“Well you tell Leslie that she can set up on my land here. There will be fewer permits to worry about. And I think I feel like performing. Let her know she can circulate that old poster of me, the one where I look like Eartha Kitt.” At that, she turns to where Emma and I stand in the doorway.
“So nice to meet you in person, darling.” Her voice is clearly the voice I heard coming from Duncan’s and Pia’s mouths back in the tent, and it’s more than a little unnerving. She gestures to the space between Emma and me. “You don’t have to be nervous, dearies. Come and have a seat now, won’t you?”
I glance down to see what she’s gesturing toward and notice that Emma and I are gripping each other’s hands. I didn’t even realize that we’d done that, and, more than that, I couldn’t tell you who is holding on to whom. We sit on the old fainting couch by a fireplace filled with unlit candles.
“My name is Katarina, darlings,” she says grandly. Her eyes are clear and her delicate brows are set in an inquisitive arch. She leans forward, her necklaces clacking as they shift, and takes our clasped hands in hers. I can’t help but notice how warm, how fiercely alive her hands are.
Her eyes flit from Emma to me and back again. “Tell me everything.”
And so Emma relives her story, starting with the way Sidney duped her and going over all the accidents and the work we’ve been doing to try to find a way to break the curse.
Katarina gives us a sly smile that just barely picks up the corners of her mouth. The few spidery lines at the corners of her eyes multiply with genuine happiness. “And you,” she says to me, “you’ve been helping her?”
I don’t know why I find this woman so unnerving, but I do. I push up my glasses with my free hand and nod.
“And you’re going to continue to help her, yes?”
I frown. “Of course.”
“And I’m going to hazard a guess and say the closer you’ve become the more frequent the accidents, am I right?”
Everything—my breath, my heart, the words on the edge of my lips—stutters as I think on what she just asked. Is it true? The night I cleaned up the wagon for Emma, I cut my hand. And when Emma told me she wanted to kiss me, Whiskey fell off the merry-go-round horse. Gin was hit with a knife the night Emma and I went on our date. Katarina’s gaze locks onto mine the moment the truth of her question comes into focus in my mind.
“Yes,” I say.
She makes a contented noise and leans back in her seat, surrounded by plump velvet cushions. “My grandchildren”—she points to each in turn—“don’t fully understand their duties. Or they have grossly misunderstood them.”
“Hey!” Duncan yells.
“You don’t, darling,” Katarina says. “It is what it is. I think that for the most part, the curse has been misunderstood for quite a long time. The mechanics of it—there’s nothing misunderstood there. But a loophole has been exploited for a very long time, with little regard for the actual intent.”
Emma and I share a glance. “What do you mean?” she asks.
Katarina leans forward until strands of her long hair brush against our hands. “The curse was never meant to perpetuate the way it has, deary. It was meant to be broken from the start. And the charm…well, consider the charm a sort of barometer for the curse. The curse is ready to be broken, and so, the charm is weakening, warning everyone of what’s coming.”
When she says it, it sounds so simple. But everyone here has lived with the tradition of the curse being transferred from person to person. Katarina snaps her fingers and shatters the silence. “Pia, be a good girl and bring me that photograph by the door.”
Pia scampers across the room and returns with a heavy wooden frame. In it there is an old, old photo of three women. One is obviously Katarina. Though the hair is dark and the face completely unlined, nothing else has changed. Behind her is a woman who must be her mother. They share a nose, a mouth, and a devilish smile. Next to Katarina is another woman, much younger, with a curl to her hair that suggests a wildness. Her eyes seem to spark out of the sepia photo.
“My sister never had the best judgment,” Katarina says, running a long fingernail around the face in the photo. “She gave her heart to a man who didn’t know how to cherish such a gift. She was impetuous, and did not like being constrained to the carnival. We lived a freer life than most, especially considering the time and the color of our skin, but we were still following someone else’s whims, someone else’s plans, and she resented that.”
“Great-Aunt Rebecca sounds like a loose cannon,” Duncan says.
Katarina glances at him over her shoulder. “There’s a touch of her in you, darling. I wouldn’t be so quick to judge.” Pia dissolves into a fit of giggles, but her grandmother ignores her. “I’m assuming you’re here because you’ve found my journal?”
“We did,” I say. Suddenly I’m having a hard time visualizing the old, crumbling paper of the journal being new and used by a much younger Katarina.
“Then you know what happened.” Her voice breaks here, betrays her age in a way her appearance does not. “I wish my intent had been as true as Mother’s. Who knows? Maybe if I could have kept the anger out of my heart, the curse would never have been born. Maybe Jasper would have gone on living his life without blemish, and you two wouldn’t sit before me right now.
“But that’s not what happened. Mother and I worked and worked to find a way for him to break the curse. We reconstructed the events of that night, the reason Jasper had become what he was. We made a potion and disguised it as wine. Once we had it all figured out, we explained it to Jasper. He would need to do what he could not do with Rebecca, and give his heart away, and that person would need to give theirs in return. The love between them would need to be strong enough to bridge life and death. Together, their pain, their actions would break the curse. But he found a loophole. He took our words and warped them, found the first woman he could trick and when he had passed off the curse to her, he left town and never looked back.”
She says those last words like they’re dirty things, like he sullied everything he was near or touched. The candles in the fireplace burn brightly, rivulets of wax already dripping down to pool in the grate, though I could have sworn they weren’t lit before. Katarina’s gaze has gone fierce, her skin lit by the points of flame dancing wildly on the candles in the fireplace.
“Jasper Clarke,” she says, her words edged with anger, “never understood that the curse was based on something real. He never dealt within the realm of reality, only the realm of what he created and what he could sell. The curse can be passed on, yes, with lies and falsehoods and charm.” She looks at me then, not at Emma. Her gray eyes are sharp enough to cut. “But the curse can be broken with love—true love, the bond of soul mates—honesty, and, above all, sacrifice.”
Chapter Thirty
Emma