“Do you want to try finishing the story?” Dante offered.
“No.” Tella sat down beside him on the edge of the fountain. “You have a voice for telling stories.”
“Of course I do.”
“You are so full of yourself.” She leaned closer to elbow him in the ribs, but Dante took the opportunity to slide his heavy arm around her waist and tuck her into his side.
He was so warm, a human shield sheltering her from the rest of the world. She allowed herself to press closer to him as he said, “The Poisoner restored her husband’s memory. Then the Fate told the wife that if she took a pitcher of water and poured it out into the pool in the center of the courtyard, it would turn to wine that would have the power to make her husband forget the other woman he loved. The wife obeyed, but as she poured out the water and it turned to wine, she also began to transform, shifting into stone while her husband watched from the balcony above. He’d only had his memory back a few short hours, but it had been long enough for him to call on a Fate as well.”
“So he had her turned to stone?” Tella asked.
“He wished her dead, but the Poisoner had promised she’d keep her home and her title, and the Fates always keep their bargains.”
Both Tella and Dante shifted to watch the frozen woman once more. She didn’t look furious, as Tella would have suspected, or as if she were attempting to fight the spell. Instead, she almost appeared to relish it, tipping out her cursed wine the way another person might spill a dare or a challenge.
“It’s believed that anyone who drinks from this fountain can forget whatever they choose,” Dante said.
“And I thought you were telling me the story to help me forget.”
“Did it do that?” he asked.
“For a minute,” she admitted. But sadly that moment had already passed. Tella dipped her finger into the fountain, coating it in swirls of bitter burgundy. It would have been so easy to put her finger in her mouth, close her eyes, and erase what her mother had said and done.
But even if she believed Dante’s tragic myth, she wasn’t sure she really wanted to forget. Tella dropped her hand, smearing the cursed wine against the white of her sheath.
“You know what the saddest part is? I should have known all along. I was warned,” Tella said. “When I was a child, I read my fortune. It contained the Prince of Hearts. So for almost my entire life I’ve known I was destined for unrequited love. I’ve never let myself become close to anyone, except my sister, for fear they’d break my heart. It never even occurred to me that the one I really needed to protect myself from was my own mother.”
Tella coughed on a sound that felt like a sob and sounded like a wounded laugh. “It seems the people who say you can’t change your fate are right.”
“I don’t believe that,” Dante said.
“Then what do you believe?”
“Fate is only an idea, but I think by believing in it we turn it into something more. You just said you’ve avoided love because you’ve believed it wasn’t in your future, and so it hasn’t been.”
“That wasn’t the only card I pulled. I also pulled the Maiden Death, and shortly after, my mother vanished.”
“Just a coincidence. From what I’ve heard of your mother, it sounds as if she would have left whether you pulled the card or not.”
“But—” Tella almost told him about the Aracle and all the predictions it had shown her. But had it really revealed the future, or had it been manipulating her along as she’d suspected last night? Had it used glimpses of possible futures not to help her, but to guide her toward Jacks so that he could free the Fates?
Tella had thought herself so bold and daring by attempting to change her mother and her sister’s fate. But maybe Scarlett’s fiancé was actually a decent person. And maybe the Aracle had lied about her mother, too. It had shown her in prison and dead, but if Tella didn’t win Caraval, if she left the cards locked in the stars’ vault, her mother wouldn’t die or end up bloody in a jail. She’d just remain where she was, trapped in a card.
Like she deserved.
As if reading her thoughts, Dante added, “I don’t believe what you saw today proves that your mother didn’t love you. What she did looked terrible, but judging her based on a moment like that is the same as reading one page from a book and assuming you know the whole story.”
“You think she had a good reason for what she did?”
“Maybe, or maybe I just want to hope she’s better than my mother.” He said it the same careless way he’d told the story about his tattoos, as if it happened so long ago it didn’t really matter. But people didn’t tattoo tales they no longer cared about onto their body, and Tella sensed Dante felt the same about his mother. His mother might no longer have been in his life, but he still felt wounded by her.
Tella’s hand found Dante’s fingers in the dark. Somewhere in the space between the Temple of the Stars and this cursed place something had shifted between them. Before their relationship was much like Caraval. It had felt like a game. But the moment he set her down on the steps of these ruins, it felt as if they’d entered the real. When she asked her next question it wasn’t because she was trying to figure out if he was Legend; if anything, she desperately hoped he wasn’t. “What did your mother do to you?”
“I guess you could say she left me with the circus.”
“Are you talking about Caraval?”
“It wasn’t Caraval then, just a talentless group of performers who lived in tents and traveled the continent. People liked to say my mother only did what she believed was best for me, but my father was more honest. He liked to drink, and one night he told me exactly what sort of woman she was.”
“Was she a…”
“I know what you’re thinking, and no. Although I would have respected her more if she was a prostitute. My father said she only slept with him so she could steal something he’d collected in his travels. They’d spent one night together, and when she returned shortly after I was born, to drop me off, she wrote a letter to his wife telling her all about the experience, and ensuring I was never truly welcomed into the family.”
Tella imagined a younger Dante, all gangly limbs and dark hair covering the hurt in his eyes.
“Don’t feel sorry for me.” Dante tightened the hand around Tella’s waist and pressed his lips against her head, close to her ear, as he said, “If my mother had been a kinder or better person, I might have turned out good, and everyone knows how boring it is to be good.”
“I definitely wouldn’t be here with you if you were good.” Tella pictured the word good withering next to Dante. Good was the word people used to describe how they slept at night and bread fresh out of the fire. But Dante was more like the fire. No one called a fire good. Fires were hot, burning things children were warned not play with.
And yet for once, Tella hadn’t even thought about pulling away from him. She used to think it was ridiculous, the idea that a girl would give her heart to a boy even though she knew it would also give him the power to destroy her. Tella had exchanged things with other young men, but never hearts, and though she still had no plans to relinquish that part of her to Dante, she was beginning to understand how hearts could be slowly given away, without a person even realizing. How sometimes just a look, or a rare moment of vulnerability like the one Dante had just shared with her, was enough to steal a fraction of a heart.
Tella arched her neck to look up at him. Above his head the sky had changed, filling with ribbons of bruised clouds that made it look as if night had fallen backward. Instead of moving forward the heavens appeared to be shifting toward the sunset, to a time when there weren’t any spying stars, leaving them unwatched and alone in the cursed garden.
“So,” she said cautiously, “is all this your way of telling me you’re the villain?”
His chuckle was dark. “I’m definitely not the hero.”