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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Holly Black
Read between
October 25 - October 26, 2025
“I want to see the throne,” says Cardan. No one is inclined to gainsay him. The brugh is full of turned-over tables and rotting fruit. A crack runs through the ground to the split throne, with its wilted flowers. Cardan spreads his hands, and the earth heals along the seam, rock and stone bubbling up to fill it back in. Then he twists his fingers, and the divided throne grows anew, blooming with briars, sprouting into two separate thrones where there was once only one. “Do you like it?” he asks me, which seems a little like asking if someone enjoys the crown of stars they conjured from the
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“Talk to me,” I say. “Tell me another fairy tale. Tell me something.” “Okay,” she says, trying to figure out how to undo the armor. “I took your advice and talked to Vee. Finally. I told her that I didn’t want my memories to be taken away and that I was sorry I let her make the promise.” “Was she glad?” I help Heather with one of the clasps. “We had a huge fight. Screaming fight,” she says. “With a lot of crying, too.” “Oh,” I say. “Do you remember the fairy tale with the snake who has the helicopter parents and marries the princess?” “Helicopter?” I echo. I did fall asleep at the end, so
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The problem with coming through something terrible and big is that afterward, you’re left feeling all the feelings that you shoved down and pushed away.
A fresh batch of servants come from the kitchens, carrying trays heaped with pale meat in different preparations—grilled and poached in oil, roasted and stewed. It takes me a moment to recognize what I am looking at. It’s serpent meat. Meat cut from the body of the enormous serpent that had been their High King and might give them a measure of his magic. I look at it and feel the overwhelming disorientation of being mortal. Some faerie ways will never not horrify me.
I hope that Cardan is undisturbed. Certainly, he appears blithesome, laughing as courtiers heap their plates. “I always supposed I would be delicious,” I hear him say, although I note that he does not take any of the meat for himself.
The last time we danced was the night of Prince Dain’s coronation, just before everything went sideways. He had been very, very drunk. You really hate me, don’t you? he’d asked. Almost as much as you hate me, I’d returned.
“I have not made myself easy to love,” he says, and I hear the echo of his mother’s words in his. When I imagined telling him, I thought I would say the words, and it would be like pulling off a bandage—painful and swift. But I didn’t think he would doubt me. “I first started liking you when we went to talk to the rulers of the low Courts,” I say. “You were funny, which was weird. And when we went to Hollow Hall, you were clever. I kept remembering how you’d been the one to get us out of the brugh after Dain’s coronation, right before I put that knife to your throat.”
“But now you’ve explained it,” he says. “And you do love me.” “I love you,” I confirm. “Because I am clever and funny,” he says, smiling. “You didn’t mention my handsomeness.”
“What was it like?” I ask. “Being a serpent.” He hesitates. “It was like being trapped in the dark,” he says. “I was alone, and my instinct was to lash out. I was perhaps not entirely an animal, but neither was I myself. I could not reason. There were only feelings—hatred and terror and the desire to destroy.” I start to speak, but he stops me with a gesture. “And you.” He looks at me, his lips curving in something that’s not quite a smile; it’s more and less than that. “I knew little else, but I always knew you.” And when he kisses me, I feel as though I can finally breathe again.
“Folk of Elfhame,” he says. “Will you accept Jude Duarte as your High Queen?” For a moment, in the silence, I believe that they will renounce me, but the ritual words come from their many mouths. “We will.” I grin irrepressibly at Cardan. He smiles back, with a little surprise. It’s possible I don’t smile like that very often.
“Have you nothing to say?” Cardan asks him. “You had so much before.” Madoc tilts his head toward me. “I surrendered on the battlefield. What more is there? The war is over, and I have lost.” “Would you go to your execution so stoically?” I ask. From nearby, I hear Oriana’s gasp. But Madoc remains grim. Resigned. “I raised you to be uncompromising. I ask only for a good death. Quick, out of the love that we had for each other. And know that I bear you no grudge.”
But I wonder if what I owe to my parents is a more flexible view of love and duty, one that they themselves might have embraced. “I told you once that I am what you made me, but I am not only that. You raised me to be uncompromising, yet I learned mercy. And I will give you something like mercy if you can show me that you deserve it.”
Grima Mog gives Vivi a list of things she’d like sent back to Elfhame, which appears to be mostly instant coffee and hot sauce.
What I don’t expect is that Cardan offers to journey with us. “You should absolutely come,” says Taryn. “We can throw a party. You two got married, and no one did anything to celebrate.” I am incredulous. “Oh, we’re fine. We don’t need any—” “It’s settled, then,” Vivi says, forever my older sister. “I bet Cardan has never even tried pizza.” Oak looks scandalized by this pronouncement and starts explaining about different toppings, from pineapple to sausage to anchovies.
“What did you do?” Cardan asks. “Beat Grima Mog in a duel,” I say. He looks at me incredulously. “He ought to have paid you in gold.”
