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1.
When the War is over, when all the dust has settled, Calroy still stands.
He stands beside Amethar, the new Ruler of Candia and the Sugarlands; Amethar, the War Buddy who considered Calroy his closest friend; Amethar, the arrogant, spoiled, ungrateful boy who cared more about playing soldier than his place in the Kingdom; His Majesty King Amethar of House Rocks, the Unfallen.
He stands and Amethar, dressed in mourning clothes even at his own coronation, clears his throat.
“Cal,” Amethar starts, voice low and brows furrowed, “You know I- I can’t do this. I was never supposed to be the one to do this. I don’t know anything about politics, I didn’t pay attention in my etiquette classes and I never remember any of those fancy titles; I don’t even know how to read, you know that.”
Calroy, who once had to trade hard labor and quick favors for his lessons, makes himself nod understandingly. “So you’ve told me, Your Majesty.”
“Come on, don’t call me that,” Amethar says quickly, waving a hand like his birthright is an annoying bug that he can shoo away. Calroy feels so sick with envy and anger that he worries for a moment that he’ll faint. “I’m not just outlining my flaws for my own health, alright, I wanted to ask you… What I’m trying to say is, you’re the best guy I know. I trust you to watch my back, and you’re great at talking us out of scrapes, and my advisors told me that I should choose someone, and-”
“Keep talking and I’ll die of boredom before you can ask me anything,” Calroy interrupts, tone balanced on the line between joking and rude. Amethar smiles, a bright guileless thing that looks much more at home on his face than his earlier wide-eyed nervousness, and his shoulders relax from where they’d begun to climb towards his ears.
“See, that’s how I know I’m making the right choice. Cal, will you be my aide-de-camp?”
A smile spreads across Calroy’s face, sharp like the dagger he keeps tucked in his boot. “Amethar,” He says, as sweet as the sugar beneath their feet, “It would be my honor.”
2.
Her name is Caramelinda and she hates Amethar. She doesn’t say it outright, because she’s whip-smart and understands that even Amethar wouldn’t miss an insult like that, but Calroy can tell. He reads it in the line of her brow and the tilt of her lips, in the way her hands tighten on her dress under the table and the way her cheek dimples when she bites it to keep herself from speaking.
Calroy finds that he rather likes her.
Her father is in talks with Amethar about marriage and Amethar is deeply miserable about it, a fact he makes clear to Calroy each evening when they drink together. Caramelinda is miserable about it too, Calroy thinks, though she’s more politic about it; it takes nearly a month for Calroy’s spies to discover that her prior engagement to the late Archmage Lazuli had been a love match because Caramelinda is so reluctant to bring it up, too loyal to her duty and her father to complain. Even ignoring Calroy’s own reasons to stop this -- marriage means heirs and the last thing Calroy wants is more Rocks brats running around -- this is exactly the sort of thing that Amethar brought him in for, so he approaches the Duke of Meringue with a soft smile and an open ear. Calroy asks about the Duke’s land, his crops, his wife. Caramelinda is his only child and possibly the end of his bloodline, so he’d been delighted to be promised such a wonderful bride price for her; Lazuli'’s offer was exorbitant, more than enough for the Duke to live comfortably for the rest of his days, even subtracting the land and livestock included in her dowry, and more than the daughter of a minor noble should ever merit.
Love, He scoffs, can make fools out of even the brightest of mages.
“You know, he doesn’t actually want you to marry his daughter,” Calroy confides to Amethar that evening.
“It seems like he wants me to marry her,” Amethar responds petulantly. The syrupy scent of his cologne fills Calroy’s nose as Amethar leans closer to fill his goblet with butterscotch schnapps and Calroy has to resist the urge to either sneeze or take a deep breath in. “My advisors want me to marry her too. They said keeping Lazuli’s promise will show that we still respect our allegiances in Candia.”
He says it with a cadence not his own, and part of Calroy is impressed that Amethar was paying enough attention to be able to parrot his advisor’s words. The rest of him is too busy being annoyed at Amethar’s advisors to care. Amethar’s advisors are a bunch of elders from rich families who have been pressuring the Monarchs of Candia for centuries and have no problem publicly calling Calroy an upstart. Calroy doesn’t like Amethar’s advisors.
“Don’t you trust me?” Calroy asks, making a show out of pouting. Amethar’s eyes flicker down, just for a second, before he settles that earnest gaze back on Calroy’s eyes. There was a time, during the War, when Calroy had gotten tired of Amethar trying to be subtle about checking out his ass and staring at his mouth, when Amethar had let Calroy push him against a tree just outside of camp, when Calroy had bit Amethar’s lip hard enough to make him bleed and then blamed it on inexperience, when Amethar had cupped a hand around Calroy’s jaw and-
Well.
Calroy mentally shakes himself. None of that matters. The War was the War, there’s important work to be done now and focus is imperative.
“‘Course I do, more than anyone in the world,” Amethar answers, soft and genuine enough to make Calroy’s skin crawl.
“Then trust me on this. He wants land and gold. The quickest route to those things right now is making you keep Lazuli’s part of the bargain, but if we can offer him an easier way to get what he wants-”
“Then I don’t have to marry Caramelinda!”
Calroy makes a noise like a champion’s bell and clinks his cup against Amethar’s. “Then you don’t have to marry Caramelinda.”
Amethar is smiling so widely that he spills more than he swallows when he tries to knock his drink back. “You’re the best, Cal, really.”
Calroy grins back, but when he says “And don’t you forget it,” his voice comes out a touch too demanding.
Whatever.
It’s not like Amethar will notice anyway.
3.
Amethar is looking for something. Calroy doesn’t know what it is; normally he’d dismiss the idea of Amethar keeping a secret from him as too ridiculous to entertain, but Amethar’s been personally visiting the Dairy Islands too often to justify if he doesn’t have a vested interest in what he could find there.
While Calroy appreciates the unquestioned leeway he’s getting with the strings that move Candia, the absence of the King is also making the other nobles feel bold enough to make their power grabs, to be more openly distasteful about Calroy. If Calroy has to hear another forgettable baron say Amethar’s reliance on Calroy is unbecoming and that the king should get more appropriate company, he’s going to do something he’ll regret, like run them through with his sword.
None of these people realize that it’s Calroy who keeps their precious liquor and food flowing, who writes the trade proposals and organizes the council meetings. None of these people have ever had damp soil from a newly weeded field caked so deep under their fingernails that it takes five washes for the water to run clear, they’ve never had so much blood dried into the creases of their hands that their palms were dyed red. Everything Calroy has, everything he is, has been fought for, and he refuses to let some snobby nobles or a flighty king ruin this for him.
At first, his fix is easy: increase the number of meetings that Amethar has to attend. As the Royal Aide-De-Camp, Calroy has almost complete control of Amethar’s schedule; while it’s typically more advantageous for Calroy to go to these meetings alone and gently shift popular opinion, the stubborn blunt force of Amethar’s Kingly opinion can work just as well when aimed correctly. It works for a while, but Calroy watches Amethar become jittery at the lack of opportunity to sneak off to another country; the man all but whines about having to do his duties, and Calroy just grits his teeth in an approximation of a smile and grips Amethar’s arm just a bit too tight as he leads him to their next meeting.
It’s not until Amethar actually skips a meeting, like he’s a child sneaking out of lessons, and doesn’t come back to the Castle for a week that Calroy decides this has to come to a stop. He stands outside Amethar’s study and puts all his energy into channeling the visage of a kind and concerned best friend. He takes a deep breath to center himself, puts a hand on the doorknob, and enters without announcing himself.
“Hey, you can’t- Oh, it’s just you,” Amethar says from where he’s making a pathetic attempt to cover the blown-up map of the Dairy Islands, brush still dripping with ink. He’s apparently in the middle of marking it, little lines and Xs and question marks littering the map. He relaxes when he sees Calroy, even as Calroy tenses.
This doesn’t look like a silly flight of fancy for Calroy to gently prod Amethar out of pursuing, and it doesn’t look like the thrill-seeking work of a boy who misses the adventure of War. This looks calculated, particular. This, Calroy thinks, looks like a nightmare.
“What’s all this, then?” Calroy asks, gesturing.
Amethar runs a hand over his dreads and laughs nervously. “It’s nothing. Just a little project.”
Calroy wants to sigh, to yell, to demand that Amethar explain, but he knows that Amethar moves easiest when he thinks he’s not being moved at all. He furrows his eyebrows and hunches his posture; he makes himself look confused and small, hurt and sad, like someone who needs Amethar’s protection. It takes only ten seconds under Calroy’s pitiful stare for Amethar to fold.
“Okay, you have to promise to not get mad.”
“When have I ever been mad at you?” Calroy asks, question rhetorical, not because he’s never been angry at Amethar but because Amethar wouldn’t have ever realized that he was. “I’m just worried. All this galavanting around, avoiding your duties, it’s not like you.”
It is like him, Calroy and Amethar both know it, and Amethar slumps at the indictment. Calroy can almost see the cracks appear in his defenses. “Alright. You can’t tell anyone, but I… I have a wife.”
“You have a what.” Calroy says. It’s not a question, but it should be because surely Calroy’s misheard. Surely Amethar Rocks is not telling Calroy that he has some secret girl in the Islands.
“A wife. Her name is Catherine Ghee. I was going to marry her the right way after the War, bring her in as my queen, but then I got moved from the Islands and she stopped answering my letters, and then my sisters-” Amethar cuts himself off, clearing his throat thickly. “Anyway, I forgot about it in the shuffle of everything else. And then there was the whole Caramelinda thing, you know.”
“I know,” Calroy confirms. Bribing the duke enough to make him rescind his acceptance of a royal marriage proposal had been his job, after all.
“All that reminded me, so I decided to go find her. It’s the right thing to do and, I mean, I think I really loved her, Cal. I think she might’ve been it for me.”
Calroy’s jaw works hard enough that he feels the joint pop. Calroy closes his eyes in the face of Amethar’s enthusiasm to give himself a second to process. This would’ve been useful to know when you were almost married off to someone else, Calroy thinks but doesn’t say. What do you mean you got married and then just forgot about her? What part of that screams ‘she’s the love of my life’ to you? Calroy thinks but doesn’t ask.
“Have you had any luck?” Calroy asks when he trusts himself to speak without screaming. Amethar’s face drops immediately.
“No. I found a few of her friends in her village but they say they haven’t seen her in years, so I’ve just been traveling around. I hope- well. You know what I hope.”
Calroy hums. He does.
Many, many Dairy Islanders were lost in the War, a larger percentage than any other country. It’s very possible that Amethar’s Catherine Ghee is dead by now. Still, if she’s not…
“You should’ve asked me for help in the first place,” Calroy chides, playfully hitting Amethar’s chest. He lets his hand linger, feeling Amethar’s warmth and the strong pulse of his heartbeat through his doublet. “You have people to do things like this. I mean, really Amethar, usually I’d be all for this -- hell, I’d join you! -- but when you’re gone so often, it worries the Kingdom.”
“It does?”
Calroy hums mournfully, tucking his hands behind his back and turning away from Amethar to study the map. “The War is over and the Concord is formed, but things are still getting back to normal. If your citizens notice their King, the venerated Amethar the Unfallen, leaving them so regularly, what will they think?”
Calroy doesn’t have to look to know Amethar’s face spasms at the title, but he watches out of the corner of his eye anyway. He knows the flinch intimately, has watched it and caused it enough that it’s burned into his memory; the way it starts with Amethar’s eyes slipping shut, how his jawline shakes and he twitches as though he’s been slapped. Sometimes, Calroy wishes he could chant it just to see the reaction over and over again. Amethar the Unfallen, Amethar the Last of House Rocks, Amethar the Unprepared.
“Will people really get upset?” Amethar asks, his voice small and unsure. Calroy makes sure his smile is more concern than smug delight before he turns around.
“It’s very possible,” Calroy answers, “But there’s no need to worry about it. Now that I know what’s going on, I can get the people whose job this should be to do it We’ll find your girl, Amethar.”
Amethar brightens, allowing himself to be guided from his room. “What would I do without you, Cal?”
Calroy is already mentally rehearsing how he’ll tell Amethar that I’ve gotten some news back from the Islands and, well... your wife… I’m so sorry, Amethar, the War has taken so much from us all, regardless of what his search-and-destroy party finds. He bumps his shoulder against Amethar’s, supportive and affectionate. “Let’s hope you never have to find out.”
4.
The day began with a letter from a furious Duke of Meringue, accusing Amethar of defiling and kidnapping his daughter, breaking his word, and trying to undermine him; it’s all so ridiculous that Calroy, who screens all of Amethar’s mail, threw the letter into the fire before taking Amethar his daily stack of mail -- things that are relevant but not too important. When all the royal responses come from Calroy’s hand and most of the royal thoughts start in Calroy’s mind, sometimes the middleman is unnecessary.
The chaos only really started when the unannounced carriage from Meringue pulled up to the gates and refused to open unless the King was there. Calroy, recalling the letter and wary of the Duke having come to deride Amethar publicly, goes with him. Or, to be clear, Calroy tried first to convince the carriage to leave but was rebuffed by the shockingly loyal driver, then insisted that the inhabitant come out to no response, and then tried to dissuade Amethar from going at all which had been like talking to a castle wall. When all of that failed, there was no option but to go with him to try and do damage control.
When the carriage finally opens and reveals Caramelinda Meringue, with her eyes red and tear-swollen, all Calroy can think is Oh Bulb.
“Your Majesty, I’m pregnant,” Caramelinda says before the herald can even finish announcing her.
“Uh,” Amethar says, clearly unsure how this affects him. Calroy pinches the bridge of his nose.
A noble lady, widowed and unmarried, gets pregnant and is foolish enough that she doesn’t get rid of it. A noble lady, previously engaged to the King, arrives at the castle and makes a show of it. A noble lady, so smart and politic that she’d impressed Calroy, uses her skills against them.
“Lady Meringue,” Calroy starts, “I understand your feelings, but I’m sure we could find a better venue-”
“It’s your sister’s,” Caramelinda finishes.
Calroy’s mouth drops open. “It’s whose?”
The war has been over for a year, and Lazuli died halfway through anyway. Nearly four years, and Caramelinda is claiming the child is hers?
Caramelinda raises her chin and her voice, challenging. “It’s Lazuli’s. I’ve come to beg sanctuary on behalf of my unborn child. Of your sister’s unborn child.”
“Bulb above, you cannot-”
“My sister’s child!” Amethar cuts in, sweeping Caramelinda into a hug so enthusiastic that her feet come off the ground. He puts her down and takes a step back, still grinning, “Oops, sorry, probably shouldn’t do that sort of thing. All that squeezing would be bad for the baby -- would it be bad for the baby, Cal? We’ve got to get some books about what’s good and bad for babies.”
Calroy closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “We have books about babies, Your Majesty.”
“Cal. Oh, and you too, Caramelinda! You’re like my sister-in-law now, you’ve got to stop all that formal stuff and call me Amethar,” Amethar says, like all the servants and knights in the castle, and half the nobles besides, aren’t right there.
Caramelinda holds up a letter with a cracked blue wax stamp, looking just as nonplused as Calroy is. It’s a hollow sort of solace. “Of course, My King. Amethar. I have a letter-”
“Sure, sure, Cal can read it to me later,” Amethar says, handing it to Calroy, “Let’s go find you a room. Do you know what kind you want? Lazuli’s old rooms are still empty, I can give you those, but I don’t know where we’d put a nursery if we set you up there, maybe one of the maids can help us -- hey, Licorina!”
And on and on Amethar goes, prattling with Caramelinda at his elbow, not asking for even the slightest bit of proof. Calroy pinches the bridge of his nose again and glares at the letter in his hand. He knows who it’s from.
Calroy retreats to the castle’s wall-walk to read the letter, ignoring the clamoring as servants try to pull together the celebration for ‘the King’s new sister-in-law and her baby!’ that Amethar wants. The envelope, bafflingly, says in case of grimoire (you’ll know the one), still in meringue, and the letter is barely more enlightening. It explains the situation in the most confusing and circuitous way, writing of a diverging path and a ritual done and a brother overjoyed. this will make sense in time, Lazuli wrote; trust your feelings, Lazuli wrote; all is as i foresaw, probably, and if it’s not then it’s close enough that it doesn’t matter, Lazuli wrote; this is not how i had intended to bring you a child, my sweet, but i am glad nonetheless, Lazuli wrote.
Calroy only stops himself from crushing it as he thinks about how fortuitous it all was -- Calroy maneuvered Amethar past not one but two marriages that could’ve created an heir, only for Caramelinda to arrive with a Rocks brat in her anyway -- because he remembers Lazuli’s habit of leaving lemon ink messages for him on the back of letters to Amethar. He closes his eyes for a moment before he does, roiling with annoyed fury; if there was one Rocks sister he hated, it was Lazuli, who used her foresight for busybodying and mocking instead of for something as simple as saving her own life.
When he holds the letter over his lamp, the heat darkens the ink of Lazuli’s secret message: congratulations. or maybe not, if it didn’t happen in this time, The letter reads, you might never get this letter, or you might get it too late, or it might not matter to you, or you might get it and assume it means something else. it’s of no concern to me. congratulations, if they apply.
Calroy presses a hand to his temple, frustrated. This, right here, is why he liked Lazuli the least.
Footsteps jolt him out of his annoyance and his hand is almost around his dagger hidden in his waistband before he recognizes the gait, the sound of expensive shoes slightly dragging on old stone and the sure thud of the steps. Calroy forces himself to relax as Amethar climbs onto the parapet beside him, close enough that he can feel the other’s warmth.
“What a day!” He starts unprompted, “Caramelinda told me all about it, it’s just like Laz to drop something like that in a letter. You know, when I was a kid and snuck out, she was almost always waiting right outside the gate for me, like she’d used her divination just to scare me shitless. She loved that kind of stuff.”
Calroy can imagine. “I didn’t know the Princess had such a sense of humor.”
“Oh yeah, Laz’s the funniest. Laz and Sapph, they’re always- they were always…” Amethar trails off, gazing over the kingdom with a woeful expression that makes him look more like the youth of his story than the Ruler of the Sugarlands. “Guess she wanted one last gotcha, huh?”
Amethar swings his legs with a restless energy Calroy recognizes. He reaches over and pats Amethar’s knee. “It’s not your fault.”
He says it both because Amethar wants to hear it and because it’s true; with all the forces invested in the downfall of the less impressionable Rocks siblings, it would’ve been impossible for Amethar to stop it.
Amethar’s eyes clear as he nods. He reaches down and takes Calroy’s hand in his own. “You always know exactly what to say.”
“You make it easy,” Calroy says, half a joke. Amethar snorts, and then he pulls their joined hands up and presses a candyfloss-soft kiss to Calroy’s knuckles.
It happens so quickly that Calroy can’t stay his reaction; the shock that he feels, the flush rising to his cheeks and the speeding of his heart, are all entirely and embarrassingly real. Amethar looks up at Calroy through his lashes and smiles at whatever expression he finds, slow and small. When he lowers his lips back down to Calroy’s hand, a proper kiss right at the curve of his wrist this time, Calroy is more ready.
He goes for flattered but nervous, allowing some of his real tension to make his laugh come out jerky and unsure. He widens his eyes and looks away even as he continues to hold hands with Amethar. “Your Majesty-”
“Please,” Amethar murmurs, and when Calroy turns his head he’s looking back at Calroy with warm, expectant eyes, “Not from you, Cal. Never from you.”
“Amethar,” Calroy concedes, and is rewarded with a brilliant grin, “I don’t- I didn’t think-”
“I didn’t think of it either,” Amethar says, picking up Calroy’s purposefully fumbled sentence with perfect timing. “But it just makes sense. We’ve been through so much together and I wouldn’t be able to run anything around here without you; you’re my partner in all but ceremony at this point. I didn’t put it together until Caramelinda said that Laz’s letter told her -- us -- to trust our hearts.”
“And your heart says-”
“Yes. Of course yes, Cal, this is what my heart wants. What about you? Will you give me, give this, a chance?”
Calroy gives himself exactly two seconds. Any longer and Amethar will get anxious, any shorter and Calroy will seem desperate. In those two seconds, Calroy starts to reorganize his game plan for the next five years, and makes a mental note to write a letter to Ceresia to personally inform them of this development. He takes a deep breath in, lets it out, and smiles like the crescent moon above them.
“I’m so lucky,” Calroy says, entangling their fingers, “To have had a man like you beside me all this time. I would be luckier to keep you there.”
“Not as lucky as I’ll be,” Amethar says, looking like he’s barely holding himself back from doing something decidedly improper. He settles for pressing another kiss to Calroy’s hand and Calroy, sitting atop the parapet of a castle that may be his much sooner than planned, looks out to the sparkling stars. Not as lucky as you indeed, he thinks, but still, when he squeezes Amethar’s hand, their hearts beat as one.