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She did not tell herself she wasn’t afraid. Long ago, after a bad fall, her father had explained that only fools were fearless. We meet fear, he’d said. We greet the unexpected visitor and listen to what he has to tell us. When fear arrives, something is about to happen.
This reflection takes place in Chapter 4 as Inej struggles to keep her fear and panic at bay while held in captivity. Throughout the novel, she remembers this advice in moments of danger. These words help her to listen to and learn from her fear, making it possible for her to retain her balance when her life is threatened. In comparing fear to an “unexpected visitor,” her father suggests that it can take many forms and appear at various moments in life. In each instance, though, fear requires both attention and action. It heralds change and must always be listened to carefully. Though she’s been separated from her family for a long time, she has held onto their lessons, and they continue to inform who she is as a person. In this way, even though they are absent, Inej’s family regularly saves her, helping her retain her sense of her own power and strength.
He was going to disappear, just as his father had always wanted, and he’d hired these men to do the job. His father who had read him to sleep at night, who’d brought him sweet mallow tea and honeycomb when he’d been sick with lung fever. As long as it takes people to forget I had a son.
This quote comes from Chapter 14 as Wylan remembers the horrors surrounding his father’s attempt to have him murdered. During the attack, Wylan remembered the times when his father showed him kindness and affection. But a father’s love is supposed to be unconditional, whereas Van Eck’s is shallow and cold, based on Wylan’s ability to serve as his heir. Van Eck not only sought to murder him, he also wanted all memory of his son to disappear, a double erasure that underscores the man’s boundless cruelty. In the wake of this assassination attempt, Wylan does in some ways disappear, even from himself. For Wylan to appear, both to himself and to the world, he must reckon with the damage his father inflicted on him.
“The drüskelle won’t stop. They consider it their holy mission to destroy your kind." It had been his mission too, and he could still feel the distrust, the pull toward hatred. He cursed himself for it.
This quote comes from Chapter 15 as Nina and Matthias discuss how best to protect the world from parem. Here, Matthias explains how the drüskelle, his brothers-in-arms, are fanatic in their determination to destroy the Grisha. What binds them is a commitment to hatred, represented as a holy duty and a form of love. Matthias comes to understand, though, how wrong this feeling is, even as it still infects him and complicates his love for a Grisha. In a different way from the cruelty of Van Eck, the drüskelle illustrate how the beliefs that connect people can be corrosive and can even outlast the relationships that instilled them. Matthias and Nina’s relationship was impeded by Matthias’s prejudices, and though he works hard to distance himself from this hateful ideology, it follows him, both internally and externally. The young drüskelle who kills him embodies the hatred that Matthias cannot fully escape and that ironically destroys him when he has most fully rejected it.
