The Ballad of Never After

What's inside (7 sections)

1. A Husband Who Will Not Wake
2. The Mirror Cut and the Archer's Curse
3. Parties, Poisons, and Petra
4. The Hollow and the Mirth Stone
5. What Sleeps Behind the Valory Arch
6. Key takeaways
7. FAQ

I picked up this middle volume because the first book left me annoyed in the specific way that makes you keep reading. Evangeline Fox had traded three kisses with Jacks, the Prince of Hearts, to stop a wedding in Once Upon a Broken Heart, published in 2021 by Flatiron Books, and closed that book engaged to Prince Apollo Acadian while owing a Fate more than she understood. The Ballad of Never After, published in 2022 by Flatiron Books at 416 pages, is the second book in the Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy, and it starts with Evangeline trying to convince herself she can cut Jacks out of the story. She cannot. The whole book is about what happens when the person you swore off becomes the only one who can keep you alive.

The setup is simple and cruel. Apollo lies in an enchanted sleep, poisoned by Jacks, hidden in Wolf Hall while the court is told a cleaner lie about his brother Tiberius and the succession. Evangeline writes herself a warning letter. Do not trust Jacks. Trust Apollo. Wait for Apollo to wake and claim the happy ending. It reads like someone trying to press a flower flat and pretend it is still growing. She means every word when she writes it. She keeps none of the intent once Apollo starts bleeding in ways she can feel in her own skin.

Garber is good at this kind of opening, where the heroine states a plan and the world smiles. Evangeline runs to the palace library with Havelock, Apollo's guard, looking for cures that do not involve Fates. She finds a sealed door and, because her blood opens doors in this world, she opens it. Behind it sits the Valory Arch, the sealed northern gate from old Valor history, supposed to be broken and out of reach. Her touch wakes a prophecy across its surface. An old librarian tells her the Arch needs four missing stones, tied to Luck, Truth, Mirth, and Youth, and then he is gone like smoke. So much for avoiding the Arch. Her blood has already announced her.

A Husband Who Will Not Wake

The early chapters belong to Apollo, or rather to his absence. Garber keeps him behind curtains and guards, which is smart, because it lets Evangeline perform devotion without testing it. She sits with him. She talks to him. She tells herself marrying him was the right choice and Jacks only poisoned her view along with her husband. Then she visits LaLa, the Unwed Bride, another Fate and the closest thing Evangeline has to a friend who tells the truth sideways.

LaLa has news of her own. She is engaged, moving houses, acting strangely bright for someone fated to be left waiting. When Evangeline explains that Jacks offered to wake Apollo if she opens the Arch for him, LaLa goes still in a way that made me reread the paragraph. Then she recovers and pushes Evangeline toward accepting. She says she is not strong enough to lift Apollo's sleeping spell herself. She says Honora Valor, one of the makers of the Arch, is the only one known to have lifted such a suspension. The message is clear. If you want your prince back, you need what is behind that door.

I admired how Garber plays this. LaLa is kind and funny and clearly fond of Evangeline, and also clearly afraid. You start wondering what LaLa knows about the Arch that she is not saying, and that suspicion sits under every later scene with her. For now, though, Evangeline refuses Jacks. She has reasons. He poisoned Apollo. He used her blood to stir old magic. He smiles when she cries. Refusing feels like growth.

Then Apollo grabs her wrist.

It happens during one of Jacks's visits, quick and shocking. Apollo, supposedly deep in enchanted sleep, seizes Evangeline and will not let go. Jacks cuts Apollo's arm to force release, and an identical cut opens on Evangeline's hand. That is the book's first real turn of the knife. Someone has tied them together with a mirror curse. Hurt one and you hurt the other. Jacks swears he did not cast it, and for once he sounds offended that she would think this one is his. Before Evangeline can sort that out, worse news arrives. The succession has moved without her. Lucien Acadian, the new heir, has come early to Wolf Hall and held his arrival ceremony while she was locked in with a sleeping prince.

Lucien is Luc. Her Luc, the boy from Valenda who chose her stepsister Marisol at the altar in book one, now made into a vampire by Chaos and wearing a new name and a court smile. He calls Evangeline to him. He leans close. He tries to bite her. Jacks pulls her clear just in time, and the rescue is so fast it feels practiced, which plants a nasty thought. How much of this chaos did Jacks arrange to force her hand.

The Mirror Cut and the Archer's Curse

Garber stacks the second curse right on top of the first, and this is where the book stops being a rescue story and becomes a hunt story. Apollo wakes, but wrong. His eyes glow red. His temper swings. In the palace gardens he finds Evangeline, raises a gun, and shoots her. It is blunt and awful after all the perfumed ball scenes of the first book, and that bluntness is the point. No speech. No warning. Just a husband firing on his wife while Jacks catches her before she hits the ground.

She dreams while bleeding. She hears pieces of the Ballad of the Archer and the Fox, the old northern tale about an archer doomed to chase the girl he loves. She wakes in a cage in the castle of Chaos, the vampire lord with the helmet he never removes. Jacks and Chaos explain the trade. A vampire bite will heal a gunshot wound that would otherwise kill her, but she will have to be caged until the blood hunger passes so she does not turn fully or harm anyone. She fights. She loses. She wakes sore, thirsty, furious, and alive.

Chaos wants the Arch opened too. His helmet is not fashion. It is a curse, and he believes what sleeps behind the Arch can free him from it. Jacks wants Evangeline to agree to find the stones and open the gate, because opening it is the only backdoor anyone can name for the paired curses riding her and Apollo. Kill the hunter or be killed by him, that is what the Archer story demands, unless older Valor magic breaks the pattern. Evangeline hates both options. Stay and be hunted by Apollo until one of them dies and the mirror curse takes the other. Or help two dangerous men open a sealed prison treasure and hope they keep their word.

She chooses the Arch, because there is no third door, and Garber makes her say so with resentment rather than courage. That felt honest. Evangeline is not converted to Jacks's side. She is cornered into it. Jacks, to his credit, does not pretend otherwise. He tells her there were keys before her, pink haired girls like her whose blood could work the locks, hunted by the Protectorate, a quiet order tasked with keeping the Arch shut. Some died. Some vanished. The detail lands hard because it reframes Evangeline from chosen one to latest attempt. Special, yes. Safe, no.

There is a lot of running in this stretch, through woods and corridors, with Apollo appearing where he should not be able to appear. Jacks keeps stepping between them. At one point Evangeline realizes her back is bleeding though nothing touched her, and understands someone is torturing Apollo elsewhere and the mirror curse is passing it to her. The marriage that was supposed to save her has become a shared wound. I found these chapters propulsive even when the logic blurred. Curses in this series run on story sense rather than rulebooks, and if you need hard costs and clean limits, you will grind your teeth. If you accept that a kiss can open a gate because promises are doors, the paired curses play fair enough.

Parties, Poisons, and Petra

The middle of the book returns to what Garber does best and worst: glittering gatherings where everyone lies through their teeth. LaLa hosts a party at her new house to celebrate her engagement, and Evangeline goes hunting for stones among guests who collect secrets the way other people collect plates. Jacks goes with her and behaves badly in the entertaining way he has, possessive and amused and watchful, steering her away from men who stare too long and toward people who might know where the Valor stones rest.

One thread here genuinely surprised me, so I will keep it soft. Evangeline finds a stone tied to truth and then crosses another guest who claims to be a key like her. The girl warns Evangeline not to let herself be spent opening someone else's door. The confrontation turns violent fast, and Evangeline kills the girl, Petra, to save herself. Garber does not let it feel heroic. Evangeline takes Petra's youth stone from the body while shaking, and Jacks handles the aftermath with a calm that is more frightening than any threat. He tells her to pack. He deals with what remains. They run to Merrywood, to an enchanted inn where curses go quiet.

Readers should know this killing changes Evangeline's texture for the rest of the book. She has been sheltered, hopeful, sometimes naive to the point of frustration. After Petra, she stops assuming kindness will protect her. She still hopes, because hoping is her nature, but she checks exits now. I liked that shift, though I wished Garber gave the grief more pages. The plot hurries Evangeline along to the next stone, the next clue, the next revelation about the Valors, and Petra fades faster than she should.

The Valor history fills in around the hunt. Aurora Valor and her loves, old marriages and betrayals, diary pages hidden in the inn, a scandal sheet about a monster the Valors made that bit throats and had to be locked away. Evangeline reads Aurora's diary and learns Aurora loved a man named Lyric Merrywood, who connects back to LaLa's family in a way that makes LaLa's push to open the Arch look less friendly. Every answer arrives with a second question attached. Who cursed Apollo and Evangeline with the mirror and the hunt. Who has been torturing Apollo behind walls. What does Chaos really remember about the night the Arch was sealed.

My complaint about this section is the same one I had with book one, only louder. The sensory detail piles up until it smothers momentum. Perfume, pastry, candlelight, fabric, blush, teeth, blood, apples. A hundred pages where every room smells of something and every dress deserves a paragraph. I love a rich setting, but there were nights with this book where I skimmed descriptions of feasts to get back to the stones. Garber's fans will call that atmosphere. I call it frosting over the gears.

The Hollow and the Mirth Stone

The Hollow is the book's best invention, and Garber knows it. It is an inn in Merrywood, Jacks's childhood home, wrapped in the power of the mirth stone so that curses cannot function inside its walls. No mirror pain. No hunting compulsion. Warmth, laughter, bread, beds with clean sheets. For a few chapters Evangeline sleeps without dreaming of being shot by her husband, and Jacks, of all people, is gentle. He tends her wounds. He teases her without edge. He looks tired in a way that suggests the inn remembers him as a boy before he was the Prince of Hearts.

It would be easy to mock this as a rest stop before the finale, but it does real work. Evangeline admits to herself that she is falling for Jacks even as she recites reasons not to. He is a Fate. His kiss kills. He poisoned Apollo. He wants the Arch for his own ends. None of that stops the feeling, and Garber writes the confusion well, all the small kindnesses landing harder because they come from someone who claims not to feel them. Evangeline also learns Jacks has been holding the fourth stone, keeping the Hollow safe, and that the safety is partly borrowed. Take the stone and the peace goes with it.

She takes it anyway. She has to. Apollo is still cursed outside, the Arch is still shut, and hiding in warmth while others bleed feels like another version of her old mistake, wishing instead of acting. What struck me is that removing the mirth stone does not remove her feelings. She hoped it would, hoped the stone was manufacturing tenderness, and it was not. That scene, quiet and embarrassed and sad, does more for the romance than a dozen near kisses. It tells her the problem is hers, not the magic's.

Jacks, pressed with the truth stone, finally says what he wants, and it is not what Evangeline expected. He does not want to rule through the Arch or loot it. He wants the stones themselves, because together they can send him back to a moment before everything broke, to Donatella, the girl from the Caraval books whose lips survived his kiss, the one person his curse did not kill. He wants to return to the instant he met her, do it differently, keep her, and let the rest of the timeline, including Evangeline, wash away. She would be happy, he says, married to Apollo, never having known him. He says it like a gift. She hears it like erasure.

This is the emotional center of the book and Garber earns it. Jacks lays out the Ballad of the Archer and the Fox in full: the Archer unsure if his love was true, the Fox certain of hers, the kiss that proved fatal, every girl after her dying the same way except Donatella. He tells Evangeline that if he stays near her, he will kill her too, exactly as the story demands, just as he killed the Fox before. It is self loathing dressed as mercy. Evangeline, who has spent two books insisting love can beat curses, hears a boy telling her the kindest thing he can do is disappear into the past and forget her. I believed both of them, which is why the last hundred pages hurt.

A note on the romance for readers coming fresh. Apollo is technically her husband and first advertised as the safe choice, but Garber writes him here as need wrapped in title. Sweet when adored, brittle when questioned, dangerous while cursed and not entirely safe even in clear moments. Luc is back as a vampire and mostly a threat with a familiar face. The real pairing is Evangeline and Jacks, built on rescues, arguments, and bargains, and it carries the charge and the problems of that shape. He saves her constantly. He withholds constantly. She forgives faster than she should and then resents herself for it. If power gaps in romance bother you, this book will bother you, because Jacks holds knowledge, years, and magic she does not. Garber tries to balance it by giving Evangeline the key blood and the final choice, but the scales tilt his way for long stretches.

What Sleeps Behind the Valory Arch

The final run moves fast. Evangeline, Jacks, and Chaos travel toward Wolf Hall with three stones in hand and the fourth contested, with Apollo still hunting through the gaps whenever curses slip their leash. Jacks is wounded at one point, bloody with gold flecked Fate blood, and refuses to explain how. Evangeline nurses him, and the role reversal is brief but tender, her turn to be the one who stays awake. Then plans harden. Jacks means to use the stones to go back. Evangeline means to open the Arch and ask Honora Valor to break every curse at once, his included.

They open it without him. Evangeline presses her bloodied hand to the Arch, the stones set, the old magic grinding awake, and a plain wooden door appears where legend stood. Chaos steps through first. He cuts a lock of her pink hair as thanks, saying he needs it to break her curses, and walks down into a quiet chamber where bodies lie in rows. Aurora. Wolfric. Honora herself. The great secret is not gold or weapons. It is the Valors, preserved, locked inside their own treasure prison all this time. Honora wakes. She calls Chaos by his true name, Castor, her son, and holds him. The monster from the scandal sheets, the throat biter, the helmeted vampire lord, is a Valor boy brought back wrong by the same kind of revival magic Evangeline keeps begging for.

It is a strong reveal, and Garber stages it with restraint, which I appreciated after so much glitter. No feast. No gowns. Just a mother and a son and a girl bleeding in the doorway. Honora listens. Chaos asks for his helm to be lifted. Evangeline asks for her marriage curses to be broken and, more and more, for Jacks to be freed from his lethal kiss. Then Chaos feeds. Whether hunger or instinct or old damage takes him, he sinks his teeth into the girl who opened his family's prison, and Evangeline dies with her confession unsaid. She had worked out the answer. Tell Jacks she loves him, truly, and give him a reason to stop running backward. Say it before he spends the stones. She does not get the words out.

Jacks arrives to blood and silence. Garber gives him a scream that the story curse itself pauses to watch, bloody tears, begging Honora to revive Evangeline the way she once revived Castor. Honora refuses. She says that revival made Castor into what he became and she will not repeat it. So Jacks gathers Evangeline, carries her out through the Arch, and starts pulling stones from their settings while Honora warns him that time demands equal payment. He does not care. He sends himself back to just before Chaos led Evangeline to the gate, buying one more chance to keep her from following Chaos inside.

The reset is disorienting on purpose. Events repeat with small wrongnesses. Evangeline feels she has lived this. Chaos takes his lock of hair. Jacks turns cold and tells her to leave the moment the Arch opens, to run and not look back, because Chaos will feed again. She begs him to come with her. He says they cannot be together, shouts it, breaks open in a way he never has. She leaves crying, then understands what she must do. Find him before he spends the stones. Tell him she loves him. Stop the backward run with a forward promise.

She never reaches him. Gold flecked blood marks the Arch stones. Then Apollo steps out, curse broken, calm, handsome, certain. He tells her Jacks caused all of it, tells her to forget the Fate, and presses his fingers to her head. Memory by memory, he takes Jacks from her. She fights, begs, cries, then forgets why she is fighting. She wakes beside a husband she does not know, soothed and held and told she is safe, that he is here, that he will never let her go. The last line lands like a door shutting. After a whole book about opening, Garber ends on a lock.

I sat with that ending longer than the cliffhanger of book one. It reframes Apollo completely. Is this protection or possession, healing or theft. Garber leaves just enough room to argue. Apollo suffered, was poisoned, tortured, cursed to hunt, and has reasons to hate Jacks. He also chooses to strip Evangeline's mind rather than ask for her trust. That choice echoes the book's theme. Every man here claims to save her by deciding for her. Jacks decides to erase himself for her. Chaos decides to feed on her after thanking her. Apollo decides to empty her to keep her. Only Evangeline's own decision, to speak love aloud, gets interrupted, twice, by death and by design.

Criticism first, because the book earns both. The pacing sags between stones, with rescues repeating and talk circling the same jealousies. Evangeline doubts Jacks, softens, doubts again across too many chapters. Apollo's torture happens offstage and arrives as wounds on her back rather than scenes, which dulls horror that should sting. The prose, lovely in images, keeps pausing plot for inventory. Doors, dresses, desserts. And the ethics stay murky in ways Garber does not fully face. A centuries old Fate courting a teenager, a husband editing his wife's memory, a vampire lord repaid with trust he has not earned. The story treats these as romantic obstacles more than violations, and some readers will rightly flinch.

Still, I could not put it down at the end, and that counts for plenty. The paired curses give the romance real stakes beyond misunderstandings. The Hollow chapters are among Garber's warmest writing. The Valor reveal pays off lore seeded across two trilogies. Jacks steps past smirk into sorrow without losing his bite, and Evangeline grows from a girl who collects omens into someone who acts inside them. She kills when she must. She leaves safety when staying would be easier. She chooses, even when choice is stolen back.

Read it if the first book hooked you and you want the bridge to the finale, A Curse for True Love. Do not start here. The mirror curse, the Archer's hunt, Petra's death, LaLa's fear, Chaos as Castor, Donatella as the exception, Apollo's red eyed hunt, all of it assumes you know the three kisses and the Arch's first opening. New readers would drown. Returning readers should clear an evening, because the last third moves like a hunt and the final pages will send you straight to find what Apollo took and whether telling Jacks she loves him can still break what binds him.

FAQ

When was The Ballad of Never After published, and is it a series?

It was published in 2022 by Flatiron Books at 416 pages. It is the second book in the Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy, set after the Caraval books.

Do I need to read Once Upon a Broken Heart first?

No. The book recaps the three kisses and the poisoned sleep, but the mirror curse, the stones, and the Valor lore land harder if you know book one.

Does the book end on a cliffhanger?

Yes, and cruelly. Apollo strips her memories of Jacks in the final pages, leaving her unsure beside a husband she no longer knows.