Your girl has just finished binge-reading The Folk of The Air series by Holly Black a few days back, and let me just tell you, I have been stuck in a reading slump for a good part of the whole 2019, and by randomly deciding to crack open The Cruel Prince and give it a read, this series quite single-handedly drag me out of my reading slump with a force of 100 horses.



And of course, when something that life changing happens, your girl gotta pay tributes by basically fangirling over it for 10 weeks straight and peruse over all the quotes and then fangirl some more.

I feel like by now, life has honestly just turned into a series of fangirl moments where I just go gaga over a certain books over movies for a while, and not going to lie, I’m all for it.

“I’ve seen many impossible things,” the man said. “I have seen the acorn before the oak. I have seen the spark before the flame. But never have I seen such as this: A dead woman living. A child born from nothing.”

In Faerie, there are no fish sticks, no ketchup, no television.

I’ve got a lot to lose, too. But so what?

“See what we can do with a few words? And everything can get so much worse. We can enchant you to run around on all fours, barking like a dog. We can curse you to wither away for want of a song you’ll never hear again or a kind word from my lips. We’re not mortal. We will break you. You’re a fragile little thing; we’d hardly need to try. Give up.”

“Never,” I say.

He smiles, smug. “Never? Never is like forever—too big for mortals to comprehend.”

“Get down on your knees,” Cardan says, looking insufferably pleased with himself. His fury has transmuted into gloating. “Beg. Make it pretty. Flowery. Worthy of me.”

And Cardan is even more beautiful than the rest, with black hair as iridescent as a raven’s wing and cheekbones sharp enough to cut out a girl’s heart.

I hate him more than all the others.

I hate him so much that sometimes when I look at him, I can hardly breathe.

“Do you know what mortal means? It means born to die. It means deserving of death. That’s what you are, what defines you—dying. And yet here you stand, determined to oppose me even as you rot away from the inside out, you corrupt, corrosive mortal creature.”

“He’s flint, you’re tinder.”

“What happiness do you have? Rutting and breeding. You’d go mad if you accepted the truth of what you are. You are nothing. You barely exist at all. Your only purpose is to create more of your kind before you die some pointless and agonizing death.”

I look him in the eye. “And?”

“Tell me, could you love me?” he asks, seemingly out of nowhere. “You really hate me, don’t you?” he asks, his smile growing.

“Almost as much as you hate me,” I say, thinking of the page with my name scratched on it. Thinking of the way he looked at me when he was drunk in the hedge maze. The way he’s looking at me now. He lets go of my hand.

“Until we spar again.”

I am hungry, I realize, but I feel too sick to eat. Is this what it is to be brokenhearted?

“Everything is spiraling into chaos anyway,” says Cardan.

“Might as well have some fun. Don’t you think, Jude?”

“Have I told you how hideous you look tonight?” Cardan asks, leaning back in the elaborately carved chair, the warmth of his words turning the question into something like a compliment.

“No,” I say, glad to be annoyed back into the present. “Tell me.”

“I cannot,” he says.

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