The world of Elfhame in The Cruel Prince teems with immortal schemers and mortal interlopers, each angling for survival, status, or the crown itself. Ambition collides with betrayal as families fracture, secret courts take shape, and a coup redraws the map of power. This guide charts the characters who bend the High Court’s glittering cruelty to their own ends—or are broken by it.
Main Characters
Jude Duarte
Bold, mortal, and relentless, Jude is raised in the High Court after her parents are slain by her foster father, Madoc. She channels humiliation and fear into strategy, training as a warrior and later embracing espionage under Prince Dain. Defined by her rivalry-turned-chemistry with Prince Cardan and her widening rift with her twin, Taryn Duarte, Jude learns to weaponize secrecy, oaths, and her own ruthlessness. In the chaos of the coronation massacre, she orchestrates a breathtaking gambit—crowning Cardan and binding him to her will—recasting herself from despised mortal to the hidden power behind the throne. Her arc sharpens the book’s exploration of Power, Politics, and Ambition and the cost of seizing them.
Prince Cardan Greenbriar
The High King’s youngest son, Cardan cultivates a persona of decadent malice, leading a clique that torments mortals while he drinks, mocks, and drifts. Yet beneath the cruelty lies a boy warped by neglect and the sadism of Prince Balekin, whose abuse taught him to preempt hurt with humiliation. His dynamic with Jude evolves from venomous antagonism into a volatile alliance layered with desire, distrust, and sharp mutual insight. When the royal line is butchered, Cardan becomes the last viable heir—forced into a crown and tethered to Jude’s command for a year and a day, a “puppet king” perched atop real power he never sought. His transformation underscores the theme of Cruelty and Bullying, revealing vulnerability beneath the mask.
Madoc
General of the High King and a fearsome redcap, Madoc kills Jude’s parents yet raises their daughters out of a rigid, alien honor. He trains Jude in tactics and steel, instilling in her the very skills she will use against him. Chafing under peacetime and hungry for influence, he conspires with Balekin to install a monarch aligned with war—and ultimately seeks to rule as regent through Oak. Both mentor and monster, Madoc becomes Jude’s most dangerous opponent, their bond twisting from familial pride to a chess match for the crown. His choices crystallize the novel’s tensions around Family, Loyalty, and Betrayal.
Supporting Characters
Taryn Duarte
Taryn is Jude’s identical twin, but where Jude resists, Taryn assimilates, choosing politeness and romance as her armor. Drawn into a secret courtship with Locke, she participates in a cruel “story” that pits her against her sister, straining their bond to its breaking point. Her pursuit of belonging through marriage exposes a quieter, insidious form of risk for mortals in Faerie.
Vivienne Duarte
Half-fae and Madoc’s biological daughter, Vivi rejects Elfhame outright, clinging to the mortal world where she builds a life and refuses Court demands. Fiercely protective of her human sisters, she urges escape over compromise, and ultimately spirits Oak away to safety. Her defiance offers a stark counterpoint to both Jude’s conquest and Taryn’s conformity.
Prince Dain Greenbriar
Favored to inherit, Dain commands the Circle of Falcons and the clandestine Court of Shadows, recruiting Jude as his spy and promising protection in exchange for loyalty. His polished honor hides a ruthless core—he poisoned Liriope to protect his succession—making him a study in glittering pragmatism. His assassination detonates the succession crisis and frees Jude to play her own game with the tools he gave her.
Prince Balekin Greenbriar
Eldest of the Greenbriars, Balekin believes birthright justifies brutality, shaping Cardan with years of calculated abuse. He allies with Madoc to topple the crown but lets violence outrun strategy, turning a coup into a slaughter that sabotages his own claim. Imprisoned by story’s end, he leaves a legacy of fear, trauma, and the vacuum Jude exploits.
Oak
Presented as Madoc and Oriana’s cherished son, Oak is revealed as the hidden child of Dain and Liriope, a secret heir with a stronger claim than Cardan. Innocent and playful, he is nonetheless the fulcrum of competing schemes: Madoc’s planned regency versus Jude’s gambit to protect him by sending him to the mortal world. His existence reorients every power calculation at Court.
Locke
Fox-like and theatrical, Locke treats people as characters in a tale he’s directing, wooing both Jude and Taryn to provoke exquisite drama. His betrayal—securing Taryn’s hand while toying with Jude—exposes how charm in Faerie often conceals malice. He’s memorable for the line, “I like for things to happen... and if I can’t find a good enough story, I make one.”
Oriana
Madoc’s second wife, Oriana maintains a cool remove from Jude and Taryn, driven by a fierce protectiveness of Oak. Once a consort to High King Eldred, she understands Court peril intimately and guards Oak’s true parentage with fear-honed precision.
Nicasia
Princess of the Undersea and Cardan’s former lover, Nicasia wields status like a blade, scorning mortals and circling Jude with jealousy and menace. As part of Cardan’s clique, she amplifies the social cruelty that defines the High Court’s youth.
Valerian
The most violently sadistic of Cardan’s friends, Valerian escalates their games to attempted murder, forcing Jude to kill him in self-defense. His death marks a turning point in Jude’s refusal to be prey—and in the stakes of their rivalry.
High King Eldred
Long-reigning and weary, Eldred seeks abdication to end cycles of bloodshed, but his choice triggers the very conflagration he hoped to avoid. His distant fatherhood and abdication plan set the stage for ambition to run rampant.
The Ghost, The Roach, and The Bomb (Court of Shadows)
Dain’s trio of spies become Jude’s covert allies after his death: the Ghost moves unseen, the scarred goblin Roach steals with effortless grace, and the winged Bomb delights in precise destruction. Together, they give Jude reach, information, and the network she needs to pull off a coronation coup.
Minor Characters
- Princess Elowyn: A political operator among the Greenbriars whose influence dies with her during the massacre.
- Princess Rhyia: Another of Eldred’s daughters, cut down in Balekin’s bloody grab for the crown.
- Princess Caelia: A royal sister whose death underscores the coup’s indiscriminate carnage.
- Liriope: Former lover of Dain and mother of Oak, her secret pregnancy—and murder—seed the novel’s central succession twist.
- Heather: Vivi’s mortal girlfriend, emblematic of the ordinary life Vivi craves beyond Faerie’s grasp.
Character Relationships & Dynamics
At the heart of the book is the Duarte/Madoc household: Madoc forges Jude into a strategist and soldier even as his violence haunts her, while Taryn seeks safety through pleasing the powerful and Vivi rejects Faerie outright. This family splinters along lines of method and morality—Jude’s conquest, Taryn’s assimilation, Vivi’s escape—yet remains bound by Oak, whose hidden lineage turns them into competing guardians of a crown.
Across the palace, the Greenbriars decay from within. Eldred’s planned abdication pits siblings against each other, with Dain trafficking in secrets and Balekin in open brutality. Cardan, the youngest, is molded by neglect and abuse into a creature of spite—until Jude sees through him and forces him into an alliance that is part partnership, part captivity.
Social power coalesces into factions: Cardan’s cruel circle (Nicasia, Valerian, Locke) polices hierarchy through humiliation, while the Court of Shadows (the Ghost, the Roach, the Bomb) undermines it with whispers and knives. Locke bridges these worlds as an instigator, weaponizing romance to fracture the Duarte twins. Meanwhile, Oriana’s guarded pragmatism and Vivi’s defiance tug Oak between courts, worlds, and futures.
Alliances shift under pressure: Jude and Cardan move from enemies to co-conspirators when the coup annihilates the royal line; Jude and Madoc transform from mentor and pupil to rival tacticians playing opposite sides of a regency; and Taryn’s betrayal severs sisterly trust at the moment Jude most needs an ally. The result is a tense new order—Cardan crowned and bound, Jude ruling in shadows, Madoc biding his time—that promises further conflict as characters renegotiate power, loyalty, and belonging.