Glass Sword

What's inside (8 sections)

1. Escape from the palace and Maven on the throne
2. Julian's list and learning to hunt newbloods
3. Nix, Shade, and rescues that cost too much
4. Corvium and the front that changes Cal
5. Tuck Island and the Guard starting to split
6. Betrayal, capture, and the arena
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I finished Red Queen late at night and started Glass Sword the next morning because I could not leave Mare where that betrayal left her. First published in 2016 by HarperTeen, the book runs 444 pages and is book two in the Red Queen series. It follows Mare Barrow after her escape from the palace, as she tries to find other Reds with powers before King Maven can kill or cage them. It is darker, sadder, and more tired than the first book, and that tired feeling turns out to be the point.

The setup is simple and cruel. Mare is Red by blood but can call lightning like a Silver. Maven, the younger prince who pretended to love her, now sits on the throne of Norta with his mother Elara whispering in his ear. Mare escaped with his older brother Cal, the exiled heir who can call fire, with help from the Scarlet Guard. Now Maven calls Mare a traitor on every broadcast. He shows doctored footage, offers rewards, and sends hunters for anyone with strange gifts. Mare decides the only way to fight him is to build an army of people like her, called newbloods, Reds with Silver style abilities who were hidden for years.

What struck me first was how little victory there is in the escape. Mare shakes. She cannot sleep. She replays Maven smiling at her, holding her hand, then ordering her death. Cal lost his father, his crown, and his name in one night. He cleans his weapons too often and stares at fires like they might answer. Their bond is less romance now than shared shock. They saved each other, so they cling to each other, even when that hurts both of them.

Escape from the palace and Maven on the throne

The book opens on the run. Mare, Cal, and their small Guard crew move through woods, barns, and safe houses with Maven posters going up behind them. Kilorn Warren, Mare's old friend from the Stilts, is with them, still joking, still loyal, still out of his depth among princes and rebels. Farley, the Guard captain, leads the practical side, food, routes, bribes, silence. She trusts Mare only as far as Mare is useful. That tension never quite leaves.

Maven rules through fear and screens. He keeps Evangeline Samos close because her house commands metal and money. More dangerous is Elara Merandus, his mother, a Whisper who can slide into minds, bend memory, and make pain feel like love. Every plan Mare makes has to assume Elara might already know it. Every captured rebel might talk without meaning to talk. I found those scenes frightening, not from gore, but because consent means nothing near her.

Mare narrates with a flat, wired voice that I believed. She counts exits. She hates sleeping because dreams bring back the palace cells and the stone cuffs that mute her power. Silent Stone, the rock that blocks abilities, appears again here, in cuffs, in cages, in bullets.

Cal struggles in a different way. He was raised to lead armies, not to hide in them. He wants to protect Red villagers, but he flinches when the Guard kills Silver guards who once served under him. He still believes in honor, in uniforms, in rules of war. Farley thinks that is soft. Kilorn thinks that is noble but useless. Mare loves Cal for his steadiness and resents him for his hesitation. No one gets to stay clean when friends are dying on screens.

Julian's list and learning to hunt newbloods

The list comes from Julian Jacos, Cal's uncle and Mare's former teacher, the gentle scholar who once lent her forbidden histories. Before the fall, Julian had been tracking Reds who showed odd gifts, children who survived shocks, workers who never burned, girls who heard thoughts. He wrote names, towns, ages, and likely powers. That paper becomes the spine of the middle book. Find them first. Teach them. Hide them.

The ethics of that mission hang over everything. Mare tells herself she is rescuing. Farley tells her plainly she is recruiting. Some newbloods are kids. Some are scared parents. Some do not want war. Mare shows up with lightning in her hands and soldiers at her back and calls it choice, but Maven is also showing up with prisons and nooses. Choice shrinks fast.

Hunts follow a rhythm. Travel in disguise. Watch the town. Find the mark. Test the power. Fight Maven's men who often arrive at the same time. Run. Each rescue costs food, medicine, and secrecy. Each failure costs more. Kilorn, who has no power at all, keeps asking the question Mare avoids, what happens to these people after they are saved. Barracks. Training. Front lines. The Guard has no schools, only soldiers.

I liked the list as a device because it shows Norta beyond the palace. Market towns, river ports, factory villages, rail stops, all under watch, all tired of war. Reds whisper about the lightning girl with hope and dread mixed.

Nix, Shade, and rescues that cost too much

Two names carry the most weight, Nix Marsten and Shade Barrow, and both show what rescue really costs.

Nix is an older newblood the crew tracks to a rough town, a man who has survived by keeping his head down. Maven wants him badly enough to send a serious force. The fight to reach him is messy and close. Houses burn. A neighbor dies for pointing the wrong way. When Nix finally stands with them, bloody and laughing in disbelief, I felt relief for about a page before the price landed. Safety is no longer a house. It is a moving camp that can be shelled.

Shade is Mare's older brother, believed dead in the war, then revealed as alive and gifted. He can jump from place to place in a blink, a gift the Guard calls jumping. For Mare, Shade is not a soldier. He is home. For a short stretch, Mare laughs for real, and the book breathes.

I will keep details light, but the mission that brings Shade fully into the crew ends in blood. Maven's forces close in during what should have been a clean pullout. Elara's touch is felt even at distance, in confused orders and turned heads. Someone screams. Stone cuffs click. Lightning answers too late. Shade dies, and Mare breaks in a way that changes her for the rest of the series. She does not just grieve. She hardens. She stops asking newbloods if they want to fight. She starts telling them Maven will kill them anyway, so they might as well fight with her. Farley approves. Kilorn does not. Cal watches with growing fear.

That death is the moral hinge of the book. Mare begins to use people the way Maven used her, for a cause she calls better. She knows it. She hates it. She does it anyway. Trauma does not make her kinder. It makes her faster, colder, and more certain.

Corvium and the front that changes Cal

Halfway through, the hunt turns toward Corvium, the battered fortress city on the front where Norta bleeds against Lakeland. Cal knows it. He served there. He has friends buried near its walls. The Guard wants to hit Maven where it hurts, to free prisoners, to steal supplies, to prove Reds can strike at Silver war. Mare wants newbloods rumored to be caged there. Everyone wants something, and Corvium gives nothing freely.

The city chapters are the best written in the book for me. Mud, smoke, sirens, trench lines, Red soldiers used as shields. Cal walks those streets like a ghost returning to his own grave. He gives orders without thinking, then hates himself for the ease of it.

The raid itself is frantic and sad. Gifted prisoners are found in poor shape, kept in Silent Stone cells, starved, tagged like stock. Some can still fight. Some cannot walk. The crew must choose who to carry while shells fall. Maven does not even need to be present to win pieces of the day. His hunters know how Mare thinks now, because she thinks like prey that keeps returning to the same water.

What I admired here was refusal to make war clean. A rescued prisoner thanks Mare and then dies of wounds an hour later. Farley calls it math. Cal calls it murder. Mare writes names in her head and stops saying them aloud because saying them makes her cry.

Corvium also cracks the Mare and Cal bond further. He wants to hold the city, to save its garrison, to prove a Calore can protect. She wants to grab the gifted and vanish before Maven closes the net. Both are right. Both are wrong. Their fight after, whispered in a ruined stairwell while dust falls, felt more real than any kiss. If the middle drags anywhere, it drags around here, not from boredom but from repetition. Another town, another name, another race, another narrow escape. Hunting is grind, but grind blurs on the page, and I started skimming travel paragraphs to reach dialogue.

Tuck Island and the Guard starting to split

After Corvium, the survivors reach Tuck, the hidden island base of the Scarlet Guard. Pine trees. Cold water. Tents and cabins. Children running messages. Newbloods training in clearings. Farley softens a fraction here, seen with family, seen laughing once. Kilorn finally sleeps through a night.

Tuck matters because it shows what revolt could be, a town, not only raids. Teachers try lessons between drills. Medics triage without asking blood color. For a few chapters I hoped Mare might rest and relearn mercy. She almost does. She plays with kids who call her sparks. She sits with Nix while he mends nets. She listens to Farley talk about her father. Then Maven's shadow reaches across the water.

Cracks show fast. Command argues about Mare. Some officers want her as a poster and a weapon, then lock her out of planning. Food runs short. Newblood training causes accidents. Cal trains fighters in Silver forms and offends Reds who hate those forms. Kilorn, brave and powerless among wonders, feels smaller each day.

Mare's head worsens on Tuck. She hears Shade's voice. She counts names. She pushes Cal away because needing him feels like weakness Maven could use. Grief does the work now. Aveyard writes exhaustion well, the short temper, the missed meals, the way Mare flinches at kindness because kindness once wore Maven's face.

The romance loops here in ways that tested my patience. Cal offers steady care. Mare wants him and fears that wanting makes her soft. Maven invades dreams and broadcasts, promising she could still rule beside him if she kneels. It is control dressed as courtship, and the book names it as rot, not romance. Still, pages spent on who Mare aches for can feel circular.

Betrayal, capture, and the arena

The final third moves like a siren. The Guard's secrecy fails. An operation meant to save lives walks into steel. I guessed part of the betrayal early, but the pain still landed because the traitor is not a stranger. It is someone Mare fed and fought beside. Motives mix fear, envy, and Elara's slow pressure in a mind that was already cracked.

Shade's death already broke Mare. The Tuck betrayal breaks the Guard's faith in her. People she saved look at her like a storm that follows. Farley, who rarely cries, shouts. Kilorn is kept from her by guards and orders. Cal stands between her and blades with his hands up, fire banked, begging for minutes. Minutes do not come. Maven's net closes with Silent Stone and screens.

Capture chapters are brutal to read. Cuffed, muted, filmed, Mare is paraded as proof that revolt fails. Maven talks softly, calls her his, promises mercy that means collar. He needs her alive because dead symbols spread. Living symbols can be shown kneeling. Cal is kept near as pressure and torment. The writing stays restrained, which makes it worse.

It ends in the arena, the Bowl of Bones in Archeon, where Silver justice is theater. Mare and Cal are thrown in to fight for crowds and cameras, chained by stone that steals their fire and lightning. Old enemies watch from boxes. Newblood friends watch from cells. The fights are ugly, desperate, and short on glory.

I admired the nerve and hated the ache, which is the right mix for book two. Glass Sword refuses to reset to happy. Mare is prisoner again, but lower than before, because now she knows the cost of leading. Cal is broken open, forced to face that honor means nothing to Maven. The Guard is scattered. The list is bloodied. Yet small seeds hold, names memorized, friends alive, newbloods who saw Mare stand and will remember. Hope here is not bright. It is stubborn.

My fair criticism stands alongside that praise. The middle hunt repeats, town after town with narrow escapes that blur. The romance loops, with Mare torn between Cal's warmth and Maven's poisoned pull long after readers have chosen. Some side newbloods get names but little inner life. And Mare's hardness, though honest, can exhaust sympathy.

Still, I closed the book shaken in a way few middle volumes manage. Red Queen asked who to trust. Glass Sword asks what trust costs when you are the one asking others to die. Mare hunts gifted Reds to save them and learns she is also spending them. Start with Red Queen first. This volume assumes you know the blood split, the houses, the ball betrayal, and why Silent Stone matters.

FAQ

Do I need to read Red Queen before Glass Sword?

No. Glass Sword is book two in the Red Queen series and assumes you know the palace betrayal, the blood split, and why Silent Stone matters.

Who are the newbloods Mare is hunting?

Mare uses Julian Jacos list to find gifted Reds like Nix Marsten and Shade Barrow before Maven can capture or kill them.

How does Glass Sword end?

It ends with Mare and Cal captured and forced to fight in the Bowl of Bones in Archeon while Maven and Elara watch.