The hospitality of knives

 As part of my current unemployed winter pastime to try and catch up on good fantasy series I've been neglecting, I checked out the third and final volume of Holly Black's YA fantasy trilogy The Folk of the Air, The Queen of Nothing.

 

As this book kicks off, Jude has been in exile for a while now, living in the human world with her fairy half-sister and half-brother, despite being the rightful High Queen of Faerie. She kicks around doing odd jobs and mercenary stuff for other Folk who are living in the mortal world. Things start to get interesting when Jude is hired to assassinate legendary redcap Grima Mog from the Court of Teeth, and then her twin sister Taryn shows back up, pregnant and having murdered her fairy husband. Through a series of convoluted schemes, this results in Jude going back to Faerie despite being supposedly exiled, getting kidnapped and stuff a bunch, having a lot of dramatic feelings about her husband, and general political shenanigans. Much like the first two books, there's a lot of violence, a lot of double-crossing and tricksiness, and a LOT of weird magic. So all in all, exactly what I wanted out of it.

 

There's also some really good dialogue, although since I already gave the book back to the library I can't quote much since I don't want to fuck it up. The bit where Cardan gives a welcome speech at a banquet and offers his own hospitality to loyal people and "my queen's hospitality, the hospitality of knives" to "traitors and oathbreakers" was nice and dramatic. Cardan is very good at being dramatic, and it's one of the things that makes him an interesting character, and a bit different from far too many YA leading dudes who are just like broody and shit. He's also obviously a giant asshole, which he has in common with many YA leads, but in this case he is supposed to be an asshole, hence the titles of the first two books in the series. Although he's much less of an asshole in this one, what with the whole "character development" thing.

 

Jude's character development is great, too; she's an extremely screwed-up person and she's absolutely ruthless when she acquires power, whether she likes it or not, and I am here for it. Over the series she's become extremely good at operating in the shadows, and this book challenges her by putting her right in the limelight, where she is definitely not comfortable. Ultimately she does turn into a beautiful murder queen because this is a fantasy story with a happy ending.

 

Anyway, I think Black's faerie mythos has really come a long way in the past fifteen years or so since Tithe was published, and it's extremely fun that it all takes place in one universe. I hope it gets made into a not-remotely-child-appropriate TV series some day.