The Grishaverse: the story so far

Alina Starkov and Mal Oretsev grew up in the same orphanage in Keramzin and ended up in the same regiment. Crossing the Shadow Fold, a strip of permanent darkness full of winged volcra that had cut Ravka off from the sea for a century, their skiff was torn apart and Mal was about to be carried off. Alina, who had never shown a scrap of power, put out a blaze of light that saved them both.

She was a Sun Summoner, the first in living memory, and the one thing that might unmake the Fold. The Darkling, general of the Second Army and the most powerful Grisha alive, took her to the Little Palace to be trained and courted. Alina made a friend of Genya Safin, failed for months to reach her own power, and let herself fall for him.

Baghra, the old woman teaching her, told her the truth. The Darkling was centuries old, he had made the Fold himself in a botched grab for power, and he meant to use Alina to widen it into a weapon. Alina ran. Mal found her, and the two of them went north after Morozova's stag, an amplifier that would make her strong enough to fight back.

She found the stag and would not kill it. The Darkling arrived, killed it himself and locked its antlers around her throat, which bound the amplifier to him rather than to her. He took her onto the Fold, threw Mal into the dark to make a point, and began spreading it over a town full of people.

The mercy she had shown the stag was what broke his hold. Alina took the power back, tore the skiff apart, and got away across the True Sea with Mal and with the Darkling still alive behind her.

Alina and Mal were hiding across the True Sea in Novyi Zem when the Darkling walked in and took them, with a shipload of shadow soldiers behind him. He wanted Morozova's second amplifier, the sea whip, and he wanted Alina to hunt it for him.

A privateer called Sturmhond took the ship out from under him, caught the sea whip, and then revealed himself as Nikolai Lantsov, second prince of Ravka, who had spent years running a private navy under a false name. Alina punched him for it and went back to Os Alta with him anyway.

She was handed the Second Army and had to make Grisha who had followed the Darkling for a lifetime follow her instead. She searched Morozova's journals for the third amplifier, the firebird. Baghra, blinded by her own son, warned her that every amplifier takes something, and Alina could feel the appetite growing in her. The Apparat, the king's priest, spread word that she was a living Saint and gathered pilgrims she had never asked for.

At Nikolai's celebration his older brother's dealings with Fjerda opened the roads, and the Darkling came through them. The Little Palace fell, the nichevo'ya tore the Grisha apart, and Nikolai escaped on the Hummingbird. Alina held the line long enough for the others to run and burned out her power doing it. Mal carried her away.

The Apparat's pilgrims took the two of them underground, into a place Alina could not leave, where she could no longer summon a single ray of light.

Alina woke underground in the White Cathedral, kept as a relic by the Apparat, powerless and faking miracles with mirrors while he built a cult around her. She got her Grisha out and made for the Spinning Wheel, Nikolai's hideout in the mountains.

Baghra came with them, taught her the Cut, and told her the rest of it: she was Morozova's daughter, and she had killed her own sister out of jealousy centuries earlier. The Darkling's shadow soldiers found them anyway. Baghra died holding them off, and Nikolai was taken and twisted into one of the nichevo'ya himself.

The hunt for the firebird ended at Dva Stolba, where Alina had been born, and there was no firebird. Morozova's third amplifier was Mal. He carried the bloodline, which was why he could track anything and why he had always been able to find her, and the only way to release it was to kill him.

On the Fold, Alina put a knife through him. The power that came out did not go to her. It scattered into ordinary people across Ravka and left her hollow. She killed the Darkling and held him while he died, and burned him on a pyre afterwards. Mal came back, healed by whatever had passed through him.

Nikolai was brought back from what he had been turned into and crowned king. Alina and Mal let the country go on believing the Sun Saint had died on the Fold, and went home to Keramzin to run the orphanage they had grown up in, with no power left between them.

Kaz Brekker ran a gang out of a Ketterdam gambling den and was offered thirty million kruge to break into the Ice Court, the fortress at the heart of Fjerda that nobody had ever entered uninvited. The prize was Bo Yul-Bayur, the scientist behind jurda parem, a drug that turns a Grisha into a weapon and then kills them for it.

He took five people. Inej Ghafa, a spy he had bought out of a brothel, who moved along rooftops. Nina Zenik, a Grisha Heartrender. Matthias Helvar, a Fjerdan witch-hunter rotting in Hellgate because Nina had put him there. Jesper Fahey, a sharpshooter with debts. Wylan Van Eck, a merchant's son who could not read and could build a bomb out of anything.

They went in disguised as prisoners and came up through the Ice Court's own machinery, and everything that could go wrong did. Matthias came face to face with Jarl Brum, the man who raised him, and chose Nina. Bo Yul-Bayur was already dead, but his son Kuwei carried the formula in his head. Nina swallowed parem to get them all out and came back from it addicted and wrecked.

Their employer, Jan Van Eck, had never meant to pay. He wanted the drug for himself. At the handover he took Inej hostage instead, and the Kuwei he carried off was Wylan, tailored into the boy's face by a parem-fuelled Nina. Van Eck gave Kaz a week to produce the real Kuwei or lose Inej. Kaz went to work on him.

Kaz had days to get Inej back from Jan Van Eck, no money, no safe house and half of Ketterdam hunting the crew for the bounty on them. He took her out of Van Eck's own house, then spent the rest of it taking the man apart rather than settling with him.

The plan ran on the auction for Kuwei Yul-Bo. Kaz put Grisha refugees in the robes of the Council of Tides to interrupt it and denounce Van Eck for rigging the bidding, while the merchant's shipping and his accounts were already being emptied underneath him. Van Eck was arrested for embezzling from the Merchant Council. Kuwei's death was staged in a church so he could leave Ketterdam a free man, taking the parem formula out of the country instead of onto its market.

Kaz also settled with Pekka Rollins, the man who had swindled him as a boy and killed his brother Jordie. He took Rollins's son for a single night, gave him back unharmed, and then took everything else Rollins had.

Matthias Helvar was shot in the street by a Fjerdan boy young enough to still believe what the drüskelle had taught them both. He died in Nina's arms.

Inej got a ship of her own to hunt slavers with, and Kaz found her parents and brought them to her. Wylan, made legitimate, took over his father's business with Jesper beside him. Nina carried Matthias's body north to bury him in Fjerda. Kaz stayed in Ketterdam and waited for Inej to come back to it.

Nikolai Lantsov had been king for three years and carried a demon in him, left behind by what the Darkling did to him at the Spinning Wheel. Every night Genya's sedative put him under so the thing could not fly. It was getting stronger, and it spoke in the Darkling's voice.

Zoya Nazyalensky, running the Second Army and covering for him, took him east with a zealot monk called Yuri to find out why saints and miracles were breaking out across Ravka.

At the old Shadow Fold they found a black disc of stone, a crowd worshipping the Darkling's symbol, and a way into a pocket of the world where three Saints, Juris, Grigori and Elizaveta, had been trapped since his death. The Saints offered to burn the demon out of Nikolai in a ritual called the obisbaya.

Juris, who took the shape of a dragon, spent the waiting days teaching Zoya what she actually was, and when he died she took his scales and his power.

Elizaveta had been lying. She had kept the Darkling's body, and the ritual was meant to put him back into it. Zoya turned the thorn wood against her and drove a thorn through her and through the Darkling both.

In Fjerda, Nina Zenik was working under a false name, found a convent sheltering a Grisha girl called Hanne Brum, and uncovered a factory where women and their babies were being dosed with a form of parem. She raised the dead into an ash tree and became a Fjerdan miracle herself.

None of it held. At the ball in Os Alta the Shu princess's double killed Isaak, the soldier standing in for the king. And out east, Yuri's body stood up with the Darkling looking out of it.

Fjerda came for Ravka with numbers, money and Shu backing, and Nikolai fought it with David Kostyk's inventions, Zemeni airships and whatever intelligence Nina could send him from inside the enemy court.

Nina and Hanne got into the Fjerdan court through Heartwood, the debutante season, and close to Crown Prince Rasmus, whom Hanne had been quietly keeping alive with a Healer's hands. Rasmus turned out to enjoy other people's suffering. Hanne killed him defending herself, used her tailoring to take his face and his body, and she and Nina agreed to rule Fjerda from inside the lie.

Fjerdan bombers hit Os Alta on the night of Genya and David's wedding. David was killed in his workshop, still in his wedding clothes.

Zoya stopped fighting what Juris had left in her and became the dragon outright, burned the Fjerdan fleet and the bombers out of the sky, and came out of it worshipped on both sides of the border as Sankta Zoya.

The Darkling, wearing Yuri's body, bargained his way to a meeting with Alina Starkov and to the thorn wood, so that the obisbaya could finally be performed and no new Fold could form. He did not end up plainly dead, and Zoya, Genya and Alina were not satisfied that he was gone.

Nikolai admitted in public that he carried no Lantsov blood, gave up the throne and named Zoya in his place. The court backed her. She was crowned Queen of Ravka with Nikolai beside her as her consort.