The Grishaverse: the story so far

Long before he was the Darkling, the boy went by Eryk, and before that by something else, and he had changed names so often that he no longer remembered the first one. He and his mother moved from Grisha camp to Grisha camp across the north, hiding from drüskelle and from other Grisha alike, because they were the only Shadow Summoners alive and his bones were worth more than his life.

At one winter camp he was allowed to be a boy for a while. He made a friend of a girl named Annika, and told her more about himself than he should have.

She worked out what he was. Grisha bone makes an amplifier, and an amplifier makes whoever holds it stronger, and Annika wanted it. She came for him with a boy called Lev, and the two of them argued over which of them would take him.

He used the Cut for the first time that night, on both of them, and they were children as well.

Then he cut himself, so that the camp would find a wounded boy and a story about attackers from outside the valley. He and his mother were gone before morning.

Duva was starving, and girls had begun to disappear out of it, and the town agreed among itself that a witch in the woods was taking them. Nadya's mother was dead, and the woman who had taken her place, Karina, struck Nadya as exactly the sort of person who would sell a girl to something in the trees. When her father did nothing about any of it, Nadya ran.

What she found in the woods was Magda, an old woman with a hut and an oven, who fed her, taught her and never once hurt her. Magda was a witch and Magda was kind, and those turned out not to be a contradiction.

When Nadya was ready to go home, Magda baked her a girl out of gingerbread in Nadya's own likeness and sent it back with her.

Her father ate it. He was found dead the next morning, and what came out afterwards was that Maxim had been the one taking the girls of Duva the whole time, and eating them. Karina had known. She had spent those years keeping his attention fixed on herself, because as long as he wanted her he was not looking at his daughter.

Nadya went back to the woods and stayed. In time she became the witch of Duva herself.

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.

Genya Safin was handed to the Ravkan court as a child because she was a Tailor, the only kind of Grisha who can change a face, and the Queen wanted to be beautiful. When the Queen was finished with her she was passed to the King, who wanted something else, and nobody at the palace considered it their business to stop him.

The Darkling knew. The Darkling had always known.

Then Alina Starkov arrived at the Little Palace and Genya was assigned to her, and for the first time in years someone treated her as a person rather than a service. Alina wrote letter after letter to Mal and gave them to Genya to send on.

The letters were never sent. The Darkling had them, and he handed them back to Genya and put a choice beside them: leave the palace and be safe somewhere far from the King, or stay and become the most useful thing he had.

She stayed, and she destroyed the letters. Alina spent months believing that the last person left from her old life had simply stopped writing back.

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.

Koja was the runt of his litter, small and ugly enough that his own mother nearly ate him, and he talked her out of it by telling her how beautiful her other children were. That was the first trap he escaped with words, and he spent the rest of his life escaping the others the same way, until the animals of the wood decided a fox that clever was worth keeping alive.

Then a hunter came to the wood, and he was very good at it, and the animals started disappearing.

Koja's plan was to befriend the hunter's sister, a quiet girl who seemed harmless and glad of the company, and to learn from her everything he needed to know about her brother.

She was the hunter. The brother was the harmless one. She had spent weeks letting Koja talk himself closer, and when she finally took him she had begun skinning him before he understood what had happened to him.

What saved him was not cleverness. It was Lula the nightingale, whom he had helped once and never thought about again, going for the huntress's eyes.

Yeva Luchova was so beautiful that people tried to steal her out of her cradle to look at her, and by fifteen her father the Duke kept her inside the palace because crowds gathered wherever she walked. When the time came to marry her off he could not choose between the men who wanted her, so he set them a series of impossible tasks and said the best of them would have her.

Semyon was a Tidemaker, a Grisha who commands water, and he had a river. He called it Little Knife and told it what to do, and the river shifted stone, carried what needed carrying, and won him every task he was set.

At the wedding the river spoke for itself. It had done the work, so it had earned her, and not the man who had been giving the orders. Semyon had spent the whole contest treating a living thing as a tool and had never once noticed it was listening to him.

The river rose, took Yeva for itself, and left with her. Neither of them was ever seen again.

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.