The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air, #2)

by Holly Black

“You can take a thing when no one’s looking. But defending it, even with all the advantage on your side, is no easy task,” Madoc told her with a laugh. She looked up to find him offering her a hand. “Power is much easier to acquire than it is to hold on to.”

I’m no longer a child, and I don’t need comfort.

“For a moment,” he says, “I wondered if it wasn’t you shooting bolts at me.” I make a face at him. “And what made you decide it wasn’t?” He grins up at me. “They missed.”

“Kiss me again,” he says, drunk and foolish. “Kiss me until I am sick of it.”

“If you’re the sickness, I suppose you can’t also be the cure.”

“Whysoever would I want you to leave my side?”

Cardan gives me a look up through his lashes that I find hard to interpret and then rises, too. He takes my hand. “Nothing is sweeter,” he says, kissing the back of it, “but that which is scarce.”

“I have too often been troubled by dreams of Jude,” he says, voice carrying. “Her face features prominently in my most frequent nightmare.”

“Some among us do not find mortals beautiful. In fact, some of you might swear that Jude is unlovely.”

“But I believe it is only that her beauty is… unique.” Cardan pauses for more laughter from the crowd, greater jeering. “Excruciating. Alarming. Distressing.”

“Say it again,”

One, he gave me an order; and two, I obeyed it.

“I want to tell you so many lies,” he says.

But when you were gone—truly gone beneath the waves—I hated myself as I never have before.”

I had to make a great many decisions, and so much of what I did right was imagining you beside me, Jude, giving me a bunch of ridiculous orders that I nonetheless obeyed.”

“Crawl to me,”