Hollin Havilliard · The full story

The rotten little prince

He beat a servant bloody over burnt porridge, and he was still a child when he did it. His own brother would rather bow to a tyrant father than ever see Hollin crowned.

THE BOY THEY SHIPPED TO THE MOUNTAINS

A daily tantrum with a crown in its future.

Hollin is the second son of King Dorian I and Queen Georgina, years younger than his brother Dorian — a spoiled, vicious child known across the Glass Castle for beating the servants. A year before the series opens he thrashed one of them bloody for burning his breakfast porridge, and the scandal was ugly enough that Queen Georgina would not hold court for a month and Hollin was packed off to a school in the mountains of Adarlan. The porridge is the whole boy in one image: a child who inflicts real harm over nothing, in a castle where nobody will stop him, because of whose son he is.

THE BROTHER EVERYONE FLEES

When Hollin comes home for Yulemas, the prince hides in the kennels.

Hollin's returns to the Glass Castle are dreaded events. When he comes back around Yulemas, Dorian and Chaol take shelter in the castle kennels — to escape the cold, and to escape Hollin. His mother throws him a banquet and a Yulemas carnival in his honour; he unveils cages of animals and gorges on the desserts while Dorian dutifully dances with the court ladies and a hired singer performs. Everyone in the room is performing goodwill for a child nobody actually wants around. It is a small, telling comedy — a whole court arranging itself to tolerate one spoiled boy who has done nothing to earn it.

SOMETHING ROTTED INSIDE HIM

Dorian's private verdict on his brother shapes the whole royal line.

Dorian looks at Hollin and thinks the plainest, bleakest thing: something had rotted inside Hollin, and his brother would make a cruel, terrible king. It is not idle. Part of why Dorian submits to their father at all is to keep the spoiled Hollin from ever being named heir — a real sacrifice, made against a small monster. And after Dorian's own suppressed magic breaks loose, he goes to the library and wonders, uneasily, whether Hollin might develop power too one day, and whether he could be taught to hide it before their father found out. Even Dorian's fear for him is really a fear of him.

KEPT OUT OF THE WAR

By the end, his own brother the king just sends him away.

When Dorian becomes King of Adarlan and the war against Erawan and Maeve closes in, Hollin all but vanishes from the story. Dorian sends him off for safety and keeps almost no contact; Hollin and his mother, the former Queen Georgina, sit out the war at Ararat, the royal family's mountain residence, far from anything that matters. It is a quietly damning end for a prince's brother — no arc, no redemption, no reckoning, just a spoiled boy parked out of harm's way while everyone else bleeds for the kingdom. The rot never becomes a story. It gets sent up a mountain and left there.