Once Upon a Broken Heart

Evangeline searches Jacks’s desk and bookshelves, finding nothing of interest until she comes across several volumes of “The Ballad of the Archer and the Fox,” a story famous for its ending being obscured by the North’s magic. She tries to read each to learn the story’s end, but all either are missing pages or fight her attempts. The last volume is a copy of the spell book Marisol had disguised under a different cover.

Evangeline flips to a section on love spells and reads the details of a spell “For Turning Someone into Your One True Love” (355). The spell contains the oil someone procured from Chaos a week ago, and one of the side effects is a marred wedding day—just like Marisol and Luc’s. It also offers a truth potion as the cure, which Evangeline sets to work brewing.

When Evangeline finishes brewing the potion, Jacks is still asleep. She leaves a note to tell him what she’s done. She’ll sneak into the palace and leave the antidote for Tiberius. If it works, Marisol’s trickery will be revealed. If it doesn’t, Marisol is innocent, and Apollo’s killer will still be unknown. If Evangeline gets caught, none of it will matter because “she’d be blamed for the murder” (360).

Evangeline gets into Tiberius’s room and leaves the bottle without an issue, but on the way out, she runs into Marisol, dressed like a princess. Marisol envelops Evangeline in a hug and looks her over with a hint of jealousy “as if now Marisol wished to be a fugitive instead of a princess” (365). Marisol ushers Evangeline into her bedchamber so the guards don’t see her. Evangeline confronts Marisol about the spell books. She accuses Marisol of spelling Luc and Tiberius, which makes Marisol shake.

Marisol admits to casting a spell on Luc but says she didn’t do anything to Tiberius or frame Evangeline for Apollo’s murder. After years of her mother telling her she wasn’t good enough, Marisol decided to be more confident like Evangeline and tried the spell on Luc just to see if it would work. When it did, Marisol was happy at first, but over time, the love felt fake and she realized she made a mistake. The book she had only gave death as a cure, so Marisol jumped on the chance to find a different cure in the North and get a fresh start for her life. Evangeline believes Marisol is telling the truth and knows she has to reveal her part in all this because “they would never mend all their wounds if some were still infected with lies” (372). Evangeline reveals her deal with Jacks, but instead of understanding, Marisol is enraged and calls for the guards.