Chapter Text
“No.” Caroline crossed her arms and raised her left eyebrow, a slash of gold against her fair brow.
“Caroline,” her father sighed, rubbing a hand over his own fair brow. “You have to be married.”
“No.” She raised her right eyebrow, her lips pursing. It was a look he’d seen often over the years, from her and from his wife. He chanced a look over his shoulder and saw the look reflected on his wife’s face. He sighed again, feeling a tension headache creeping in.
“Sweetheart,” he tried, in his suavest tone, the same one he used to use on her to make her pay attention to her embroidery tutor. Actually, he reflected, it had never really worked then, either.
“No. ”
“Honey,” he said, turning to his wife, “mayhap we ought not-”
“No.” Liz said, tone as final as her daughter’s had been. “The invitations have been sent. Every noble, unmarried man in the surrounding hundred miles will be here in a fortnight to participate in the tourney. Caroline, honestly, you should-” whatever Caroline should or shouldn’t do was lost in the hellacious screech that their daughter emitted in her whirling exit from the solar.
“Honey,” Bill tried again, his tone softer now, as his wife rested a hand over her eyes and tried to control her breathing.
“Oh, honestly, Bill,” Liz snapped, though there was mostly no heat to it, “isn’t there some stable boy you can be bothering, instead of me?”
He only smiled and told the steward in the hall to send for a pot of tea.
***
“Just, can you believe this? Why do I need a husband? It’s not like I can’t rule on my own!” Caroline fumed, firing arrows into the centers of the targets at the opposite end of the shooting field. Perched on a stump next to her, Liv only rolled her eyes, barely paying attention. All of her focus was on the book in her hands, probably another one of her romances.
“What about children? Are you going to impregnate yourself , Your Royal Highness?” Liv asked her mistress candidly, tone as acidic as ever.
Caroline shrieked. “I am nineteen years old! ” She bellowed, and flung down her bow into the grass. “And if I needed a child that badly, I’m sure there are some to be found lying about!”
“Whatever you say, Your Highness,” Liv muttered, and made an encouraging gesture. “Keep shooting. Maybe the sun will burn you and you’ll look bad enough that none of the lords want to marry you.”
Caroline stomped off, instead, though she did pick up her bow and loop it over her head, slinging it across her back for safekeeping.
Liv didn’t appear to notice her departure, idly turning to the next page.
***
“Just, can you believe this? She didn’t even ask me, Bonnie! Who does that?” Caroline exploded, pacing back and forth in the little smoky room where Bonnie Bennett was stirring a large cauldron over a crackling fire. The Court Magician’s apprentice rolled her eyes much like Liv had done earlier, though she was careful to keep her back turned as she did.
“Well, Care, I don’t know what you want me to say here,” she hedged, glancing over at the open grimoire on the desk. “Maybe if you hadn’t run off all the suitors that’ve come around until now, your mom wouldn’t have to give your hand to some random lord’s son at a tournament.”
Caroline gaped, pausing her pacing. “I haven’t run off any suitors!” She hissed, fists clenching. Bonnie tossed in a pinch of adder’s tongue and leaned back as the concoction let out a bang and a cloud of foul-smelling smoke.
“What about Matt?” Caroline winced, remembering poor young Lord Donovan, who had come around when she was sixteen to pitch his woo.
“Well,” she reasoned, “that was a long time ago. I was barely more than a girl, and he didn’t believe that I could outshoot him.” Matt Donovan’s outdated notions on what a woman could and could not do were not her fault. And besides, he’d probably grown into less of a chauvinist because of it.
“You shot him in the leg, Caroline.” Bonnie reminded her. “He escaped in the dead of night with only his horse. His trunk is literally still upstairs somewhere. ”
“Well, maybe I did run him off. But he’s the only one!” Caroline insisted, cheeks reddening.
“What about Lord Salvatore’s sons?” Caroline gritted her teeth.
“That one was all Elena’s fault,” she retorted hotly. “If she hadn’t been the biggest skank in the whole entire kingdom -”
“Caroline, you lit their capes on fire. And what about Enzo, and Jesse, and-”
“Bonnie, enough!” Caroline interrupted, throwing up her hands. “I’m not asking you to defend my mother. I’m asking you to help me figure a way out of this.” Caroline waved a hand towards the contents of the room, the jars and bottles full of herbs and eyes of newt and the like. “You know. With your special skills. ”
Bonnie stopped stirring.
“How am I supposed to stop this tournament? Your mom has had them building the arena for weeks. The invitations have been sent. Caroline, it’s not like I can brew a potion and make this all go away.”
“I’m not asking for you to poof everything away!” Caroline argued, stepping closer to her friend and gripping her by the upper arms. “Just, we have to think of something. Bonnie, please. I don’t want this.” Her eyes were feverishly bright, the way they only got when she was plotting something. The last time they’d looked like this, Bonnie remembered, she’d let loose all the livestock into the Great Hall to chase off stuffy Lord Saltzman. That had been a disaster, though he’d run straight into their old governess, Miss Parker, and ended the woman’s reign of academic terror with a marriage proposal.
Bonnie sighed. “Fine. We’ll figure something out.”
***
“You know,” Caroline began nervously, drawing her cloak even tighter around her body as they crept through the darkened forest, “when you said you had a plan, I didn’t think you meant ‘get me killed in the Mystic Forest so I didn’t have to marry anyone at all, ever.’”
“Funny,” Bonnie deadpanned, leading the way with a witchlight that cast a bluish glow over the ground in front of them. “I didn’t think you were really in a position to be picky.”
Caroline huffed, and then stumbled over a root, swearing.
“There!” Bonnie whispered, reaching back and grabbing Caroline’s wrist to still her. She pointed at a mossy little cottage just ahead, seeming to become excited at the sight of it.
“What the hell is this place, Bon?” Caroline whispered back, as they crept nearer and nearer. The cottage was unmarked, and the moon overhead was heavy and blue and full, casting light onto where it was situated in a sweet little clearing. “I’ve never seen it before.” Before, she’d have claimed to know every piece of the Mystic Forest, as it was one of her favorite places to go and hide from her pointless needlepoint lessons. She’d completed her studies on her country’s history when she was fifteen, and her lessons on diplomacy by seventeen. She could speak three languages and shoot a squirrel dead at a quarter of a mile with her bow. What use did a future queen have for sewing and painting and other such tedious pursuits?
“I heard Grams talking about it once.” Bonnie replied, and her voice trembled a bit with excitement and terror. “If anybody can poof away your suitors, it’s Qetsiyah.”
“Qetsiyah?” Caroline asked, furrowing her brows. “Who’s-”
“You called my name.” A deep, even voice said, cutting through the stillness of the night, and Caroline shrieked, falling backwards ungainfully.
The woman was tall and almost heartbreakingly beautiful, with a plush mouth and a complexion like simmering brown sugar. Caroline was struck by her impossible beauty, and for a moment was frozen, before she regained her wits and ripped the dagger from her boot.
“Who are you?” She asked, brandishing the blade before her, where its silver edge caught the moonlight sharply.
“I am Qetsiyah, witch of these woods,” the woman answered, with an odd smile tugging at the corners of her lush, rosy lips. “I am the one that you seek.”
***
Qetsiyah’s dilapidated cottage was impossibly larger on the inside, Caroline noticed with growing unease, wrapped in a borrowed shawl by the fire crackling merrily in the stone fireplace. She sipped at the cup of broth that Qetsiyah had ladled for her out of the pot that rested on the nearby hearth. Bonnie was practically vibrating with questions, hands curled into fists at her knees. Whenever Caroline glanced her way, she mouthed Qetsiyah and oh my god at her, clearly having some sort of Moment.
“Now, Princess, what is it you wish? Why have you come to me?” Qetsiyah asked her, and though Caroline was no less unnerved by her than she had been outside, she also was unable to stop herself from feeling the slightest bit soothed by her rhythmic, melodic way of speaking, as well as the oddly herbal taste of the broth. It made her tongue looser than it might’ve been, otherwise.
“I don’t want to be married.” She heard herself saying, and then flushed at her own bluntness. She’d been taught better than that, in all her lessons on diplomacy and negotiation. Never show your hand.
Qetsiyah, however, only smiled, as if pleased by her lack of artifice.
“Ah. You want me to kill your fiance, is that it?” She sounded terribly nonchalant discussing murder, which should’ve made Caroline even more uneasy, but instead she found herself laughing.
“No, no! My mother, she’s throwing a tournament. To find me a husband.” Here she paused to roll her eyes dramatically. Bonnie coughed, a strangled sort of sound, but Caroline drove on, taking another sip of broth, and then another. She’d have to have the cooks learn this recipe, she mused, it truly was something else. “As if I need a husband! I don’t want to marry some stranger! But, the law states that if a tourney is called, I am duty-bound to marry the victor.”
Qetsiyah tutted, and then stroked a hand over her hair. Caroline blinked in surprise, as she wasn’t sure when the witch had moved close enough to do so.
“And if someone undesirable wins? Someone your mother does not favor?” Qetsiyah questioned, lightly, and Caroline snorted, imagining the look on her mother’s face should a disguised crofter win, like in some ballad.
“The law says I’d have to marry them anyway,” she replied, still giggling a bit.
“Ah. I think I have your solution then, my dear,” Qetsiyah murmured in her ear, curved around her back. She was quite warm, and Caroline leaned back into that warmth unconsciously.
“You do?” She asked mindlessly, turning her head as she spoke so her mouth grazed the witch’s warm, sweet-smelling skin.
Bonnie let out a light snore from her chair. When had she fallen asleep?
“I will give you a gift,” Qetsiyah whispered, her voice bouncing off of the walls of the cottage that seemed closer than they had before. “The tools with which to shape your own destiny.”
“That is very nice of you,” Caroline told her very sincerely, before she promptly passed out.