Page 149 of Caging Darling

“Quite clever if you ask me,” says the Nomad. “Her making you love every firstborn male from that line, mating each of them to someone else. You, forever in love, the object of your affection forever out of your reach.” I could snap the Nomad’s neck for the casualness with which he says it. But even then, he glances not at the Sister, but at me, pity written in his blue eyes. “Curses are cruel like that, I’m afraid.”

“You would know my pain,” says the Middle Sister to the Nomad. “I’m shocked you don’t have more sympathy for me.”

“You fail to make yourself palatable enough to be sympathized with, I’m afraid,” says the Nomad through his teeth. “Not like Wendy over here.”

At that, the Middle Sister recoils. That single move, that display of jealousy, comparison, is all I need to confirm the fear welling up within my heart.

“You’re his descendant,” I say to Astor, looking him in the face for any sign I should have detected before. “She loves you. That’s why the Eldest Sister mated us together. As part of her punishment for the Middle Sister. It had nothing to do with me.”

Astor shakes his head ever so slightly, a silent apology.

“You are one of many who have been blights on my immortal existence,” says the Middle Sister.

I think back through what Astor had told me about how our lives were supposed to be written. How we were supposed to meet in a better state, fall in love instantly. But something about that picture had been off, wrong.

I turn to Astor. “How was the first tapestry supposed to come about? You said the fact that you traded my Mating Mark away set everything off course, but that shouldn’t have impacted my illness. The plague would have still swept through Jolpa. I still would have fallen ill. How, in this other reality, had I not died at five?”

Astor doesn’t answer. Instead, the Nomad speaks. “Because our friend, the Sister over here, is the crafty sort.”

“Usually, I would have had no idea where my beloved’s Mate would be,” the Middle Sister says, “You see, my sister cursed me with the inability to read either my beloved’s tapestry, or his Mate’s. I had no way of tracking where either of you were. You could have been anywhere in the universe.

“But then I found Peter. And he had that awful Mating Mark on his back, which I recognized, but I felt no pull toward him, so I knew he wasn’t my Mate. Eventually, he told me the story of how he acquired it. How he ached for a girl across the sea.”

“You tricked me,” says Peter, to which no one in the entire courtyard responds.

“I told him I could protect you. Keep you for him until you were old enough to wed. He led me right to you. You were such afeeble child. Of course, part of my curse…” She stops, as if she’s said too much.

“She can’t harm either of us directly,” says Astor.

The Sister shivers, as if of all the components of the curse, the inability to lay a hand on me is the least bearable. “Thankfully, I didn’t have to. I knew the region you were in. All I had to do was cross the threads of a few drunk sailors nearby. Convince them to boil the sewage rats into their stew.”

I blanch. “You started the plague. You killed thousands of people, maimed thousands more, just to kill me? A child?”

The Sister shrugs. “It did not go as planned. Peter was enslaved to me by that point. Came begging for me to save you. At first, I thought myself unable to be convinced, but he made a deal with me. He’d figured out by then that the plague was my fault, that I wanted you dead. He’s clever, you know. You should have treated him better. Anyway, he reminded me it didn’t matter if I killed you off. My beloved was hardly bound to you, anyway. He loved another, and I would have to compete for her love more than I would yours. So Peter came up with a plan, in which I could rid my beloved of his love for both of you. Use Iaso’s blood to keep you alive, then he would detest you, and the wife would be out of the way.

“I thought happiness was finally knocking at my doorstep. Everything had fallen into place. Except I’d assumed, with the ease at which Peter had given up Astor’s two loves, he would give up the location of his friend. But Peter had made another bargain. Gone to my elder Sister without me knowing, and bargained that he would not disclose the location of my beloved to me. And yet again, on the cusp of my contentment, I had been thwarted.”

All it takes is the flash of surprise on Astor’s face, the way he glances at Peter.

“You didn’t know that part,” I whisper, thinking of the small imprint of a hand underneath Peter’s right ribcage. The bargain he tried to pass off as a birthmark.

Ever so slightly, still staring at Peter, Astor shakes his head.

Peter’s face is stone. He’s not looking at either of us. He could be ashamed or proud or sentimental, and neither of us would ever know.

“If Peter couldn’t tell you Astor’s location, how did you find us?” I ask.

The Sister stares—at least, I think she does—toward Astor. “Why, your Mate came to me.”

I instinctively look at Peter. But he’s hardly reacting. It only takes a moment for me to crane my head back toward Astor. I can hardly get the words out, so I just mouth, Why?

Astor’s face is streaked with apology, begging for me to understand. “I couldn’t let you be enslaved to him forever.”

My heart hammers in my chest. I grab at his, digging my fingernails into his shirt. “Astor, what did you do?”

He takes one hand in his and caresses it apologetically with his thumb. “When I learned of the spell Peter was keeping you under, I went to the Nomad. Asked him to summon a Fate yet again.”

“You can imagine my surprise when he informed me which Sister he’d like to summon,” says the Nomad, crossing his arms.

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