King of Scars — Nikolai Duology #1

A King with a Monster Inside

Leigh Bardugo spent two trilogies — Shadow and Bone, Six of Crows — building the Grishaverse’s political architecture and the people who survive it. King of Scars takes the most reliably entertaining supporting character from those books, King Nikolai Lantsov, and puts him at the center of his own story. The result is the Grishaverse at its most politically astute and emotionally sophisticated.

Nikolai is a man who rules by performance. He is clever, charming, and strategically self-deprecating, and Bardugo has always written him with a quality that made readers want more of him. What King of Scars adds is the private cost of that public persona: the monster the Darkling’s darkness left inside him, which surfaces at night and during moments of vulnerability, threatening to consume everything Nikolai has built.

The Weight of a Crown

The book operates on two tracks. Nikolai and Zoya pursue a solution to his curse through the country’s rural heartland, where old Grisha heretics practice a faith Ravka’s official religion has suppressed. Simultaneously, Nina Zenik continues her mission in Fjerda, mourning Matthias and running a covert operation to extract Grisha refugees before they reach the prison camps.

The contrast between storylines is deliberate and effective. Nikolai’s thread is political and internally focused — what does it cost to rule, and can you rule without sacrificing the self that made you worth following? Nina’s thread is grief and action, the work of continuing after catastrophic loss. Together they give the book emotional range that neither story alone would provide.

Zoya and the Question of Partnership

One of King of Scars’ genuine achievements is Zoya Nazyalensky. Her dynamic with Nikolai is the relationship that drives the book’s emotional engine: two people who know each other’s masks better than anyone, who have reasons not to trust, and who might be each other’s best chance at something real. Bardugo develops this with patience and considerable wit, resisting easy resolution in favor of genuine tension.

The Grishaverse’s political landscape — Ravka surrounded by hostile powers, the Grisha Corps underfunded and undersupplied, the church wielding more influence than the crown — is rendered here with the complexity of a fully imagined geopolitical situation rather than fantasy backdrop.

Setup, Promise, and a Cliffhanger Worth Bearing

King of Scars is explicitly the first half of a duology, and it reads that way: the book ends in a place that demands the second volume rather than offering comfortable closure. For readers invested in the Grishaverse, that is a feature rather than a limitation — the promise of Rule of Wolves looms large and satisfyingly over the book’s final pages.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A rich, politically astute Grishaverse entry that finally gives Nikolai Lantsov the story his charisma always promised, anchored by Bardugo’s sharpest writing and a central relationship worth following into the duology’s conclusion.

Reading Guides

• Leigh Bardugo Books in Order: Complete Grishaverse Reading Guide (2026)

Ravka at Its Most Vulnerable

King of Scars opens with Ravka in a precarious position that the earlier Grishaverse books established but never examined this closely. The country has survived the events of Ruin and Rising, but survival and stability are different conditions. The Grisha Corps, which Alina rebuilt, requires resources the crown can barely supply. The church — whose Apparat wielded significant power in the Grisha trilogy — remains a political force. Fjerda presses at the northern border. Shu Han experiments with something that could reshape the balance of power entirely.

Bardugo is writing political fantasy here in the truest sense: not politics as backdrop but politics as the actual substance of the story. Nikolai’s challenges as king are not primarily supernatural but structural — a country whose institutions are fragile, whose allies are unreliable, and whose enemies are patient. The curse living inside him is the most dramatic element, but it is also an externalization of the less dramatic truth: a ruler is always carrying something that could, if revealed, destroy him.

Zoya Nazyalensky: A Character Remade

Readers of the Grisha trilogy know Zoya as a supporting figure — ambitious, cold, and reliably competent, but defined primarily by her opposition to Alina and her loyalty to the Darkling. King of Scars is partly the story of what happened to Zoya after she chose to continue serving Ravka despite the collapse of everything she believed in, and what that choice cost her.

Bardugo writes Zoya’s internal life with considerable care. Her sharpness, which read as hostility in earlier books, is here contextualized: it is a defense mechanism built over many years of understanding that a Grisha woman’s value is contingent and therefore her position is always precarious. Her dynamic with Nikolai — two people who know each other’s masks better than anyone, who have reason to be wary of trust, who might nonetheless be each other’s best chance at something real — is the book’s emotional engine, and Bardugo develops it with patience that resists easy resolution.

The Curse and Its Implications

The monster inside Nikolai — a remnant of the Darkling’s darkness, something that surfaces at night and under pressure — serves the narrative on multiple levels. Practically, it is a threat: if it is known, Nikolai’s reign becomes indefensible to the institutions that support him. Thematically, it is the question the duology keeps asking in different forms: what is the relationship between the private self and the public role, and how long can a person sustain the gap between them?

The rural journey Nikolai and Zoya undertake to find a solution — through the heartland of Ravka, to Grisha heretics who practice a suppressed faith — is the book’s most interesting structural choice. It takes the court fantasy away from the court and puts it in contact with the Ravka that neither Nikolai nor Zoya has had to think about: ordinary people, old beliefs, and a country that is larger and stranger than the capital suggests.

Nina’s Mission in Fjerda

Nina Zenik’s parallel storyline, which follows her covert operation in Fjerda to extract Grisha refugees, is the book’s emotional anchor outside the main narrative. She is grieving Matthias — processing his death by doing the work he would have wanted done, by being in Fjerda the way he was no longer able to be. Her sections are quieter than Nikolai’s and deliberately so: the contrast between the court’s crises and one woman’s grief-work is itself a thematic statement about the scale at which political decisions are felt.

The introduction of new characters in Fjerda — and hints about what Shu Han is developing with captured Grisha — extends the duology’s scope outward, ensuring that Rule of Wolves will have more to resolve than a single relationship and a single curse.