oh this is such a lovely thought-invoking question. let me map post-eris ascension out a little … i think amalia probably waits on helion to seek her out because—if after all this time he does not want her, if after all this time his affections have waned, if after all this time he has found another, for she has of course heard of his dalliances, if after all this time he turns her away, then what does that leave her? but of course it doesn’t take very long for him to seek her out. probably at eris’s ceremony. which is time enough for eris to spin it as a calculated move on both of their parts. to make him a shrewd heir to the throne rather than an abandoned son; to make her into a wily and cunning politician to have leveraged herself as lady of another court so readily, that way the betrayed hearts of the people won’t bring any lords to prompt eris to seek vengeance against her and helion.

there’s never any hope for her and emile, and she knows it. he is her biggest disappointment, biggest failure. he immediately ingratiates himself with the beron loyalists and begins an intense downward spiral; he died without his father’s acceptance, the one thing he wanted above all, and so he mythologizes beron—is the most potent threat to all of his family. emile, by necessity, has to die soon after beron dies. she and carmine have a cordial but distant relationship, the way you might have with a friend you once loved dearly but fell out with and things can now never be the same but neither of you can address the rift because that would be to acknowledge a problem at all. she would favor marius most of all the non-lucien sons she has left, if only because his grief is the most potent and least generally violent—but he makes it very clear that he would kill lucien in less than a heartbeat and she can’t countenance that. he’s also most loyal to eris, if only because of complacency, which strains them further. so left to her after emile dies are eris, carmine and kirsi, and marius and adonia.

i think carmine and kirsi would probably bring her the biggest sense of indignation; they have three children together and carmine, despite still being charming and silver-tongued, is unlike amalia has ever known him to be now that he’s married to kirsi. proof to her of how different her sons could have been if they ever even just got free of beron, which means proof to her of how she failed her sons in letting beron sire them at all. kirsi is very hypervigilant of her kids and doesn’t let any vanserra close knowing How They Are, so i could see a lot of strain between kirsi and amalia at social gatherings, especially because kirsi doesn’t have time for autumn pleasantries and that would offend amalia. they are kin of my kin; i have a right to know them, amalia might say if sufficiently offended. you know not even your own kin; you may claim no right to mine, kirsi might say back. and carmine who has never (and will never) acknowledge that his deep-rooted sense of unlovability comes from his mother feels a keen satisfaction at hearing kirsi do so, which strains everything even more.

i’d say marius and adonia are most gracious with her in the aftermath, once adonia heals enough from losing her mate to regain her sense of self and her sense of propriety. but i think amalia disdains adonia for all she sees of herself in adonia—adonia who was in love with a male who was not her husband yet stayed with her husband until his end at the expense of herself and those around her, then immediately found solace in the arms of her love once her husband died. the parallels are Very Much There. so if adonia eventually gives birth to any of marius’ children, i think amalia might try to overstep with them. maybe try to make amends for her own failings as a mother by criticizing adonia. gently, of course. they are both autumn ladies. but marius wouldn’t stand for it, not after so long of adonia doubting herself with emile. he’s a bit more of his old self now, which is to say he takes on the silas role in his relationship with adonia—happy to be bark and bite on both of their behalves because she is him as he is her. this fills in the loss of a mating bond well for adonia; she basks in it.

they do !!! tytti virtanen and urho virtanen. they ruled the sulatta province of winter, which spans the border of the autumn court. both were hardened and wise to beron’s testing of the borderland, and they were trusted counsel of the high lord who preceded kallias because of it. kirsi, kallias, and viviane were friends because of how frequently their parents gathered together. because of how close her parents were to the high lord of winter, they were part of the thorough culling of winter fae utm after the plot against amarantha was exposed. i still go back and forth on whether kirsi was utm—i think she probably would have been killed if she had been, and i think if she actually saw what carmine was up to utm, there’d never be a chance in hell for her to fall for him. so i think she probably was hiding out with viv in whatever the winter equivalent to velaris was when her parents were killed. i doubt word was traveling out of utm and to winter after the quashed rebellion, so i think she probably didn’t find out her parents were dead and that by birthright she was the new lady of the sulatta province until amarantha was felled.

need you to know that i did Not have time to write this today but i couldn't think of anything else after this ask came in so now i have ~1400 words of kirmine on my hands and love in my heart also you literally made me laugh out loud i adore u

Muscles loose and limber, Carmine extricates himself from the down mattress and its overwhelming pile of furs. The perpetual chill of these lands threatens to seep in the moment his feet meet the icebound stone, to unwrite the fire from his body as though its mere existence is an offense. He casts a blister of heat about him to stave it off, pulling on first his trousers, then his silken tunic, both without wrinkle despite how long they have lain on the floor.

"Must you go?" a voice asks as he toes into his boots, high and tuneless and wrong to the ear. He knows from the rustling of fabric at his back that the female in the bed has pushed herself up on an elbow to watch him. "I could arrange for a thrall to bring us our repast. We could make an eve of it."

Carmine turns to her. Indeed, she is propped up amongst the pelts, fair as ivory, except where he marked her pleasure in pinks and reds along the expanse of her breasts. Though she arches her back to entice him with their surfeit, he feels unfulfilled to see them, just as he felt to lay with her at all.

It had not always been so.

Not so long ago, he could have lost himself between her thighs and come up feeling as satiated as if he had eaten a meal course to course. He would have partaken in this offered confection, then stayed for a spot of wine, then to break his fast come the morning, if he felt so inclined. He would have been well-pleased by his efforts and glutted on her adulations of them.

But there is a hollowness to them now.

Leaning forth to take her hand, Carmine presses his lips to the back of her knuckles. "Next time."

She pushes up further as he straightens to his full height, chasing after the lick of his flame. "Then there is to be one?"

"Surely," Carmine lies, smiling back at her in his egress. "Is there a male who could know you the once without wishing to know you all of his days?"

His footsteps echo crisply in the cavernous corridors of this wintry keep, as unlike the Forest House as two places can be: stolid where his home woos, unyielding where his home bends, glacial where his home smolders. If only he could melt this place through until it was malleable to his touch, until it came away wet and dripping on his fingers, until it sighed his name on the wind. Then, perhaps, he might feel full again.

"Lord Carmine," he hears from ahead.

This voice—velvety and smooth, like the slow draw of a bow along string—echoes out richly from its source, reverberating back to him from the small alcoves carved along his chosen path so that, for a moment, it seems she is all around him.

"Lady Kirsi," he greets, inclining his head.

i literally just inked!!! kirsi who really isn't very manipulative and honestly disdains such underhanded tactics but who has that deep sense of duty that draws her to do whatever it is she needs to in order to best steward her people. that same sense of duty that has her accepting her betrothal to carmine in canon verse. she thinks long about it. she already knows so much about the vanserras, about eris. she learns how best to ingratiate herself based on what he likes—a submissive female, of course, and a virgin; a female who will not challenge him in any way, not intellectually, not politically, not socially; a female who will do as he says how he says when he says it. that is what eris vanserra is said to prefer.

so the next banquet they attend together, that is what she is. demure. palatable. submissive. she lowers her eyes. she smiles soft. she laughs when she ought. yes, lord vanserra. of course, lord vanserra. if you think it so, lord vanserra. like eris has never seen her before. like eris doesn't know how much she hates him and his family. (males never pay kirsi any mind; why would she think he knew her?) he's amused! not mad. why would he be mad? this is what he wants, after all. she isn't wrong. it's what his father would want. it's what his father taught him to want. so it doesn't bother him. it doesn't annoy him. it doesn't enrage him, her feigned servility. he's amused.

kirsi is just so obviously out of her depth with it all. eris pushes her as far as he can for his own amusement, but she doesn't act without dignity even though it's such a thin artifice, and she doesn't ever break. she takes him in stride. she's SO wary of him, too. all he wants is for her to get her father to move his forces up closer to the summer border with winter so eris can have excuse to rearrange his own troops and get more males loyal to his father away from him without his father being suspicious. but oh my god she literally fucking won't. she feigns this submission, but beneath it, she's one of the most stubborn females he's ever met.

which he should hate. but he doesn't. it makes her interesting. it makes her fun to play against. it makes him HORNY. the next game he initiates is one surrounding her virginity. whether she will give it to him. because he 1) doesn't think she's a virgin 2) doesn't think she'll have sex with him besides. but kirsi's been clocking eris, too. kirsi's been monitoring the way he operates and with whom. she thinks: what is my virginity for the preservation of my people? and my god being this close to him feels like an entire bottle of wine is in her belly. his flame is like no other. it muddles her, dizzies her, blurs her and melts her. so hard to think about anything but his pretty face and his hand on her thigh and she wants him but she's so dizzy—

they're both such products of their environments and upbringings. kirsi is very involved with every single part of their lives and probably coddles them to an extreme. their safety, their longevity, their continuing lives are her utmost priority. she knows well how fortunate she is to bear three children to term with no complications—and she would treat them like the miracles they are to her. always in her lap or at her side, and if they aren't, they're in the same room as her almost always. any threats to them—any even potential threats to them—are handled swiftly and exactingly. the first time one of them falls ill/suffers injury sends her into a genuine hand-shaking, hyperventilating spiral that carmine has to try to calm her down from, which does in fact have the potential to make things worse.

because by comparison, carmine is pretty hands-off with his kids. he literally just. never had it modeled for him? he only ever really saw his mom dote on lucien, and by then, he mentally detached himself almost completely from his family and the emotions they elicited in him, so he was probably too busy distracting himself with sex to file any of that in his brain. plus if he thinks to himself that he wants to be unlike his own parents and treat his children more lovingly, then he has to accept that he has been affected by beron and amalia's parenting/lack of attention—and he just is not that emotionally mature, nor is he prepared to reckon with something like that. he's like his eldest brother that way! so carmine really let's his kids do kinda whatever. he plays with them and gives them attention enough, but he'd be just as willing to let a wet nurse/governess care for them—if kirsi would ever part from them.

which leads to a primary point of contention for my darlings once the children are born: kirsi pays much more attention to the children than she does to carmine—and that does not sit well with him. when the first is a baby, he's able to be like, okay, an infant needs to be cared for. but once the first has grown enough to be what he considers "self-sufficient" and kirsi is still all about their child all the time, he definitely gets resentful and snappish. that shitty petulance of like—you love our child more than me; you don't make time for me; you can't separate long enough from them to even have sex with me. which, of course, sex remains a huge thing for carmine, especially now that he's only having it with one person. that old unloved/unlovable wound crops up in a terrible way because this is exactly what he feared in coming to love someone: that they would eventually abandon him/withhold their love the way his parents did.

this blatant resentment hits kirsi hard as well. she understands how he feels, but she can't understand how he doesn't see that the children are the most important thing to her and that they should be to him as well. they should both be united on this, but he seems so disinterested in them. typical autumn court male—he doesn't understand how sacred this life they created is because he's used to such plenty. so she's pretty unforgiving of his attitude and doesn't offer him the reassurance he's after. she also really only sees the sex component of all this since he's never opened up about beron and amalia, so anything she knows of their relationship has been gleaned but never confirmed—which means that to her, this is all because they aren't having as much sex. she gets very paranoid that he's fucking around on her. that makes her more hostile towards him, which makes him more panicked and resentful and seeking of her comfort because it's proof that she doesn't love him.

god i wish i had like face claims for any of my characters or a better visuospatial sketchpad in my head. i picture her and carmine together as very quintessentially ice and fire. she’s slender and a lot of her height is in her legs—long neck, more subtle curves, regal bearing. white hair and blue eyes like kallias. truly an icicle of a fae. here’s a quick little moodboard i compiled because i’m bad at physical descriptions lmao

ohhhh baby baby okay i definitely scale faeries up from human heights because i picture them all ~ethereal~ and ~willowy~ and as such Very Tall, especially high fae. i haven’t ever given any of them precise measurements but … eris “towering height” vanserra i peg as like 7’ maybe, tamlin a bit shorter atttt maybe 6’6 but b r o a d, carmine shortest of them at 6’4. to faeries, these are pretty standard heights—tamlin like the equivalent of a human’s 6’ (tall but not crazily so) and carmine the equivalent of a human’s 5’10 (pretty average, same height as beron). eris’ height deviates enough to be visibly considered tall.

every single one of my synapses sparked at one time over this. every single one!!! rare era of hostile truce between beron and the high lord of winter. winter!hl invites the vanserras to a banquet. beron leaves eris in autumn but brings emile and carmine. around this time, carmine is so desperate for love that he's actively being groomed by female courtiers + kirsi is so devoted to her purpose even at such a young age that she's isolated herself from everyone but her family. complete opposite ends of the spectrum.

carmine tries to engage in conversation with kirsi at dinner. she wrinkles up her nose at him—ew! a vanserra!—and angles herself away, trying instead to hear what her father is speaking to the high lords about. he's still young enough to get angry and defensive instead of adapting to a new tactic of getting her to pay attention to him. he scoffs—makes some comment about how she might as well talk to him to pass the time since no one else is paying her any mind. kirsi, who clocked the way one of the females in their entourage touched his elbow in passing earlier, makes some cool cutting remark—looks to that female way down the table and comments something about the impropriety of his autumn ways. (yeah she's victim blaming. he's a vanserra! he can't be a victim. he's a perpetrator, else he will be soon.) they sit across from each other just mutually fuming and irritable.

but those comments stick in their little formative brains.