#the wicked king

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WHEN DID JUDE GET NIGHTFELL BACK??

So in the released Novl QoN excerpt, Jude mentions wishing she could have brought Nightfell with her to the Grima Mog duel:

“I draw the long knife I have hidden in my boot. It doesn’t have the best reach, but I don’t have the ability to glamour things; I can’t very well ride my bike around with Nightfell on my back.“

But here’s the last time we see Nightfell in WK, right before Jude escape’s Madoc’s house arrest by jumping out the window:

Once she is gone and the tea is cold, I climb the steps to my room. There, I take up Taryn’s knife and the other one hidden under my bed. I take the edge of one to the pocket of my dress, slicing through it so I can strap the knife to my thigh and draw it swiftly. There are plenty of weapons in Madoc’s house—including my own Nightfell—but if I start looking for them and belting them on properly, the guards are sure to notice. I need them to believe I have gone docilely back to bed.

Later, when dueling with Balekin, Jude spares a moment to regret not grabbing Nightfell:

I’d rather have the knife than be unarmed, but more than anything, I wish I had Nightfell.

So Jude leaves Nightfell at Madoc’s house after she is returned from the Undersea, and she does not ever get the chance to get it back before she’s exiled. She literally gets dumped on the sidewalk of a random Maine town with no time to pack her bags at all. So it stands to reason that Nightfell would still be sitting at Madoc’s house, unless Madoc or Taryn grabbed it before leaving to start the coup.

So how does Jude have Nightfell sitting in Vivi’s apartment in Chapter 2?

I literally don’t know, you guys. Open to theories and ideas. 

Spoilers for the released QoN excerpt.

Jude is going to steal Madoc’s red cap, isn’t she?

Like, there’s literally no other reason for her to go on about stealing Grima Mog’s cap in Chapter 2 and how important that cap is to a redcap, unless it’s foreshadowing. 

Back in The Wicked King chapter 1, Jude goes on and on about how faerie marriage and specifically royal marriage works, in the context of Mother Marrow’s sneak engagement attempt. So of course at the end of the book, when Jude and Cardan get married, we already know how that works because it’s been set up from the start. Not the most subtle foreshadowing tbh, but whatevs.

Holly tends to reuse certain structural and narrative tools (I’m looking at you, Mr. Everything Goes to SHIT at the ¾ Point), so it stands to reason she’s pulling the same stunt here. 

Madoc better start guarding his hat.

Damn straight you’re going to make a proposal. The foreshadowing in this series is insane.

Y’all know we’re less than 100 people away from another out of context Queen of Nothing quote, right? 

Oh my god I figured out who poisoned Cardan at the end of The Wicked King.

We know that Balekin is behind the poisoning, but surely it wasn’t Balekin himself who put the actual poison in Cardan’s food. Balekin is now an ambassador, but he wouldn’t have kitchen privileges and the Court of Shadows would be watching Balekin closely.

So who poisoned Cardan?

Tatterfell.

Tatterfell is Madoc’s servant who was assigned to Jude while she lived in his household. Taryn brings Tatterfell to Jude in The Wicked King to take care of Jude, since Jude’s bad at hygiene. Of course, Jude is immediately suspicious:

I look into the imp’s inkdrop eyes. “You mean Madoc has her spying for him.”Tatterfell’s lip curls, and I am reminded how sharply she pinches.“Aren’t you a sly and suspicious girl? You ought to be ashamed, saying such a thing.”

Note that Tatterfell never denies that she’s spying for Madoc. She just makes Jude feel guilty for suggesting it. Tatterfell never swears allegiance to Jude. She is loyal to Madoc, who spared her lover’s life. 

The last time we see Tatterfell, she’s back at Madoc’s house looking after Jude following Jude’s Undersea ordeal. But Tatterfell could get back into the palace as an acknowledged and recognized servant of the High King’s seneschal. And as Jude discovered in The Cruel Prince, servants often fade into the background and are quickly forgotten by others. As a servant, Tatterfell would be able to go to the kitchens, and she would have access to Cardan’s food and drink. 

Of course, this would require Madoc to re-team up with Balekin. It would require Madoc to form an alliance with the man who imprisoned his foster daughter, and for Balekin to trust Madoc again after the crown debacle in The Cruel Prince. Which I admit is a stretch.

But Balekin may be feeling short on allies, and Madoc doesn’t mind teaming up with people he dislikes so long as he feels he can maintain the upper hand. At the final revel when Cardan is poisoned, Madoc disgustedly tells Jude:

“Is this going according to your plan?” he demands under his breath. “Your puppet is drunk. Get him out of here.”

“I’ll try,” I say.

“I have stood by long enough,” Madoc says, his cat eyes staring into mine. “Get your puppet to abdicate the throne in favor of your brother or face the consequences. I won’t ask you again. It’s now or never.”

Madoc tells Jude that Cardan is drunk. Jude assumes, like the rest of us at this point, that Madoc means drunk on alcohol. But what if Madoc was twisting his words? ‘Drunk’ can mean a variety of things. Cardan could have drunk any beverage recently. Cardan could be drunk on something other than alcohol - a good argument could be made that Cardan is drunk on love for Jude at this point. Madoc follows his observation up with a threat: get Cardan to abdicate or face the consequences. Is that a veiled threat at Cardan’s demise from poisoning?

The more I think about it, the more I believe that Madoc has prepared for the moment he breaks with the Crown. Taryn (or Tatterfell) has already scouted out Jude’s clothing and then had the clothing handy for Taryn to change into (Taryn couldn’t have grabbed Jude’s clothing during the final revel because Jude, Cardan, and co. camp out there fairly quickly to deal with the poisoning, so she must have obtained it beforehand). Madoc has assembled and prepped his troops, and considered exactly how many he needs for a proper civil war and how many he can convince Cardan to part with. 

The moment the revel begins, Madoc is already ready to launch his civil war.

So Madoc knew that Balekin was going to make his move, and had his own pieces in place. Madoc was aware of Cardan’s poisoning in advance.

And Tatterfell was the pawn that made it all happen. 

So… we all know Jude and Cardan are going to have an epic dance in Queen of Nothing, right?

Jude and Cardan have some sort of angry/lusty dance in both books so far, so it stands to reason that Queen of Nothing will finish out the pattern. Which means they’re either going to have another rage-filled waltz while they contemplate ripping off each other’s clothing, or some sort of triumphant epilogue dance when they can finally make out like they’ve always wanted to.

I recently reread Cruel Prince/read the B&N short story, and I had THOUGHTS:

  • Cardan is already drunk at the coronation because he’s angsty about his least favorite brother becoming king, but he gets really drunk to the point of completely missing the coronation massacre because he’s pissed about Jude. So essentially, Jude is indirectly responsible for saving his life.
  • Ilove how Jude is so shocked that Cardan is attracted to her that her first thought is that he must somehow be lying or twisting his words, while Kaye figures it out in about five seconds flat just watching them dance from a distance, before she’s spoken to either one of them.
  • During the nixie episode, Jude thinks Cardan goes to the river’s reeds to get a better look when she slips and falls in the water. He’s really about to get into the river to help her if she was actually in trouble. I love how she automatically assumes the worst conclusions with him.
  • Cardan was probably looking for Jude under the tables after the coronation massacre. She and Taryn have a well-established habit of hiding under the tables at feasts, and he knew she would be in danger. It wasn’t luck that Jude got her hands on Cardan - he was actively trying to find her.
  • One of the guards at Hollow Hall tells Jude and Sophie that Cardan has to return them both back this time. This raises SO MANY QUESTIONS. Cardan at the start of CP wouldn’t be the type to return glamoured humans to the human world - he really does have a contempt of them, learned from Balekin and from his friends. But he also wouldn’t intentionally hurt human servants either, and definitely not kill them. So what was happening there? I don’t think we’ll ever get answers and that upsets me a little.
  • When Jude first breaks into Cardan’s room, she sees that he broke his pen. The pen he was writing his infamous Jude note with… so many angsty feelings.
  • Jude and co are literally the biggest dumbasses for not seeing the Balekin/Madoc alliance coming. Jude recognizes the spy she killed as being Madoc’s and just decides not to mention it?? Jude figures out they’ve been misreading the blusher mushroom note and then not only fails to follow up on her investigation (to be fair, getting sidetracked to rescue Sophie is a noble cause), she fails to mention it to the Court! Sorry but the Court of Shadows is really bad at spying. Just epically bad. No wonder they mess up again in WK.
  • Cardan making out with random fairies while watching Jude make out with Locke is a mood and I can’t believe Jude didn’t figure out things sooner.
  • At the beginning of WK, when Grimsen is introduced, Jude mentions that Cardan had told her some info once about the Alderking’s son Severin. I totally forgot that happened in CP and that we also met Severin.
  • I love how at the coronation and the Hollow Hall party, murder and mayhem is happening with abandon and everyone just stands around eating popcorn and watching the shenanigans unfold.
  • I really liked The Lost Sisters novella, but it ended a little too soon. I’m forever curious about Taryn’s thought process when Jude comes in with Cardan at the Hollow Hall party.
  • In addition to Jude and co being unbearably bad spies, the one other major failing of the book is that it starts at the point when Jude stops giving a shit and starts fighting back. For the majority of her childhood, Jude has sat with Taryn under tables and hidden in balconies at feasts, bowed her head and bit her tongue to Cardan, and generally kept a low profile when the faeries are asshats to her. At the start of CP, Jude decides she’s had enough and enters her rebellious teenage phase. Taryn says multiple times in CP that Jude fighting back “isn’t like you” and is a new bad idea Jude hasn’t had before. This is reinforced in The Lost Sisters. But we don’t really get much of a glimpse of Jude’s previously meek behavior, except at the first feast when she curtsies to Cardan. Because of this, Jude starts off in feisty rage mode, which rather lessens the effect of said mode because we don’t have anything to compare it to. I wish CP had started a little earlier, so we could get a better contrast and also a better idea of how Jude survived this long if she’s willing to push everyone’s buttons.
  • It’s very clear that Cardan was attracted to Jude even when he was with Nicasia, which much have pissed him off to no end. I’m so curious when he started developing feelings for Jude.
  • I didn’t notice this so much in WK, but in CP Cardan and Jude’s contrasting approaches to alcohol speaks volumes about their personalities. Jude has a low alcohol tolerance and wouldn’t drink anyways because she likes to always be in control of herself and always be in a sane frame of mind. She feels like she always needs to be on her toes and can never truly relax (and is in fact kind of creeped out by how relaxed and chill she was at Locke’s house). Cardan drinks in excess because he hates his life and if he’s drunk he can basically forget about it. Jude is constantly aware of her shitty situation and makes copious efforts to improve it by any means possible. Cardan is unmotivated to improve his shitty situation because he believes there is no way to fix or improve it, so might as well get drunk and have fun.
  • It will never cease to amuse me that one of Cardan’s demands in exchange for helping Jude and co stop Balekin is all the alcohol in the palace. Like, damn.
  • I love the part when Jude and Cardan are in class the day after she snuck into Hollow Hall and saw Balekin beat him, and she realizes he’s actually in a lot of pain but pretending to be his usual chill, snarky self. And she realizes that there’s been plenty of times he’s come to class and has pretended he’s fine when he isn’t, just like her. It’s a nice moment early-ish on where Jude starts to understand that she and Cardan have more in common than she’d like to think.
  • It’s also a great scene when Jude finally tells Cardan the exact circumstances of Valerian’s death. Cardan says he assumed Jude had hunted down and murdered Valerian, and I rather like that Cardan had begun to think the worst of Jude in the same way that she thought the worst of him. When she holds him at knife’s point at the end of the coronation, she realizes she’s smirking in the same way that Cardan usually did to her. So there’s some nice continued role reversal where Cardan is taking on Jude’s worst case scenario expectations. When Jude explains that Valerian actually tried to kill her again and came pretty close, Cardan realizes that he had misunderstood Jude’s character. Holly Black has said that Cardan is the only person who truly understands Jude, and I think that moment is when Cardan really starts to get Jude and how she operates. He understands that Jude isn’t actually as mean and nasty as she’s been pretending to be, and that she must have given Valerian quite a few chances for him to have nearly strangled her.
  • Not a new note, but Vivi’s decision to give zero fucks about anything Madoc cares about is amazing and a beauty to witness. The fact that she has maintained and sustained this kind of rebellion for ten years is honestly life goals.
  • Returning to the B&N short story, I quite like Kaye and I hope she and Jude become friends. But I really don’t get the Kaye/Roiben dynamic. I don’t think the story did a great job of making their relationship convincing, in part because the story got majorly sidetracked with playing voyeur to Jude and Cardan. Which was my favorite part of the story, but still. This is Kaye’s short story, not Jude and Cardan’s.
  • I have SO. MANY. QUESTIONS about the Ghost’s motivations. After the coronation massacre, everyone is upset, but the Roach is mostly upset that they now have literally nothing without Dain while the Ghost is mostly upset that Dain is dead. So the Ghost is loyal to Dain, whereas the rest of the Court of Shadows were mostly opportunistic and loyal to the power and money that Dain could offer them. But then why would the Ghost side with Balekin and the Undersea in WK? Balekin literally killed Dain. He stabbed him straight through the chest. I can see the Ghost thinking Jude and Cardan and shitty rulers, but I can’t fathom him siding with Balekin. There is clearly other things going on that will be explained in QoN, but right now I am a very confused person.
  • So it wasn’t clear to me until after I reread CP that the original Hollow Hall plan was to drug Madoc and then have him fall asleep at the party while Jude was in the hallway letting the Court in through the window. It wasn’t Jude’s original intent for Madoc to follow her out, and their duel was her improvising to delay Madoc until the poison took effect. So the OG plan was just for Madoc to collapse in the party in front of everyone and for Balekin to just think this was fine and normal?! I would think that would totally freak Balekin out and maybe even lead him to cancel the party immediately, which would ruin Jude’s plan.
  • Where are the other faerie lands?? Where do the other courts live? Jude has literally only ever been to the islands of Elfhame, but there’s this massive faerie world out there that she’s heard about but never been to. I’m so curious, and I have a good feeling we’ll find out in QoN since the setting is ice and snow.
  • By the way, super curious also about how Cardan has a copy of Alice in Wonderland in his room. I guess he sees Alice as a Jude parallel. Is he more curious about Alice, the intruder in Wonderland, or about the inhabitants of Wonderland themselves? Everyone keeps commenting that Jude and Taryn’s situation is like a fairytale come to life, but I think it’s interesting to view their situation through an Alice in Wonderland lens. In the book, Wonderland is insane because it literally runs on dream logic, nothing makes sense, and Alice spends the entire book attempting and failing to apply human logic and reasoning to the madness she encounters. But what if Wonderland wasn’t a dream, and what if Alice couldn’t go back home in the end? What if Alice had to stay in Wonderland forever?
  • Every time Cardan tells Jude that she doesn’t belong in Faerie and should leave, all I can think about is in WK, when he tells her, “I wasn’t sure if I wanted you or wanted you gone from my sight so I that I would stop feeling as I did.” Having read that in WK, it’s so interesting to go back and see those moments in CP where Cardan is trying to get Jude to leave Faerie so he can forget about her and move on. 
  • When Jude first starts trying to make alliances with other courts, we get this great line: “’Take care’ he [Cardan] says, then smiles. ‘It would be very dull to have to sit here for an entire day just because you went and got yourself killed.’” Cardan admitted earlier to Jude that he smiles when he’s nervous, and I’m convinced that’s why he’s smiling here. He tells her to take care because he’s genuinely worried about her safety. Then he has an ‘oh shit my feelings are showing’ moment and backtracks by covering his slip up with an insult. 

missescara:

“By you, I am forever undone.”- Holly Black ( The Queen of Nothing ) ✨

ekbelsher: Ugh. I’m tired of looking at this so I guess it’ll have to be done. It’s a mixed success,

ekbelsher:

Ugh. I’m tired of looking at this so I guess it’ll have to be done. It’s a mixed success, at best. I got annoyed at how the pencil lines kept dissolving under the watercolour washes, so I drew over them in ink, which was a mistake. I think you either do loose pencil lines or else ink, but not both. (I do like is how the texture of the watercolour wash shows, though). 



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Jude and Cardan and that scene, you know the one

 worked with @owlcrate and @hollyblack to create a JudexCardan illustration for the QoN box. If you&

worked with @owlcrateand@hollyblack to create a JudexCardan illustration for the QoN box. If you’ve got the box, there’s a little extra surprise for this print I won’t mention here. It’s something I’ve been wanting to try for a while and I’m so very happy they indulged me

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26032825-the-cruel-prince?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=HxVNTyJaDU&rank=1


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 Illustration for @owlcrate and @hollyblack QoN box. I’ve spent such an ungodly amount of time

Illustration for @owlcrateand@hollyblack QoN box. I’ve spent such an ungodly amount of time painting scales for this illustration!! I usually try to find a way to speedup repetitive tasks up but not this time. If it looks cool, it was worth it right?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26032825-the-cruel-prince?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=HxVNTyJaDU&rank=1


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Even your shadow can be stolen…. Get ready to explore a world of shadowy thieves and secret societies in Book of Night by #1 New York Times bestselling author Holly Black!  

Why are people saying Jude’s pregnant, y’all know they didn’t have sex right?

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