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.”

Once, they were a comfort to me. I take a long last look, and then, one by one, I feed them to the fire. 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.” I feel those words, feel them like a kick to the stomach. He sees my expression and laughs, a sound full of mockery. I can’t tell which of us he’s laughing at. He hates you. Even if he wants you, he hates you. Maybe he hates you the more for it. After a moment, his eyes flutter closed. His voice falls to a whisper, as though he’s talking to himself. “If you’re the sickness, I suppose you can’t also be the cure.”

Something is really wrong with me, to want what I hate, to want someone who despises me, even if he wants me, too.

“I hate you,” I whisper before he can speak. He tilts my face to his.

“Say it again,” he says as the imps comb my hair and place the ugly, stinking crown on my head. His voice is low. The words are for me alone.

“I hate you,” I breathe into his mouth. “I hate you so much that sometimes I can’t think of anything else.”

that I like

him better than I’ve ever liked anyone and that of all the things he’s ever done to me, making me like him so much is by far the worst.

Pain makes you strong, Madoc once told me, making me lift a sword again and again. Get used to the weight.

“It seems I have a singular taste for women who threaten me.”

Maybe it is not unlike mithridatism; maybe I took a killing dose when I should have been poisoning myself slowly, one kiss at a time.

“It is said we learn more from our failures than our successes,”

“I wasn’t kind, Jude. Not to many people. Not to you. I wasn’t sure if I wanted you or if I wanted you gone from my sight so that I would stop feeling as I did, which made me even more unkind. But when you were gone—truly gone beneath the waves—I hated myself as I never have before.”