44 pages • 1-hour read
How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories
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Chapters 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “The King of Elfhame Tries to Do One Good Thing”
Cardan, now High King and lovingly married to High Queen Jude, spends the night in the mortal realm with Jude and her family. He has a wonderful time in what, to him, is a very alien environment. He is struck by the stark contrast of her eclectic loving family and his—now mostly dead—loveless one. He also thinks of his and Jude’s conflicting feelings about Elfhame: his strong desire to leave it and hers to stay.
The next night, Cardan and Jude meet with the solitary fey, who request Jude’s assistance in dealing with a monster terrorizing the local woods. Queen Gliten’s Court also seeks revenge against this monster. Jude agrees to help. Cardan is irritated that the solitary fey focus only on Jude when making their request. He doesn’t want Jude to put herself in danger by fighting this monster alone.
Later, when Jude falls asleep, Cardan realizes that she was planning to sneak off to do exactly that. He initially plans to confront her but realizes that the monster is Aslog. Believing that he is the only one who can stop her, Cardan sneaks out alone instead.
Chapter 11 Summary: “The King of Elfhame Gets What He Deserves”
Armed with only Jude’s sword and a map, Cardan sets out in search of Aslog. He soon gets lost and stops at a gas station for directions. The gas station worker gives him another map and a book of local supernatural tales; Cardan pays with glamoured gold, a smug contrast to other fey who would pay with glamoured leaves. Cardan identifies probable faerie activity in the book and locates Aslog. When he finds her in the woods, she is grinding bones to add to her bread flour.
At first, Cardan attempts to bargain with her as High King. The attempt fails. Instead, Aslog tricks him into falling into a pit trap that she has littered with iron filings since all faeries are weak to iron. Cardan fends off her subsequent attack and buys time by telling her a story. This time, he is the narrator.
In his story, a boy is born with a clever tongue and uses it to hurt others so that they hate him. His villainy soon loses its luster, so he asks a troll woman to turn his heart into stone. Afterward, he feels nothing—no pleasure, no pain, no fear, and no delight. He leaves to seek his fortune but continues to be awful. He learns that a rich warlord will marry his cursed daughter to anyone who can spend three nights with her without fear. The boy tries his luck but begins to question the wisdom of turning his heart into stone.
The boy passes an amicable first night with the cursed monster girl. During the day, he encounters an old woman who requests his assistance with chores. In return, she tells him that the girl asked to become a monster because she didn’t want to be a warlord like her father. The second night is also amicable; the next day, the boy once again helps the old woman with chores, and she tells him that she bespelled the girl but was forced by the warlord to amend the spell to the three-day marriage terms—once the curse is broken, the girl must obey her father forevermore. On the third night, the boy meets the monster girl once more. He pretends to be afraid; the girl attacks him and shatters his stone heart, so he feels true emotions again. He tells the girl his solution—they will marry on the third day, but he will always be a little afraid of her so that her spell will never truly be broken, thus freeing her from her tyrannical father. She agrees, and the story ends happily.
Aslog disdainfully notes Cardan’s changes to the tale and guesses that the moral is that everyone gets what they deserve. Cardan reminds her of her past lessons that both people and stories can change and that faeries can tell stories despite their inability to lie because all stories contain “a truth, if not precisely the truth” (159). His story’s lessons are that everyone needs a heart, no matter how terrible, and that the hero’s actions are always justified by the storyteller.
Aslog remains unmoved by his exhortations to change, accusing him instead of trying to buy time until dawn and using the sun to turn her into stone. Cardan says that he was buying time for Jude to rescue him but tricks the troll again—he uses magic to rescue himself and then traps her in her own pit of iron filings. Dawn turns Aslog into stone. By the time Jude finds Cardan and scolds him for endangering himself and acting on a very not strategic plan, Cardan declares that he dislikes being a hero. Jude wraps things up, and Cardan is satisfied with his deeds. He is unapologetically, very sardonically, himself.
Chapters 10-11 Analysis
This section features the climax of the book, as well as an epilogue of sorts to the main Folk of the Air trilogy. The events of this section occur after The Queen of Nothing, book three in the series, once Cardan and Jude are grown and married and are the High King and High Queen of Elfhame. The section also connects the rest of the book to Chapter 1 of How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories, in which Cardan and Jude begin the story by leaving Elfhame for the mortal world.
This section shows how The Class and Race Divide can be overcome. Once antagonists, Cardan and Jude are now happily married and fully equals. As High King, Cardan has achieved the highest rank a faerie can possibly receive, while Jude, a supposedly “inferior” human, has done what no other human has achieved before—she is the first mortal High Queen of Elfhame, outranking every faerie except Cardan and proving that humans are equal, rather than inferior, to the fey. Although the novel features fey and humans, it implies that class and racial divides in the real world can be conquered and that no race or class is superior to another.
The solitary fey reinforce the idea that class and race distinctions are arbitrary, not inherent truths. Courtless, the solitary fey reside in the mortal world. They live separately from humans and view them with contempt. However, humans have more power over them with the ubiquity of iron. The fey are forced to the fringes of an oblivious society, rather than holding power openly as they do in Elfhame. This flips the script of Elfhame, where fey are considered superior to humans. It is a reminder to the reader that class and race superiority is an arbitrary construct, not an objective fact.
In this section, Cardan has metamorphosed into his mature, adult self, a complete contrast to the younger versions of himself. He openly embraces his mortal bride and human heritage, venturing out alone to interact with the human world. He remains a trickster out of necessity, hiding his faerie features from the humans. However, in contrast to his past self and faerie peers, he enchants his money when paying for purchases, using gold rather than leaves. Rather than turning humans into victims like he once would have, he proudly treats them with respect and condescends to faeries that do not.
The rule of three continues to be prevalent. This section features Cardan’s third and final development arc, as well as his third and final phase of life (adulthood). Similarly, in his third and final meeting with Aslog, their paths parallel and diverge one last time. Though Cardan had previously described himself as the stone-hearted boy, in the end, it is he who transforms and matures. In contrast, Aslog remains static, fixated on her grudge against Queen Gliten’s betrayal. This is represented by her turning into stone.
Like Cardan, the stone-hearted boy of the fairy tale transforms. The boy and girl choose the magic curses, rather than being forced to accept them as they did in previous versions. Though the boy’s stone heart shatters, the girl remains a monster, leaving the curse unbroken as a form of freedom. This retelling blurs the dichotomy of previous versions of the story, where the monster transformed and the stone-hearted boy remained the same. Cardan’s story is the only one with a happy ending, implying that blurred nuance is better than strict divisions.
This section underscores how stories contain veracity. Aslog and Cardan agree that “stories tell a truth, if not precisely the truth” (159). Cardan’s story also reflects the truth of his own experiences, strengthening his argument that the tale’s takeaways are that having a heart is necessary and that the hero is always justified by the storyteller. He asserts that the lessons he suggests are not the only ones possible in any story; there is always room for interpretation and thus transformation. Though Cardan speaks specifically about the tale he tells, this lesson—this truth—can be expanded to the novel as a whole and to storytelling in general.
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