“LaLa, where is the closest arch?” she asked.
If LaLa could tell her where the arch was, Evangeline was certain she could coax the arch to take her to the clearing with the tree. Her blood opened any door, and arches in particular always responded to her.
“I’ll go with you,” LaLa said.
“Thank you,” Evangeline said. “But I think I need to go alone this time. If I’m going to save Jacks, it’s not going to be through force.”
“Then how are you going to save him?” asked Aurora.
“With love.”
Aurora laughed again. The sound of it was getting uglier.
Evangeline’s cheeks heated, but she refused to be embarrassed. “Love is nothing to laugh at.”
“It is today. Because you see, Evangeline, even if you save Jacks’s heart, it’s not going to be enough to save you. If you ever kiss him, you will die. It doesn’t matter if your love is the truest love that the world has ever seen.”
Evangeline reminded herself Aurora was a liar; until moments ago, this whole scene had a been a charade. But she didn’t look as if she was acting now. Aurora looked disturbingly triumphant.
“When I realized Jacks was never going to kill the fox girl, I put another spell on him,” Aurora said. “But the story curse twisted the truth of it. It’s not Jacks’s true love who will be immune to his kiss and make his heart beat again. Only a girl who will never love Jacks can survive the kiss. Maybe your love can save his heart, but if you decide to kiss him, you’ll just be one more fox that Jacks has murdered.”
Chapter 41
Evangeline
Finding the arch was easy.
It seemed to take only minutes.
Evangeline imagined the actual journey from Aurora to a hidden arch on the edge of the Cursed Forest couldn’t have been that quick. It had probably taken her and LaLa closer to an hour to find it. But time felt as if it was speeding by. Evangeline’s blood still pumped impossibly fast. Even standing still, she found herself woefully short of breath.
She felt one relief as she entered the clearing: Jacks wasn’t there yet.
It was just Evangeline, the phoenix tree, and the slowly setting sun.
Her first time in this clearing, there had been lively musicians playing harps and lutes, courtiers bedecked in all their finery, a banquet table piled high with food, and promises of wishes come true in the air.
Tonight there was just the nervous rustle of leaves as Evangeline drew closer to the shimmering tree. She could hear the leaves quiver and shake against each other, as if they somehow sensed that their time was almost up.
The last time she’d been here, all the unchanged leaves had been red and orange and bronze, but tonight they were green as emeralds and dewy grass.
She saw the veins of a shaking leaf rapidly turn from green to gold. Then she watched as the gold began to spread across the surface of the entire leaf, as if it could outrace what it feared might be coming. And yet, unless the other leaves changed as well, this leaf’s transformation would not be enough to protect it from what Jacks would soon do.
Evangeline took a deep calming breath, both for herself and for the fearful tree.
She was afraid as well. She felt as if she shouldn’t have been. She felt as if her faith in love was supposed to be unflinching.
But Evangeline was flinching a lot.
Every light sigh of the breeze made her shoulders tense. The quietest shift of the leaves made her gasp.
On the night she’d opened the Valory Arch, there had been a sense of something inevitable. She’d known that opening that arch was exactly what she’d been born to do. She’d felt that every event in her life had led her to that moment.
Now she was living in the moments after the inevitable, and she felt that, too. Instead of being carved in stone, this moment felt like a fragile sort of tapestry that could unravel with one tug on a thread—or one pull of a leaf.
The clearing brimmed with anticipation; it burst against her skin like sparks from a match, making her feel as if anything could happen. She’d always loved that feeling before, but now it made her as nervous as that little leaf that had just changed from green to gold.
Evangeline had changed as well since the first time she had entered this clearing on her first night in the Magnificent North, when she had believed that marrying a prince could make all her dreams come true. Looking back, her dreams had felt impossible and she had felt so courageous for believing in them. But now she realized those were never her dreams, not really. They had been dreams borrowed from stories, dreams she had clung to because she had yet to imagine her own dreams.
That first night in the North, she would have never dreamed of a future with Jacks. She might have been attracted to him, but he wasn’t what she was supposed to want.
Jacks wasn’t safe. He came with no promises of a happily ever after. If anything, he guaranteed the opposite. He didn’t believe that heroes got happy endings. Loving Jacks felt doomed from the start. But Evangeline had learned that love was more than a feeling. And it didn’t have to be the safe choice, because love was also more powerful than fear. It was the ultimate form of hope. It was stronger than curses.
And yet . . .
She worried that her love might not be enough.
Aurora’s last words still haunted her.
It doesn’t matter if your love is the truest love that the world has ever seen. The story curse twisted the truth. It’s not Jacks’s true love who will be immune to his kiss. Only a girl who will never love Jacks can survive the kiss.
Evangeline didn’t like to think about Jacks with other girls. She didn’t like to imagine him caring for them or kissing them or killing them. When she’d first met Jacks, she had imagined that he didn’t really think about them, either. The careless, disrespectful version of Jacks she’d met in his church hadn’t seemed capable of caring for anyone.
But now, when she pictured Jacks on the first day she had met him, she didn’t think about their first awful conversation. She saw him sitting in the back of his church, roughly ripping his clothes and bowing his head as if in mourning or performing some act of penance.
He’d been brokenhearted. Not in the same sense that most people thought of, as if one person had broken his heart. Jacks’s heart had been broken over and over again until it was no longer capable of hope and care and love.
The stories always made it sound as if the girls that Jacks had kissed before had not really loved him. They’d just been girls he’d tried on and then discarded like clothes that didn’t fit.
But now Evangeline wondered if Jacks hadn’t been quite so callous with his kisses at first, if perhaps he had cared for some of the girls before he’d kissed them. Then she wondered if some of the girls had truly loved him. If there had been ones who had believed, just like she did, that their love could be enough to save him, to break the curse. But it never was.
No wonder Jacks thought her feelings weren’t enough. And maybe they weren’t. But that didn’t mean he was beyond saving. Maybe it wasn’t her love alone that would save him. Maybe it had to be his love, too.
Evangeline looked up at the newly changed gold leaf, and watched it sway against another green leaf as if begging it to change as well. Because unless the entire tree was gold, it would all go up in flames. Just like she and Jacks would, if she was the only one who believed in the power of love.