How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

Cardan and Nicasia shift from friends to casual lovers. They tell each other secrets, including the prophecy at Cardan’s birth that hints at the destruction of the Elfhame crown and throne. Nicasia suggests that Cardan become her future consort. Initially, Cardan likes the idea—he can rule with her in the Undersea while his siblings squabble over ruling Elfhame. Nicasia takes him to the Undersea, but even with enchantments that allow him to breathe underwater, Cardan feels oppressed and powerless beneath the waves; he realizes that he could never accept an underwater fate. He returns to land, desperate for air, and deceives Nicasia into thinking that he enjoyed the visit. Cardan thinks of Jude.

As Cardan regains what little favor he’d ever received from his father, he embraces his reputation as a murderer and a villain, excelling in causing trouble. One night, one of Cardan’s sisters gives him a book written by a human, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass. Intrigued, Cardan accepts it.

The next night, Cardan encounters Aslog a second time. She carries a basket of bones and tells him another story. In this version, the boy has a wicked heart and is awful to everyone around him. A witch curses him, turning his heart into stone, so he feels nothing—“[n]ot fear nor love nor delight” (80). 

The boy likes his stone heart and continues his villainy when he leaves to seek his fortune. A rich man offers his wealth to anyone who can spend three nights with his cursed daughter without fear. The boy decides to try his luck but is unnerved that his stone heart prevents him from enjoying the rich man’s good treatment. The first two nights go well. On the third night, he discovers the truth—the rich man’s daughter already has a lover. She was cursed by her lover’s witch mother for rejecting him, but the girl had only rejected him out of fear that her rich father would slay him. The girl’s lover curses himself to become a monster to save the girl, and on the third night, he attacks the stone-hearted boy, shattering his stone heart. The boy, who has fallen for the cursed girl as well, tries to fight her lover, but the two monsters flee. The rich man, upon hearing the truth the next day and finding his daughter gone, makes the boy with the once-stone heart his heir. Thus does the boy with the wicked heart make his fortune.

Cardan initially scoffs at the story’s changes and believes that the initial moral is too heavy handed—awful people are eaten. He again feels that there is no lesson in this tale. Aslog corrects him on both fronts: Stories, like boys, can change, and even stone hearts can be broken.

Uninterested in his future, Cardan embraces debauchery. Balekin, a hedonist himself, encourages this behavior. One night, he invites Cardan and his posse to one of his parties. Cardan gets drunk and imbibes many different recreational substances. Locke and Nicasia flirt with each other throughout the night; Cardan, who is still romantically involved with Nicasia, takes note. Later, he discovers them in his room. Furious, he wakes them and fights with Locke, who tries to manipulate himself out of blame. Cardan breaks up with Nicasia and kicks them out.

Feeling that his heart is made of glass rather than stone or fire, Cardan drowns his upset feelings with alcohol and substances. Three days later, Cardan, still inebriated, interrupts class on horseback to prove that he is fine. He uses his princely status to cancel lessons for the day. Nicasia is horrified at his antics, but Locke loves them. Jude hatefully stands up to him. Cardan is briefly confused by her loathing but antagonizes her anyway, feeling as powerless and futureless as she is supposed to be.

When he returns home, still very drunk, Balekin already knows everything. He scolds Cardan for letting the betrayal affect him and reminds him that Queen Orlagh of the Undersea is an important ally, hinting at his own political machinations. He tells Cardan to stay on good terms with Nicasia. Cardan realizes that he had almost become the very person he didn’t want to be—someone mooning after Nicasia.

Time passes, and Cardan becomes fond of human novels. One day, Nicasia approaches him. Locke has abandoned her for one of the human twins. Nicasia wants Cardan to take her back; Cardan refuses, despite the opportunity to gain political power. The members of his posse are friends again, though they are more vicious than before. Angry at Locke and aware of his manipulations, Nicasia asks Cardan to punish both him and the human twins; Cardan does so willingly.

Later, Cardan’s posse bullies Jude and her sister, pushing Jude into a river. He expects her to grovel, but she refuses to be cowed; it is Cardan who eventually retreats. Jude and her contempt for him become Cardan’s obsession. He feels that she sees through his villainous veneer; increasingly, he wants to put her in her proper place as an inferior human.

Years later, when Cardan studies how to be a spy, he thinks about Balekin’s command to choose a future. As he tries to learn a coin trick, his spy tutor tells him that he can’t control fate; he can only control himself.