Finale: A Caraval Novel recap

In the first book, Scarlett and Donatella Dragna got off the island of Trisda and away from their violent father to attend Caraval, the performance game staged once a year by a showman known only as Legend. Tella was taken as the game's prize, and Scarlett spent five nights buying clues with secrets, memories and days of her life to find her, watching both her sister and a sailor named Julian appear to die before the game closed. All of it was staged: Julian was one of Legend's performers, and Tella had agreed in advance to play the missing prize. Scarlett won. Tella had her own reason for taking the part - she had bargained with a stranger who promised word of Paloma, the mother who abandoned them, in exchange for Legend's true name. In the second book Tella played the next Caraval, staged in Valenda for Empress Elantine's birthday, to settle that debt. She was shadowed by Jacks, who proved to be the Prince of Hearts: one of the Fates, the immortals pictured on the Deck of Destiny she inherited from her mother, imprisoned long ago and determined to get out. The game's clues ran directly through the history of how the Fates were bound, and Tella was steered into helping free them. Legend's true name was given up and the disguise he ran the game behind was broken - he had been playing the performer Dante, at Tella's side throughout. Empress Elantine died during her own celebrations, telling Donatella first that the Dragna sisters are her family. Paloma was recovered, and her response was not relief but a warning: the Fates walking free is a catastrophe. That is where this book opens - the Fates loose in the empire, the imperial succession unsettled, and both sisters standing in the middle of it.