Ruin and Rising

Alina and her soldiers enter the Fold and wait for the Darkling. He appears in his glass ship, and Alina is able to maintain the invisibility until she goes onto the ship to try and free the Grisha children, who she assumes are out of sight in the ship’s cabin. Rattled by the wounds of her friends, a few of whom are struck by bullets even though they’re invisible, Alina’s grip on the invisibility wavers long enough for the Darkling to find and restrain her. Nikolai joins the battle, striking down the shadow monsters. Alina realizes that the children aren’t actually on the ship and that the Darkling just used them as bait to lure her out. She uses her connection with the Darkling to feign attacking him so that the shadow monsters who restrain her let her go to protect the Darkling instead. Alina escapes into the darkness around the ship. Mal finds her and insists that she kill him with a Grisha dagger. Against her will and yet eager at the sense of power she feels, Alina does so, and Mal dies. For a moment, Alina is filled with incredible power: “I was a living star. I was combustion. I was a new sun born to shatter air and eat the earth” (377). Her friends rejoin her in the darkness, and Alina tries to summon light but finds that she can’t do so. In the distance, she sees that the non-magical soldiers have all become Sun Summoners instead.

The Darkling finds her, and they both realize that Alina’s powers are gone. The physical amplifiers Alina wears have broken and come off, useless. When the Darkling touches Alina, the old connection between them is gone. Alina uses the last bit of her power—summoning darkness—to hide the Grisha dagger from the Darkling and then stab him with it, killing him. His monsters and the Fold begin to break apart. Two of Alina’s friends, who are magical healers, manage to resurrect Mal.

Alina wants her friends to fake her death in the battle with the Darkling, and so they sneak her and Mal onto one of the ships and hide them away at the abandoned house when they reach West Ravka. Nikolai, who survived the battle and is back to his former self after the Darkling’s death, takes the credit for defeating the Darkling and destroying the Fold. All across the country, every non-magical soldier has gained the ability to summon light.

Alina and Mal recover and plan to take new names for themselves, circulating the story that they both died during the battle. Genya uses her magical powers to help temporarily disguise Alina, whose hair turned white at the end of the previous book. Alina and Mal, along with the boy who came with them from the mountain fortress, cross the area where the Fold used to be as people stream across it from both sides, triumphant at regaining their country again. Alina gets to the city where Nikolai has installed himself as King, and he again asks her to marry him, saying that he still has darkness inside him from his time as a shadow monster, and only Alina will understand that. Alina gently refuses him, however, and arranges for Genya’s pardon for poisoning the former King. She also chooses Genya, David, and another of the Grisha to lead the Second Army in the future.

Using magic, the Grisha have made the body of a fallen soldier look like Alina’s, and hold a public cremation, along with the body of the Darkling, with the whole kingdom watching.

Alina and Mal get married quietly, using their assumed names. They go back to Keramzin and rebuild their old orphanage into a school where children are educated, treated well, and cared for better than they were. They live an anonymous, ordinary life, although their Grisha friends and Nikolai stay in touch with and come to visit them occasionally. Alina, however, doesn’t mourn for her lost powers or the chance to continue being extraordinary—she is happy with Mal and her work at the school, which give her a sense of meaning and fulfillment.