Caraval Series, Book 1

  “You saw her?”

  “I only heard her voice.” Scarlett explained what had happened.

  Julian looked as if he were holding back a chuckle. “You keep forgetting this is a game. She was either acting, or someone else was pretending to be her. Either way, I don’t think you need to worry about your sister. Trust me when I say Legend knows how to take care of his guests.”

  Julian’s last words should have eased the knots in Scarlett’s stomach, but something about the way Julian spoke made them tighten instead. His smile left his eyes cold, untouched.

  “How do you know how Legend treats his guests?”

  “Look at the room we were given because you’re his special visitor.” Julian’s accent thickened as he said the word special. “It makes sense to think he’s put your sister somewhere just as nice.”

  Again, Scarlett should have felt better. Tella was not in any danger. Her sister was merely a part of the game, and an important part at that. Yet that’s exactly what made Scarlett so unsettled. Why of all people would Legend choose her sister?

  “Ah, I get it,” Julian added. “You’re jealous.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “It would make sense if you were. You were the one who wrote him letters all those years. No one would blame you if you felt bad he chose her instead.”

  “I’m not jealous,” Scarlett repeated, but this only made the sailor smile wider as he continued to toy with the knob from the broken wardrobe, making it disappear and reappear between his deft fingers. A cheap magic trick.

  She tried to think of Tella’s disappearance this way, a simple sleight of hand—she wasn’t gone for good, just out of Scarlett’s reach.

  She reread her first clue again. Number two you’ll discover in the rubble of her departure. As Tella’s sister, Scarlett should have had an advantage. If something in the room did not belong to Tella, Scarlett would know, but there were hardly any items left. Except for the glass button and the picture card in her hand, which upon second glance no longer looked quite so ordinary as before.

  “What is it?” Julian asked. When Scarlett didn’t answer right away his tone turned charming. “Come on, I thought we were a team.”

  “Being teammates has mostly benefitted you, not me.”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘mostly.’ You forget, if it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t even be here.”

  “I could claim the same,” Scarlett argued. “Last night, I saved you from being kicked out of the game, but you were the one who slept in our room!”

  “You could have slept in the bed as well.” Julian toyed with the top button of his shirt.

  Scarlett scowled. “You know that was never an option.”

  “All right.” He put his hands up in an exaggerated surrender. “From now on it will be a more even partnership. I’ll keep telling you what I know about the game. We share with each other what we learn, and we trade days for the room. When you sleep in there, I promise I will not. Though you are welcome to join me whenever you want.”

  “Scoundrel,” Scarlett muttered.

  “I’ve been called much worse. Now, show me what’s in your hands.”

  Scarlett looked out toward the hall, making certain no one was lingering outside the door. Then she turned the picture card in her hand toward Julian. “This did not belong to my sister.”

  14

  When Scarlett was eleven, she’d been wildly in love with castles. It didn’t matter if they were made of sand or stone or bits of imagination. They were fortresses, and Scarlett imagined if she lived in one, she’d be protected and treated like a princess.

  Tella had no such romantic notions. She did not want to be cossetted, or spend her days locked away in some musty old castle. Tella wanted to travel the world, to see the ice villages of the Far North and the jungles of the Eastern Continent. And what better way to do that than with a beautiful emerald-green fish tail.

  Tella never told Scarlett, but she wanted to be a mermaid.

  Scarlett had laughed so hard she’d cried when she’d discovered Tella’s hidden cache of picture cards. All of them with glittering mermaids—and mermen!

  After that, whenever they fought, or Tella teased Scarlett, Scarlett was tempted to taunt her about being a mermaid. At least castles were real, but even Scarlett, who at the time still had impractical dreams and an untethered imagination, knew mermaids did not exist. But Scarlett never said a word. Not when Tella teased her about her castles, or about her growing fixation with Caraval. Because Tella’s fantasy of being a mermaid gave Scarlett hope—that despite their mother’s abandonment, and their father’s lack of love, her sister could still dream, and that was something Scarlett never wanted to destroy.

  “My sister’s picture cards were a very particular collection,” she told Julian. “Tella would not have had a picture card with a castle on it.”

  “I believe that’s actually a palace,” said Julian.

  “It’s still not a picture she would have had. This must be the next clue.”

  “You’re positive?” Julian asked.

  “If you don’t trust my knowledge of my sister, then you can find someone else to work with.”

  “Believe it or not, Crimson, I like working with you. And I think I remember seeing that palace after we caught the boat last night. If you’re right, and the card is the second clue, the palace is where we should look for the third one. When I played before—”

  Julian quieted at the sound of boot steps. Heavy. Confident. They stopped just outside the door to Tella’s room.

  Scarlett peeked into the hall.

  “Why, hello there,” Dante greeted her, with a smile a little too crooked to be perfect. Again he was dressed in all black, matching the darkness of his tattoos, but he seemed to brighten at the sight of Scarlett. “I was just going by to check on you. Did you sleep well in my room?”

  Coming from Dante, the words sleep and my room sounded more than a little scandalous.

  “Who’s at the door, my love?” Julian moved behind Scarlett. He didn’t actually touch her, but the way he slid close was just as proprietary. She could feel the coolness of his body caressing hers as he placed one hand on the frame and the other on the door right behind her.

  Dante’s charming expression vanished. His eyes darted from Scarlett to Julian. He didn’t say a word, but Scarlett could clearly read his hardening face. She felt something shift in Julian as well.

  Julian’s chest brushed her back, and when it did, every muscle was hard and rigid, at odds with his careless tone. “Isn’t someone going to introduce me?”

  “Julian, this is Dante,” said Scarlett.

  Dante stuck out a hand. The one with a rose inked on the back.

  “He was kind enough to give up his room for me,” Scarlett explained, “since there was a mix-up involving mine.”

  “Well, then it’s very good to meet you.” Julian shook Dante’s hand. “I’m so glad you could help my fiancée. When I heard about what happened I felt sick. I wish she’d come to me.” Julian turned to Scarlett, all false affection and infuriating looks.

  She was wrong about him being disturbed. He was enjoying this. Playing the part of concerned fiancé, just to scare away Dante, when really he couldn’t have cared less.

  Scarlett looked back up at Dante, hoping to find a good way to explain she hadn’t really lied. But he no longer looked at her, and his handsome face had shifted from upset to a disturbing shade of indifferent, as if she had ceased to exist.

  “Come on, love,” Julian whispered. “We should move aside so he can get a look.”

  “That’s all right,” Dante said. “I think I’ve seen what I needed.” He took off down the hall without another word.

  Scarlett whirled on Julian the moment Dante was out of sight. “I am not your piece of property and I don’t appreciate your acting like it.”

  “But you enjoyed the way he was looking at you?” Julian gazed down at Scarlett, blinking thick, dark lashes as he gave her an i
ntentionally lopsided smile. “You think he practices that look in a mirror?”

  “Stop it. He didn’t look at me like that. He’s just a nice person. Unlike some people, he was willing to make a sacrifice to help me.”

  “He looked as if he was willing to collect on that sacrifice, too.”

  “Ugh! Not everyone is like you.” Scarlett marched out the doorway and down the hall, gripping the second clue—Tella’s picture card.

  “All I’m saying is, that one’s bad news,” Julian said. “You should stay away from him.”

  Scarlett stopped at the top of the stairs, squaring her shoulders as she turned to Julian, clearly recalling the hungry look on his face when she’d caught him in the barrel room with Tella. “As if you’re any better.”

  “I’m not saying I’m a good man,” Julian said. “But I don’t want any of the things from you that bloke does. If I did, I’d tell you to stay away from me too. He won Caraval last time I played. Remember what I said about this game costing people? Even winning comes with a price, and his triumph cost him, a lot. My bet is he’ll do anything to win the wish and try to get back everything he lost. If you think my moral compass is damaged, his doesn’t exist.”

  * * *

  “Oh, if it isn’t the happy couple!” The pretty dark-skinned girl clapped excitedly as Scarlett and Julian climbed into her boat.

  The last thing Scarlett felt like doing was pretending to be Julian’s blissful bride-to-be, but she managed to add some sugar to her voice. “Weren’t you on a unicycle last night?”

  “Oh, I do lots of things,” the girl said proudly.

  Scarlett remembered Julian’s warning about her, but as the girl started to row, it was difficult to think she was made of anything other than genuine cheer. Much friendlier than the sailor girl from the night before.

  Perhaps Julian just didn’t like anyone who seemed pleasant.

  Although, he was now amiable enough to this girl; after flashing her the picture card with their destination, he inquired after her name.

  “Jovan, but people call me Jo,” said the girl. As she rowed, Julian asked more questions and laughed at her jokes. Scarlett was impressed with how polite he could be when he wanted, though she imagined most of it was just to get information. Jovan pointed out all sorts of sights. The canals were circular, like a long apple peel spread out around curving lantern-lit streets, full of pubs piping russet smoke, bakeries shaped like cupcakes, and shops wrapped in colors like birthday presents. Cerulean blue. Apricot orange. Saffron yellow. Primrose pink.

  While the canals remained midnight dark, glass lanterns lined the edges of each building, emphasizing the brilliant colors as people bustled in and out. Scarlett thought it looked like a sort of jolly dance to the various kinds of music that played. Harps, bagpipes, violins, flutes, and cellos. Each canal had a different instrumental heartbeat.

  “There’s a lot to see here,” said Jovan. “If you’re willing to pay and you look hard enough, you’ll find things on the isle you won’t come across anywhere else—some people just come here to hunt through shops and don’t even bother playing the game.”

  Jovan continued chattering, but her words were lost as Scarlett spied what seemed to be a commotion on the corner of one street. It looked as if a woman was being dragged out from a shop, forcibly. Scarlett heard a cry, then all she could see was a cluster of people pulling at the woman, made of thrashing arms and kicking legs.

  “What’s going on over there?” Scarlett pointed. But by the time Jovan and Julian looked, someone on the street had snuffed out all the nearby lanterns, concealing whatever Scarlett had witnessed in a curtain made of night.

  “What did you see?” Julian asked.

  “There was a woman, in a dove-gray dress, and she was being dragged out of a shop.”

  “Oh, that was probably just a street show,” Jovan said merrily. “Sometimes performers do that to spice things up for the folks who are just observing—probably made it seem as if she’d stolen something or was going mad. I’m sure you’ll see more like that as the game goes on.”

  Scarlett almost whispered to Julian that it looked very real, but hadn’t she been warned about that when she’d first entered the game?

  Jovan clapped again as she stopped rowing. “Now here we are. The palace on the card. Otherwise known as Castillo Maldito.”

  For a moment Scarlett forgot about the woman. Lines of gleaming sand stretched up into a palace shaped like a colossal birdcage, covered in curved bridges, horseshoe-shaped arches, and rounded domes, all dusted with gold-like flecks of fallen sunshine. The picture card had not done this place justice. Rather than being lit by candles, the structure itself glowed. It filled everything with light, making it brighter there than everywhere else, as if they’d found a spot of land that managed to bottle streams of daylight.

  “What do we owe you for the ride?” Julian asked.

  “Oh, for you two, there’s no charge,” said Jovan, and Scarlett realized this was probably another reason why he’d been so kind to her. “You’ll need all you have inside there. Time goes even faster in the Castillo.”

  Jovan nodded to the two massive hourglasses flanking the sand palace’s entrance, each more than two stories high and filled with churning ruby beads. Only a small fraction of the beads were at the bottom.

  “If you’ve noticed, the nights and days on this isle are shorter,” Jovan went on. “Certain types of magic are fueled by time, and this place uses a lot of magic, so make sure you use your minutes wisely when you go inside.”

  Julian helped Scarlett out of the boat. As they crossed over the arched bridge and past the massive hourglasses, Scarlett wondered how many minutes of her life it would take to form one bead. A second in Caraval seemed richer than an ordinary second, like that moment on the cusp of sunset, when all the colors of the sky coalesce into magic.

  “We should look for the type of place your sister would be attracted to,” said Julian. “I’d wager that’s where we find the third clue.”

  She thought of the note tied to her key. Number three you must earn.

  Beyond the hourglasses, the path on their right led up into a series of golden terraces, which formed most of the Castillo. From below they looked like libraries, full of the kind of antique books Scarlett felt people were always saying not to touch.

  The path straight ahead fed into a massive courtyard, swarming with color and sound and people. A banyan tree grew in the heart of it, teeming with tiny birds made of wonder. Winged zebras and avian kittens, miniature flying tigers wrestling with palm-size elephants that used their ears to keep aloft. A motley collection of gazebos and tents surrounded the tree, music dancing out of some, while laughter tripped out of others, like the jade-green tent selling kisses.

  There was no question as to where Tella would have ventured, and if Julian had asked, Scarlett would have confessed she was also mesmerized by what she saw in the tented courtyard. She should not have been tempted.

  Scarlett should have been thinking only of Tella, looking for her next clue. But as she watched the jade kissing tent, fluttering with hushed giggles and whispers and the promise of butterflies, she wondered.…

  Scarlett had been kissed. At the time she’d told herself it was nice, and she had been content with that, but now nice seemed like a word people used when they had nothing better to say. Scarlett doubted her nice kiss would compare to a kiss during Caraval. In a place where even the air tasted sweet, she tried to imagine the flavor of someone else’s lips pressed to hers.

  “Does that strike your fancy?” Julian drew out his words with a throaty rasp, bringing an instant flush to Scarlett’s face.

  “I was looking next door.” She hastily pointed to a tent the unfortunate color of plums.

  Julian’s grin grew. Obviously he didn’t believe her. His smile stretched wider as her cheeks grew pinker.

  “No need to be embarrassed,” he said. “Although if you need some practice before your wedding, I’m more
than willing to help for free.”

  Scarlett attempted to make a sound of disgust, but it came out more like a whimper.

  “Was that a yes?” Julian asked.

  She gave him a foul look, meant to serve as a no. But apparently teasing her put him in a good mood.

  “Have you even seen your fiancé?” he asked. “He could be really ugly.”

  “His appearance doesn’t matter. He sends me letters every week, and they are kind and thoughtful and—”

  “In other words he’s a liar,” Julian broke in.

  Scarlett scowled. “You don’t even know what his letters say.”

  “I know he’s a count.” Julian began ticking things off with his fingers. “That means he’s a noble, and no one holds a position like that and manages to stay honest. If he’s looking for an island bride, it’s probably because his family is inbred, which also means he’s unattractive.” Julian’s tone turned serious as one of his fingers came to rest beneath the bottom of Scarlett’s chin, tilting her face toward his. “Are you sure you don’t want to rethink my offer and consider that kiss?”

  Scarlett pulled away with a grunt of revulsion, but it was a little too loud, a little too wrong. And to her horror, rather than feeling distaste, a tingle of periwinkle curiosity prickled her senses.

  Scarlett and Julian were closer to the kissing tent now. Perfume wafted from it. It smelled like the middle of the night, making Scarlett think of soft lips and strong hands, dark stubble brushing her cheek that reminded her entirely too much of Julian.

  Ignoring the way her pulse kicked up speed, she tried to think of something clever to say in retort to Julian’s next jibe. But, for once, Julian remained quiet. In a way his sudden silence was more uncomfortable than if he’d teased her again.

  She couldn’t imagine her response to his offer had offended the sailor, although she noticed he didn’t walk as close as before. Even when he made no effort to touch her, he was usually near enough that he easily could, but they continued through the courtyard, a little too far apart and much too quietly, appearing nothing like an engaged couple.