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

by Leigh Bardugo

For my grandfather: Tell me some lies.

Impressive dedication lol 🔑Plot 🔮 Foreshadowing 👤 Character 🗺️ World-Building 💡 Theme 💬 My Take ✨ Prose/Quote 🤔 Conflict 📝 Review Material ❓ Confusion

The boy was short and stocky, shy but always smiling. The girl was different, and she knew it.

👤

Three figures emerged in elegant fur hats and heavy wool kefta: one in crimson, one in darkest blue, and one in vibrant purple. “Grisha!”

👤

Ana Kuya was already there, birdlike in her black dress, pouring tea from the samovar, her large key ring jangling at her waist.

👤 Duke's housekeeper

Up in the balcony, the boy and the girl nodded sagely to each other. Their benefactor, Duke Keramsov, was a celebrated war hero and a friend to the people.

👤

“Alina Starkov! Malyen Oretsev! Come down here at once!”

👤

“We are not witches. We are practitioners of the Small Science. We keep this country and this kingdom safe.” “As does the First Army,” Ana Kuya said quietly, an unmistakeable edge to her voice. The woman in red stiffened, but after a moment she conceded, “As does the King’s Army.”

🗺️ What is small science?

He had seen a woman, barefoot and unflinching in her doorway, face down a row of bayonets. He knew the look of a man defending his home with nothing but a rock in his hand.

People, particularly big men carrying big rifles, don’t expect lip from a scrawny thing like me. They always look a bit dazed when they get it.

But that was before the Shadow Fold.

🗺️

And then there were the maps that just showed the Shadow Fold as a long, narrow lake and labeled it by its other name, “the Unsea,” a name intended to put soldiers and merchants at their ease and encourage crossings.

🗺️

The next, a dark slash had appeared on the landscape, a swath of nearly impenetrable darkness that grew with every passing year and crawled with horrors.

🗺️

“You look like you’re on your way to a really good dinner instead of possible death and dismemberment.”

🔮 Ohh, he's gonna die. Isn't he?

I’d never slept well. But it had been even worse over the last few days. Saints knew I had plenty of good reasons to dread going into the Fold, reasons shared by every member of our regiment who had been unlucky enough to be chosen for the crossing. But there was something else, a deeper feeling of unease that I couldn’t quite name.

🔮 Do you have some powers that you don't know of? Did you hide your powers when you shared that look with Mal when those three came?

There had been a time when I could have told him anything.

🤔Why not now?

“Alina, come on. We’ll be fine.” “You can’t know that.”

Yeah, he's gonna die

“Madam’s spirits have been restored!” Mal shouted. “The sun can once more shine!”

Is she the sun summoner?

Alexei and I were both junior cartographers’ assistants and, as part of our training, we had to submit two finished sketches or renderings at the end of every day.

👤

“He’s not natural,” said Eva, another assistant; she had pretty green eyes that did little to distract from her piglike nose. “None of them are.”

👤

“I guess it’s easy to have a lot in common when you’re kids.”

I wanted to believe that Mal and I would always be friends, but I had to face the fact that we were on different paths. Lying in the dark, waiting for sleep, I wondered if those paths would just keep taking us further and further apart, and if a day might come when we would be strangers to each other once again.

two Grisha Etherealki, the Order of Summoners, in dark blue kefta. The silver embroidery at their cuffs and the hems of their robes indicated that they were Squallers, Grisha who could raise or lower the pressure of the air and fill the skiffs’ sails with wind that would carry us across the long miles of the Fold.

🗺️

their blue robes bore the red cuffs that indicated they could raise fire.

🗺️ So, everyone wears blue, but the color of the cuffs changes based on their abilities?

All around us, men shouted, people screamed, soldiers were locked in combat with the massive, writhing forms of winged beasts, and the unnatural darkness of the Fold was broken in fits and starts by bursts of golden Grisha flame.

"MEN shouted, PEOPLE screamed?" ??? Sooo MEN don't fall into the same category as PEOPLE? Ok, that makes sense.

It rushed at us, claws slashing, its talons tearing across Mal’s chest. He screamed in pain.

I knew it. Unreasonably optimistic fictional people always have tragic endings all the time.

I saw Mal lowering his rifle. His torn shirt was dark with blood. The rifle slid from his fingers as he swayed and fell to his knees, then collapsed onto the deck.

Nooo, he's just losing consciousness. Not dying. Hopefully.

I saw that the cuffs of her red kefta were embroidered in black. What did a Heartrender want with me?

🗺️ I thought red meant fire? Is it healing now?

charcoal-clad oprichniki, the elite soldiers who made up the Darkling’s personal guard. The oprichniki weren’t Grisha, but they were just as frightening.

🗺️

Only one Grisha wore black, was permitted to wear black.

🗺️

I knew that the more powerful Grisha were said to live long lives, and Darklings were the most powerful of them all.

🗺️👤

Mal was alive.

Thank God!

He wore the purple kefta of a Materialnik, a member of the Order of Fabrikators.

👤

In a few hours’ time, every Fjerdan spy and Shu Han assassin will know what happened on the Fold, and they’ll be coming for you.

🗺️👤Wait a damn minute. Who tf are they?

The Corporalki were the Order of the Living and the Dead. I tried to focus on the living part, but I’d never been healed by a Grisha and every muscle in my body tensed with fear.

“If you really believe that saving a life is an honor, then why not become a Healer instead of a Heartrender?”

I need a character map or something with their dress codes and abilities.

“Fedyor, go with him. You take this side. We’ll take the other. At all costs, defend the coach.”

Don't tell me he's gonna die now. He sounded like a good guy.

I started to worry that I’d somehow offended him. (Though, given how little we’d spoken, I wasn’t sure how I could have managed it.) Occasionally, I caught him looking at me, his eyes cool and unreadable.

Ohhhhh

“One hundred and twenty. Give or take.”

Now I feel sorry for getting excited for Alina. But hey, she's also a Grishna now hopefully with a long life.

“The length of a Grisha’s life is proportional to his or her power. The greater the power, the longer the life. And when that power is amplified…”

🗺️

Other countries don’t treat their Grisha so well as Ravka,” he said grimly. “The Fjerdans burn us as witches, and the Kerch sell us as slaves. The Shu Han carve us up seeking the source of our power.

🗺️

“My great-great-great-grandfather was the Black Heretic, the Darkling who created the Shadow Fold. It was a mistake, an experiment born of his greed, maybe his evil. I don’t know. But every Darkling since then has tried to undo the damage he did to our country, and I’m no different.”

I thought of the Black Heretic. He had created the Fold,

there was something very different about being the only naked person in the room, especially when everyone kept shooting curious glances at me.

Well, I'm sure that's very different

Like all Grisha, the Etherealki indicated their designation within their order by color of embroidery: pale blue for Tidemakers, red for Inferni, and silver for Squallers. My cuffs were embroidered in gold.

🗺️

“The Grisha claims the amplifier, but the amplifier claims the Grisha, as well. Once it is done, there can be no other. Like calls to like, and the bond is made.”

🗺️

But he had gotten my letters. What had he done with all of them? Had he even bothered to open them? Had he sighed with embarrassment when the fifth and the sixth and the seventh arrived?

I don't feel like that's the case. He might not be getting your letters

I know then. I know that we are different from one another. Terribly, irrevocably different. Alina. Alina! I make my choice. I grab hold of the thing inside me and push it back down. “Mal!” I shout, and begin to struggle once more.

Thought so

The thought filled me with grief, grief for the dreams we’d shared, for the love I’d felt, for the hopeful girl I would never be again.

Suddenly, lots of things seemed easy. I wasn’t tired all the time or winded when I climbed the stairs. I slept deeply and dreamlessly every night and woke refreshed.

You are living the dream tbh

Your power serves you because that is its purpose, because it cannot help but serve you.”