Shadow and Bone (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy, #1)

by Leigh Bardugo

He could have run, could have wept, could have clung to the sides of the skiff until the darkness took him, but he did none of those things. He stood unflinching before the gathering dark. Only I had the power to save him—and I was powerless to save him.

thought the stag was haunting me, a reminder of my failure and the price my weakness would exact. But I was wrong. The stag had been showing me my strength—not just the price of mercy but the power it bestowed. And mercy was something the Darkling would never understand. I had spared the stag’s life. The power of that life belonged to me as surely as it belonged to the man who had taken it.

This was what I had been born for. I would never let anyone separate me from it again.

Light exploded from me, pure and unwavering,

The Darkling looked momentarily confused. He narrowed his eyes, and I felt his will descend on me again, felt that invisible hand grasping. I shrugged it off. It was nothing. He was nothing.

I felt the weight of the collar around my neck, the steady rhythm of the stag’s ancient heart beating in time with mine. My power rose up in me, solid and without hesitation, a sword in my hand.

“Is that the future you want? A world of darkness? A world remade in his image?”

“Goed morgen, fentomen!” a deckhand shouts to them as he passes by, his arms full of rope. All the ship’s crew call them fentomen. It is the Kerch word for ghosts.

They are alone again, as they were when they were young, hiding from the older children, from Ana Kuya’s temper, from the things that seemed to move and slither in the dark. They are orphans again, with no true home but each other and whatever life they can make together on the other side of the sea.