Cardan lets himself fall back on the grass. He lies there for a long, dizzy moment, until he hears the tinkling of the leaves on Jude’s armor. He looks up to see her running toward him.
“What is wrong with you?” she shouts, falling to her knees by his side. Her hands go to his shirt, pushing it aside to look at the wound on his shoulder. Her fingers are cold against his flushed skin. It’s nice. He hopes she won’t take them away. “You told me not to come alone, and yet here you are—”
“I knew Aslog,” he says. “We were friends. Well, not precisely friends. But something. We were something. And I decided to play the hero. See how it felt. To try.”
“And?” she asks.
“I didn’t like it,” he admits. “Henceforth, I think we should consider our roles as monarchs to be largely decorative. It would be better for the low Courts and the solitary Folk to work things out on their own.”
“I think you have iron poisoning,” she tells him, which could possibly be true but is still a hurtful thing to say when he is making perfect sense.
“If you’re angry with me, it’s only that I executed your mad plan before you got a chance,” he points out.
“That’s absolutely untrue.” Jude helps him stand, propping herself under his good shoulder. “I am not so arrogant as to have begun my fight with a troll in the middle of the night. And I definitely wouldn’t have managed to talk her to death.”
“She’s not dead,” Cardan objects. “Merely imprisoned in stone. In fact, that reminds me. We need to alert our retainers to haul her back to Elfhame before sunset. She’s probably rather heavy.”
“Oh, rather,” Jude agrees.
“You didn’t hear the story I told,” he goes on. “A shame. It featured a handsome boy with a heart of stone and a natural aptitude for villainy. Everything you could like.”
She laughs. “You really are terrible, you know that? I don’t even understand why the things you say make me smile.”
He lets himself lean against her, lets himself hear the warmth in her voice. “There is one thing I did like about playing the hero. The only good bit. And that was not having to be terrified for you.”
“The next time you want to make a point,” Jude says, “I beg you not to make it so dramatically.”
His shoulder hurts, and she may be right about the iron poisoning. He certainly feels as though his head is swimming. But he smiles up at the trees, the looping electrical lines, the streaks of clouds.
“So long as you’re begging,” he says.
This was a strange and magical project from start to finish, and a lot of people helped me get it right.
First, I have to thank my agent, Joanna Volpe, for figuring out how this book could work; my editor, Alvina Ling, for getting on board with such a weird project; and our art director, Karina Granda, for shepherding it through the many steps to getting it in front of you. Thanks to Ruqayyah Daud and Jordan Hill for managing so many details and also managing me.
Thank you to Siena Koncsol and everyone in Marketing and Publicity at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, who have always been a joy to work with.
Thanks to Emma Matthewson and everyone at Hot Key Books for being enthusiastic about this series from the beginning.
Thank you to Rovina Cai for being willing to do this in the first place and then for putting up with me constantly asking for more Cardan extravagance.
Thank you to my critique partners for all your help. Thank you to Kelly Link for reading seventy thousand versions of this, to Cassandra Clare and Joshua Lewis and Steve Berman for convening a workshop with what was no doubt annoying swiftness, to Sarah Rees Brennan for helping me figure out what might happen in the first place and then helping me figure it out again when I went in a totally new direction, and to Leigh Bardugo for coming in and reminding me what a plot is and what I could do to suggest there was one.
And thank you to Jessica Cooper for letting me know what the people would like.
And, as always, thanks to Theo and Sebastian, for being both inspiration and distraction.