The_Wicked_King_-_Holly_Black 2
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are
the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is
coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Holly Black
Illustrations by Kathleen Jennings
Cover art copyright © 2019 by Sean Freeman. Cover design by Karina
Granda.
Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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First Edition: January 2019
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“Nymphidia” by Michael Drayton, first published in 1627
“The Fairies” by William Allingham, first published in 1850
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Black, Holly, author. | Jennings, Kathleen, illustrator.
Title: The wicked king / Holly Black ; illustrations by Kathleen Jennings.
First edition. | New York ; Boston : Little, Brown and Company, 2019. |
Series: [The Folk of the Air ; 2] | Summary: As seneschal to High King
Cardan, Jude must fight to keep control of the Faerie throne while her
younger brother, Oak, enjoys the childhood she never knew.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017056642| ISBN 9780316310352 (hardcover) | ISBN
9780316310338 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316310345 (library edition ebook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Kings, queens, rulers, etc.—Fiction. | Power (Philosophy)
—Fiction. | Courts and courtiers—Fiction. | Fairies—Fiction. | Sisters—
Fiction. | Fantasy.
Classification: LCC PZ7.B52878 Wic 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056642
ISBNs: 978-0-316-31035-2 (hardcover), 978-0-316-31033-8 (ebook), 978-0-
316-45213-7 (int’l), 978-0-316-48713-9 (Barnes & Noble)
E3-20181107-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Book One
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Book Two
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
For Kelly Link, one of the merfolk
Jude lifted the heavy practice sword, moving into the first stance—readiness.
Get used to the weight, Madoc had told her. You must be strong enough to
strike and strike and strike again without tiring. The first lesson is to make
yourself that strong.
It will hurt. Pain makes you strong.
That was the first lesson he’d taught her after he’d cut down her parents
with a sword not unlike the one she held now. Then she’d been seven, a baby.
Now she was nine and lived in Faerieland, and everything was changed.
She planted her feet in the grass. Wind ruffled her hair as she moved
through the stances. One; the sword before her, canted to one side, protecting
her body. Two; the pommel high, as though the blade were a horn coming
from her head. Three: down to her hip, then in a deceptively casual droop in
front of her. Then four: up again, to her shoulder. Each position could move
easily into a strike or a defense. Fighting was chess, anticipating the move of
one’s opponent and countering it before one got hit.
But it was chess played with the whole body. Chess that left her bruised
and tired and frustrated with the whole world and with herself, too.
Or maybe it was more like riding a bike. When she’d been learning to do
that, back in the real world, she’d fallen lots of times. Her knees had been
scabby enough that Mom thought she might have scars. But Jude had taken
off her training wheels herself and disdained riding carefully on the sidewalk,
as Taryn did. Jude wanted to ride in the street, fast, like Vivi, and if she got
gravel embedded into her skin for it, well, then she’d let Dad pick it out with
tweezers at night.
Sometimes Jude longed for her bike, but there were none in Faerie.
Instead, she had giant toads and thin greenish ponies and wild-eyed horses
slim as shadows.
And she had weapons.
And her parents’ murderer, now her foster father. The High King’s general,
Madoc, who wanted to teach her how to ride too fast and how to fight to the
death. No matter how hard she swung at him, it just made him laugh. He liked
her anger. Fire, he called it.
She liked it when she was angry, too. Angry was better than scared. Better
than remembering she was a mortal among monsters. No one was offering her
the option of training wheels anymore.
On the other side of the field, Madoc was guiding Taryn through a series
of stances. Taryn was learning the sword, too, although she had different
problems than Jude. Her stances were more perfect, but she hated sparring.
She paired the obvious defenses with the obvious attacks, so it was easy to
lure her into a series of moves and then score a hit by breaking the pattern.
Each time it happened, Taryn got mad, as though Jude were flubbing the steps
of a dance rather than winning.
“Come here,” Madoc called to Jude across the silvery expanse of grass.
She walked to him, sword slung over her shoulders. The sun was just
setting, but faeries are twilight creatures, and their day was not even half
done. The sky was streaked with copper and gold. She inhaled a deep breath
of pine needles. For a moment, she felt as though she were just a kid learning
a new sport.
“Come spar,” he said when Jude got closer. “Both of you girls against this
old redcap.” Taryn leaned against her sword, the tip of it sinking into the
ground. She wasn’t supposed to hold it that way—it wasn’t good for the blade
—but Madoc didn’t reprimand her.
“Power,” he said. “Power is the ability to get what you want. Power is the
ability to be the one making the decisions. And how do we get power?”
Jude stepped beside her twin. It was obvious that Madoc expected a
response, but also that he expected the wrong one. “We learn how to fight
well?” she said to say something.
When Madoc smiled at her, she could see the points of his bottom cuspids,
longer than the rest of his teeth. He tousled her hair, and she felt the sharp
edges of his claw-like nails against her scalp, too light to hurt, but a reminder
of what he was nonetheless. “We get power by taking it.”
He pointed toward a low hill with a thorn tree growing on it. “Let’s make a
game of the next lesson. That’s my hill. Go ahead and take it.”
Taryn dutifully trooped toward it, Jude behind her. Madoc kept pace, his
smile all teeth.
“Now what?” Taryn asked, without any particular excitement.
Madoc looked into the distance, as though he was contemplating and
discarding various rules. “Now hold it against attack.”
“Wait, what?” Jude asked. “From you?”
“Is this a strategy game or a sparring practice?” Taryn asked, frowning.
Madoc brought one finger under her chin, raising her head until she was
looking into his golden cat eyes. “What is sparring but a game of strategy,
played at speed?” he told her, with a great seriousness. “Talk with your sister.
When the sun reaches the trunk of that tree, I will come for my hill. Knock
me down but once and you both win.”
Then he departed for a copse of trees some ways away. Taryn sat down on
the grass.
“I don’t want to do this,” she said.
“It’s just a game,” Jude reminded her nervously.
Taryn gave her a long look—the one that they gave each other when one
of them was pretending things were normal. “Okay, so what do you think we
should do?”
Jude looked up into the branches of the thorn tree. “What if one of us
threw rocks while the other did the sparring?”
“Okay,” Taryn said, pushing herself up and beginning to gather stones into
the folds of her skirts. “You don’t think he’ll get mad, do you?”
Jude shook her head, but she understood Taryn’s question. What if he
killed them by accident?
You’ve got to choose which hill to die on, Mom used to tell Dad. It had
been one of those weird sayings adults expected her to understand, even
though they made no sense—like, “one in the hand is worth two in the bush”
or “every stick has two ends” or the totally mysterious “a cat may look at a
king.” Now, standing on an actual hill with a sword in her hand, she
understood it a lot better.
“Get into position,” Jude said, and Taryn wasted no time in climbing the
thorn tree. Jude checked the sunmark, wondering what sort of tricks Madoc
might use. The longer he waited, the darker it would get, and while he could
see in the dark, Jude and Taryn could not.
But, in the end, he didn’t use any tricks. He came out of the woods and in
their direction, howling as though he were leading an army of a hundred.
Jude’s knees went weak with terror.
This is just a game, she reminded herself frantically. The closer he got,
though, the less her body believed her. Every animal instinct strained to run.
Their strategy seemed silly now in the face of his hugeness and their
smallness, in the face of her fear. She thought of her mother bleeding on the
ground, recalled the smell of her insides as they leaked out. The memory felt
like thunder in her head. She was going to die.
Run, her whole body urged. RUN!
No, her mother had run. Jude planted her feet.
She made herself move into the first position, even though her legs felt
wobbly. He had the advantage, even coming up that hill, because he had
momentum on his side. The stones raining down on him from Taryn barely
checked his pace.
Jude spun out of the way, not even bothering to try to block the first blow.
Putting the tree between them, she dodged his second and third. When the
fourth one came, it knocked her to the grass.
She closed her eyes against the killing strike.
“You can take a thing when no one’s looking. But defending it, even with
all the advantage on your side, is no easy task,” Madoc told her with a laugh.
She looked up to find him offering her a hand. “Power is much easier to
acquire than it is to hold on to.”
Relief broke over her. It was just a game, after all. Just another lesson.
“That wasn’t fair,” Taryn complained.
Jude didn’t say anything. Nothing was fair in Faerie. She had learned to
stop expecting it to be.
Madoc hauled Jude to her feet and threw a heavy arm over her shoulders.
He drew her and her twin in for an embrace. He smelled like smoke and dried
blood, and Jude let herself sag against him. It was good to be hugged. Even
by a monster.
The new High King of Faerie lounges on his throne, his crown resting at an
insouciant angle, his long villainously scarlet cloak pinned at his shoulders
and sweeping the floor. An earring shines from the peak of one pointed ear.
Heavy rings glitter along his knuckles. His most ostentatious decoration,
however, is his soft, sullen mouth.
It makes him look every bit the jerk that he is.
I stand to one side of him, in the honored position of seneschal. I am
supposed to be High King Cardan’s most trusted advisor, and so I play that
part, rather than my real role—the hand behind the throne, with the power to
compel him to obey should he try to cross me.
Scanning the crowd, I look for a spy from the Court of Shadows. They
intercepted a communication from the Tower of Forgetting, where Cardan’s
brother is jailed, and are bringing it to me instead of to its intended recipient.
And that’s only the latest crisis.
It’s been five months since I forced Cardan onto the throne of Elfhame as
my puppet king, five months since I betrayed my family, since my sister
carried my little brother to the mortal realm and away from the crown that he
might have worn, since I crossed swords with Madoc.
Five months since I’ve slept for more than a few hours at a stretch.
It seemed like a good trade—a very faerie trade, even: put someone who
despised me on the throne so that Oak would be out of danger. It was thrilling
to trick Cardan into promising to serve me for a year and a day, exhilarating
when my plan came together. Then, a year and a day seemed like forever. But