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Chapter Twenty-Six
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Children of Virtue and Vengeance, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power and Systems of Oppression
Cycles of Violence
Tradition and History
Love vs. Duty
Summary
Analysis
The military finds Inan and Ojore an hour later. Nehanda forces Inan to take sedatives and as they take effect, he relaxes on sweaty sheets. She chastises him for acting alone and asks if he’s used magic like this before. Inan has. Nehanda tells him to not use it again. Ojore and Jokôye enter, thankful for and thrilled by what Inan did. Inan peeks out and sees Iyika kneeling in the dirt, bound in majacite chains. Jokôye marches to them and asks for information on where the rest of the Iyika are. When no one answers, she pulls out vials of majacite. Inan flashês on Saran torturing Zélie, but Nehanda insists that this is the only way to win. Jokôye injects the majacite into a girl’s veins. The girl seizes and dies.
Jokôye’s preferred method of torturing the Iyika is especially difficult for Inan, given that he had to watch Saran torture Zélie with liquid majacite when Inan and Zélie were in love in the last book. Though this is painful for Inan, the fact that he flashês on Zélie here shows that in his mind, the Iyika still have faces and are still people, all because he briefly was in love with Zélie. Love, then, can shift someone’s perspective in regards to what their duty is, and who they must protect to fulfill that duty.
Themes
