The Wicked King

“‘I have heard that for mortals, the feeling of falling in love is very like the feeling of fear. Your heart beats fast. Your senses are heightened. You grow light-headed, maybe even dizzy.’ He looks at me. ‘Is that right? It would explain much about your kind if it’s possible to mistake the two.’”

Since toxic love is a running theme throughout this novel—shown in Jude and Cardan, Taryn and Locke, Madoc and Jude’s mother Eva—this quote encompasses the tangled relationship between love and fear. In addition, a combination of love and fear is what many mortals experience when experiencing Faerie, or the idea of it, for the first time. This quotation illustrates what it is like to be alive, to be mortal in an unfamiliar world.

“I, who have had little power in my life, must be on guard against that feeling. Power goes to my head too quickly, like faerie wine.”

Jude’s biggest weakness is her ambition and her craving for power. Her current position represents a complete reversal from her childhood growing up as a mortal in faerie, and the addiction is every bit as powerful as the enchantments she is immune against. While Jude is on some level aware of her weakness, she is not yet able to rise above it.

“The last time I saw my little brother, he was sitting at the table in Vivi’s apartment, learning multiplication as though it were a riddle game. He was eating string cheese. He was laughing.”

Oak is experiencing a reversal of Jude and Taryn’s childhood. Instead of being taken from the mortal world to Faerie and living a precarious life of danger and court politics, he’s been taken out of Faerie and is growing up in the mortal world.