Opening
In these chapters, Jude Duarte pushes past fear into ruthless resolve. A near-murder at school, a romantic gambit, a doomed rescue, and a blood-soaked coronation tear down Elfhame’s order and harden Jude into someone willing to pay any price for power.
What Happens
Chapter 16
Jude’s days blur into poison tolerance, war lessons with Madoc, and covert missions for Prince Dain Greenbriar. At school, an uneasy truce holds with Prince Cardan Greenbriar and his circle. Locke flirts openly, confusing Taryn Duarte and needling Nicasia, who confronts him about Jude; Locke needles her back, implying Cardan’s pride is what truly bleeds.
The ceasefire breaks in a tower classroom. Jude falls asleep and wakes on the floor, her rowan berry necklace gone. Valerian orders her, glamoured, to hail Cardan and leap to her death—but Dain’s geas shields her. Furious, Valerian attacks. Remembering Madoc’s lessons, Jude drives a cold iron knife into his side and runs, bloody and shaking.
On the lawn, Cardan stops her at swordpoint, sneering at the stain of blood. Jude lifts her knife and promises she can spill more. Locke arrives, slings an arm around her, and steers her away. The escalation of Cruelty and Bullying collides with Jude’s refusal to be prey, a turning point in her struggle with Fear and Powerlessness.
Chapter 17
As they walk, Jude tells Locke she stabbed Valerian. Locke waves it off: Valerian won’t confess to being bested by a mortal. He claims Cardan isn’t a leader—he’s a lightning rod for each friend’s private vice: Nicasia’s hunger for status, Valerian’s lust for pain, Locke’s taste for theatrics. He takes Jude to his family estate, its beauty threaded with emptiness, and tells the story of his mother, Liriope, poisoned with blusher mushroom after becoming entangled with the High King. Jude remembers the note in Prince Balekin Greenbriar’s study.
At the top of the tallest tower, amid night air and the distant twinkle of mortal lights, Jude and Locke kiss. He invites her to a party that night; she accepts, donning a gorgeous, slightly decaying gown from Liriope’s wardrobe. In the hedge maze, Cardan is already drunk. Nicasia spits an insult; Locke whisks Jude away, and Jude answers by kissing him again and again, feeling Cardan’s gaze like a blade. The scene glows with the ache of Mortality vs. Immortality, desire against the cold permanence of faerie time.
Chapter 18
In the morning, Jude changes back into her own clothes and finds a golden acorn in the dress pocket. She pockets it. Outside, Nicasia reminisces about her broken betrothal to Cardan and says his nature is “to ruin things.” Later, during a lecture on succession, the knight Dulcamara explains: the High Crown passes only to Greenbriar descendants, and murdering the crowned wearer kills the murderer.
After class, Taryn confronts Jude about staying out all night; Jude parries by teasing Taryn about her secret suitor. Alone, Jude examines the acorn and discovers it’s a puzzle. Inside, a tiny mechanical bird plays Liriope’s last plea: protect my son; hide the truth of my death. Combined with Dulcamara’s lesson, Jude reinterprets the note from Balekin’s study: “provenance” likely means the origin of the blusher mushrooms used on Liriope, not a plan to poison Dain. The scent of Power, Politics, and Ambition pulls her back toward Hollow Hall.
Chapter 19
Jude sneaks into Hollow Hall again, disguised as a servant. The incriminating letter is gone, but Sophie—the glamoured human—still dusts the library, hollow-eyed. Jude cannot leave her. She salts Sophie’s tongue to break the enchantment and drags the shaking girl out, nearly colliding with Cardan on the way.
At Madoc’s, Jude enlists Vivienne Duarte to ferry Sophie to the mortal world on ragwort steeds. Vivi suggests Jude is trying to save their mother by proxy. Over the sea, the horror of Faerie crushes Sophie’s fragile calm. Pockets weighted with stones, she lets go and vanishes into the dark water. Jude and Vivi search the waves. The sea keeps its secret.
Chapter 20
Dain summons Jude at dawn, furious—not about Sophie, but about Valerian and her immunity to glamour. He decides to test absolute obedience. “Stab your hand,” he commands. Jude hesitates, then drives a blade through her palm. Oriana interrupts, misreading the scene as a dangerous affair and revealing her own past as the High King’s consort—and that Liriope likely died in a princely rivalry.
Madoc gifts Jude a sword named Nightfell, forged by her mortal father, and speaks, almost tenderly, about the past. Hours later, at the coronation, the court assembles. Madoc’s closest commanders stand at strategic posts. As King Eldred lifts the crown toward Dain, Balekin challenges. The guards—Madoc’s creatures—do nothing. Balekin murders Elowyn. When Dain calls for aid, Madoc steps forward and cuts him down.
Panic detonates. Balekin kills Taniot and Eldred. From the rafters, the Ghost kills Princess Caelia to stop her from crowning Balekin. Princess Rhyia takes her own life. The carnage lays bare Family, Loyalty, and Betrayal. Balekin reaches for the crown and burns: it will not accept him. Lord Roiben announces a deadline—three days to be crowned by a Greenbriar or the other courts refuse fealty. The dais smokes with blood. The throne stands empty.
Character Development
Jude steps across a line she cannot uncross. Each choice—iron, kiss, rescue, self-wound—chisels away the last of her human softness and replaces it with calculation.
- Jude: Uses lethal force against Valerian; claims public defiance before Cardan; risks everything to free Sophie and is broken by the outcome; accepts pain on command to prove loyalty; refocuses from serving a prince to seizing leverage herself.
- Madoc: Reveals the depth of his long game; pairs ersatz fatherly warmth (Nightfell, shared memories) with ruthless regicide; positions loyal commanders for a seamless coup.
- Prince Dain: Exposes his cruelty and hubris by treating spies as breakable tools; underestimates brute force and dies mid-intrigue.
- Locke: Frames his motives as “dramatics,” curating scenes and emotions; entwines tenderness and manipulation; invites Jude into his family’s tragic mythology.
- Prince Balekin: Ambitious, brutal, and dependent on Madoc’s machinery; murders siblings but cannot command the crown’s magic.
Themes & Symbols
The contest for power consumes private lives and public rituals alike. Ambition demands sacrifice: Jude’s bloodied palm, Dain’s shattered certainty, Madoc’s patience bursting into violence, and Balekin’s grasp scorched by the crown’s refusal. Politics here is not ceremony; it is appetite sharpened into action, the engine of the coup and the recalibration of every allegiance.
Cruelty escalates from classroom torment to assassination on the dais, forcing a reckoning with fear and agency. Mortality carves a hard line through Faerie: Sophie’s mind breaks and chooses silence beneath the waves, while Jude chooses to harden and endure. Nightfell, forged by Jude’s mortal father yet gifted by her faerie guardian, embodies her divided inheritance—steel she can wield, love and hatred she cannot untangle.
Key Quotes
“If I cannot be better than them, I will become so much worse.”
- Jude reframes survival as domination. The line marks her pivot from defensive endurance to offensive strategy, justifying choices that will cost her blood and conscience.
“His nature is to ruin things.”
- Nicasia’s verdict on Cardan foreshadows the way he catalyzes chaos without steering it. Her bitterness also exposes how desire and destruction tangle in the Gentry’s affections.
“Stab your hand.”
- Dain’s command reduces loyalty to performance under pain. Jude’s compliance binds her to a path where power is proven in scars, not promises—and makes his death hours later sting with wasted devotion.
“Be crowned by a blood relative within three days, or we refuse our fealty.”
- Roiben’s pronouncement turns massacre into deadline, transforming grief into a political clock that drives the next phase of the struggle for Elfhame.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
This sequence detonates the novel’s center. The courtly status quo collapses in a single ceremony, shattering Jude’s alliances and clearing the board for a new game defined by leverage, secrets, and speed. Her choices—killing to live, bleeding to prove, rescuing and failing—forge the mindset she needs for the chaos ahead.
The crown’s rejection of Balekin and the three-day ultimatum lock the realm into a volatile interregnum. With Dain dead, Madoc unmasked, and the Greenbriar line in tatters, Jude’s survival now depends on engineering power rather than serving it. The girl who refuses to be prey becomes the strategist willing to out-monster monsters.