Page 88

I absently said, “I would never hurt him.” But wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I hurt all humans?

As I stared down at him, he stared back—as if I were a stranger. Which meant he’d lost not only his father this night, but his mother as well.

A wave of dizziness hit me, joined by excruciating pressure on my temples, like my head was cracking open. With my mind all but forced wide, memories flowed as if from a fountainhead.

A scene arose from a far distant time. I gasped as it bloomed in my consciousness, unfurling to catch ever more light. Words left my lips: “I remember . . . the first game. I remember Tar Ro.” The sacred realm and arena created for our play.

The Fool must’ve given me these recollections, but I’d never seen them before now.

As if unable to help herself, the Priestess asked, “What was it like?”

“Heaven and hell mixed together. Beauty and danger for us at every turn.”

Jack fell silent. Even Tee, cradled in vines, eventually quieted.

I pressed my fingers against my pounding temples. “We four—along with the Fool—were the last ones left. Were in an alliance.” The Sun must’ve come along later in that game. The players before me looked different, though their eyes had been the same.

Temperance’s chronicles—which had underwhelmed me when I’d scanned them—were now the opening wedge to pry up memories of us. “We were the Dawnrider, the Beast Whisperer, the Abysmal, and the Betrayer.”

I had been the Betrayer.

I’d lured them all into a trap, surrounding them with vine, but they hadn’t realized they were about to die, hadn’t recognized any threat from me, an ally they trusted.

Millennia later, these Arcana had made the same mistake again.

The Priestess forced herself to relax against my hold. “What happened to us?” I all but heard her thinking, Keep the Empress talking, while she mustered up another wave as the river refilled. But she would never strike me with her godson so close.

“Matthew won it, right?” Fauna said in a high voice, catching on to her friend’s stall the Empress plan. Her wolves had resurrected from my spore attack and crouched closer.

Soon I would seize that pack and disembowel them while Fauna watched. She would feel every ragged rip of her familiars’ flesh. And once I’d killed her, they would never return.

“Tell us more, pequeña.” The Sun too had stopped struggling. “Talk about this history.” Had his eyes lightened a fraction? Readying to strike me mad?

I nearly laughed. I’d just covered the earth in thorns and poison; actions didn’t get much more insane than that. Besides, I knew none of them would risk this baby. “The Fool was the Gamekeeper. Right when I was about to secretly strike against you, he brought a message from the gods, granting us a choice. We could end ourselves and the game, or it would persist forever, spreading out from Tar Ro and annihilating humans. We spat at the offer, choosing to continue our bid for immortality.”

It had all been a test—one we’d failed. No wonder the Fool had reacted so strangely whenever I’d demanded we end the game. The gods had already given us that possibility.

The Priestess asked, “Is that why he eliminated you?”

I nodded. “The gods sent their Gamekeeper to kill us all. He’d had no choice.”

I glanced over at the Chariot’s body. Since that offer, we’d all been caught in a loop, just as he had been in this life. In six or seven hundred years, I’d be right where I was now—having learned nothing, having lost everything.

Again.

We were just puppets to the gods, born for one purpose, and cursed to repeat it for eternity. I whispered, “We’re in hell.” Death had told me we’d been damned, but I’d never quite grasped that fact until now.

Sadness filled the Priestess’s eyes. “Yes. We are.”

Unless we all escaped tonight. The Empress didn’t get trapped. And she didn’t perform for the entertainment of others.

The red witch resisted Evie’s efforts to surface. I was being foolish! Wouldn’t I rather be evil and immortal than decent and dying?

As the witch strained for control, I gazed down at Tee. I was about to give him a never-ending nightmare! How would he ever find love or friendship? Would his eyes never scan a horizon for the return of a beloved?

Inside, I warred with the witch, quelling her hunger for icons, for bloody battle. Everything for Tee.

Over this game, I’d seen symbols everywhere—infinity symbols, a bow, a jagged fracture of rock like a lightning bolt, and more—all waypoints on a journey that had led me here.

To look down into a baby’s eyes.

Sudden understanding suffused me. This was why he’d been born. He wasn’t the salvation. I was. Kentarch and we four Arcana were. Tee had only bought me time to realize it. The fate of the world would turn because I’d seen myself reflected in my son’s eyes.