The Wicked King

Power Reversed

At the end of The Cruel Prince, Jude engineered a situation that few readers saw coming: she put Cardan on the throne of the High Court and positioned herself as the power behind it. The Wicked King begins with that arrangement established and immediately complicates it — because controlling Cardan means being close to Cardan, and proximity to someone who has tormented you and whom you find compelling in complicated ways is not a neutral experience.

Holly Black uses the inverted power dynamic to explore what controlling power actually means. Jude has the formal leverage; Cardan has the throne and the faerie nature that she cannot fully predict. Neither has power in any straightforward sense, and Black is sophisticated about how the arrangement generates mutual vulnerability rather than simple dominance.

The Scheming Gets Deeper

The political intrigue in The Wicked King escalates without losing coherence. Threats arrive from multiple directions — a general with his own ambitions, a political rival who understands more than Jude has revealed, forces from outside the court who have been watching. Jude’s task is managing an increasingly complex board while maintaining the fiction that Cardan rules freely.

Black’s plotting is meticulous in the way of the best political fantasy: the pieces move in ways that feel inevitable in retrospect, and the reader’s growing understanding of who knows what about whom generates sustained suspense.

The Ending

Without spoiling the novel’s final pages: the ending of The Wicked King is one of the most effective series-middle conclusions in recent YA fantasy. It is the kind of ending that forces an immediate reassessment of everything that preceded it and makes the wait for the third volume genuinely agonizing. Black earned that reaction across 336 pages of careful preparation.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A sophisticated, darkly romantic second volume that deepens everything the first book established and delivers one of the genre’s most effective cliffhanger conclusions.

The Folk of the Air at Its Peak

The Wicked King is widely regarded as the strongest volume in the Folk of the Air trilogy, and the reason is structural: it inherits the foundations laid by The Cruel Prince and is free to build at full height without the burden of introducing the world. Black can assume the reader knows Elfhame’s rules — the prohibition on lying, the binding force of oaths, the lethal etiquette of the court — and she spends that earned knowledge on intricate political manoeuvring and a romance that finally begins to deliver on the tension the first book so carefully wound.

Romance Through a Power Imbalance

The Jude-Cardan relationship moves into genuinely interesting territory here precisely because of the formal arrangement that governs it: Jude controls Cardan through an oath, and that control poisons any straightforward reading of their growing attraction. Every warm moment is shadowed by the question of coercion and consent, of whether feeling can be trusted between two people when one holds binding power over the other. Black does not resolve this discomfort cheaply. She lets it complicate the romance, which is what elevates the relationship above the genre’s usual antagonism-to-affection arc. The tension is intellectual as well as emotional.

A Cliffhanger That Reframes Everything

The book’s final pages contain one of the most discussed twists in recent YA fantasy — an ending that does not merely set up the third volume but retroactively reorganises the reader’s understanding of everything that came before. Without spoiling it, the reversal works because Black has been laying its groundwork throughout, and because it turns on exactly the faerie logic the series has trained the reader to track. It is the kind of ending that sends readers immediately back to earlier chapters to reassess what they missed, and it is the single biggest reason the trilogy generated such fervent word of mouth.

The Demands It Makes

This is not a book to read in isolation or after a long gap. It assumes close familiarity with the first volume’s dense web of alliances, betrayals, and obligations, and readers who arrive without that context will struggle. For those who come prepared, though, The Wicked King is the trilogy operating at its full power — a sophisticated, morally tangled, ruthlessly plotted middle volume that earns its reputation as the high point of one of the defining YA fantasy series of its era.

Power Behind the Throne

The Wicked King (2019), the second Folk of the Air novel, finds Jude wielding real power for the first time as the secret puppet-master controlling the newly crowned Cardan, whom she has bound to obey her for a year and a day. Black tightens the screws of court intrigue — shifting alliances, the threat of the sea queen Orlagh, the constant danger that Jude’s leverage will slip — while deepening the dangerous attraction between captor and captive. The book is widely held to be the trilogy’s peak, and it ends on one of the genre’s most discussed betrayals, a cliffhanger that reframes everything the reader thought they understood about who holds power over whom.

The dangerous intimacy between Jude and the bound, mocking Cardan is the engine of the book, and its final betrayal — delivered just as the two seem to reach an understanding — is among the most discussed cliffhangers in modern young-adult fantasy.

It is the volume in which the Folk of the Air series fully comes into its own, balancing political machination against a romance that neither character will admit to wanting.