Alina Starkov has spent her life as an orphan in Ravka, working as a mapmaker's assistant in the First Army. When her regiment attempts to cross the Fold, a swath of impenetrable darkness filled with monsters, Alina discovers a power she never knew she had. Taken from everything she knows, she is brought to the Little Palace in Os Alta to train as a Grisha under the mysterious and magnetic Darkling. The first novel in the trilogy establishes the world, the magic system, and the central tension between Alina's growing power and the people who want to control it.