Across from her, Jacks stirred.
Evangeline slowly lifted her eyes from the page in time to see his shoulders shudder—as if he was having a bad dream.
She wondered, briefly, what sort of things might haunt Jacks. He had once told her the story of the girl who’d made his heart beat again—the one girl who had survived his fatal kiss. She was supposed to be his one true love, but instead she stabbed him in the heart and chose to love another. At the time, Evangeline had believed that was Jacks’s greatest tragedy, but now she suspected there were even deeper wounds in his past.
Once again, she thought about the picture she’d seen of the Merrywood Three. She knew Jacks said they had died and that the storybooks lied. Yet she couldn’t completely dispel the idea that Jacks was part of this trio.
If only she knew more about them. All she knew was that Lyric Merrywood was the son of a lord.
The archer wasn’t named, but she was still drawn to the idea that he was the Archer from The Ballad of the Archer and the Fox.
Then there was Castor Valor, the prince.
According to the stories, all the Valors had been beheaded. But if anyone could have escaped death, it would have been Jacks. And if Jacks had been the only Valor to survive, if he’d lived to see his whole family killed, then of course it would have destroyed him. It also explained why he would want to open the Valory Arch—as one of the Valors, he would know better than anyone what the Valory contained.
Jacks rolled his neck and made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a groan. He was waking up.
Evangeline turned her gaze out the window before he opened his eyes and caught her staring.
Outside, the scenery had shifted. She wondered if they’d taken a wrong turn. Gone were the snowdrifts and winter birds. Murky gray replaced the blue of the skies and turned the snow on the ground to sludge.
In her father’s curiosity shop, Evangeline had once opened a very fine-looking crate of imported storybooks from the Icehaven Isles. The covers were lovely mint-green leather, with rose-gold embossing and the most beautiful foil designs. She’d felt impossibly eager to open them and see what sort of tales were inside. But all she’d found was ash, as if someone had set a match to the center of the pages and burned away each word.
This place reminded her of those books, but instead of words, it was color and feeling and hope that had been vanquished—it was green needles on trees and red painted doors and blue cobblestones. Even the color of the snow had been leached away, turning it a despairing shade of gray.
In the distance, it looked as if there might have been a village once, but now there were only the bones of dead cottages and abandoned pieces of a township. The road changed as well, turning bumpy and craggy and shaking the carriage as it wended its way through a forest of skeletal trees without any leaves.
Evangeline shivered. She hadn’t realized until that moment that the coach had been growing colder and colder. The heated bricks at her feet had lost their warmth, and now they felt like ice. She tried to pull her cloak tighter, but it didn’t help. It was as if this chill were a living thing. Fog seeped in through the cracks around the carriage door, smelling faintly of decay. It covered her boots and froze her toes as the coach rocked over a great gash in the road that nearly jostled her out of her seat.
“Don’t fret, Little Fox, it’s just this place,” Jacks said, but his voice lacked its usual swagger.
“Where are we?” Evangeline asked. Her voice sounded brittle—a frightened thing that wanted to close the curtains and look away. Yet she could not take her eyes off the unsettling scene.
As the carriage kept rumbling on, the village disappeared, and for a stretch, there was nothing but the charred remains of trees. She thought she perhaps saw some sort of inn still intact, but the place was too far away, and then they were nearing a sign that took the breath right from her lungs.
WELCOME TO THE GREAT MERRYWOOD MANOR!
The sign was as desolate as everything else, chipped and faded, and as sad as the feeling that was growing inside her. Her cheeks became wet with tears. She might never have been here before, but the sign reminded her of the way the book described House Merrywood—the Merrywoods were said to be joyful, generous people, and their home was a place of warmth and love. But all that remained of this house was the carcass of a once magnificent staircase that climbed out of a great pile of ash into nothing.
“Here’s the answer to your questions about the Merrywood Three,” said Jacks darkly.
“They did this?” Evangeline asked.