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57 pages 1 hour read

Stephanie Garber

The Ballad of Never After

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022

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Part 1, Chapters 13-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapter 13 Summary

As Jacks hauls Evangeline through the water, he gazes at her with an intensity that takes her breath away, and she has to remind herself that he’s a Fate and doesn’t care about her. Evangeline asks if Jacks can control Apollo to stop him from hunting her. Jacks explains that the curse will only break when the archer kills the fox but that “[i]f [she] open[s] the Valory Arch, the spell on Apollo can be undone” (94). Evangeline wants to find this suspicious, but Jacks’s pounding heart and the fact that the arch holds untold magic make her think that Jacks may be telling the truth.

Evangeline questions whether Chaos could have cast the curse. Jacks says that Chaos wouldn’t jeopardize another key after the last one was murdered. Suddenly, Evangeline realizes how much danger she’s in, which makes her feel “as if she’[s] been transmuted from iron into a thin sheet of glass” (97).

Part 1, Chapter 14 Summary

That night, Evangeline has nightmares about Luc and Apollo killing her before they transform into a dream where she feels safe in Jacks’s arms. She wakes to find Jacks watching her, and they argue again about opening the Valory Arch. Jacks reminds her that Apollo will kill her if she doesn’t, to which Evangeline responds that he can’t be sure since no one knows how “The Ballad of the Archer and the Fox” ends. Jacks claims that he knows because ballads don’t end happily, and Evangeline starts to wonder if he’s right. She agrees to open the arch and orders him to leave so she can get dressed. Jacks does, seeming reluctant, making Evangeline “grateful he [can]not see her sudden blush” (103).

Part 1, Chapter 15 Summary

At a meeting with Chaos, Evangeline finds a gem that seems to glow for her. When Chaos takes the gem, Evangeline fights with supernatural force until he locks it away in an iron box, making her energy disappear. The gem is the luck stone, one of the four required to open the Valory Arch, and, as a key, Evangeline feels the stones’ powers more keenly. She thinks that the remaining three won’t be so bad, and Jacks points out the problems with mirth, youth, and truth, ending by saying, “The truth is never what you want it to be, Little Fox” (110).

Part 1, Chapter 16 Summary

Chaos and Jacks task Evangeline with finding the remaining stones, and then Jacks leaves the palace, making Evangeline feel betrayed. Chaos gives Evangeline access to his library, where he has books upon books about the Valor family and the history of the North, which seem to change as she reads them. Unable to find anything about the Valory Arch, she reads up on the noble houses, focusing on the Merrywood family, which contains an unnamed archer. Chaos comes to check on her and suggests a book that she hasn’t read yet. The new book’s words flicker and change so much that Evangeline can’t read them, but when she sets it aside to go back to the Merrywoods, all that’s left of that book is “a fluttering piece of paper” (120).

Part 1, Chapter 17 Summary

The paper seems to contain clues about the Valory stones, but try as she might, Evangeline can’t decipher any meaning. The next week yields no answers, and the monotony is broken up by the news that LaLa and her husband-to-be are throwing a party. Evangeline feels foolish for wanting to go when she needs to find the stones, but she’s lonely enough to admit to herself that “even Jacks would have been welcome company” (124).

Another article claims that Prince Tiberius, Apollo’s brother, was apprehended after an escape attempt. Tiberius was imprisoned after trying to kill Apollo in the name of a group dedicated to making sure the Valory Arch is never opened, and Evangeline wonders if the group might have any of the stones. It’s dangerous to visit Tiberius to learn what he might know, but Evangeline resolves to do it, unafraid because her “hope had always burned brighter than her fear” (125).

Part 1, Chapter 18 Summary

While the vampires sleep, Evangeline sneaks out to the tower where Tiberius is imprisoned. After talking her way past the guards, Evangeline heads up the stairs to Tiberius’s cell, hearing an ominous warning from Jacks in her head. Tiberius sneers at her until Evangeline tells him that Apollo is alive, providing details about the archer curse and link. Tiberius tries to appear unaffected, so Evangeline carves a message into her arm, asking Apollo where he is. His response comes as more words in her skin, and Tiberius believes her.

Evangeline offers Tiberius a deal—his freedom and Apollo back for help opening the Valory Arch—but Tiberius refuses. Evangeline doesn’t understand why he would let Apollo die, to which Tiberius says that it’s “better his one death than the deaths of countless others and the end of the Magnificent North as [they] know it” (133). The arch stones call to one another and are too powerful when united, and Tiberius won’t take the risk.

Part 1, Chapter 19 Summary

On her way back to Chaos’s palace, the woods keep rearranging themselves until Evangeline is hopelessly lost. Luc arrives and invites her to a party, holding up an invitation to LaLa’s engagement ball, which reads “Mirth, Merriment, and Marriage” (139). Remembering what Tiberius said about the stones calling to one another, she resolves to go to the party.

Part 1, Chapter 20 Summary

The next day, Evangeline searches for Chaos to secure transportation to LaLa’s party but instead finds Jacks casually flirting with a girl whom Evangeline doesn’t recognize. Jacks dismisses the girl, who huffs away, and Jacks notices Apollo’s message on Evangeline’s arm, which seems to frighten him. To keep him from asking questions, Evangeline tells him about LaLa’s party at House Slaughterwood, explaining her theory about the stones being there. Jacks reluctantly agrees, noting that they can’t tell Chaos they’re going. When Evangeline asks why, Jacks responds, “House Slaughterwood is the reason we’re all in this mess, Little Fox” (146).

Part 1, Chapter 21 Summary

As Evangeline packs, she comes across the book that Chaos gave her when she asked about House Slaughterwood in the library. The words on the cover have changed to “The Ballad of the Archer and the Fox,” but when she opens it, she finds the story of “Vengeance Slaughterwood and his beautiful bride-to-be” (149). The book is full of pictures of the Slaughterwoods and others, and Evangeline is ready to give up when she comes across an image of Jacks with two other boys labeled as the Merrywood brothers. Jacks looks happy in the picture—so different from how he typically appears—and when the real Jacks enters the room a moment later, Evangeline notes his cold aloofness, “as if a sculptor had taken a dagger to who he had once been and carved out all the softness” (152).

Evangeline tries to show Jacks the picture in the book, but it disappears. He dismisses her questions about the Merrywood brothers, but the tension in his body makes Evangeline think that he’s lying.

Part 1, Chapters 13-21 Analysis

These chapters offer an exploration of the theme of Manipulation. In Chapter 13, Jacks says that the archer curse can be broken if the Valory Arch is opened. Evangeline has no proof of this, and, at first glance, Jacks seems to be trying to convince her to open the arch for his own purposes. However, Jacks later says that he doesn’t want the arch opened. The sense of uncertainty surrounding Jacks’s motivations and expectations allows Garber both to drive the plot, as the reader attempts to solve the sense of mystery alongside Evangeline, and to explore Evangeline’s internal conflicts involving her sense of trust and feelings of love. Rather than using dialogic encouragement from Jacks, however, Garber uses embodied action to portray what convinces Evangeline that opening the Valory Arch is a good option: his heavy breathing and heart rate. This heightens the uncertain romantic tension.

Garber uses these chapters to create several moments of foreshadowing. Evangeline’s dreams in Chapter 14 show that neither Luc nor Apollo have her best interests in mind and that Jacks will save her life at the end of the book. In Chapter 16, the fluttering piece of paper at the end of the chapter foreshadows the truth that Evangeline later learns about Chaos, Jacks, and the Slaughterwoods; the unread piece of paper leaves in suspense the question of what is on it. In Chapter 15, Evangeline has her first encounter with a Valory stone in Chapter 15, and Chaos locks the gem in an iron box, through which Garber alludes to fairy lore. In fairy myths, iron counters fairy magic, and iron is often used as a counter to magic in general. This foreshadows Evangeline later using iron to lock away the mirth stone’s power. Conversely, Garber alludes to previous moments in the series that gain significance in terms of Jacks’s character development in these chapters: The argument with Jacks about “The Ballad of the Archer and the Fox” alludes to the fact that Jacks has, in fact, lived the ballad once before with his kiss curse.

Evangeline’s visit to Tiberius in Chapter 18 is another instance of an intertextual climax based on events from the previous book in the series. Tiberius played a larger role in the prequel, where he represented the Protectorate—the group that doesn’t want the Valory Arch opened. He returns in this book to state that he believes that opening the Valory Arch is dangerous; he won’t even do so to save his brother. Though he is firm on this, Evangeline doesn’t believe that he tells the truth. She wants to believe that he cares about Apollo and doesn’t want to see his brother hurt, something that is typical of her Cinderella-like characterization.

In Chapter 21, Evangeline finds the book that disappeared from the library. The book is a reflection of the concealing and revealing of information that happens throughout the series, building suspense for the reader. The book makes pictures of Jacks disappear when Jacks arrives, suggesting that it doesn’t want Jacks to know what it’s showing Evangeline. Through the disappearing image, Garber hints at a major “offstage” character development for Jacks in the past, which is juxtaposed with his lack of character development between Books One and Two.

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