A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-9

Chapters 10-18

Chapters 19-27

Chapters 28-36

Chapters 37-45

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 37-45Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 37 Summary

Jasper officiates the wedding. Cas and Poppy kneel and place their rings on the soil. Cas sprinkles dirt on the rings. Jasper slashes their left palms with his dagger. The blood falls on the rings and the cuts heal, leaving behind a streak of gold. As Poppy and Cas exchange the dirt and blood-splashed rings, the sky darkens. Jasper declares this a good omen—a sign that Nyktos, the sleeping king of the gods, approves of the union. Nyktos last made such a sign at the wedding of Cas’s parents.

The golden streak on their palms will disappear only if their marriage ends, either by death or decree. Poppy and Cas partake of each other’s blood, as is tradition for married couples in Atlantia. Cas tells Poppy about heartmates, the term Kieran had used. The first heartmates were a deity and a mortal. When the gods refused to bless the mortal with a long life, the mortal grew old and gray with time. The grieving deity gave up his life for his lover. The gods realized their mistake and ever since then, have blessed such unions if the love is pure and passes trials, and if the blood of the immortal serves as a source for the mortal lover’s prolonged life.

Chapter 38 Summary

Two hundred Ascended reach Spessa’s End. Duchess Teerman, Poppy’s former minder in Solis, addresses Cas on the battlefield, demanding that the Maiden be returned to them. When Cas refuses, Duchess Teerman calls for Poppy, who is hidden by Cas’s side, to return—she belongs to the Queen of Solis. Poppy reveals herself and says she belongs to no one. According to the duchess, Poppy is actually the granddaughter of Queen Ileana, the Queen of Solis. This is impossible, as the Ascended cannot have children, but the duchess suggests the queen is not an Ascended, trying to trick Poppy into returning to Solis to learn the truth about her ancestry. Poppy does not take the bait. The duchess says the gifts she has bought may persuade Cas and Poppy to change their minds. On her command, Solis soldiers release the catapults. Severed heads land around Cas and Poppy, one of them that of Elijah, the keeper of New Haven.

Chapter 39 Summary

Enraged and horrified, Cas and Poppy declare battle. They are joined by the guardians, the elite soldiers Poppy saw training on the ramparts of the rise, as well as wolven hiding in the fields. Poppy gives herself to the chaos of battle, even as she wonders why young mortals are sacrificing themselves for the Ascended. Poppy kills a knight who is about to attack Cas. She heads to the duchess’s carriage as fire breaks out around her.

Chapter 40 Summary

A second party of Ascended reaches Spessa’s End earlier than expected. Cas begs Poppy to leave the field. Poppy refuses, thinking she should offer herself to the duchess so the bloodshed stops. As soldiers surround her and Cas, Poppy threatens to slit her own throat if the war is not halted. The soldiers stop. Just then reinforcements arrive from Atlantia: hundreds of wolven and Atlantian soldiers on horseback. The wolven seem to have been summoned by Poppy’s distress. The Atlantians take down the Ascended. As Poppy attacks the duchess in her carriage, the duchess tells Poppy her brother Ian is alive and with Malik, Cas’s brother. The duchess is overjoyed when she sees the golden imprint of marriage on Poppy’s palm, since this means Poppy has “seized Atlantia right out from under them” (504). Poppy cannot understand what the duchess means and kills her.

Chapter 41 Summary

The Atlantian army is victorious over the forces of Solis, which are wiped out, save for one soldier. The soldier is to carry a message for a parlay to the King and Queen of Solis. As Poppy moves among the wounded to heal them, an older wolven tells her to stay guarded—the King of Atlantia wants her dead to send a message to the Blood Crown. Poppy realizes that even Cas’s parents view her with suspicion because of her ties with Solis. When she brings up the issue with Cas, he tells her his father’s plans have changed. The king now knows he must accept Poppy as Cas’s wife. Poppy wonders if there is some truth to the duchess’s assertion that she is the granddaughter of the Queen of Solis.

Chapter 42 Summary

A heavy golden mist surrounds the woods before the Skotos Mountains of Atlantia as the party heads toward Saoin’s Cave. They camp on a hilltop when it grows dark. Cas tells Poppy that animals stay away from the area as the mist is magical. Cas, Poppy, and Kieran sleep in the same tent. Poppy senses the mist is alive and responds to her touch. As she falls asleep, she is awoken by someone calling her name. She recognizes the voice as that of her father and follows it out of the tent.

Chapter 43 Summary

She sees the scene from her nightmares replay, but this time, a stranger is talking to her father. Eager to learn the identity of this stranger, she follows him. The mist coalesces into the golden figure of a woman who tells her to turn back—the answers Poppy seeks can be found at home. Poppy pauses. Just then, Cas and Kieran catch up with her. Cas pulls her back from the edge of the cliff, to which she had sleepwalked. Neither Cas nor Kieran saw the golden woman, but a rumbling in the ground suggests what Poppy saw was real. This is the sound of a god returning to its place of sleep, suggesting that Poppy encountered the goddess Aios, patron of love and fertility, who sleeps under the highest mountain of Skotos.

Chapter 44 Summary

The group finally reaches Saion’s Cove, where Alastir greets them. He tells them that the king and queen are in the city to meet Cas and Poppy. While Alastir and Cas leave for a private conversation, Beckett accompanies Poppy to the Chambers, the temple of the gods carved into an enormous mountain. Armed Atlantians throng the statue of Nyktos at the center of the temple. One of them calls Poppy a Soul Eater and says she should never have come to Atlantia. Poppy argues with the hostile group, trying to convince them she means well. The group throws rocks at Poppy and calls her slurs. Poppy senses their pain and hatred and charges up with the negative emotions. The sky rains blood.

Chapter 45 Summary

The crowd takes the bleeding sky as a sign that the gods want them to kill Poppy. Surging with the power of their emotions, Poppy begs them to stop. The people notice her glowing eyes and realize Poppy may be Atlantian. They reverse course, but Poppy’s power is already too great for her to control. It rebounds on them, killing them. A blood forest tree, like the one at New Haven, shoots up where Poppy’s blood fell. Jasper and the other wolven arrive in their animal forms, followed by Casteel, Alastir, and Cas’s parents. The wolven make a protective ring around Poppy. Cas takes a knee to Poppy, his swords crossed. Queen Eloana, his mother, is shocked. She asks everyone to bow to Poppy, the last direct descendant of the ancient deities. The novel ends with Eloana taking off her crown and offering it to Poppy, the rightful Queen. The rest of the story continues in The Crown of Gilded Bones, the third book of the series.

Chapters 37-45 Analysis

The plot of the final set of chapters fulfills several traditional narrative tropes. Cas and Poppy, the romantic leads, get married, signifying a comic resolution (in the older sense of the word “comedy”—a narrative that ends in romantic union, as opposed to “tragedy”). Poppy’s journey to Atlantia ends, marking a homecoming. The forces of the Ascended are defeated for the time being, marking the victory of good over evil. The full extent of Poppy’s power is revealed in a climactic scene which brings together the novel’s themes and symbols. Finally, Poppy is revealed as the “chosen one,” a trope staple of genre fiction. However, the novel does not really have a falling action section because it ends on a cliffhanger. It is not made explicit why Cas bows to Poppy or his mother submits her crown before her. The unresolved ending leaves the reader invested in the storyline which extends to the next book in the series, The Crown of Gilded Bones. Thus, the novel also follows the particular conventions of a multi-part series.

This section is particularly informative about Atlantian religion. The gods of Atlantia are actual entities in the universe of the text. Omens, such as the sky darkening at the wedding of Cas and Poppy, or raining blood when Poppy is attacked, are not subjective interpretation of unusual but natural phenomena. Instead, omens are literal messages from the 11 gods, led by Nyktos, who created the world of the Atlantians. Atlantians were created when the children of the gods—called deities—took mortal lovers and gave them immortality by sharing blood. The Atlantian gods are now in deep slumber, but very present. Because she was raised in Solis, Poppy has until now considered the gods as less concrete and more to do with belief—an understanding closer to that of our real world. However, after she sees the gold mist around Atlantia and the form of the goddess Aios, she realizes that the gods are fact, rather than faith. This is confirmed through the gods’ more pronounced interaction with the world of the novel. The rain of blood at the temple of the gods and the appearance of blood trees signals the nearness of these ancient and powerful entities.

Several instances of foreshadowing take place. One predicts the changing nature of the relationship between Poppy, Cas, and Kieran. When they share a tent, the novel suggests that they are getting closer to the emotional and sexual bond implicit in the Joining rite. The second foreshadowing event is about Poppy’s connection with the wolven. More and more frequently, wolven sense her moods and come to her aid without her calling for them: Kieran and Vonetta feel a charge from Poppy, Delano senses her anger, and wolven come to her side during the attack of the Ascended and then the massacre at the temple. Finally, Poppy’s destruction of the Atlantians, and the queen’s remark about Cas having brought danger to Atlantia, foreshadows that Poppy’s growing power may have a violent aspect. Since reigning in one’s own power with control and ethics is a major theme in the novel, we can assume that this will be Poppy’s next character arc.

As befits a novel that is part of a series, suspense and cliffhangers are a large part of the structure of the ending. The mystery of the strange man in Poppy’s dream is left unresolved, as is that of Poppy’s origins, and that of the golden figure that stopped her from falling off the mountain. There is also the implication that Alastir took away Cas deliberately so that Beckett could strand Poppy at the temple. Likewise, while the reader gets more information about the fates of Poppy’s brother Ian and Cas’s brother Malik, their current status remains unknown. Thus, the novel ends with many threads unresolved, inviting the reader to read the next book in the series.

While Cas assures Poppy that the people of Atlantia are bound to accept her because the gods do, Cas’s optimism is proven a little naive. The people at the temple are openly hostile toward Poppy, accusing her of gaining Cas’s trust by manipulating his emotions with her empath abilities. So great is their disdain of Poppy, they call her “the whore of the Ascended” (551) and are even ready to forsake Cas to kill her. The sexist slur shows the depth of the opposition Poppy faces, and is a comment on the real-world propensity to hate what is “foreign” or what one fears. The ugly emotions of the crowd are in steep contrast to Cas’s idealism, and establish that while the prince may be hundreds of years old, his romanticization of rebellion makes him surprisingly naive. It is suggested the people of Atlantia hold beliefs far more complicated than the idealistic Cas has assumed. The people’s hostile reception to Poppy foreshadows that she and Cas are not bound to walk into their happy ending easily. Being heartmates, they are destined to undergo trials to prove their love. Thus, despite their affection for each other, obstacles will keep cropping up in their path for a while.

The theme of The Relationship Between Pain and Pleasure comes together in the scene of Cas and Poppy’s lovemaking right after the battle at Spessa’s Bay. After Poppy kills her old minder Duchess Teerman, Cas and Poppy have sex in the duchess’s carriage—a very literal combination of sex and violence. Poppy notes that “we’d been on the cusp of being separated or killed […] and what came next in the shadowy carriage was proof of how rattled we both were by the knowledge that we could’ve lost each other” (505). Poppy and Cas’s passion gets its edge from dangers inherent in their high-stakes, brutal world. That is why violence often acts as an aphrodisiac, reminding them that time with each other must be seized.