Prince Cardan

Quick Facts

• Role: High King of Elfhame; narrator and subject of How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories
• First appearance here: A neglected stable boy and a vicious princeling who becomes a ruler
• Key relationships: spouse and strategic partner Jude Duarte; father High King Eldred; abusive brother and tutor Balekin

Who They Are

Beneath the lacquered decadence and razor-edged wit, Prince Cardan Greenbriar is a boy taught to survive by making himself the monster first. This collection reveals the private logic of his cruelty: if he can be the villain, no one can hurt him worse than he already hurts. Cardan’s opulence—black, curling hair; collars sharp as his ears; cuffs of feathers—works like armor, just as his hidden, betraying tail advertises the feelings he refuses to voice. More than any other figure in Elfhame, he embodies both the seduction and danger of stories, making him a living study in The Power and Peril of Stories and the battle over Identity and Self-Perception.

Personality & Traits

Cardan’s charisma hides old wounds and an iron talent for observation. He performs indolence to disguise how swiftly he reads a room, and he performs wickedness to keep anyone from seeing how much he yearns. His cruelty, wit, and hedonism are not contradictions to his tenderness so much as the scaffolding that kept him standing until tenderness became possible.

• Cruelty as armor: He terrorizes classmates and singles out mortals—most memorably Jude at the river—not because he is fearless, but because fear rules him. The performance lets him control humiliation rather than be ambushed by it.
• Wit like a blade: His sarcasm keeps people at a distance and lets him dictate the terms of every exchange. Mockery becomes the safe place to speak when sincerity is lethal at court.
• Hedonist, on purpose: Taught by Balekin to numb himself with “a vast variety and quantity of wines” and powders, he uses excess to silence shame and grief rather than pure appetite.
• Vulnerable, then vigilant: Neglect from Eldred and torment from his siblings leave him “nourished on cat milk and contempt,” which makes dependence terrifying—and makes his eventual openness radical.
• Perceptive and political: Even when he pretends not to care, he grasps how stories, oaths, and optics work in Faerie—and later bends those same tools to protect, rather than punish.

Character Journey

Cardan’s arc moves from scapegoat to self-made villain to a ruler choosing love over spectacle. As a child, he sleeps in the stables and longs to be sought; then exile to Hollow Hall teaches him that being feared is safer than being forgotten. Under Balekin’s “lessons,” he chooses not a heart of stone but a “heart of fire,” building a cruel little court with Nicasia, Locke, and Valerian. Nicasia’s betrayal and Locke’s smug theatricality curdle his faith in narrative itself; stories become excuses people use to hurt you. Jude’s defiance refracts that belief—she sees him, resists him, and refuses both his script and her own. In the frame narrative, as High King, he confronts Aslog of the West; by retelling her tale, he claims the quill from the hand that wrote him and deploys story not as a trap but as a rescue. Choosing Jude and the crown means choosing accountability, making his reign an experiment in Love and Redemption: power as protection, not performance.

Key Relationships

• Jude Duarte: Jude is the axis of his transformation. He hungers for and resents her strength, trying to break the thing he cannot possess—until possession gives way to partnership. With her, he learns that vulnerability can be a tactic and a truth, and that love thrives alongside ambition when both refuse to flinch.
• Aslog of the West: Aslog’s tales script Cardan as a cursed boy with a wicked tongue. Their final contest in the mortal world lets him flip the narrative: by telling the story himself, he denies her power and demonstrates mercy as mastery.
• Balekin: Balekin fashions Cardan’s persona through ritualized degradation, teaching that power equals cruelty. Cardan eventually overturns that lesson, but the scar-logic—humiliate or be humiliated—explains much of his early behavior.
• Nicasia: First love as mirror and accomplice. Their glamorous malice collapses when she betrays him, confirming his suspicion that affection is a stage trick and pushing him deeper into self-made monstrosity.
• Locke: A storyteller who treats other people’s lives as set pieces. Locke’s “it’s just a story” ethos is the seed of Cardan’s hatred of stories—until Cardan learns to wield narrative responsibly.

Defining Moments

Cardan’s life is punctuated by scenes that rewire how he understands power, love, and story.

• The first tale in the stables: As a lonely child, he hears the fable of the boy with a wicked tongue and a heart of stone. Why it matters: It gives him a role to play—monster as survival strategy—and foreshadows his struggle to escape that script.
• The beating at Hollow Hall: Balekin forces the ensorcelled mortal Margaret to whip him. Why it matters: He chooses a “heart of fire” here, deciding that if he must suffer, he will also scorch; it’s the birth of the villain he thinks he must be.
• Catching Nicasia and Locke: Discovering their affair detonates his fragile belief in loyalty. Why it matters: The betrayal pushes him into conspicuous cruelty (including the drunken horseback terror at the palace school) and cements his loathing of stories-as-excuses.
• The river confrontation with Jude: He taunts, she refuses to beg, and he retreats first. Why it matters: He recognizes that she unsettles the story he tells about himself—and that her power over him is the truth he can’t mock away.
• Becoming the storyteller: Trapped in a pit, he defeats Aslog by rewriting her own story to save Jude. Why it matters: Cardan claims authorship of his identity, using narrative not to wound but to shield, the clearest sign of his kingship.

Essential Quotes

A prince of Faerie, nourished on cat milk and contempt, born into a family overburdened with heirs, with a nasty little prophecy hanging over his head—since the hour of Cardan’s birth, he has been alternately adored and despised. This line compresses his origin: indulgence without affection, destiny without welcome. It frames his cruelty as a response to being both spectacle and surplus, setting up why fear feels safer than love.

Not a heart of stone, but a heart of fire. Cardan rejects numbness for fury, choosing pain that moves over pain that freezes. The mantra explains his early theatrics and the later pivot—fire that once burned others becomes light he uses to guide and guard.

Villains were wonderful. They got to be cruel and selfish, to preen in front of mirrors and poison apples, and trap girls on mountains of glass. They indulged all their worst impulses, revenged themselves for the least offense, and took every last thing they wanted. Here he glamorizes villainy as freedom from humiliation. The irony is that this “freedom” is its own cage; he discovers that power without tenderness only confirms the story others wrote for him.

"Stop telling me who I am," he snarled, teeth bared. "I am tired of your stories." A refusal of Aslog, Locke, and the court all at once. Cardan names the violence of being narrated by others and signals the shift from being a character to being an author of himself.

"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." This confession reveals how love reorders his motives: kingship becomes a means to protect, not merely posture. The line folds ferocity into devotion, defining what his heroism looks like when it finally arrives.