Siege and Storm by Leigh Bardugo: Grisha Trilogy Book Two
The second novel of Leigh Bardugo's Grisha trilogy opens at sea. Alina Starkov and Mal Oretsev are in flight across the Bone Road, trying to disappear into the world beyond Ravka's borders after the events of Shadow and Bone — which ended with Alina's power revealed, the Darkling's ambitions unmasked, and the Fold transformed into something still more catastrophic than it had been. They do not disappear successfully. The Darkling finds them, and he brings with him something the first book could not have prepared readers for: a Sea Whip, a mythological sea creature, whose existence reconfigures the stakes of what Alina's power might ultimately require her to become.
This opening sequence establishes what Siege and Storm does differently from its predecessor. The first book was in large part a story about discovery: Alina discovering her power, her place among the Grisha, and the danger embedded in what she had been brought into. The second book assumes that discovery as its starting point and moves to something harder — the question of what Alina does with what she now knows, and how much of herself she is willing to sacrifice to become what the mythology of her world seems to demand.
To understand Siege and Storm properly, the first novel requires brief accounting. Shadow and Bone (2012) introduced Alina as an orphan cartographer in the Ravkan First Army, unremarkable until she crosses the Shadow Fold — a strip of permanent darkness bisecting Ravka and teeming with monstrous winged creatures called volcra — and discovers she can generate light. The Fold is itself an ancient catastrophe, and the ability to dispel it is not merely useful; it is politically explosive. Alina is taken from her unit to train at the Little Palace, the court of the Grisha, where she comes under the tutelage of their leader, a centuries-old Shadow Summoner known simply as the Darkling.
The Darkling is the figure around whom the Grisha trilogy's emotional architecture is organized. Bardugo has spoken about the conscious decision to write him as genuinely attractive — not attractive despite his cruelty but partly because of his certainty, his history, his apparent belief in Alina as someone who matters. The first novel's movement from admiration to horror mirrors Alina's own disillusionment, and the second book deepens that arc by showing what the Darkling has become in the aftermath of his defeat at the end of the first novel.
"Siege and Storm assumes discovery as its starting point and moves to something harder — the question of what Alina does with what she now knows, and how much of herself she is willing to sacrifice."
— Novel Sounds editorialThe Introduction of Nikolai Lantsov
The most immediately recognized contribution of Siege and Storm to the Grishaverse is the introduction of Nikolai Lantsov, who appears initially under the alias Sturmhond — the captain of a privateer vessel that intercepts both Alina's flight and the Darkling's pursuit in the Bone Road sequence. Nikolai is a prince of Ravka, third in line for a throne that has been badly weakened by the Fold, by corruption, and by the political fallout of the Darkling's emergence as an independent power. He is also, as the novel establishes across several hundred pages, one of the more intelligently written characters in Bardugo's early work.
Nikolai serves multiple narrative functions simultaneously. He provides a third option in the romantic geometry that has dominated Alina's story — neither the dark intensity of the Darkling nor the familiar comfort of Mal, but something more complex: a person who is wholly aware of the political calculus of his interest in Alina while also being genuinely drawn to her. More importantly, he represents a vision of Ravka that the trilogy needs: a future leadership that is competent, reform-minded, and able to hold together a country that the Darkling's ambitions have fractured.
The character proved popular enough that Bardugo eventually gave him two full novels of his own. King of Scars (2019) follows Nikolai as Ravka's king in the aftermath of the Grisha trilogy, dealing with the consequences of the Darkling's war on the country's stability and on Nikolai's own body. Rule of Wolves (2021) continues that story. Both novels are set in the same Grishaverse and engage with characters and events from the Six of Crows duology, weaving the world's timelines into an increasingly dense shared history.
Amplifiers and Mythology
The mythological framework of the Grisha trilogy becomes considerably more elaborate in Siege and Storm. The concept of amplifiers — objects or materials derived from creatures of mythological significance that can augment a Grisha's power when bound to their body — was introduced in the first novel through the Stag, a white deer whose antler Alina acquired. The second novel introduces the Sea Whip as a second amplifier, and establishes that a third exists: the Firebird. The three amplifiers together constitute a legend of enormous power, and the question of what Alina would become if she bound all three to herself drives the trilogy's escalating sense of consequence.
The amplifier mythology operates on two levels. On the narrative surface, it provides structure: a quest framework that moves Alina and her allies across Ravka and its borders in search of creatures that exist only in myth. At a deeper level, the amplifiers are a meditation on what power costs. Each amplifier requires a death — specifically, the death of the creature — and that requirement puts Alina in recurring conflict with Mal, whose ability to track mythological animals has already made him instrumental in acquiring the first amplifier. The question of what it means to destroy something irreplaceable, and to justify that destruction in the name of a larger good, is one the trilogy keeps returning to without providing easy answers.
Bardugo has noted in interviews that the Russian and Slavic mythological traditions informing the Grishaverse were intentional and researched, though the world is not a strict analog of any historical or mythological reality. The Grisha orders — the Corporalki (who work with the human body), the Etherealki (who work with natural forces), and the Materialki (who work with matter and materials) — have a systematized internal logic that feels grounded even when the narrative stakes are fantastical. This groundedness is part of what distinguishes the Grishaverse from many YA fantasy worlds of the same period.
Alina's Arc: Power and Identity
The central tension of Siege and Storm is not external — it is not primarily about the Darkling's new army or the political instability of Ravka, though both are present and consequential. The central tension is internal to Alina: she is becoming something she does not entirely choose to be, and the process of becoming it is costing her the relationships and the sense of self that grounded her before her power was discovered.
Bardugo is deliberate about the corrupting potential of power in the series, and in Alina's story specifically. The Sun Summoner's identity — the symbol that Ravka has built around her, the cult of personality her presence generates, the military and political weight her power carries — is at odds with the person Alina understands herself to be. The novel traces the incremental ways in which she begins to perform this identity, to inhabit its expectations, and to lose the clarity about her own desires and values that she had at the start. This arc is not presented as a straightforward fall, but as something more nuanced: a person discovering that the distance between who they are and who they are needed to be can shrink in ways they do not fully control.
The relationship between Alina and Mal becomes the site of this tension in Siege and Storm. Their childhood friendship and love, which was presented as an anchor in the first book, is strained by the asymmetry of what Alina is becoming. Mal is a tracker of exceptional skill, but in the world of the Grisha he has no power and no formal status; in the world of Ravka's politics, he is increasingly secondary to Alina's significance. Their dynamic in this middle volume is one of the more honestly rendered complications of the trilogy — the difficulty of maintaining an equal relationship when one person's life has been transformed and the other's has not.
The Netflix Adaptation and the Merging of Timelines
When Netflix developed Shadow and Bone as a television series, released in April 2021, the creative decision that generated the most discussion among readers of the source material was the merging of the Grisha trilogy's timeline with characters from the Six of Crows duology. In the books, the Six of Crows characters — Kaz Brekker, Inej Ghafa, Jesper Fahey — exist in Ketterdam years after the events of the Grisha trilogy, in a world that has already absorbed the consequences of Alina's story. In the television adaptation, they are active in Ketterdam at the same time that Alina is discovering her power, given a mission that places them in proximity to the Grisha trilogy's setting.
This structural choice served the television production's practical goals: the Six of Crows characters had their own passionate fanbase and the heist-adventure energy of their storyline provided contrast with the more introspective drama of Alina's arc. It also allowed the series to establish both narrative branches without requiring viewers to watch two separate seasons devoted to different sets of characters. The first season drew significant viewership and the second followed in March 2023. Netflix cancelled the series after its second season in June 2023, leaving the adaptation unfinished relative to the full arc of either source series.
The adaptation's existence increased readership of both the Grisha trilogy and the Six of Crows duology, and created a generation of readers who encountered Kaz Brekker and the Crows before Alina Starkov. This reversed order of discovery has affected how readers approach the two series, with some finding the Grisha trilogy slower-paced after the propulsive heist structure of Six of Crows. Bardugo's decision to set the Crows in a morally complex criminal world, with a protagonist defined by trauma and obsession rather than chosen-one mythology, gives the duology a different tonal register from the trilogy — one that some readers find easier to enter.
Bardugo and the Architecture of the Grishaverse
The Grishaverse has grown into one of the more architecturally ambitious YA fantasy universes of the 2010s. Beginning with the Grisha trilogy, it expanded through the Six of Crows duology set in the mercantile city of Ketterdam, the fairy tale collection The Language of Thorns (2017), and the King of Scars duology. The novels are set in different countries of the same world — Ravka, Kerch, Fjerda, Shu Han — and the political relationships between those countries shift as characters move between them and as the consequences of earlier books ripple outward.
What the Grishaverse does particularly well is maintain internal consistency across an expanding world. The Grisha system — its orders, its politics, its vulnerabilities — behaves the same way in Ketterdam as in Ravka, which it should, since it is the same magic. The consequences of the Darkling's war are visible in King of Scars. The characters from Six of Crows have opinions about the events of the Grisha trilogy, though they were not present for them. This texture of cross-reference, built across a decade of publication, gives the world a weight that single-volume or shorter-series fantasies cannot achieve by the same means.
Frequently Asked Questions
Siege and Storm is the second novel in Leigh Bardugo's Grisha trilogy. It follows Alina Starkov and Mal as they flee Ravka by sea after the events of Shadow and Bone. The Darkling pursues them, a privateer prince named Nikolai Lantsov intervenes, and Alina must consolidate her power as Sun Summoner while facing a more terrifying version of the enemy she thought she had escaped.
Nikolai Lantsov is a Ravkan prince introduced in Siege and Storm operating as the privateer captain Sturmhond. He is witty, politically shrewd, and militarily capable — an ally to Alina with motivations both personal and dynastic. He became one of the most popular Grishaverse characters and is the protagonist of Bardugo's later novels King of Scars (2019) and Rule of Wolves (2021).
Yes. Siege and Storm is a direct sequel that begins immediately after the events of Shadow and Bone. Major plot points, character relationships, and Alina's development as Sun Summoner carry forward without substantial recap. The first book is essential context for understanding what the second is reacting against.
Shadow and Bone (2012) follows Alina Starkov, an orphan soldier in the Ravkan First Army, who discovers she is a Sun Summoner — able to generate light — when crossing the Fold, a zone of permanent darkness filled with creatures called volcra. She is taken to train with the Grisha and comes under the influence of their leader, the Darkling, whose true goals she must ultimately confront.
The Grishaverse is Leigh Bardugo's shared fictional world, inspired by Tsarist Russia and surrounding territories. It centers on the Grisha — people who can manipulate matter and energy, organized into three orders. The Grishaverse encompasses the Grisha trilogy, the Six of Crows duology, the King of Scars duology, and the fairy tale collection The Language of Thorns.
The Darkling is the leader of the Grisha and the primary antagonist of the Grisha trilogy. A Shadow Summoner who has lived for centuries, he presents himself as Alina's ally and mentor before the full scope of his ambitions becomes clear. His relationship with Alina — compelling and dangerous in equal measure — is the emotional spine of all three Grisha trilogy novels.
Netflix released Shadow and Bone as a television series in April 2021. It was notable for merging the Grisha trilogy's timeline with Six of Crows characters — Kaz Brekker, Inej Ghafa, and Jesper Fahey — weaving the two narratives across the same season despite the books being set years apart. A second season followed in 2023. Netflix cancelled the show after its second season in June 2023.
Siege and Storm introduces the amplifier mythology in full — creatures of mythological power (the Stag, Sea Whip, and Firebird) whose remains can augment a Grisha's abilities when bound to their body. The novel establishes that Alina's full power requires all three amplifiers and builds the trilogy's central ethical question: what is she willing to destroy to become what her world needs her to be?
Six of Crows (2015) is a heist novel set in the merchant city of Ketterdam in the same Grishaverse world, following criminal mastermind Kaz Brekker. It is set after the Grisha trilogy and references its consequences, but can be read independently. Many readers first encounter the Grishaverse through Six of Crows via BookTok recommendations.
Publication order: Shadow and Bone (2012), Siege and Storm (2013), Ruin and Rising (2014), Six of Crows (2015), Crooked Kingdom (2016), King of Scars (2019), Rule of Wolves (2021). The Language of Thorns (2017) can be read at any point. The Grisha trilogy and Six of Crows duology can each be read independently before approaching the King of Scars duology.