King of Scars

About the King of Scars series

Nikolai Lantsov -- the charming, endlessly resourceful boy king readers first met in the Shadow and Bone trilogy -- is now on Ravka's throne, holding together a country surrounded by enemies, drained by war, and short on money, allies and time. But Nikolai carries a secret even his closest advisors don't know: a shadow of dark magic left behind from his own transformation years earlier, one that threatens to consume him entirely if he can't find a cure before it's too late.

Leigh Bardugo returns to the Grishaverse to finally give her most charismatic supporting character his own duology, pairing Nikolai's political survival plot -- courting alliances, facing rebellion, keeping Ravka standing -- with a genuinely dark, body-horror-inflected personal crisis. Nina Zenik and other familiar faces from Six of Crows and Shadow and Bone return, giving the duology the feel of a Grishaverse reunion as much as a solo Nikolai story, while the stakes escalate into open war and existential threat to the Grisha themselves.

It's the capstone that completes the original Grishaverse's central arc, best read after both the Shadow and Bone trilogy and the Six of Crows duology, whose characters and consequences it draws together.

How to read this series

Read Shadow and Bone trilogy and the Six of Crows duology first -- King of Scars pulls characters and unresolved threads from both and won't land the same way without that context. Within the duology itself, read King of Scars then Rule of Wolves in publication order; it's one continuous story split across two books.