Finale: A Caraval Novel characters

Also known as Tella

Appears from the start

The younger Dragna sister, who came out of the last Caraval having settled her debt and helped set the Fates loose on the empire. She has her mother back and she knows who Legend really is. She is still the sister who acts first and reckons the cost afterward, and she is discovering that everything she was told about the Fates before they walked free was the polite version.

First appears in chapter 7

The elder Dragna sister, who won the first Caraval and has spent the time since trying to build an ordinary life out of a family that never permitted one. She is steadier than Tella and far less willing to gamble, and she carries unfinished business with Julian into a capital that has larger problems than either of them.

Appears from the start

The master of Caraval, whose real name and face Tella now knows. He is no longer the remote figure Scarlett once wrote letters to: he is a person with a history, designs of his own, and a company of performers who do what he asks without asking why. What passed between him and Tella at the end of the last game was left unresolved.

Also known as The Prince of Hearts

First appears in chapter 2

One of the Fates, immortal, and lethal to anyone he kisses except the one person he has spent a very long time failing to find. He got what he wanted out of the last Caraval and remains entirely indifferent to what it cost the people who helped him get it. He has not stopped circling Tella.

First appears in chapter 7

One of Legend's performers, and the man Scarlett has never managed to decide about. He has been more honest with her than he used to be, which is not the same as being easy to trust after two games' worth of playing a part.

Appears from the start

The sisters' mother, recovered at the end of the last book after years of absence. She knows a great deal about the Fates and about how they came to be bound, considerably more than she has explained to her daughters, and she is the one who told them that freeing them was a disaster rather than a triumph.

Appears from the start

The immortals of the old stories, pictured on the Deck of Destiny and imprisoned long ago, now released and moving through the Meridian Empire as people rather than as cards. They are worse than the tales about them suggested, they have quarrels and appetites of their own, and nobody in the empire is equipped to deal with them.