We take a closer look at Leigh Bardugo’s latest addition to the Grishaverse, King of Scars, and how Nikolai and Nina face their biggest fears head on. (spoilers!)

The wait for the first book in the Nikolai duology within Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse has come and gone, leaving fans with a cliffhanger in King of Scars’ wake. King of Scars took place a few years after Crooked Kingdom left off, around the same amount of time that was between Ruin and Rising and Six of Crows.

While King of Scars’ exposition leans more towards the first trilogy in the Grishaverse, with Nina also being one of the main points of view means that without reading Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows the reader would have major gaps re: information within the newest duology. Before now, it hadn’t been imperative to have read Shadow and Bone before reading Six of Crows, but that isn’t so with the Nikolai duology.

This article has major spoilers within, so if you haven’t read any/all of the Grishaverse, beware!

King of Scars hits the ground running, literally, with the monster that Nikolai became in Ruin and Rising making its first appearance by ravaging a local farm and Zoya coming to clean up his mess. Like Six of Crows, Leigh started the book out with an outside point of view that doesn’t show up again in order to set the book into motion.

Haunted by the monster that he has become at night, Nikolai’s arc within King of Scars is simple: he has to face what he fears, which is the very monster that he has become. Nikolai is king of a crumbling country, rife with war and poverty, the pressure that he is on is immense, and that is without the added pressure of needing to find a bride as well as the monster within him.

Nikolai isn’t known for showing fear, always with a smirk and a joke to hide any kind of weakness. To have his fear manifested so plainly by turning into a monster it is no wonder that Nikolai can’t face it. He cannot fathom the thing he becomes even though he says “the monster is me and I am the monster,” throughout King of Scars.

In the end, thanks to Nikolai faced his demon by setting it free within him. He let go of the perfect king that he felt like he needed to be and instead let everything he had been ashamed of and everything he was hiding come to the surface. It’s pretty deep, actually. We are our own worst fears and sometimes letting ourselves bring what we shove down within ourselves out helps us move on. Now, Nikolai, though, actually did set the demon within him free.

Official art by Kevin Wada

That demon, it turns out, was part of the Darkling. Stabbed by the thorn wood, the part of Nikolai that is the monster is laying dormant within him, weak and biding its time. Instead of killing Yuri, the Darkling’s host, Nikolai decided to leave him alive in hopes that he will be able to rid himself completely of his shadow self. Of course, we all know that it won’t be that easy, especially when it comes to the Darkling. I fear that leaving Yuri alive will come to bite Nikolai, perhaps literally, in the butt.

Nikolai wasn’t the only one that spent much of King of Scars who had to deal with his biggest fear. Nina Zenik, who has spent the last few years undercover in Fjerda trying to spirit Grisha out of the country that persecutes them for who and what they are, has to come face to face with the man she both hates and fears: Jarl Brum.

The very man who captured her the first time, before she met Matthias. The man who raised Matthias into the prejudiced boy he’d been before he’d wanted to be better. Jarl Brum terrified Nina in Six of Crows and his appearance in King of Scars was both a surprise and expected at the same time. For Nina, King of Scars was about coming to terms with her traumas, about moving on.

Both her fear of losing Matthias and letting him go paired with the very real adversary that is Jarl Brum makes Nina’s arc even more poignant than Nikolai’s. Nina, who has been dragging Matthias’ body around Fjerda with her for years, along with hearing his voice in her head until she laid him to rest obviously would take a toll on her psychologically.

After the way that Nina took Matthias’ death in Crooked Kingdom it’s no surprise that she hadn’t been able to let that last bit of him go. Even I felt as though he was still there as he talked to her from beyond, even though it was just in her head. The grief she felt was palpable and didn’t pass with his burial. Most of the time in fiction it is difficult to grasp how much death of loved ones affect us, but Leigh did an amazing job with Matthias and Nina’s grief over losing him.

Official art by Kevin Wada

Seeing that Jarl was alive, paired with burying Matthias and finally letting him go, along with Nina seeing his wolf out in the wild meant that Nina, unlike Nikolai, couldn’t really avoid going head on against her fears.

Though her facial features were different, her fear was very real as she had to act as though she didn’t know him. Her new companion, Hanne, being Jarl’s daughter definitely complicated things. Keeping her cool under pressure solidified Nina’s resolve in her mission to figure out what was going on in the village with all of the missing girls.

The last glimpse we have of Nina in King of Scars is her being ingratiated into the Brum family, thanks to Hanne and Jarl believing that she had a hand in changing his daughter into the woman he wanted her to be. Nina, of course, believed Hanne to be perfect the way she was, but they have to keep up the pretenses in order to take him down. I can’t wait to watch Nina utterly destroy him in the sequel.

Having to wait for the sequel is going to be a killer, especially with the cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers at the end of King of Scars. I guess in the meantime I’ll have to reread the Grishaverse (again), and wait for more news about the Grishaverse TV show that’s in the works.

Related: Wishlist for Netflix’s Grishaverse: from the page to the small screen, ‘Six of Crows’ sets new standard in YA Fantasy for diversity and inclusivity, 10 Too Real ™ ‘Six of Crows’ quotes that push the boundaries of fantasy