in the Great Stone Candy Mountains, and so Caramelinda has had far too much time to herself, time to wander the castle and try not to cry. The walls are high, and the stone is chipped and cold to the touch. The corridors twist and turn, and she can rarely find her way back to her quarters on the first try. It doesn't feel like it could ever be a place of love.
I want to go home.
But she can't, not really. In two months, she returns to the Villa Meringue, but nothing will ever be the same after this.
Amethar, sitting at her feet, tilts his head up at her, and she searches his face, wary of what she might find.
There is nothing but genuine concern and worry in his eyes.
“All right. Amethar." She half-expects to be struck down by lightning for omitting the Prince title, but the breeze only picks up slightly, the last few rays of twilight piercing the vines with purple beams of light. "We could be friends. If that's what you want.”
"Oh, yes." He punches at the air, his sword nearly falling out of its sheath as he does so. "I knew you were gonna be cool - Sapphira and Rococoa think you are, too, and Citrina hasn’t said much of anything, but she likes everyone, so I'm sure she likes you. Next time you need to cry, you should definitely go find one of them. Trust me, they can be a lot more comforting than a bench."
They like me. Caramelinda takes a shaky breath, feeling the tears in her chest starting to fight for freedom once more. Maybe she hasn’t been messing up as drastically as she’s thought.
“Can you tell me about your other sister, Amethar?” she says instead, a little hesitantly. “The Princess Lazuli?”
“Oh, Lazuli’s the best.” Amethar’s eyes light up. He scrambles easily up to sit on the bench beside her, reaching into the pocket of his doublet and pulling out a small jeweled case a moment later. “She’s the smartest person I know. You’ll get along, don’t worry - she’s always late for dinner too. She tends to be busy, reading and practicing and trying to invent new spells."
"She's a spellcaster?" And an inventor of spells, to boot. Not just a user of them.
No one had mentioned Lazuli Rocks liked to invent things before.
“She made me this, actually.” Amethar clicks open the latch on the case, letting the lid swing open. Caramelinda peers down to see an intricate chessboard of inlaid amethyst and lapis lazuli squares, sparkling with flecks of quartz and gold and sugar-stone. The two sides of the board contain two sets of pieces, one purple and one blue, modeled after the armor and ranks of the Candian army. Details are carved into their faces with careful precision, the curves of a cheek or the greaves of a breastplate crystal clear despite the pieces being almost unimaginably small. It is a work of art, a labor of love - even with magic, it must have taken hours and hours to construct. The work of someone with a mind of diamond and the patience to match.
Caramelinda realizes she is smiling, her mouth twitching up at the corners despite itself. Her mind is filled with a thousand rainy-day chess matches in her mother's study, water trickling down the windowpanes as she watched her parents sit on opposite sides of the desk and strive to outsmart each other. They always took the game deadly seriously - right up until the moment when one of them broke, and then the match devolved into laughter and kisses.
If Lazuli Rocks likes the game of chess, she supposes, then they already have one thing in common.
“Would you like me to teach you?” Caramelinda says to Amethar, and he beams at her and picks up a piece.
"This one is the soldier, right? That's who I want to be when I'm older."
***
Amethar is twenty, and - well, it’s not that Comida is scary , exactly. He isn’t scared of anything. Least of all a big, bustling city. And this isn’t even his first time traveling here, not by a mile. There are all sorts of friends of the Candian crown who have their seats of power here, so the royal family has attended endless banquets (boring) and tournaments (thrilling) over the years.
But this time, they’re not here to visit friends and family. They’re here to watch Citrina be inducted as a high priestess of the Bulbian Church, and everyone’s acting weird. Rococoa, normally the most at ease with Official Royal Things, has been spending all her time poring over the legal implications of a revered religious sister, her face permanently chiseled into a frown. Sapphira has been sneaking off to parties at all hours, but she always returns stressed and sober, scraps of paper written in code spilling out of the sleeves of her gem-colored dresses. Citrina has been praying from dawn to dusk, and Lazuli has been avoiding Citrina, and by extension, everyone else.
Amethar is able to get through just about anything with his four older sisters to follow. But somehow, they've wandered away from him, or he’s wandered off their path, or he's done something wrong, or he's somehow made them mad.
Either way, he's alone.
He is coming to realize he does not like being alone.
Will it all go back to normal once this is over? he wonders, shifting uncomfortably on the stiff pew of the Cathedral of St. Arugula as the first scripture readings commence. Citrina, wearing a simple white gown, sits directly in front of the massive Bulbian altar. Her face is calm and reverent, but her knuckles are clenched white atop the worn copy of the Book of Leaves she’s owned since she was a child. Amethar can practically feel how scared she is. Despite her faith, her boundless belief in the love of the Bulb above, she’s still scared she won’t be good enough to do its works in the world.
He wishes he shared even an iota of her selflessness. But his fears are of far more worldly things.
What if Citrina’s different when we get back home? What if she won't spend time with me anymore?
He rubs his thumb over the rounded pommel of Payment Day. The weapon takes up a quarter of the pew; it's almost as large as he is. What do I do without my sister?
Something crackles to life within his skull. The spark is sudden enough to make Amethar flinch automatically, squinch up his eyes in confusion. Lazuli's magic - bright strands of energy, practically jumping around his mind with eagerness. Amethar looks around, confused, till he finally locates his older sister, slouched down on the far side of the Cathedral with her head buried in the hymnal. He raises a hand to wave gingerly to her, trying to catch her attention.
Maybe she's done something to me accidentally. He's stumbled into her experiments often enough that that's not too crazy a possibility.
Are you okay? a voice says in his mind, a moment later.
It's definitely not Lazuli's.
Caramelinda, sitting in the pew directly in front of him, shifts slightly in her seat with a faint rustle of silk. It is the first time she's really moved since the royal retinue arrived in the chapel. Her posture is, as always, perfect, not a hair out of place or a wrinkle in her dress. And, as Amethar watches, a faint blue glow flickers around her fingers, like a captive flame.
She's casting magic. Amethar didn't even know she could do that but she’s doing it nonetheless, and in a Bulbian church to boot.
I - Cara? You're talking to me? Magic operates in such weird ways. Amethar has to stop himself from speaking out loud, moving his lips silently instead to form the words. He’s never been able to get a handle on it like his sisters have. How are you - why - where did you learn to do this?
Lazuli came up with a spell last month, so we could talk in private whenever we wished, Caramelinda says, her voice still little more than a measured whisper in his mind. It was her birthday present to me.
Amethar can feel the difference in the magic, now that he's looking for it. The spell thrums with swirls of cold, slick precision, the same loops and curls that make Lazuli's handwriting in her journals so distinctive. But a warm, honeyed glow infuses the structure of the words themselves, a trace of Caramelinda, the one who is casting it So that’s why you two have been acting so weirdly at meals lately!
Well, it’s a very good spell, Caramelinda replies, a little smugly. Before them, row after row of Bulbian clergy file past Citrina - Vegetanians and Ceresians and Fructerans, all dressed in bright gold garb, shoes clicking on the polished stone floor. Caramelinda glances sideways to where Lazuli sits, and Amethar can see a smile tugging the corner of her mouth upwards. She is far too sweet in her creations.
Amethar decides that the knowledge that his older sister apparently flirts must be expelled from his mind immediately. Well, credit to you for being a very good learner, he tells Caramelinda, swallowing the observation down. This is a hell of a useful spell, though I doubt I’d be able to learn it if I tried.
Caramelinda is silent for a moment, though the connection still lingers. I know you’ve been alone this trip, more than normal, she finally says. Sapphira’s sneaking around, Rococoa’s playing politics to keep herself busy, and Lazuli feels more than a little uncomfortable around all the Bulbian officials.
It's not that bad, Amethar lies. At the altar, Citrina stands, candlelight and the scent of smoke flickering around her. Her Book of Leaves glows faintly as she kneels before the Pontifex, an old Fructeran man with tired eyes. He lays a hand on her shoulder, and Amethar bites his lip. I mean, I've got to get used to not having them around sometime, right?
Caramelinda reaches a hand up to her hair, pretending to adjust its style, and a moment later, something with cold and chiseled edges falls onto Amethar's lap with a barely audible thud. He drops his hand down to grasp it, and finds himself holding a small chess piece. A worn but intricate carving of an amethyst soldier.
I found your old chess set, from when we were younger, Caramelinda says. You left it in one of the Castle Candy libraries. It wasn't too hard to pack. I thought that I might challenge you to a game when the ceremony was done.
Amethar wraps his fingers around the soldier, closes his eyes, imagines the cathedral falling to ruins and a giant chessboard springing up in its place. A battlefield he knows how to navigate, for once.
You're planning your first move now, aren't you? he replies, and swallows a giggle when Caramelinda immediately ends the spell, kicking him in the ankle with her pointed shoe underneath the pew. He knows he's right about that, at least. They played games for years and years whenever she came to visit, and she always planned ahead.
Across the room, Citrina, her hands steadier now, glows with golden light. Amethar swallows down his apprehensions about the future, leans forward in the pew, and starts preparing to finally trounce his sister-in-law at chess.
***
Caramelinda is twenty-eight, and barely a day after she, her wife, and her siblings-in-law arrive at Castle Manylicks to talk Joren Jawbreaker out of his rebellion, war arrives on their heels. A band of rogue Ceresian marauders, snuck into the castle by a traitorous servant, break down the door to the royal guest quarters at four in the morning, armed and ready to kill all within.
Unfortunately for them, the guest quarters are filled with shockingly competent people who do not take kindly to having their rooms invaded.
When Caramelinda and her wife stumble into the guest foyer, they are greeted with the sight of Amethar and General Rococoa, back to back in their nightclothes, fighting off half a dozen plate-armored Ceresians. Caramelinda's hands shake, but she glances over at Lazuli, seeing the Archmage of Candia's eyes begin to glow with brilliant fire, and promptly ducks back through the doorway to hide.
"Thank you, my love. Stay safe from me," Lazuli says smoothly as she walks further into the foyer. "Celeri morte. Quia saccharo."
The whip-crack of arcane magic sizzles through the air. A second later, Caramelinda hears the six Ceresian soldiers drop to the ground in a clatter of metal and flesh.
Trembling, she cranes her head back around the doorframe, looking into the main room. Lazuli stands, calm and collected, amidst the bodies of the intruders. Arrows of glowing green magic have neatly cleaved their skulls down the center. Blood is starting to pool around her bare feet, a crimson sea that suits her shockingly well.
There is a long silence, broken only by the squish of Rococoa kneeling in the blood and starting to examining the bodies. Amethar is breathing heavily, a wide, dripping gash freshly cut into his chest and shoulder by the Ceresians. As Caramelinda watches, he leans forward on his giant sword for just a moment, letting his guard drop ever so slightly as the dizziness starts to kick in.
Through the broken foyer door behind him, something glints steely and silver. Caramelinda moves without thinking, throwing her hands up into the air and pushing.
Amethar's arms move of their own accord. Payment Day swings his body around, countering the strike of a silver longsword at the last possible moment with a dissonant clang before it lops off his head.
Caramelinda slides her hands down and sideways, and within an instant, it's over. The blade of the giant sword cuts the body of the seventh Ceresian assassin in half, scattering him in chunks across the hallway.
Lazuli and Rococoa turn to stare at her, wide-eyed, as Amethar drops his sword, letting it clatter to the floor.
"Bulb above, Cara," Rococoa says hoarsely, her blade still drawn. "You all right?"
"I'm - I'm fine." Caramelinda takes a shaky breath in, bites down hard on her lip to steady herself as her hands start to shake even more. Panicking after the fact helps no one. You simply did your duty. "Amethar? How are you?"
Amethar, his armor sprayed with pieces of bread, cracks a tired smile. "Impressed by you and your sharp eyes, Cara."
"Same eyes that find your chess errors," she says, as her vision blurs for a moment and blackness creeps into the edges of her eyes. Amethar and Lazuli are on either side of her to catch her before she even hits the floor.
"Whoa. Cara. Okay. It's okay." Amethar places his hand behind her head and guides her carefully to sit against the wall. Lazuli, her eyes flaring with concern, begins muttering incantations, weaving her fingers tightly through Caramelinda's. "You did fantastically. And you're going to be fine. Just breathe."
War is a lot worse than our chess games, Caramelinda tries to say, but she passes out before she can form the retort into words. The last thing she feels is Lazuli's magic wrapping around her to keep her safe, a beacon of love so bright that it sends fire shuddering through her veins.
I love you, my darling, Lazuli says in her mind. Caramelinda squeezes her hand.
***
Amethar is twenty-three, and standing outside Caramelinda's door.
The suite she and Lazuli used to share is high up on the second floor of Castle Candy, its door made of gold and stone with ornate oil lanterns hanging from either side. Now, though, they dangle darkly in the corridor, their glass panes dusty, spiderwebbed with cracks. The door handle has specks of rust around its edges. The corridor is silent. Everyone in the castle has fled to the battlements, to watch the rest of the Candian troops make their way back into Dulcington to rest and recuperate from the battle at Pangranos.
She already knows, he reminds himself, and then feels guilty that he cares so much about what he is about to feel. He has already had his grief; he does not deserve to take up more. He was there, in Lazuli's final moments - and they will never leave him - but he was there when she left the world forever, and Caramelinda did not get that final courtesy.
As he stands, fist half-raised to tentatively knock, the door swings open of its own accord. A spectral, magical hand fades into air as Amethar steps through the doorway.
Inside, the room is dark, the fire barely stoked, the curtains coated with dust. Lazuli's spellbooks lie scattered and haphazard on every available surface. Pages of scribbled notes crisscross dressers and chairs and half-eaten plates of food.
Caramelinda, for her part, is a puddle of purple silk sitting on the floor beside her bed. Her knees are drawn up to her chest, her fingers tangled through her hair.
"Cara," Amethar manages to get out, and she glances up at him like a startled animal, her eyes little specks of light amidst the shadows.
"I've been looking for a way to bring her back," she whispers, waving her hand vaguely at the books and papers that surround her. "But I just couldn't figure it out."
Amethar takes one step towards her, then a second. And then he is on his knees, his arms wrapped around Caramelinda, as she topples forward into him and sobs, grasping blindly at his arms and face and shoulders for some sort of purchase. A drowning woman trying to swim further down.
"I know," he says, again and again, because there isn't anything else to say. "Neither could I."
***
Caramelinda is thirty-four, and the evening of her second wedding is exactly as dour and dreary as it should be. Rain streaks down from the sky like a volley of arrows, droplets piercing the fabric of her dress and flattening the curls of her hair. Freezing winter winds whip around her and Amethar as they struggle across the garden courtyard of Castle Candy to the royal chambers beyond. The air feels charged, heated with electricity and lightning. Or maybe, she acknowledges dimly, it's simply her imagination. A wish for lightning to strike them and erase the rest of the day.
As she struggles through the rain, she can see the second-floor balcony out of the corner of her eye. Her and Lazuli's old rooms, the place where they were first introduced, the place where they first fell in love.
I love you, my darling, Lazuli says in her mind, her voice sweet, her voice absolutely unbearable, today of all days. Caramelinda's hand burns with a phantom touch, but when she whips around, praying to the Bulb despite it all, there is no one there but Amethar. His shoulders are set, and his jaw is clenched, as he tries to stay on his feet in the ever-growing puddles of garden mud.
"This is extremely bad weather," Amethar shouts at her over a crash of appropriately-timed thunder. A flash of anger sears Caramelinda's chest - undeserved, perhaps, but none the less potent. He really only knows how to state the obvious, doesn't he?
"Are you all right, Cara? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"If only." She does not bother trying to smile for him. "We should get inside. We've already permanently ruined our wedding clothes at this rate."
They struggle on through the gardens, trying desperately to escape the rain, but Caramelinda could swear she hears Amethar mutter "Let them be ruined" behind her, and some grim sort of companionship is growing between them by the time they stumble in through the doors of their new chambers and lock the storm outside. The room is large, the rafters filled with shadows, the guttering candles doing little to chase them away. Caramelinda sits wearily on the bed, removes her shoes and shakes trails of water from them out onto the polished floor.
I wish we hadn't had to get married.
And, she knows, so does Amethar. But wishes are simply fantasy, and wishes pale in comparison to duty.
At least now it's over. They are the King and Queen of Candia. She has a country to rule, its people to protect, and a wife to miss for the rest of her life.
Metal clatters against wood, and Caramelinda looks up to find Amethar leaning Payment Day against the doorframe, as casually and improperly as if it was a wet umbrella.
“She would find this entire day extremely amusing, you know," he says quietly. Caramelinda snorts. He certainly has a point.
“She would have been writing down all the absurd things that the nobles said to us to laugh at later. Did you see that one Meatlander dignitary, the one who was trying to be delicate about her?”
“Oh, the one who kept referring to her as "Saint Lazuli?"" Amethar leans against the door. "She would have destroyed him utterly for that alone."
"She didn't even enjoy being "Archmage," for the love of the Bulb. She would have skinned him alive for trying to canonize her." Caramelinda imagines the look on Lazuli's face, the way that her brows would have lowered furiously over her spectacles and her voice filled with syllables of magic. "No - she would have cast Confusion on him and sent him reeling through the crowd."
Amethar bursts out laughing at the image, and Caramelinda stifles a small smile at the thought of Lazuli resurrecting from the dead and attending their wedding simply to annoy a tactless, thoughtless noble into submission. It would be her style, very much so. It would be the most Lazuli thing in the world.
Their laughter fades, eventually. The rain outside carries on, drumming against the door, howling like a battlefield of soldiers. Their grief, begging to be let back in.
“I miss her every day," Amethar whispers finally, his voice hoarse, and Caramelinda will not look at him - she will give him that kindness, that courtesy - but she knows he is fighting back tears with all his might. "I miss them every day. I don't know how we're supposed to live with it.”
Caramelinda lies back on the bed, and stretches her hands up towards the shadows in the ceiling. For a moment, just a moment, she thinks she sees them reach back towards her.
In sweetness there is strength.
Their grief does not have to be destructive.
“Not alone," she says finally, and sits up and smiles at the man who is, before anything else, her long-beloved friend, and a dear, dear family member. “I do not know how we live with it either. But we don’t live with it alone.”
Amethar's face is buried in his hands. When he finally looks up, there are tear tracks glowing in the dim candlelight, but he nods, jerkily, in response to her words.
“I, ah, had a present for you," he mumbles, and reaches into his cloak, items clinking together distantly in the pockets as he searches. "Not really a present, just a re-gifting of sorts.”
Caramelinda is not surprised when Amethar pulls out Lazuli's chess set. Most of the jewels are now dislodged from their precise settings in the glossy white box. The magic has almost gone from the intricate swirls of the clasp. But small sparks of blue still dance around the edges, and for an instant, Caramelinda swears she can see a glimmer of green-blue flame dance through one of the smallest gems.
“Would you like to play?" the King of Candia asks her, and he is weary and war-worn, burdened with twice as many titles as wounds, but for a moment, the present fades away, and they are children again, finding each other in the garden.
"It would be an honor, Amethar,” Caramelinda says.
With a flick of her hand, the shadows set up the chessboard between them.