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.
He was indeed a miniature of the man I’d loved and lost. But there was a little bit of me in his appearance. My mother too. Would he be fierce like her?
Would I?
Words left my lips: “I don’t play games where I don’t make the rules.” How many times had I said that in the past? Now was my last chance to put those bold words into brave action. “I’m bowing out.”
Circe clenched her jaw, then grudgingly said, “You can’t. We can’t all live. We must die for the world to come back.”
Crying over my mother’s body, I’d sworn to her that I would do anything I could to fix the world. Killing my friends wasn’t what I’d had in mind.
I might have been the Betrayer in the past, but I never would be again. “Says who?”
Tee’s tears eased—because I was changing, becoming his mother once more. The thorns in my crown turned into flowers, and my claws receded.
Withhold viciously. Or give lavishly.
I’d despaired of discovering the point to this game, the lesson we were meant to learn.
Love.
Could I find my way back to it, when the monsters would just keep coming? Yes. As Aric had said, my wrath was boundless. But so was my love.
I would give lavishly.
My vines returned Tee to Jack. Muscles tensed, he drew my son close. He said nothing, just kept his watchful eyes on me.
I inwardly called, Matthew! Answer me.
Silence. This was for me to figure out. It always had been. The solution stretched to my consciousness like a stalk of cane to the sky.
If I am strong enough to poison the entire world, I can feed it.
The vines surrounding us shifted from smoking black to green as they spread over this mountain, covering the lava rock, the remains of Richter. They cocooned the bodies of those we’d lost. Kentarch. Joules. Gabe.
They gathered up Aric’s ashes into a vessel made from the wood of life.
Love.
Flowers spilled from my hair as tears flowed down my cheeks. The love—and the grief—made me even more powerful. To have loved and lost made you stronger than anything else in the universe.
The red witch withered and went dormant.
“What’s happening?” Lark asked nervously. Her recovered wolves gazed from me to their mistress.
Circe murmured, “The Empress is changing. Her tableau is righting itself.”
The vines that had tethered my prisoners now curled around my friends, gathering them close. “We’re going to take control of the deck and fight the gods instead of each other.” In honor of those we’d lost.
Sol said, “But we can’t kill gods, unless we really are gods.” His eyes widened. “I knew it!”
“We can remove their curse. We will bring the world back.”
Circe gave a tense laugh. “You always did think highly of yourself.”
“Eves, are we strong enough to do something like that?”
I nodded at Lark. “We are unfathomable.”
In Tar Ro, I’d been abundance. Now my excess power flowed through us all. I fueled their ability to regenerate, their own abundance, until our powers linked, and they felt what I did. And the reverse.
Our minds united; our heartbeats synced. I didn’t know how. Matthew? Or witchcraft? Maybe a rogue god’s intervention.
Didn’t matter. The earth was stirring, and my friends saw the symbols that kept appearing to me—the shapes, designs, and clues.
Circe’s whirlpool was like a carousel. Like a tourniquet twisting.
I released my own tourniquet. No blood flowed.
Love.
It felt as if our feet weren’t touching the ground, like we ourselves were spinning. Petals flitted all around us.
Sol’s skin began to glow with a warm light. “What is this?” he asked in wonderment.
Circe said, “It feels like our own magic.”
All over the world, my poison subsided, disappeared, replaced by blooms and berries. My toxic thorns morphed to harmless stalks. I cleaned the soil of the curse that had left it barren.
Fruit trees emerged from the ground and stretched their limbs, while grain sprouted to cover fields. At Haven, cane and oaks burst into existence. We rise.
Somewhere across the planet, a small girl eyed a vine laden with berries. The four of us felt the sweet tug as her tiny hand plucked one. We felt the nourishment sweep through her. A world away, on a different continent, another shaking hand dared to reach for an apple.
Circe gazed at me. “Abundance.”
As she cleaned all the water on earth, from the oceans to the rivers, I answered, “Sister almighty.” I perceived waves through her, could hear the currents and understand the whispers in her echoing queendom.
Sol turned to her. “You smell like the seaside. Like I remember as a boy.”
She breathed, “The secrets return.”
Lark’s long hair spun in the air, making infinity symbols. “Guys, something is happening to me, something that feels really right.” She lifted her hands to the sky, and monarch butterflies poured from her palms. As they danced above us in Sol’s light, we felt each determined wingbeat. “Holy crow! Did you see that?”
We sensed all the animals killed in the Flash resurrecting. None of them had blank eyes like Lark’s first sparrow; these teemed with life. Birds made their songs. Insects chirped. Her wolves peered around in bafflement.
Circe’s expression was just as excited as Lark’s. “Whale song lifts my heart!”
We all heard it. The gods’ magic was strong, but together, ours was stronger.
“Ay, I feel dizzy hope,” Sol said. “I feel the sea and the creatures. A child is eating berries with glee. My dream to feed people is happening!” His skin grew brighter with an ethereal glow, until an orb of light emerged from his chest. It flew outward into the world faster than a solar wind. He blinked. “That was the light I used to help the Bagmen rest.”