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 16-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
Content Warning: This section contains summaries of graphic depictions of death.
The body left alone to hang is a trap, and Maven stands in the shadows. Two Silvers grab Shade before the group can teleport away. Mare tries to stop them with her lightning, but a strange clicking noise echoes in her head, and her power makes pain shoot through her. Maven captures her, and the clicking grows faster, increasing the pain until she feels like she is “being obliterated inside [her] own skin” (236).
Chapter 17 Summary
After some time, the pain fades, and Mare opens her eyes to find Kilorn and Cal in Maven’s place. She was unconscious for four days, and Maven left a brand on her skin. The pain was caused by a machine that overloaded Mare’s power and turned it against her. While she was out, the group fled Harbor Bay and regrouped, rescuing the other newblood in the process. As Cal and Kilorn explain what happened, they smile and joke with one another, a far cry from the barely suppressed hostility they’ve shown up until now.
Kilorn leaves, and Cal examines Mare’s brand—an M carved into her collarbone. With sudden clarity, Cal realizes Maven isn’t hunting newbloods to destroy them but to draw Mare out because he “wants you more than anything else on this earth” (249). Mare swears he’ll never get her, not even to protect someone else, and kisses Cal, trying to feel like she isn’t alone. In the back of her mind, she knows she’s a weapon—a sword—but she feels she’s made of glass and ready to break.
Chapter 18 Summary
After Cal leaves, Mare regrets kissing him because it’s a distraction and because she feels she can’t afford to love him. Kilorn confronts her, warning her away from Cal, telling her she can love him but begging her, “Please don’t let him control you” (255). Mare says he wouldn’t, but Kilorn doesn’t believe her.
Over the next few weeks, Mare’s group travels across the country, recruiting newbloods to their cause. Newbloods have vastly varying abilities from absorbing knowledge like a sponge to making living things wither and die to control over sound. The group forms a training camp, and as their army grows and improves, Mare starts to feel hopeful. All the while, they keep tabs on Maven, who travels the country on his coronation tour, which is also an excuse to kill newbloods.
Chapter 19 Summary
After three days of finding only dead newbloods, Mare and Farley lead a group to a small city, leaving Shade behind with an injury and Cal behind to teach the recruits. The locals help the group find the two newbloods, and Mare takes Nix and another recruit who stumbles over calling Mare by her name. Many of the recruits similarly stumble, which makes Mare sad because as much as she tries to be one of them, “they see me as something apart” (272).
The newblood’s home is abandoned, and the group finds a dead baby wrapped in a bloody cloth, holding an alarm device. One of Mare’s team makes them invisible just as Silvers storm the house. The officers leave without finding the group, and Mare covers the baby with her jacket, finding a note beside the corpse. It’s dated yesterday from Maven, telling her she’s responsible for these deaths and promising, “Surrender to me, and it will stop” (276). The group returns to their base, and Mare hunkers alone in her room until nightfall when she wanders in a stupor until she finds herself at Cal’s room. She crawls into bed beside him, and despite her anguish, she falls asleep, cradled by his comforting warmth.
Chapter 20 Summary
Mare shares Cal’s bed every night after the incident, pretending to sleep when he wakes from his own nightmares. Her search for newbloods reveals more dead and more notes from Maven that she can’t bring herself to get rid of. The notes remind her of the Maven she knew before he betrayed her, and though she knows she shouldn’t, “I miss the boy I thought he was” (280).
One morning, Mare finds a newblood teaching Kilorn to write. The moment Kilorn notices Mare, he stalks away, his reaction to her ever since she’s started sharing a bed with Cal. A document Shade stole from a Silver soldier details how a legion of 5,000 child soldiers is being sent to the front as a sacrificial distraction. Mare knows they are a punishment for the Scarlet Guard’s actions, and “it feels as if I’ve sentenced them to death myself” (286).
On the next rescue mission, two newbloods—a flier and a shapeshifter—enter a city to retrieve the newest recruits. Mare, Cal, Farley, and Shade hike to a meeting place, only to be stopped by a strange newblood man who can see the future.
Chapters 16-20 Analysis
Chapter 16 is more foreshadowing, as well as a show of how powerful Maven has become. The Silvers who grab Shade foreshadow Shade’s death in Chapter 26 and show that Shade’s power has limitations. Until now, Shade’s power has gotten the group out of countless situations, and he’s been able to move freely where Cal and Mare had to be careful. While Shade’s ability seems stronger because he can evade danger, all it takes is someone grabbing him to keep him from being useful. He could teleport while the Silvers have him, but he would take them with him, meaning they’d still be a threat when he relocates. The clicking sound Mare hears is a device Maven has invented specifically to incapacitate her. In Chapter 30, the device keeps Mare unconscious and unable to use her power. Here, Maven is testing the device. It may be that he knows Mare will be rescued, or, given that the reader doesn’t see what happened, it may be that Maven let her go because he was simply collecting data to refine the device. The brand Maven leaves is a warning and a show of power. He wants to unsettle Mare and believes marking her skin will do so. He also suspects Mare and Cal’s feelings for one another are genuine, and having been second to Cal all his life, Maven wants to mark his territory, labeling Mare as his, not Cal’s.
Chapter 17 shows Cal and Kilorn getting along. In the wake of Mare nearly being captured, the boys put aside their differences to help her, and each realizes the other isn’t as terrible as they initially thought. Their new relationship again points to the theme of The Line Between an Enemy and an Ally. While not exactly friends, Cal and Kilorn have developed a cordial relationship and solid alliance. However, Kilorn’s warnings in the next chapter show he still doesn’t completely trust Cal. He claims he fears for Mare, but it may also simply be that Kilorn is jealous of the connection between Mare and Cal and their powers. Chapter 17 also reveals Maven’s obsession with Mare. Cal understands the brand’s significance because he knows Maven always felt like he was in Cal’s shadow. Mare refuses to give in to Maven after what he did, and her kiss with Cal here shows that she can no longer rely solely on him as her anchor. The book’s title is explained here. Mare is the “glass sword,” a weapon that is both powerful and fragile. She knows she only has so much to give and fears what will happen when she reaches the limit.
Chapter 18 contains the training montage—a sequence common in young adult dystopian and fantasy novels. As is typically true of the training montage, an extended period passes in which the rebel group’s forces grow and become stronger. The group’s diversity of abilities and skills also foregrounds the theme of Differences Are Not “Wrong.” New newblood powers are discovered and tested, and the progress gives Mare hope, which will be expanded and dashed as the book enters its rising action, climax, and resolution. The training montage also offers a glimpse at the villain’s progress. Here, it shows Maven on his coronation tour, which is truly an excuse to hunt newbloods, seek Mare, and show off his power to win over or threaten any suspicious Silvers.
Chapter 19 brings the action back into focus by showing a mission where Maven sets a trap, and Mare fails to save someone. The dead baby shows the lengths Maven will go to win, and the alarm device is a symbol that, as much power as the newbloods have, Maven has technology they don’t and a slight advantage because of it. The note Mare finds is one in a line of missives Maven leaves, and though she knows she should get rid of them, she doesn’t because part of her wants to believe the Maven she thought she knew is real. The mission also shows how Mare doesn’t belong to any group. With few exceptions, the newbloods treat her as something different, even though she’s one of them. Like Maven’s psychological torture, Mare’s isolation by her own people makes her question herself and feel as if she doesn’t belong.
Mare sharing Cal’s bed for comfort is another common trope of young adult dystopias. Though Mare and Cal have feelings for one another, they don’t act on them, instead simply holding one another close because they feel each is the only one who understands what they’re going through. For Mare, nights are the only time she feels truly safe, as her days are filled with more newbloods she couldn’t save and unsettling notes from Maven. In addition, these nights drive more of a wedge between her and Kilorn, who believes Mare is somehow betraying Reds and newbloods by getting closer to Cal.
Related Titles
By Victoria Aveyard
