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

by Leigh Bardugo

The Darkling shrugged. “Fear is a powerful ally,” he said. “And loyal.”

“Might want to leave him alone,” Sturmhond said. “That type needs plenty of time for brooding and self-recrimination. Otherwise they get cranky.” “Do you take anything seriously?” “Not if I can help it. Makes life so tedious.”

I didn’t walk around with thirty knives hidden about my person, but I wasn’t completely incompetent.

His face had the blissful, placid expression Saints always seemed to wear in paintings, usually before they were murdered in some horrific way.

He kissed me once, gently, and though I tried to ignore it, there was something mournful in the brush of his lips.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” she asked. She was gnawing on her lip so agressively, I thought she might draw blood. “Of course not,” said Sturmhond. “Anything worth doing always starts as a bad idea.”

I closed my eyes against the brightness, trying to focus, to regain control. I heard Baghra’s harsh voice in my head, demanding that I trust my power: It isn’t an animal that shies away from you or chooses whether or not to come when you call it. But this was like nothing I’d felt before. It was an animal, a creature of infinite fire that breathed with the stag’s strength and the sea whip’s wrath. It coursed through me, stealing my breath, breaking me up, dissolving my edges, until all I knew was light.

I remembered my arms, my legs, the press of my ribs, as he held me tighter, piecing me back together. I recognized my lips, my teeth, my tongue, my heart, and these new things that were a part of me: collar and fetter. They were bone and breath, muscle and flesh. They were mine. Does the bird feel the weight of its wings?

“You’re all right?” he asked. His voice was rough. “Yes,” I replied. But that wasn’t quite true. I felt the collar at my throat, the pressure of the fetter at my wrist. My other arm felt naked. I was incomplete.

Despite the bruises and bumps, my practices with Tamar helped to dull the edge of my constant worry. Girls were drafted right along with boys into the King’s Army when they came of age, so I’d seen plenty of girls fight and had trained alongside them. But I’d never seen anyone, male or female, fight the way Tamar did. She had a dancer’s grace and a seemingly unerring instinct for what her opponent would do next. Her weapons of choice were two double-bit axes that she wielded in tandem, the blades flashing like light off water, but she was nearly as dangerous with a saber, a pistol, or her bare hands.

I shot him a sour look. “I’m not a package you’re delivering, Sturmhond.” “More’s the pity,” he said, sauntering past. “Packages don’t talk, and they stay where you put them.”

“Your friend seems to be enjoying himself.” I shrugged. “Mal’s always been like that. You could drop him in a camp full of Fjerdan assassins, and he’d come out carried on their shoulders. He just blooms wherever he’s planted.” “And you?” “I’m more of a weed,” I said drily. Tamar grinned. In combat, she was cold and silent fire, but when she wasn’t fighting, her smiles came easily. “I like weeds,” she said, pushing herself off from the railing and gathering her scattered lengths of rope. “They’re survivors.”

And I had to admit, I liked Sturmhond, too. He was cocky and brash, and always used ten words when two would do, but I was impressed with the way he led his crew. He didn’t bother with any of the tricks I’d seen the Darkling employ, yet they followed him without hesitation. He had their respect, not their fear.

“My mother was an oyster,” he said with a wink. “And I’m the pearl.”

But the next moment, we were in darkness. It was like no night ever known—a perfect, deep, unnatural blackness that seemed to close around us in a suffocating grip. We were in the Fold.

The Fold felt different. I told myself it was just imagination, but it seemed like the darkness had a texture. I could almost feel it moving over my skin. The edges of the wound at my shoulder began to itch and pull, as if the flesh were restless. I’d been on the Unsea twice before, and both times I’d felt like a stranger, like a vulnerable interloper in a dangerous, unnatural world that did not want me there. But now it was as if the Fold was reaching out to me, welcoming me. I knew it made no sense. The Fold was a dead and empty place, not a living thing. It knows me, I thought. Like calls to like.

Two hundred rounds per minute. So this was what a modern army could do.

“Please,” he said in a conciliatory tone. “Sit. I don’t know about you, but I find everything much more understandable when seated. Something about circulation, I suspect. Reclining is, of course, preferable, but I don’t think we’re on those kinds of terms yet.”

Weakness is a guise. Wear it when they need to know you’re human, but never when you feel it.

It’s okay to flout expectations, but never disappoint them.

“Watch yourself, Nikolai,” Mal said softly. “Princes bleed just like other men.” Nikolai plucked an invisible piece of dust from his sleeve. “Yes,” he said. “They just do it in better clothes.”

“You couldn’t make a meat pie from what you know, girl.”

“You’re taking to power well, I see. As it grows, it will hunger for more. Like calls to like, girl.”

THE MONSTER’S NAME was Izumrud, the great worm, and there were those who claimed he had made the tunnels that ran beneath Ravka. Sick with appetite, he ate up silt and gravel, burrowing deeper and deeper into the earth, searching for something to satisfy his hunger, until he’d gone too far and lost himself in the dark.

Strange sounds echoed through the dim warren of tunnels, groans and unexplained rumblings; cold pockets of silence were broken by low hisses that might be nothing or might be the sinuous movement of a long body, snaking closer through a nearby passage in search of prey. In those moments, it was easy to believe that Izumrud still lived somewhere, waiting to be woken by the call of heroes, dreaming of the fine meal he would have if only some hapless child would walk into his mouth. A beast like that rests; he does not die.

“You are on your knees,” I said. “We are not negotiating.”

Men fight for Ravka because the King commands it, because their pay keeps their families from starving, because they have no choice. They will fight for you because to them you are salvation. They will starve for you, lay down their lives and their children’s lives for you. They will make war without fear and die rejoicing. There is no greater power than faith, and there will be no greater army than one driven by it.”

“Because they’re better men than you.” “You might make me a better man.” “And you might make me a monster.”

Despise your heart. I wanted to. I didn’t want to grieve anymore, to feel loss or guilt, or worry. I wanted to be hard, calculating. I wanted to be fearless.

“My cousin Ludovic woke up with a white streak in his hair after he almost died in a house fire. Claimed the ladies found it very dashing. Of course, he also claimed the house fire was set by ghosts, so who can say.”

We’d made the wise choice, done the right thing. I had to believe that logic would bring comfort in time. Tonight, there was just this too-quiet room, the ache of loss, knowledge deep and final as the tolling of a bell: Something good has gone.

“Suffering is cheap as clay and twice as common. What matters is what each man makes of it.

The same things that make the mountain make you. It has no lungs, so let it breathe with you. It has no pulse, so give it your heartbeat.

I saw no tears on Baghra’s cheeks. Her grief is old, I reminded myself. And yet I didn’t think pain like that ever faded entirely. Grief had its own life, took its own sustenance.

Maybe love was superstition, a prayer we said to keep the truth of loneliness at bay.

The stars looked like they were close together, when really they were millions of miles apart. In the end, maybe love just meant longing for something impossibly bright and forever out of reach.

I just know there’s no way to live without pain—no matter how long or short your life is. People let you down. You get hurt and do damage in return.

“You are all I’ve ever wanted,” he said. “You are the whole of my heart.”

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