Shadow and Bone Trilogy: Shadow and Bone, Siege and Storm, Ruin and Rising

by Leigh Bardugo

You keep storing up all that anger and grief. Eventually it spills over. Or you drown in it.”

Was this the truth behind Mal’s gift for tracking, that he was somehow tied to everything, to the making at the heart

of the world? Not a Grisha, and no ordinary amplifier, but something else entirely?

The cycle had already been completed. He’d endowed his daughter with the power he’d meant for the firebird. The circle had closed.

You were willing to give up your life,” he said quietly. “Why won’t you let me do the same?”

“He’s a warrior,” she’d said. “If you make him believe he’s less now, he’ll never know he can be more.”

It was our knowledge of the forbidden, our desire for more.

I could almost imagine his laugh. Well, if I’m going to be a monster, I might as well be king of the monsters.

I could feel the wound inside me, the gap where something whole and right had been. I wasn’t broken. I was empty.

This was the gift of the three amplifiers: power multiplied a thousand times, but not in one person.

“You were meant to be like me. You were meant … You’re nothing now.”

But in this moment he was just a boy—brilliant, blessed with too much power, burdened by eternity.

“This was my martyrdom, Tolya. I died here today.”

His blood had been thick with it, and that purloined bit of creation was what had made him such a remarkable tracker. It had bound him to every living thing. Like calls to like.

“I know you love to be loved,” I said, “but a little fear couldn’t hurt, either.”

The names they gave were false ones, though the vows they made were true.

They had an ordinary life, full of ordinary things—if love can ever be called that.