How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories (The Folk of the Air, #3.5)

by Holly Black

Jude tells him with troubling equanimity, her expression saying, Horrible risks are entirely normal to me.

Cardan tried not to snort. Despite being a little afraid of her, despite knowing better, he had a tendency toward levity at the worst possible moments.

Hate that was so bright and hot that it was the first thing that truly warmed him. Hate that felt so good that he welcomed being consumed by it. Not a heart of stone, but a heart of fire.

Villains were wonderful. They got to be cruel and selfish, to preen in front of mirrors and poison apples, and trap girls on mountains of glass. They indulged all their worst impulses, revenged themselves for the least offense, and took every last thing they wanted. And sure, they wound up in barrels studded with nails, or dancing in iron shoes heated by fire, not just dead, but disgraced and screaming. But before they got what was coming to them, they got to be the fairest in all the land.

It was only later that it disturbed him to think back on the shape of her boot in the soil, as though she was the only real thing in a land of ghosts.

Even the prophecy that once seemed to doom him took on a new meaning. Perhaps he would destroy Elfhame one day and be a villain above the waves but a hero beneath them. Perhaps all the hatred in his heart was good for something after all.

And if, as he had floated in the cold darkness, his thoughts turned to the curve of an ear, the weight of a step, a blow that was checked before it could land, that didn’t matter.

The seneschal still believed Cardan was responsible for the murder of a man he loved, and now that Cardan had committed himself to villainy, he took a perverse delight in the misunderstanding.

Playing the villain was the only thing he’d ever really excelled at.

Don’t ask me the lesson, because I don’t know it and I can’t imagine there is one.” “No?” Aslog inquired. “It’s simply this. A heart of stone can still be broken.”

Jude looked up at him, and in her eyes, he recognized a hate big enough and wide enough and deep enough to match his own. A hate you could drown in like a vat of wine.

“It is a mere nothing. No need for dramatics.” “I am nothing,” Cardan said, “if not dramatic.”

And doomed as she was, he envied her whatever conviction made her stand there and defy him. She ought to be nothing. She ought to be insignificant. She ought not to matter. He had to make her not matter. But every night, Jude haunted him.

“Why didn’t you hate everyone?” he asks. “Everyone, all the time.” “I hated you,” Jude reassures him, bringing her mouth to his.

If he gets himself killed like this, she is never going to let him live it down.

“You don’t think monster girls and wicked boys deserve love?” Cardan asks her, his own heart kicking up a beat as he notes how few stars are visible. If he can just keep her talking a little longer, they may make it through this enterprise.

“Everyone finds different lessons in stories, I suppose, but here’s one. Having a heart is terrible, but you need one anyway.

“And you think it was sunrise I was waiting for and not my queen. Do you not hear her footfalls? She has never quite managed the trick of hiding them as well as one of the Folk. Surely you’ve heard of her, Jude Duarte, who defeated the redcap Grima Mog, who brought the Court of Teeth to their knees? She’s forever getting me out of scrapes. Truly, I don’t know what I would do without her.”

“Now what?” “We wait for the sun together,” he says, his gaze going to the hot blush of the horizon. “And no one dies.”