The Familiar

“While it was true that she’d simply gone from one loveless home to another, that didn’t mean she didn’t feel the absence of love. Doña Valentina had no acceptable name for the longing she felt, and no idea how to soothe it, so she filled her days irritating their few servants with constant correction and existing in a state of relentless dissatisfaction.”

Valentina introduces the theme of longing and The Price of Ambition. While Valentina is of a higher social class than Luzia and the other servants, she still longs to advance in the world and gain more power for herself. At the beginning of the novel, she is a petty and ruthless woman who does not hesitate to exploit others for her own advantage—an attitude she will gradually abandon over the course of her character arc.

“The magic was meaningless, a bit of fun, a trick of the eye, and in the hands of a poor but pious Christian woman, nothing to fear. But if anyone looked too closely, what would they see?”

This passage captures how Luzia’s early viewpoint of her magic is as just a small thing, a trick, to make her life easier—a perception that proves ironic as her power grows. Magic is dangerous anyway when the inquisitors are watching, but because her family was Jewish, Luzia risks persecution. Luzia’s magical talents and their links to her Jewish identity introduce the theme of The Power of Magic and Talent.

“Luzia saw her reflection in the goblet, changed but unchanged, made perfect and ruined all the same.”

This passage of self-reflection, represented by Luzia seeing her reflection in the goblet she just broke and mended, captures the turning point in the story when she has revealed her gift. The image captures a stylistic technique Bardugo has of putting two opposite things in tension, like the idea of being perfect and ruined at the same time.