The Queen of Nothing

The Queen of Nothing is the third and final book of Holly Black’s Folk of the Air trilogy, following The Cruel Prince and The Wicked King. How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories is a companion volume to the series. The series is inspired by Celtic and British folklore and legends around faeries. Told as ballads, nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and stories, this lore has traditionally focused on the fey, that is, magical creatures who live in the shadows, hills, and bogs of the human world. Faeries are different from benevolent fairies in that they are often associated with tricking and tormenting humans.

Black takes inspiration from these legends to create the fictional world of Faerie in her series. Her Faerie world broadly consists of the Seelie and Unseelie courts. These courts are mentioned in Scottish, Welsh, and German folklore. Seelie courts are comprised of the relatively benign fairies, while Unseelie courts consist of wilder and more malevolent folk. In Black’s trilogy, Elfhame is the chief among the Seelie courts, while kingdoms like the Undersea and the Court of the Teeth are among the Unseelie. At the start of the series, Elfhame is ruled by High King Eldred, direct descendant of Queen Mab Greenbriar. Eldred has several sons and daughters, of whom Cardan is the youngest. Eldred chooses Prince Dain as his heir in The Cruel Prince. To gain more power in the world of Faerie, mortal Jude becomes a secret spy for Prince Dain, a part of his Court of Shadows. At Dain’s coronation, Madoc (the High King’s General) and Prince Balekin stage a bloody coup, killing the king and all his other children, save Cardan. Cardan is spared so that he can crown Balekin; only a blood relative can crown the ruler. But Jude has an ace up her sleeve. Unknown to most people, her brother Oak, the foster son of Madoc, is the son of Dain and thus a blood relative to both Balekin and Cardan. Jude has Oak crown Cardan the king. Cardan, who is in Jude’s custody, vows to be under her control for a year and a day.

In The Wicked King, Jude is Cardan’s seneschal (chief advisor). Balekin is in prison in the Undersea. Jude develops feelings for Cardan, slowly realizing there is more to him that his fearsome reputation. When Jude learns that Balekin may be plotting against Cardan, she allows herself to be taken prisoner by the Undersea, where she spends a month in an underwater cage. She learns of Balekin’s plan and foils it when she is released, killing him in a duel. Meanwhile, Cardan offers Jude marriage in exchange for his freedom from her control. Jude accepts, and they wed in secret. Soon after, the Undersea demands justice for the death of Balekin, their prisoner and ambassador, and at the end of The Wicked King, Cardan publicly exiles Jude as a punishment. Jude believes Cardan offered her marriage only to trick her and exile her. It is revealed in The Queen of Nothing that Cardan’s decree of exile was just a front.

In the books, the fey are often referred to as “the folk,” as is common in folklore. Creatures such as imps, goblins, phookas, redcaps, and the unseelie are mentioned in stories and ballads. Elfhame is the Scots word for “fairyland,” while Eldred is a word from old English, meaning “wise.” Queen Mab, the ancestor of the Greenbriars in the Folk of the Air books, is a legendary fairy in folklore. She is mentioned in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as the midwife of the fairies. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a long poem called “Queen Mab” (1813) in which the fairy queen serves as an agent for a revolutionary utopia. The idea that the fey make up a secret parallel world alongside that of humans has long been explored in oral literature. It is detailed in The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies, an account of Celtic supernatural creatures by Scottish clergyman Robert Kirk. Kirk composed the book in 1691, but it first came into print in 1893, revised by Andrew Lang. Black counts The Secret Commonwealth among works that inspired her Folk of the Air series.