How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

by Holly Black

  “Ah, but we knew that already,” Cardan agrees. “You see, he realized he didn’t have to feel fear. He only had to show fear. And since his heart was stone, he wasn’t afraid of what would come next. He decided to take a chance.

  “You know what happened next. She knocked him into the wall with a single heavy blow. And as he hit, he felt something crack in his chest.”

  “His heart,” the troll woman says. “A shame he had to feel the terror, along with the agony of his own death.”

  Cardan smiles. “A great swell of fear crashed over him. But along with it was a strange and tender feeling for her, his monster bride.

  “‘You have cured me,’ the boy told her, tears wetting his cheeks. ‘Now let me keep your curse from ever being broken.’ And she paused to listen.

  “He explained his plan. She would marry him, and he would vow to never pass three nights without being a little afraid. And so the monster girl and the awful boy with the clever tongue marry, and she gets to stay powerful and monstrous and he gets his own heart back. All because he took a chance.”

  “So that’s the lesson of the story?” the troll woman asks, rising from her rusty chair.

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

  “Or, here’s another: Stories can justify anything. It doesn’t matter if the boy with the heart of stone is a hero or a villain; it doesn’t matter if he got what he deserved or if he didn’t. No one can reward him or punish him, save the storyteller. And she’s the one who shaded the tale so we’d feel whatever way we feel about him in the first place. You told me once, stories change. Now it’s time to change your story.

  “Queen Gliten cheated you, and the High King would not listen to your complaint. You didn’t get what you deserved, but you don’t have to live inside that one story forever. No one’s heart has to remain stone.”

  Aslog looks up at the sky and frowns down at him. “You think you’ve made your story long enough for the sun to rise and catch me unawares, but you’re wrong. And it will take only a few moments to kill you, kingling.”

  “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.”

  Aslog must have heard the tales, because she turns away from the pit, searching the woods with her gaze.

  In that moment, Cardan reaches out to the land with his will. Blunted as his powers are by being in the mortal world and by the bits of iron that still cling to him, he is still the High King of Elfhame. The great trees bend their branches low enough for him to grasp one and swing out of the pit.

  As soon as his feet touch the ground, he lifts the troll woman’s abandoned chair.

  Aslog turns to him in astonishment. He doesn’t hesitate. He slams the rusted legs into her stomach, sending her sprawling backward into the pit.

  An agonized howl rises as her skin touches the generous dusting of iron at the bottom.

  As she stands, Cardan draws Jude’s sword from his back. He points Nightfell toward the troll woman. “No part of that was a lie, save for the whole,” he says with an apologetic shrug.

  Aslog looks around her pit, her fingers scraping the roots and dirt along the sides. She is larger than Cardan, but not so big that she can clamber out unaided. She has set her trap well, crafting it to suit any of Queen Gliten’s knights. “Now what?”

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

  He sits with her as red turns to gold, as blue edges out black. He sits with her as gray creeps over Aslog’s skin, and he does not look away from the betrayal on her face as she becomes stone.

  Cardan lets himself fall back on the grass. He lies there for a long, dizzy moment, until he hears the tinkling of the leaves on Jude’s armor. He looks up to see her running toward him.

  “What is wrong with you?” she shouts, falling to her knees by his side. Her hands go to his shirt, pushing it aside to look at the wound on his shoulder. Her fingers are cold against his flushed skin. It’s nice. He hopes she won’t take them away. “You told me not to come alone, and yet here you are—”

  “I knew Aslog,” he says. “We were friends. Well, not precisely friends. But something. We were something. And I decided to play the hero. See how it felt. To try.”

  “And?” she asks.

  “I didn’t like it,” he admits. “Henceforth, I think we should consider our roles as monarchs to be largely decorative. It would be better for the low Courts and the solitary Folk to work things out on their own.”

  “I think you have iron poisoning,” she tells him, which could possibly be true but is still a hurtful thing to say when he is making perfect sense.

  “If you’re angry with me, it’s only that I executed your mad plan before you got a chance,” he points out.

  “That’s absolutely untrue.” Jude helps him stand, propping herself under his good shoulder. “I am not so arrogant as to have begun my fight with a troll in the middle of the night. And I definitely wouldn’t have managed to talk her to death.”

  “She’s not dead,” Cardan objects. “Merely imprisoned in stone. In fact, that reminds me. We need to alert our retainers to haul her back to Elfhame before sunset. She’s probably rather heavy.”

  “Oh, rather,” Jude agrees.

  “You didn’t hear the story I told,” he goes on. “A shame. It featured a handsome boy with a heart of stone and a natural aptitude for villainy. Everything you could like.”

  She laughs. “You really are terrible, you know that? I don’t even understand why the things you say make me smile.”

  He lets himself lean against her, lets himself hear the warmth in her voice. “There is one thing I did like about playing the hero. The only good bit. And that was not having to be terrified for you.”

  “The next time you want to make a point,” Jude says, “I beg you not to make it so dramatically.”

  His shoulder hurts, and she may be right about the iron poisoning. He certainly feels as though his head is swimming. But he smiles up at the trees, the looping electrical lines, the streaks of clouds.

  “So long as you’re begging,” he says.

  This was a strange and magical project from start to finish, and a lot of people helped me get it right.

  First, I have to thank my agent, Joanna Volpe, for figuring out how this book could work; my editor, Alvina Ling, for getting on board with such a weird project; and our art director, Karina Granda, for shepherding it through the many steps to getting it in front of you. Thanks to Ruqayyah Daud and Jordan Hill for managing so many details and also managing me.

  Thank you to Siena Koncsol and everyone in Marketing and Publicity at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, who have always been a joy to work with.

  Thanks to Emma Matthewson and everyone at Hot Key Books for being enthusiastic about this series from the beginning.

  Thank you to Rovina Cai for being willing to do this in the first place and then for putting up with me constantly asking for more Cardan extravagance.

  Thank you to my critique partners for all your help. Thank you to Kelly Link for reading seventy thousand versions of this, to Cassandra Clare and Joshua Lewis and Steve Berman for convening a workshop with what was no doubt annoying swiftness, to Sarah Rees Brennan for helping me figure out what might happen in the first place and then helping me figure it out again when I went in a totally new direction, and to Leigh Bardugo for coming in and reminding me what a plot is and what I could do to suggest there was one.

  And thank you to Jessica Cooper for letting me know what the people would like.

  And, as always,
thanks to Theo and Sebastian, for being both inspiration and distraction.