How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

by Holly Black

  But Cardan only laughed. He even laughed when Balekin ordered him into his office, expecting another servant and another strap. But it was only his brother.

  “I have seen enough of your maudlin display to understand that you have lost some favor with Nicasia?” Balekin said.

  Since he wasn’t sure he could stay upright, Cardan sat. And since a chair wasn’t immediately beside him, he sat on the floor.

  “Do not invest a dalliance with greater significance than it warrants,” Balekin went on, coming around from behind his desk to peer down at his younger brother not entirely unsympathetically. “It is a mere nothing. No need for dramatics.”

  “I am nothing,” Cardan said, “if not dramatic.”

  “Your relationship with Princess Nicasia is the closest thing to power that you have,” Balekin said. “Father overlooks your excesses to keep peace with the Undersea. Do you think he would tolerate your behavior otherwise?”

  “And I suppose you need me to have influence with Queen Orlagh for something or another,” Cardan guessed.

  Balekin didn’t deny it. “Make sure she comes back to you when she tires of this new lover. Now take yourself to bed—alone.”

  As Cardan crawled up the steps, his head ringing with hoofbeats, he thought of how he’d vowed not to be one of the fools groveling for the affections of some princess of the Undersea and of how, if he wasn’t careful, that was exactly what he would become.

  C

  ardan had his polished boots resting on a rock and his head pillowed on the utterly ridiculous mortal book he’d been reading. Since the one with the girl and the rabbit and the bad queen, he’d discovered he had a taste for human novels. A hob in the market traded them to Cardan for roses smuggled out of the royal gardens.

  Nearby, sprites wearing acorn caps and wielding glaives the size of toothpicks battled above a sea of tiger lilies. He glanced up to see Nicasia standing above him, a basket over her arm.

  “I wish to talk,” she said, and settled beside him, arranging a blanket and some little cakes dotted with dried fish and wrapped in kelp beside a bottle of what appeared to be a greenish wine. Cardan wrinkled his nose. There was no reason for her to go to all this trouble. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t behaved perfectly civilly toward her and Locke. The four of them menaced the rest of the Court as thoroughly as before. And if his cruelty had the sharp edge of despair, if slights and taunts were all that fell from his tongue now, what did it matter? He had always been awful. Now he was just worse.

  “Have one,” she offered.

  If he wasn’t going to rule by her side in the Undersea, he didn’t have to eat the food there. “Perhaps once you’ve told me why you’ve disturbed my repose.”

  “I want you to take me back,” she said. “None of our plans need to change. Nothing between us needs to change from the way it was before.”

  He yawned, refusing to give her the satisfaction of his surprise. Those were the words that he’d hoped for her to say when he’d discovered her with Locke, but now, he found he no longer wanted them.

  In the end, he supposed Balekin had been right. Her dalliance had been a mere nothing. Balekin was probably also right when he said that only with her by his side would Cardan have some measure of political power. If he lost her, he was only himself, the despised, youngest prince.

  Luckily, Cardan cared very little for politics. Or reprimands from Eldred.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Cardan said. “But I am curious about your change of heart.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed one sprite tumbling into a flower and emerging heavily dusted with carrot-colored pollen. The other held up its glaive, victorious.

  For a long moment, Nicasia didn’t speak. She picked at a fishcake.

  Cardan raised his eyebrows. “Ah, you didn’t make the choice to leave him, did you?”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” she told him. “And it affects you as well.”

  “Does it?” he inquired.

  “You must listen! Locke’s taken one of the mortal girls as his lover,” Nicasia said, obviously attempting to keep her voice from shaking.

  Cardan was silent, his thoughts thrown into confusion.

  One of the mortal girls.

  “You can’t expect me to pity you,” he said finally, voice tight.

  “No,” she said slowly. “I expect you to laugh in my face and tell me that it’s no more than I deserve.” She looked out toward Hollow Hall, miserable. “But I think Locke means to humiliate you as much as he does me in doing this. How does it look, after all, to steal your lover and then tire of her so quickly?”

  He didn’t care how it made him look. He didn’t care in the least.

  “Which one?” Cardan asked. “Which mortal girl?”

  “Does it matter?” Nicasia was clearly exasperated. “Either. Both.”

  It shouldn’t matter. The human girls were insignificant, nothing. In fact, he ought to feel delighted that Nicasia had such swift cause to regret what she’d done. And if he felt even angrier than he had before, well then, he had no cause. “At least you will have the pleasure of seeing what the Grand General does when Locke inevitably mishandles this situation.”

  “That’s not enough,” she said.

  “What then?”

  “Punish them.” She took his hands, her expression fierce. “Punish all three of them. Convince Valerian he’d like tormenting the mortals. Force Locke to play along. Make them all suffer.”

  “You should have led with that,” Cardan told her, getting to his feet. “That I would have agreed to just for fun.”

  It wasn’t until he was glaring down at Jude, standing waist-deep in river water, fighting the current, that he realized he was in trouble. Ink swirled around her from the pot Valerian had dumped out. Sharp-toothed nixies lurked not far off.

  Jude’s wet chestnut hair was plastered to her throat. Her cheeks were flushed with cold, her lips turning bluish. And her dark eyes blazed with hatred and contempt.

  Which was fair, he supposed, since he was the reason she was in the water. Valerian, Nicasia, and even Locke jeered from the bank.

  Jude ought to be cowed. She was supposed to bow and scrape, to submit and acknowledge his superiority. A little groveling wouldn’t have gone amiss. He would have very much liked it if she begged.

  “Give up,” Cardan said, fully expecting she would.

  “Never.” Jude wore an unnerving little smile in the corners of her mouth, as though even she couldn’t believe what she was saying. The most infuriating part was that she didn’t have to mean it. She was mortal. She could lie. So why wouldn’t she?

  In this, there was no winning for her.

  And yet, after he told her all the soft, menacing things he could think of, after he left her clambering back up onto the riverbank, he realized he was the one who had retreated. He was the one who backed down.

  And all through that night and for many nights after, he couldn’t rid his thoughts of her. Not the hatred in her eyes. That he understood. That he didn’t mind. It warmed him.

  But the contempt made him feel as though she saw beneath all his sharp and polished edges. It reminded him of how his father and all the Court had seen him, before he had learned how to shield himself with villainy.

  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. The coils of her hair. The calluses on her fingers. An absent bite of her lip. It was too much, the way he thought about her. He knew it was too much, but he couldn’t stop.

  It disgusted him that he couldn’t stop.

  He had to make her see that he was her better. To beg his pardon. And grovel. He had to find a way to make her admire him. To kneel before him and plead for his royal mercy. To surrender. To yield.

  Choose a future
, Balekin had commanded him when he’d first brought Cardan to Hollow Hall. But no one chooses a future. You choose a path without being certain where it leads.

  Choose one way and a monster rends your flesh.

  Choose another and your heart turns to stone, or fire, or glass.

  Years later, Cardan would sit at a table in the Court of Shadows while the Roach taught him how to spin a coin over his knuckles, to set it whirling and have it land the way he wished.

  Cardan tried again and again, but his fingers wouldn’t cooperate.

  “Tails, see?” The Roach repeated the movement, making it look frustratingly easy. “But a prince like yourself, what possible reason would you have to learn a rogue’s trick?”

  “Who doesn’t want to control fate?” Cardan answered, setting his coin to spinning again.

  The Roach slammed his hand down on the table, breaking the pattern. “Remember, all you really get to control is yourself.”

  T

  he night before they are set to meet with the solitary fey in the mortal world, Vivi and Heather take them out for bubble tea. There are no actual bubbles. Instead, he is served toothsome balls soaked in a sweet, milky tea. Vivi orders grass jelly, and Heather gets a lavender drink that is the color of the flowers and just as fragrant.

  Cardan is fascinated and insists on having a sip of each. Then he eats a bite of the half-dozen types of dumplings they order—mushroom, cabbage and pork, cilantro and beef, hot-oil chicken dumplings that numb his tongue, then creamy custard to cool it, along with sweet red bean that sticks to his teeth.

  Heather glares at Cardan as though he bit the head off a sprite in the middle of a banquet.

  “You can’t eat some of a dumpling and put it back,” Oak insists. “That’s revolting.”

  Cardan considers that villainy takes many forms, and he is good at all of them.

  Jude stabs the remainder of the bean bun with a single chopstick, popping it into her mouth and chewing with obvious satisfaction. “Gooh,” she gets out when she notices the others looking at her.

  Vivi laughs and orders more dumplings.

  When they return to Heather’s apartment, they watch a movie about a terrible family in a big, old house and the beautiful and clever nurse who inherits everything. Cardan lies on the rug with one arm propping up his head and the other slung across Jude’s waist. He understands everything and nothing he sees on the screen—just as he understands everything and nothing about being here with her family. He feels like a feral cat that might bite out of habit.

  Oak gave up his room so they could sleep there, and although the bed is small, Cardan cannot mind when he takes Jude in his arms.

  “You’re probably missing your fancy palace right about now,” she whispers to him in the dark.

  He traces the edge of her lip, runs his finger over the soft human hair of her cheek, pausing on a freckle, and comes to rest on a tiny scar, a line of pale skin drawn there by some blade.

  He considers explaining how much he despised the palace as a child, how he dreamed of escaping Elfhame. She knows most of that already. Then he considers reminding her that the fancy palace is now as much hers as his. “Not in the least,” he says instead, and feels her smile against his skin.

  But once he starts recalling his desire to leave Elfhame, he can’t help but also recall how desperately she wanted to stay. And how difficult that had been, how hard she had fought, how hard she was still fighting, even now that she didn’t have to.

  “Why didn’t you hate everyone?” he asks. “Everyone, all the time.”

  “I hated you,” Jude reassures him, bringing her mouth to his.

  Late the next afternoon, Bryern comes to the woods between the highway and Heather’s apartment complex.

  Jude’s old employer turns out to be a phooka in a vest and a bowler hat. He has black fur, golden goat eyes, and what Cardan believes to be a bad attitude. He’s accompanied by a scruffy clurichaun and a nervous-looking ogre serving as bodyguards, which suggests that Bryern was afraid to come before his sovereigns. That doesn’t bother Cardan—in fact, he’s rather pleased about it—but it’s insulting to think those two would keep Bryern safe from the High King and Queen of Elfhame. Not only that, but Cardan finds their bows to be insufferably shallow.

  They seem rattled when they realize who he is. And somehow he finds that to be the thing that annoys him most of all, that they thought he wouldn’t be bothered to come, that he would leave this to Jude.

  His queen is dressed in mortal clothing, jeans and what they call a hoodie, her thumbs through holes at the wrists. Her hair falls mostly loose, but two braids hang near her face in a style she might wear in Elfhame, but which here does not mark her as anything other than a mortal girl who grew up in a mortal home.

  For his part, he is clad in what Vivi told him to put on—black shirt and jeans, boots and jacket. No silver or gold except the rings on his fingers, which he refused to remove. He has never before willingly worn such an understated costume.

  “So,” Jude says, “you want to give me my old job back.”

  Bryern has the good sense to flinch a little. “Your Majesty,” he says, “we are in the middle of a very difficult situation. A Court from the Northwest has come here, saying they are hunting a monster, and will not respect our self-governance. Their knights force us into servitude, claiming we must fight at their side. And the monster slaughters anyone who comes into the woods where it dwells.”

  “Huh,” says Jude. “Where exactly are these w—”

  “Which Court?” Cardan interrupts, hoping to keep Jude from immediately volunteering to fight something.

  “That of Queen Gliten, Your Majesty,” Bryern tells him, but then turns to Jude, fishing a folded paper out of his pocket. “This is a map. I thought you might want it.”

  Queen Gliten. Cardan frowns. He knows something about her, but he can’t quite recall what.

  Jude pockets the map.

  Bryern gives an awkward bob of his horned head. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  She gives him a look that Cardan would not enjoy having leveled in his direction. “Is that why you compared my foster father to Grima Mog and tried to guilt me into it?”

  “A comparison you can hardly mind, since Grima Mog now sits in a place of honor by your side,” the clurichaun puts in hopefully, speaking for the first time.

  “Stuff it, Ladhar,” Jude says with a roll of her eyes. “Okay, we’re on it. Don’t say the High Court never did anything for you.”

  That night, Cardan lies in bed, looking at the ceiling, long after Jude falls asleep.

  At first, he thinks it is the unfamiliar scents of this world keeping him awake, the iron tang that hangs over everything. And then he thinks that perhaps he has become too used to velvet coverlets and mattresses piled up on one another.

  But as he slides out of bed, he realizes it isn’t that.

  After their meeting with Bryern, Jude was entirely amenable to his suggestions. Yes, they should immediately send a message to Queen Gliten and command her representatives to present themselves to be reprimanded. Yes, absolutely, they ought to send for reinforcements. And sure, he could look at the map, although it was tucked into her rucksack, so maybe he should look later. After all, they had time.

  Heather cooked something she called “plant-based meat” for dinner, formed into the shape of “hamburgers” and dressed with two sauces, leaves, and slices of raw onion soaked in water. Oak ate two. After dinner, Cardan found himself at a picnic table outside, drinking rosé wine from a paper cup and laughing over every detail Vivi supplied about Madoc’s attempts to fit into the mortal world.

  It was an entirely lovely night.

  Marriage means sharing each other’s interests, and since his wife’s run toward strategy and murder, he’s used to her throwing herself at absolutely everything that crosses her path. If she isn’t doing that now, there’s a reason.

  He pads out to the kitchen and takes her leather rucksack
. Fishing around, he draws out the map from Bryern. Beside it, he finds the ancient leafy metal armor that Taryn—of all people—discovered in the royal treasury.

  He shakes his head, sure now of her plan.

  Sometime before dawn, she will wake, dress herself in that armor, strap on her mortal father’s sword, sneak out, and go fight the creature. That’s what she always planned, why she wanted to come without retainers or knights in the first place.

  It would serve her right if he sat at the kitchen table and caught her as she tried to sneak out.

  But when he takes the map to the window and reads it by the dim light of the streetlamp outside, he realizes something else.

  Over the stretch of woods where the creature is supposed to dwell is marked ASLOG. And that’s when he remembers the last time he heard Queen Gliten mentioned—she was the one who cheated the troll woman out of what she’d earned. Now Aslog is being hunted, both by Queen Gliten’s Court and by Jude, if she has half a chance.

  Maybe he has the power to fix this. Maybe he’s actually the only one who can.

  Oak looks up sleepily from the couch he’s been exiled to, but upon seeing Cardan, he turns over, kicking the blankets off his feet and burrowing deeper into the cushions.

  C

  ardan has seldom navigated the mortal world alone and finds himself fascinated by the strangeness of the landscape. The road stretches out in front of him, sand and slag and crushed stone bound in stinking oil. He passes closed grocery stores, hairdressers, and pharmacies with lights still on. Everything reeks of iron and rot, but in a way, he minds less and less as he grows more accustomed to being here.

  He has put on one of Vivi’s hoodies over his clothes, strapped Jude’s sword across his shoulders, and glamoured himself both to hide the sword and to pass for human.

  Although he has the map from Bryern, he quickly realizes it has no street signs and assumes a level of familiarity with the area that Cardan doesn’t possess. After a few confused turns, he heads toward a gas station in the hopes of getting better directions.