The Cruel Prince

“If I weren’t wearing a string of rowan berries, he could ensorcell me so that I thought dirt was some kind of delicacy. Only Madoc’s position would give him reason to hesitate. I do not move, do not touch the necklace hidden under the bodice of my tunic, the one that I hope will stop any glamour from working. The one I hope he doesn’t discover and rip from my throat [...] Since Cardan’s a prince, it’s more than likely no one has ever cautioned him, has ever stayed his hand. I never know how far he’ll go [...].”

This passage incorporates two important elements. The first

is the vulnerability that Jude’s mortal status entails, as evidenced by the fact that she must wear rowan berries for protection. The second is Cardan’s arrogance and sense of entitlement, which Jude muses must mean “no one has ever [...] stayed his hand” (29). 

“I bite the inside of my cheek. Of course I want to be like them. They’re beautiful as blades forged in some divine fire. They will live forever.”

Jude has a complex set of emotions about the faeries she lives among. While her classmates torment her, she is also envious of their beauty, immortality, and the sense of belonging they have in Faerie. While this intensely enmeshed disdain and admiration would be painful for anyone to endure, Jude nevertheless remains honest with herself; she confesses her enemies have desirable traits, and she confesses her envy of them. This mix of emotions makes Black’s story and Jude’s character more complex.

“They want me to be afraid, I know that. During the mock war that very afternoon, Valerian trips me, and Cardan whispers foul things in my ear. I head home with bruises on my skin from kicks, from falls. What they don’t realize is this: Yes, they frighten me, but I have always been scared, since the day I got here. I was raised by the man who murdered my parents, reared in a land of monsters. I live with that fear, let it settle into my bones, and ignore it. If I didn’t pretend not to be scared, I would hide under my owl-down coverlets in Madoc’s estate forever [...] I don’t desire to do as well in the tournament as one of the fey. I want to win. I do not yearn to be their equal. In my heart, I yearn to best them.”

Again, Jude’s complex relationship with the faeries is explored. Jude’s rumination gives the faeries a new context: At the same time as they are extraordinary, the faeries are also incredibly unremarkable, insofar as Jude’s terrifying origin story has already somewhat immunized her from the fear the faeries try to provoke. Moreover, the cruelty and malice with which her classmates treat her only fuels her desire to be superior, since they degrade her through their treatment. Jude’s wavering between fear and courage contributes to her emotional complexity as a character.

“I want to scream at him: Do you know how hard it is to always keep your head down? To swallow insults and endure outright threats? And yet I have done so. I thought it proved my toughness. I thought if you saw I could take whatever came at me and still smile, you would see that I was worthy. You’re no killer. He has no idea what I am. Maybe I don’t know, either. Maybe I never let myself find out.”

This passage highlights Jude’s teenage status. She is still discovering who she is and trying to weigh others’ assessments against her own self-knowledge. Madoc believes she isn’t capable of killing—but Jude proves him wrong. Usually, it would be a positive thing for one to be told that they are “no killer”, but because Madoc has raised Jude to be skilled in combat, Jude is stung by his words; they seem tantamount to telling her she lacks skill or inner strength.

“It turns out that passing between Faerie and the mortal world isn’t all that difficult. Faerie exists beside and below mortal towns, in the shadows of mortal cities, and at their rotten, derelict, worm-eaten centers. Faeries live in hills and valleys and barrows, in alleys and abandoned mortal buildings. Vivi isn’t the only faerie from our islands to sneak across the sea and into the human world with some regularity, although most don mortal guises to mess with people.”

Jude highlights the permeability that marks the border between Faerie and the human world. This permeability is explored several times in the book, most notably because Jude can send Oak to the mortal world with Vivi to protect him. Although it’s never discussed in the book, this permeability and Jude’s ability to pass between the two worlds suggests that she freely makes the decision to stay in Faerie.

“We strut through the JCPenney as though we’re the most dangerous things around. But when I see human families all together, especially families with sticky-mouthed, giggling little sisters, I don’t like the way I feel. Angry. I don’t imagine myself back in a life like theirs; what I imagine is going over there and scaring them until they cry. I would never, of course. I mean, I don’t think I would.”

Jude is sometimes alarmed by her thoughts and feelings, and when her life is juxtaposed against the “normalcy” of the human world, the discord is especially jarring to her. Jude’s reaction to the life she could have had is anger, not longing. This aligns with her combative predisposition. Her first instinct is to defend herself and fight, because of her upbringing with Madoc.

“ [...] I shake my head at the thrill running through me at the sheer lunacy of what I’m about to do. It’s the thrill of leaping without being able to see the ground below you, right before you realize that’s called falling. ‘You think because you can humiliate me, you can control me?’ I say, looking him in those black eyes. ‘Well, I think you’re an idiot. Since we started being tutored together, you’ve gone out of your way to make me feel like I’m less than you. And to coddle your ego, I have made myself less. I have made myself small, I have kept my head down. But it wasn’t enough to make you leave Taryn and me alone, so I’m not going to do that anymore. I am going to keep on defying you. I am going to shame you with my defiance. You remind me that I am a mere mortal and you are a prince of Faerie. Well, let me remind you that means you have much to lose and I have nothing. You may win in the end, you may ensorcell me and hurt me and humiliate me, but I will make sure you lose everything I can take from you on the way down. I promise you this’—I throw his own words back at him—‘this is the least of what I can do.’”

Even though she’s unsure of her ability to defeat Cardan, Jude’s anger summons the courage to stand up to him. She identifies the dynamic that has driven her relationship with Cardan, with him humiliating her to make her feel inferior. Her anger becomes a source of strength for her and helps her threaten Cardan in a way she didn’t expect. Her words also express an ironic reversal in their power dynamic; unlike Cardan, because Jude is powerless, she has nothing to lose—and this ultimately gives her the upper hand.

“I am choking to death. The worst part is the joy blooming inside me from the fruit, blotting out the terror. Everything is beautiful. My vision is swimming. I reach up to claw at Valerian’s face, but I am too dizzy to reach him. A moment later, it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to hurt him, not when I am so happy [...] I feel fine. I feel better than I have ever felt in my entire life. I’m glad the antidote is gone.”

This passage illustrates what happens when humans eat faerie fruit in Black’s world. Jude goes from misery and fear to enchanted, incapacitating bliss. Her powerlessness and indifference to what happens to her demonstrate her vulnerability as a mortal in Faerie.

“Because you’re like a story that hasn’t happened yet. Because I want to see what you will do. I want to be part of the unfolding of the tale.”

Locke’s words to Jude reveal much of his motivation for being involved with her. He seeks diversion, upheaval, and mischief—consistent with his characterization as a trickster—but Jude interprets this as innocent interest. Jude’s status as an underdog intrigues and fascinates Locke, but he also turns against her, blindsiding her with his secret relationship with Taryn.

“I should be glorying in seeing Cardan like this. I should be glad that his life sucks, maybe worse than mine, even though he’s a prince of Faerie and a horrible jerk and probably going to live forever. If someone had told me that I’d get an opportunity to see this, I would have thought the only thing I’d have to stifle was applause. But watching, I cannot help observing that beneath his defiance is fear. I know what it is to say the clever thing because you don’t want anyone to know how scared you are. It doesn’t make me like him any better, but for the first time he seems real. Not good, but real.”

Jude stumbles upon Cardan’s secret misery as she watches Balekin beat his brother, and she feels a sense of kinship with Cardan. This reaction surprises her, since she expected to feel triumphant. Just as her anger and resentment toward others surprise her, so too does her ability to feel empathy for her rival. Not only does she begin to see Cardan as a different person, but it is also a moment of self-discovery.

“I was frightened pretty much the whole time—how is that enjoyable? But the longer I think about it, the more I realize that I did sort of enjoy it. Most of my life is dreadful anticipation, a waiting for the other shoe to drop—at home, in classes, with the Court. Being afraid I would be caught spying was an entirely new sensation, one where I felt, at least, as though I knew exactly what to be scared of. I knew what it would take to win.”

The routine misery of Jude’s daily life is highlighted with the phrase “dreadful anticipation”. This agonized hypervigilance, however, somehow fundamentally contrasts with the fear she experienced as a spy; She realizes that her missions for Dain exhilarate and empower her rather than destabilize her. Jude frames the difference in terms of knowledge: “I knew […]” (121). However, another fundamental contrast between her past fear and her present fear is that, in her spy missions, it is a position she’s actually chosen, and she has agency. At the same time, Jude realizes that the chronic “dreadful anticipation” has helped prepare her for her missions—and she turns her traumatic history to her advantage.

“Every day that I don’t beg Cardan for forgiveness over a feud he started is a day I win. He can humiliate me, but every time he does and I don’t back down, he makes himself less powerful. After all, he’s throwing everything he’s got at someone as weak as I am and it’s not working. He’s going to take himself down.”

Jude begins to feel as though she has the upper hand against Cardan. She interprets Cardan’s slights and contempt as damaging to himself, not to her. This puts her in a position of power, tipping the scales toward her favor for the first time. This hinted role-reversal in their power dynamic foreshadows Cardan’s eventual enchanted servitude of a year and a day.

“Of course, Taryn is right about stories. Bad things happen to those princesses. They are pricked with thorns, poisoned by apples, married to their own fathers. They have their hands cut off and their brothers turned into swans, their lovers chopped up and planted in basil pots. They vomit up diamonds. When they walk, it feels as though they’re walking on knives. They still manage to look nice.”

Jude vividly itemizes one of the tropes of fairy stories when it comes to women—namely, that “bad things” will happen to them. The expectation placed on such heroines to embody traditional femininity (to “look nice”) is upheld by Jude, who aspires to mask her hardships with beauty. However, Jude’s sardonic musings call into question the relationship between ornamental beauty and femininity.

“When I pass the library, I hesitate. The girl is still inside, mechanically lifting books from a pile and placing them on shelves. She will keep doing that until she’s told to do something else, until she collapses, until she fades away, unremembered. As if she were nothing. I cannot leave her here. I don’t have anything to go back to in the mortal world, but she might. And yes, it’s a betrayal of Prince Dain’s faith in me, a betrayal of Faerie itself. I know that. But all the same, I can’t leave her. There is a kind of relief in realizing it.”

Jude’s inner journey toward self-knowledge continues when she grapples with the question of whether to release the servant girl. Just as she was surprised to realize that she can feel kinship with Cardan, she is startled and relieved when she realizes that her morals have not been completely corrupted by Faerie. The low status of human servants in the kingdom is emphasized by the phrases “fade away” and “unremembered”.

“My hands feel sweaty as I draw out the miniature crossbow, seeking to steady it against my arm. I have grown up in a house of butchery. I have trained for this. My principal childhood memory is of bloodshed. I have killed already tonight. And yet, for a moment, I am not sure I can do it. You’re no killer.”

As Jude faces the prospect of killing the spy, she must confront opposing ideas about herself. She knows she is capable of killing because she just killed Valerian. At the same time, Madoc’s words have emotional weight because she considers him a father figure who knows her well.

“What I feel is a kind of nervous adrenaline-soaked readiness. I seem to have passed some kind of threshold. Before, I never knew how far I would go. Now I believe I have the answer. I will go as far as there is to go. I will go way too far. He raises both brows. ‘You’re good at this. Nice marksmanship and a stomach for violence.’ I am surprised. The Ghost is not given to compliments. I have vowed to become worse than my rivals. Two murders completed in a single night mark a descent I should be proud of. Madoc could not have been more wrong about me.”

While Jude had just grappled with inner conflict, weighing Madoc words against her own self-understanding as a capable killer—the conflict is now resolved. Jude begins forming her adult identity when she kills the spy and the Ghost praises her for it. Madoc’s influence is identified explicitly here, and Jude begins diverging from it when she defies his expectations. From here on in the story, Jude’s sense of belonging will increasingly be tied to the spies and her work with them, not her family.

“Maybe there’s something broken in me from watching my parents being murdered. Maybe my messed-up life turned me into someone capable of doing messed-up things. But another part of me wonders if I was raised by Madoc in the family business of bloodshed. Am I like this because of what he did to my parents or because he was my parent?”

Jude returns to Madoc’s impact in this passage, and more deeply examines its ambiguity. Jude wonders how much of her identity comes from her innate personality, from the trauma of her parents’ murder, and from Madoc’s influence. The phrase “family business of bloodshed” (216) portends the discovery of Oak’s lineage, which will force him into the arena of bloodshed and intrigue as well.

“Just seeing [the Roach] has filled me with a sense of finally belonging to this place. He and the Ghost and the Bomb are not precisely my friends, but they actually seem to like me, and I am not inclined to split hairs. I have a place with them and a purpose.”

Jude realizes that her relationship with the other spies, and her status as one of them, bring her a sense of fulfillment and belonging she hasn’t had before. Unlike with her classmates, Jude has a sense of being liked and respected by her fellow misfits. This will cement the spies’ relationships at the end of the book as they navigate the situation with Cardan and Balekin.

“All my life, I grew up thinking of the High King and Prince Dain as our unquestioned rulers. I believed Madoc to be entirely loyal to them; I was loyal, too. I knew Madoc was bloodthirsty. I guess I knew he wanted more conquest, more war, more battle. But I thought he considered wanting war to be part of his role as the general, while part of the High King’s role was to keep him in check. Madoc talked about honor, about obligation, about duty. He’d raised Taryn and me in the name of those things; it seemed logical he was willing to put up with other unpleasantness.”

Some of Madoc’s ethical beliefs and ideals are described here. He has raised Jude and Taryn as his family and has instilled their loyalty to him and his household. Madoc begins taking advantage of the shifting situation with the monarchy to achieve his true goal—to place Oak on the throne and rule through him.

“‘You hate the Folk.’ Taryn’s eyes flash as she spins her sword in an elegant strike. ‘You never cared about Locke. He was just another thing to take from Cardan.’

That staggers me enough that she’s able to get under my guard. Her blade just kisses my side before I whirl away, out of her reach.

She goes on. ‘You think I’m weak.’

‘You are weak,’ I tell her. ‘You’re weak and pathetic and I—’

‘I’m a mirror,’ she shouts. ‘I’m the mirror you don’t want to look at.’”

Taryn identifies the reason Jude is so angry toward her—Jude sees things in herself that she projects onto her twin. Taryn recognizes the unfairness of this treatment, but by the time she is dueling her sister it is too late to point it out to Jude in a different way. Jude will keep trying to distinguish herself from her family and her sister as the book draws to a close.

“[Taryn] looks like a lady of the Gentry, if one does not stare overmuch at the rounded curves of her ears. When I allow myself to truly think on it, I cannot fault Locke for choosing her. I am violent. I’ve been poisoning myself for weeks. I am a killer and a liar and a spy. I get why he chose her. I just wish she had chosen me.”

Jude’s feelings of betrayal are directed more at Taryn than at Locke, although she is upset with him too. This shows that she values her relationship with Taryn and hoped to receive the same care from her sister. Jude’s assessment of herself as “a killer and a liar and a spy” reflect the events of the novel that have shaped her identity.

“Against my will, I recall the way he held that sword in the study with Balekin and the sloppiness of his technique. I thought he’d been doing that deliberately, to annoy his brother. Now, for the first time, I consider the possibility that he just doesn’t much like sword fighting. That he’d never learned it particularly well. That if we ever fought, I would win. I consider all the things I have done to become a worthy adversary of him, but maybe I haven’t been fighting Cardan at all. Maybe I’ve been fighting my own shadow.”

Again, Jude realizes that she might be transferring her own issues and desires onto someone else—this time, it’s Cardan. She continues her journey of understanding and becoming more empathetic toward her enemy. Righting the misplaced conception of Cardan and what motivates him frees Jude to make more strategic decisions in the last few chapters of the book.

“I hate you because your father loves you even though you’re a human brat born to his unfaithful wife, while mine never cared for me, though I am a prince of Faerie. I hate you because you don’t have a brother who beats you. [...] Besides which, after the tournament, Balekin never failed to throw you in my face as the mortal who could best me [...] I don’t know about being angry? I don’t know about being afraid? You’re not the one bargaining for your life.”

Some of the motivations for Cardan’s animosity are revealed in this discussion with Jude, and these motivations center primarily on envy and shame. Jude is loved by her father; Cardan is not. Jude has no brother who beats her; Cardan does. Moreover, this same abusive brother uses Jude as something to measure Cardan against—and find him lacking. Cardan’s assessment of himself as being the powerless one in their relationship reflects their increasingly reversed power dynamic.