The Queen of Nothing (The Folk of the Air, #3)

by Holly Black

“Well,” he says, patting the couch beside him. “Didn’t you get my letters?” “What?” I am confused enough that the word comes out like a croak. “You never replied to a one,” he goes on. “I began to wonder if you’d misplaced your ambition in the mortal world.” This must be a test. This must be a trap. “Your Majesty,” I say stiffly. “I thought you brought me here to assure yourself I had neither charm nor amulet.” A single eyebrow rises, and his smile deepens. “I will if you like. Shall I command you to remove your clothes? I don’t mind.” “What are you doing?” I say finally, desperately. “What are you playing at?” He’s looking at me as though somehow I am the one who’s behaving strangely. “Jude, you can’t really think I don’t know it’s you. I knew you from the moment you walked into the brugh.”

He is a gravitational force, pulling everything toward him.

“By you, I am forever undone.”

“It’s you I love,” he says. “I spent much of my life guarding my heart. I guarded it so well that I could behave as though I didn’t have one at all. Even now, it is a shabby, worm-eaten, and scabrous thing. But it is yours.” He walks to the door to the royal chambers, as though to end the conversation. “You probably guessed as much,” he says. “But just in case you didn’t.”

Let me have everything I ever wanted, everything I ever dreamed, and eternal misery along with it. Let me live on with an ice shard through my heart.

I felt that if I could control everything and everyone, then nothing could hurt me.

ENTJ things

He’s every bit as terrifying as any serpent. I don’t care. I run into his arms.

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.

“I don’t know what to apologize for first,” I say. “Cutting off your head or hesitating so long to do it. I didn’t want to lose what little there was left of you. And I can’t quite think past how wonderous it is that you’re alive.”

“You don’t know how long I’ve waited to hear those words,” he says. “You don’t want me dead.” “If you joke about this, I am going to—” “Kill me?” he asks, raising both black brows. I think I might hate him after all.

“I love you,” I say, the words coming out in an unintelligible rush. Cardan looks taken aback. Or possibly I spoke so fast he’s not even sure what I said. “You need not say it out of pity,” he says finally, with great deliberateness. “Or because I was under a curse. I have asked you to lie to me in the past, in this very room, but I would beg you not to lie now.”

And when he kisses me, I feel as though I can finally breathe again.

Cardan looks at his reflection in the door of the microwave and adjusts his crown so it’s at an angle. I roll my eyes, and he gives me a quick grin. And my heart hurts a little because we are all together and safe, and it wasn’t something I’d known how to want. And Cardan looks a little shy in the face of all this happiness, as unused to it as I am. There will be struggles to come, I am certain, but right now I am equally sure we will find our way through them.

To family and Faerieland and pizza and stories and new beginnings and scheming great schemes. I can toast to that.