56 pages • 1 hour read
Victoria AveyardGlass Sword
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 26-30Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 26 Summary
While most of the group goes to free more prisoners, Mare, Cal, and Cameron infiltrate the command center, taking down Silvers until they reveal where Julian is. Cal starts to leave, but Cameron doesn’t follow, busy exacting revenge on the Silver guards. As Mare watches, she feels her desire for vengeance growing, and she joins Cameron, saying, “Lightning has no mercy” (376). After, Mare and Cameron join Cal, taking out more Silvers along the way. They find Julian at the bottom of a cell block and free him, letting him use his power to make a metal controller and build the staircases and catwalks so the group can escape.
With Silvers and newbloods fighting together, Mare’s group continues their rampage through the prison. In one cell block, an enemy Silver manipulates light, making the room difficult to see, and Mare runs straight into the queen. As Mare feels herself being controlled, she slips into a cell of Silent Stone, cutting off the queen’s ability. The queen aims a gun at Mare, but Shade smacks her away, pulling Mare out of the cell and teleporting her away. With Cal, Kilorn, and Julian on her heels, Mare sprints for the prison entrance, battling enemy Silvers the entire way. Once they’re outside, Shade teleports Cal and Julian to the jets. When he returns for Mare, he teleports into the path of a knife aimed at her and is killed. In her rage, Mare kills the queen and drags her corpse to the jets, where she weeps and stares at her hands “painted in both colors of blood” (388).
Chapter 27 Summary
With Shade’s corpse at her feet, Farley demands to know if Jon told Mare that Shade would die. Still not knowing what it means, Mare relays Jon’s message—that the answer to Farley’s question is “yes,” which drains the fight out of Farley. Cal reprimands Mare for fighting with Farley and killing the Silver guards alongside Cameron. He knows about the notes from Maven that Mare kept and feels betrayed by how much she cares about them. When Mare counters that Cal misses Maven too, Cal bluntly states, “He’s my brother. I miss him in a very different way” (395). Mare doesn’t know how to respond to that, so she doesn’t. When Cal tries to comfort her, she pushes him away.
On Mare’s orders, Cal flies the jet back to the Scarlet Guard island base, where she presents the queen’s corpse to the Colonel. She records a broadcast showing the dead queen and calling for newbloods to join the Scarlet Guard. Despite how much Mare hates the queen, using her corpse like this feels terrible, as if Mare’s fighting “against anything good I might have left inside myself” (400).
Chapter 28 Summary
The Colonel takes Mare to meet Rash and Tahir, newblood twins and representatives from the Free Republic of Montfort, where newbloods are accepted members of society. They’ve come with an offer of an alliance, but Mare only sees their request as another ruler wanting to use her for a cause. Any newbloods who wish to live safely are welcome in Montfort. Mare agrees to this but rejects joining Montfort’s forces by saying, “Bring me Maven Calore’s head and your leader can use me as a footstool” (408).
Mare hides in the infirmary, letting the memory of Shade’s death replay until Julian finds her and tells her to stop feeling sorry for herself. She’s experienced terrible things and made terrible choices, but if she wants to protect those she cares about, she can’t let those things control or destroy her. Mare realizes how much like a monster she’s been lately and vows to do better, thinking, “I will not lose who I am, even if it kills me” (412).
Feeling a little better, Mare goes to her family’s quarters, where she endures their anger and grief about Shade’s death. She’ll be leaving again on a mission to rescue the child soldiers, and her two other brothers volunteer to accompany her. Afraid but grateful to know they’ll be with her, Mare curls up on a bed beside her mother and cries.
Chapter 29 Summary
Mare goes to the mess hall to explain the mission, cut off by yelling Reds and newbloods as Cal and Julian enter. They don’t want Silvers there, but the Colonel temporarily quiets the protests. Cal protests Mare’s plan, believing it will be a massacre, but the battle zone isn’t how he remembers it, meaning Mare’s plan should work fine. When Mare asks who will join her, many volunteer. Cal is among them, staring at her with a gaze hot as fire, which Mare thinks is a waste because “there is nothing in me left to burn” (422).
That night, Cal pilots an airship to a city near where Mare’s group will infiltrate the army, but fires are blazing at the city center. A blast tears the airship apart and sends it plummeting, metal reshaping into a cage as it falls. Maven waits on the ground, impassively watching the group try to escape the twisting metal. Knowing it’s the only way to save Cal and Kilorn, Mare offers Maven a deal: “Let the rest go—and I will be your prisoner” (433). As Cal and Kilorn protest, Maven agrees.
Chapter 30 Summary
As Maven’s prisoner, Mare is kept chained with a block on her power. He brings her before jeering Silvers, who hold up names and pictures of the Silvers who’ve died by her doing, and the sight breaks Mare, making her cry. Jon is there, looking apologetic, but Mare refuses to forgive him. Before the crowd, Maven snaps a collar around Mare’s neck and forces her to kneel, saying, “You put her body on display. [...] I’ll do the same to you” (439).
Chapters 26-30 Analysis
The battle in the prison symbolizes the worst of people. Mare and Cameron torture the guards until they give up the information the girls want, but instead of stopping, they kill until there are none in the room left alive. This goes against everything Mare has said up until now, suggesting either that she’s been lying to herself about her feelings toward Silvers or that proximity to Cameron’s vengeful rage has made her angry enough to kill indiscriminately. Shade’s death similarly affects Mare. Having believed she lost him once only to discover he’d survived, seeing him die in front of her makes Mare lose control. The queen doesn’t directly kill Shade, but she is a target for Mare’s anger, and the lightning storm Mare brings down fries the queen with all of Mare’s anger and grief. As war often does, the battle highlights The Different People We Become. Mare shows unrestrained rage and vengeance against the Silvers and the queen, demonstrating that the battle has changed her, but whether for the short-term or long-term is unknown.
Cal and Mare’s conversation about killing and Maven in Chapter 27 shows the differences in how their characters have grown. Cal has been unable to kill Silvers for most of the book, finally breaking in the last few encounters because the other option was to let them kill him. He is mad at Maven but doesn’t take that anger out on all Silvers, recognizing that Maven is the only one responsible for his actions. By contrast, Mare seems to forget the lessons she learned in Red Queen about how Silvers are people too. Cal is angered by Mare’s feelings for Maven. He can’t understand how she still cares for him, and he feels betrayed because he thought she had those types of feelings for him. When Cal argues that he misses Maven in a different way than Mare, Mare says nothing because she knows she has no argument. Clinging to the belief that Maven could be salvaged is foolish, and instead of admitting this, she lets her anger rule her, pushes away Cal, and lashes out at everyone until Julian lectures her in Chapter 28.
The broadcast Mare records in Chapter 27 is another trope of the young adult dystopian genre. Regimes in dystopian novels often use their control over media to influence people’s beliefs and make themselves appear good when they are anything but. By recording a broadcast featuring the queen’s corpse, Mare puts herself on the same level as Maven in a few ways. First, she uses media to tell her story and deliver the truth Maven has kept from the people. Second, she stoops to Maven’s level in using every tool at her disposal, even those that feel wrong or inappropriate. The twins from Monfort are another trope of dystopian books—the representatives from a land with a very different structure than the one where the main character fights for justice. In Monfort, newbloods, Reds, and Silvers allegedly live in peace as equals. Mare has no proof of this, and either cannot or doesn’t want to believe it, likely because she fears what such knowledge might do to her. She fears more lies from a controlling government and, if the twins are telling the truth, the breaking of her resolve to fight when there is an option for her just to live her life.
Mare’s visit with her family in Chapter 28 is foreshadowing. It’s the last time she’ll see them before being captured by Maven, and her tears show her letting go of her anger and grief just in time to be taken. Throughout the book, Mare declared that she would never be a prisoner again and wouldn’t return to Maven for anything. Faced with the capture of Cal and Kilorn in Chapter 29, Mare gives herself over to Maven because she can’t stand the idea of what will happen to the people she cares about. The final chapter is the set-up for King’s Cage. As Maven’s prisoner, Mare is kept collared and under constant silencing, so she can’t use her power. In the final chapter, Maven brings her before the Silvers, who are angry at the deaths she’s caused. Seeing their protest banners makes Mare realize the Reds and newbloods aren’t the only ones who’ve lost loved ones. Though the Silvers have been lied to by Maven, that doesn’t make their losses or pain any less—it simply means they direct the blame to the wrong person. As Mare used the queen to make a point, Maven vows to use Mare in the same way, meaning she will once again be a pawn in the royal family’s game.
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