How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories recap

A short companion volume to the Folk of the Air trilogy, gathering linked tales about Cardan, told from outside his own point of view and framed by his present life as High King of Elfhame with Jude as his queen. The stories go back to his birth, to the prophecy that the old High King's youngest son would bring ruin on the crown, and to a mother who saw no advantage in him and a father who kept him landless and unclaimed. They follow a child nobody would take responsibility for, his eventual place in the household of his eldest brother Balekin, who taught cruelty as a form of authority, and the notorious, idle young prince the court came to gossip about. Set against these are the present-day sections, in which the same person wears the crown and lives with a reputation assembled by people who were never fair to him. The book takes its title from that: Cardan distrusts stories because stories about him were told long before he had any say in them.

Previously, in the Folk of the Air trilogy: mortal twins Jude and Taryn Duarte were raised in Faerie by Madoc, the redcap general who killed their parents. Jude fought for a place at the High Court, spied for Prince Dain, and was tormented by Prince Cardan, the High King's youngest son. When Prince Balekin murdered the High King and most of his heirs with Madoc's help, Jude captured Cardan, the last heir able to pass the crown, and made him High King in exchange for his oath to obey her for a year and a day, keeping her small brother Oak, the secret true heir, out of Madoc's reach. Ruling as Cardan's seneschal, Jude survived assassins, Madoc's plotting and captivity in the Undersea. When Madoc moved against the throne, Cardan married her, making her High Queen, and then exiled her to the mortal world. She returned in her twin's place after Locke's death, the marriage was acknowledged, and in the final confrontation an old prophecy attached to Cardan's birth was fulfilled: he was turned into a serpent that ravaged the court, and Jude killed it, restoring him. Madoc was defeated and exiled, and Jude and Cardan now rule Elfhame together. This novella looks back at Cardan's own history.

The book opens the way a book of tales does, presenting the High King of Elfhame as a figure other people tell stories about, and then going back to where those stories start. Cardan was the last of the old High King's children, born to a court lady, Asha, who expected the birth to raise her standing and found that it did not. A prophecy attached itself to him at once: this son would bring ruin on the crown of Elfhame. His father, Eldred, responded by keeping him at a distance, giving him no lands, no title and no household, and his mother, having no use for a child who could not advance her, gave him no care either. The early tales follow a boy who belonged to nobody in a palace full of people who all knew exactly what had been foretold about him, and who learned young that attention, of any kind, was easier to get than affection.

The middle tales cover the years that made the prince the court gossiped about. Cardan is eventually taken into the household of his eldest brother, Balekin, which is the closest thing to a home he is offered and is run on violence: Balekin's method of raising him is to demonstrate that authority means being able to hurt people who cannot hurt you back, and to punish any sign that the lesson has not been absorbed. What the court sees from outside is a landless youngest prince with no responsibilities, a talent for spectacle and a habit of cruelty, and it tells the appropriate stories about him. The tales sit that outside view against what produced it, and the present-day sections, in which the same man now holds the crown and is married to a mortal queen, show him living with a reputation he can neither disprove nor entirely disown.

The final tales bring the sequence up to the present and close it. Cardan is High King of Elfhame, ruling with Jude as High Queen, and the collection's separate strands, the prophecy, the mother who would not claim him, the father who would not either, the brother who taught him what power looked like, resolve into a single account of how the boy became the man on the throne. The book does not rehabilitate him; the cruelties in the earlier stories are left as they were. What it does is show why a person who has been narrated all his life by people with no interest in being fair to him would come to hate stories, which is where the title lands. It ends with Cardan in a position none of the prophecies allowed for: still the subject of everyone else's tales, but no longer alone in them, and finally in a position to act rather than to be described.

The collection closes in the present, with Cardan settled on a throne he was never meant to hold and Jude beside him as High Queen. Nothing in the earlier tales is undone by it: the neglected child, the boy raised in his brother's violent household, and the notorious young prince are plainly the same person as the king, and the court's stories about him are not lies so much as accounts written by people who were never going to give him the benefit of the doubt. The book's argument, made through the sequence rather than stated, is that a story told about someone before they can answer becomes a cage, and that Cardan's hatred of stories is the hatred of a person who was defined by them from birth. What has changed is that he is no longer alone inside them: the marriage holds, the reign holds, and he now has both the power to make his own account and one person who does not need the account to know him. The trilogy's outcome is left standing, and the novella ends as a companion piece to it rather than a continuation, filling in the childhood that the main books only glanced at.