Siege and Storm

The Prologue’s omniscient third-person narration gives the opening a fairy tale quality that befits Alina’s new status as the would-be saint the Sun Summoner. The Prologue concentrates on Alina’s desperate wish to anchor her security and find a “home” (4)—desires that put her at odds with typical fairy tale protagonists, who seek out adventure. Alina vacillates between being a young woman and a legend—a dichotomy that introduces the theme of Growing into One’s Role.

Following traditional folklore tropes, the novel sets up a black-and-white conflict between the forces of good and evil. Alina is maximally aligned with traditional positive tropes, as her magic is specifically related to light and the sun. Meanwhile, her opponent is equally, unsubtly a creature of darkness—his names (both the Darkling and the Black Heretic) reference the absence of light, and his powers have to do with extinguishing light. While there is little nuance to the characterization of the Darkling, whose goals and means of achieving them are uniformly morally wrong, the novel creates distance between the symbolic purity of Alina’s powers and her internal struggle. One interesting element of Alina’s character is her power hunger. Like the Darkling, who revels in his magic, Alina in this section also longs to unleash her own abilities, drawn to the significant power that she’s not using, gifted by Morozova’s collar. The pluses and minuses of the magical amplifiers that both Alina and the Darkling will try to find throughout the novel are relevant to the idea of the Difficulty of Balancing Power—a theme the novel explores.

The Darkling’s newest skill, creating the nichevo’ya, brings up the novel’s naming strategy. Character and place names, magic powers, and other proper nouns borrow words from Slavic languages—primarily Russian. For instance, Genya and Tolya are standard diminutives of the Russian names Evgenya and Anatol. The Morozova collar’s name comes from the Russian word for “frost,” while nichevo’ya is rooted in the Russian word for “nothing.” Sometimes, the novel’s use of Russian is flawed; for example, the legendary Ilya Morozova who made the collar Alina wears should really be called Ilya Morozov, the form this last name would take for a masculine noun. Similarly, Alina’s last name should be Starkova, the feminine variant of this word.

The novel balances ambiguous aspects of folklore, like Alina’s dreams of a woman carrying a heavy burden, with more straightforwardly realistic representations of politics large and small. Genya and Alina have different takes on the ramifications of the Darkling’s actions. Genya believes that he is working for the greater good of Ravka, an interpretation that the novel demonstrates is wrong, but one that makes sense given the many factions at odds in Bardugo’s world. Similarly, while Alina and the Darkling are highly aligned with good and evil, other actors have much more pragmatic motivations: While Tolya, Tamar, and Sturmhond—the crew and captain of the ship—seem sympathetic, Alina quickly discovers they are mercenaries, whose ability to be bought has pros and cons.