Literature / The Bone Season

Behold the anchor, the amaranth and the sundial pattern of Seven Dials.

"You know reality? Forget it. Sheol I has its own rules. Accept that now, and everything will be easier."

— Liss Rymore

The Bone Season is the 2013 debut novel of author Samantha Shannon, the first in a seven-book series. Set in a Dystopian, Alternate History England, the story follows a young clairvoyant woman named Paige Mahoney. Since 1859, when the phenomenon of clairvoyance first became public knowledge, England has operated under an oppressive and strongly anti-voyant government called Scion. Paige belongs to a class of criminal voyants who use their contact with spirits and the spirit world (called the æther) to make a living while avoiding the authorities. She is a rare kind of voyant known as a dreamwalker, capable of separating her spirit from her physical body and entering the æther in spirit form.

One night, Paige is subjected to a spot check by government agents and accidentally kills one with her gift. She is arrested that very night and transported to the city of Oxford, which is home to a secret penal colony called Sheol I. The penal colony is run by a race of supernatural creatures known as Rephaim, who arrived on Earth two hundred years ago through a rift in the æther, along with man-eating monsters called Emim. The Rephaim have a deal with Scion: in exchange for protection from the Emim, Scion must send a number of voyants to Oxford every ten years. These decadal harvests are known as Bone Seasons.

Upon their arrival in the penal colony, every voyant is assigned a Rephaite keeper and taught to fight the Emim as part of a penal battalion. Paige is chosen by a Rephaite called Arcturus Mesarthim, known as the Warden, who has never previously shown interest in humans. If she wants to escape the penal colony and return to London, she must learn how to survive in her new environment ... and figure out her keeper's mysterious motives.

If you're looking for the sequels, please select one of the following:

• The Mime Order
• The Song Rising
• The Mask Falling

To return to the general page for the Bone Season series, click here.

For character-specific tropes, please go to the character page for this series.

You can also check out the 10th anniversary edition of ''The Bone Season'', published in 2023.

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This book contains examples of:

• Accidental Murder: During the spot check that sets off the rest of the story, Paige is so terrified of being detained that she lashes out with her spirit, killing one Underguard and driving the other out of his mind.
• Accidental Pun: Nashira calls Paige a free spirit, which is appropriate, given that her spirit regularly leave the confines of her body.
• After Action Patch Up: Paige does this twice to Warden after he returns from his forbidden altercations with the Emim, though not because she gives a damn if he lives. On the first occasion, he's unconscious, and she seriously considers finishing him off herself before coming to the grim realization that his death would only worsen her situation. On the second occasion, he's awake and coherent enough to instruct her on how to treat his wounds. She only grudgingly complies.
• Armor-Piercing Question: When Paige accuses Warden of saving her life with the intention of forming the golden cord, he calmly points out the flaw in her argument.
  "How could I possibly have engineered such a thing, when I had no idea whether or not you would ever dream of saving my life in return? You despise the Rephaim. Why would you try and save one?"
• Armor-Piercing Response: When Paige finds out that Warden's fiancée murders clairvoyants to usurp their gifts, she reacts with anger and horror, calling him evil and demanding to switch keepers. He replies in such a way as to completely take the wind out of her sails.
  Warden: You do not want a Sargas keeper, Paige.
  Paige: Don't tell me what I want. I want —
  Warden: You want to feel safe again. You want me to treat you as Thuban and the others treat their humans, because then you would feel that you had every right to hate the Rephaim. But because I do not harm you, and because I try to understand you, you run away. [...] You ask yourself time and time again why I want to help you, and you come to no conclusion. But that does not mean that there is no conclusion, Paige. It means you have yet to discover it.
• The Big Damn Kiss: The unresolved tension between Paige and the Warden culminates in one of these near the end of the book, moments before she's marched up to the stage for public execution.
• BFS: The instrument of Paige's botched onstage execution at the Bicentenary, a greatsword called the Inquisitor's Justice.
• Bitch Slap: Nashira does this to Warden when she visits the Founders Tower, apparently for no better reason than because he doesn't answer a question quickly enough for her liking. Paige, hidden behind the curtained door to the tower, watches all the while, appalled.
• Blatant Lies: After drinking the antidote Warden offers her, Paige tells him that they're even, since she bandaged his wounds the night before. He responds by denying that he was ever injured to begin with. It's unclear why he felt the need for such a transparent falsehood. Perhaps it's bad form for a Rephaite keeper to admit that he was vulnerable in front of his human, or perhaps the message was that he won't acknowledge her help, much less thank her for it, and that such efforts would be unwelcome in the future.
• Bridal Carry: Warden carries Paige back through the meadow this way after their first bout of training. Justified, as she's so exhausted she can barely stand.
• Brutal Honesty: When Paige observes that he treats the humans at Magdalen as his butlers, Warden corrects her: "Slaves, Paige. Let us not be delicate."
• Cheated Death, Died Anyway: Liss. Despite everything Paige does to save her from spirit shock — breaking into the House to get her a new deck of cards, persuading Warden to give her his last dose of amaranth — Liss dies anyway at Gomeisa's hand during the Bicentenary.
• Creepy Souvenir: The death masks with which Nashira decorates her walls, presumably moulded from the faces of the voyants she has murdered.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: If Paige had just waited for Nick to drive her home, she never would have been arrested.
• Cryptically Unhelpful Answer: Warden, who never seems to have a straight answer for anything, does this when Paige asks him why pollen of the poppy anemone had such a horrible effect on the Rephaite Kraz Sargas.
  Warden: We are not what we seem, Paige. How long was there between the application of the pollen and the shooting?
  Paige: Maybe ten seconds.
  Warden: What did you see in those ten seconds?
  Paige: It was like his face was rotting. And his eyes were white, like they'd lost all their colour. Dead eyes.
  Warden: There you have it.
• David Versus Goliath: Paige facing Nashira in the climax. Nashira is a powerful Rephaite with not one but several clairvoyant abilities, as well as her fallen angels to serve as weapon and shield, while Paige is a human woman whose only assets are her rare gift and the element of surprise.
• Death Glare: Warden gives Nashira an impressive one during the Bicentenary, while she's addressing the Scion emissaries.
  His expression was terrible to see. Angry. Brutal. Murderous. I'd never seen him look like that.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Paige says this almost verbatim after showing Warden her most painful memory.
• Empty Shell: Paige accuses Warden of being this after walking in his dark, ashen, completely featureless dreamscape. She'd thought that seeing the inside of his mind would allow her to better gauge his character, but she has no idea what to make of a Mental World devoid of anything pertaining to his true nature.
  "There's nothing for me to see. That suggests to me that there's nothing inside you. No thoughts, no conscience. No fear."
• Fantastic Ghetto: The Rookery, where the harlies are forced to live in squalor: starved, beaten and fed upon by the higher castes of the penal colony.
• Flashback Cut: When Warden brings up the subject of possession, Paige flashes back to the day Jaxon asked her to break into his dreamscape and puppeteer him. It's not a new possibility for her as a dreamwalker, but one she never seriously considered.
• Grief Song: One of Paige's memories has her singing "An Ember Morning," a mourning song associated with the victims of the Molly Riots.
  My heart, I saw a flame upon the sky
  When October's bitter morn was nigh
  Smoke choked the honey meadow.
  Hark, spirit of the south,
  I am waiting near the cloven tree
  Now Ireland's heart is broken by the sea.
• Held Gaze: Paige catches a Rephaite studying her at the oration, and holds his gaze for an intense, charged moment before remembering that she's forbidden to look him in the eye. Once he becomes her keeper, they start doing this on a regular basis.
• I Didn't Mean to Kill Him: Spoken by Paige, regarding the unfortunate Kraz Sargas. Although she ends up putting a bullet in his head, she truly didn't know how much damage the pollen would do.
• If I Can't Have You…: A non-romantic example. Jaxon Hall is extremely possessive of his gang — or, rather, their rare and prestigious gifts. So when his only dreamwalker tells him that she's quitting the Seven Seals, he threatens to kill her using this exact formula.
  "If I can't have you, no one does."
• I Let Gwen Stacy Die: The deaths of Seb and Liss both serve this purpose for Paige, as she blames herself for not being able to save their lives and hates the Sargas all the more for killing them.
• I'm Not Hungry: Paige does this no less than three times in the early stages of her imprisonment, mainly because she despises having to accept anything like generosity or benevolence from her keeper.
  • When she ends up bedridden with blood poisoning after her first test, she rejects both the antidote and the food that Warden brings her.
    I wanted him to think I was on hunger strike. I wanted my power back. I wanted to make him feel as small as I felt.
  • She does this again after missing the curfew, when Suhail drags her back to Magdalen. When Warden insists that she sit down and eat something, she lies and says that she isn't hungry, despite having lived on skilly and toke for a week. Eventually she gives in and finishes off the prepared meal.
  • When she wakes up after walking in Warden's dreamscape, still furious with him about the salvia, Michael greets her with a spread of food. She tells him she's not hungry and that she doesn't want Warden's "guilt breakfast," but since she doesn't have anything against Michael personally, it doesn't take much coaxing to make her eat.
• In-Universe Catharsis: Warden asks Paige to show him her last, most painful memory, so that she can confront it and be free of it. Whether or not it worked is left ambiguous, but she's no longer pining after Nick by the time The Mime Order rolls around.
• I Shall Taunt You: Warden does this to Paige when they train on the meadow, trying to goad her into attacking his dreamscape.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Used by a few of the Rephaim, just to prove what assholes they are.
  • Thuban refers to Paige as "it" when questioning Warden about her, demonstrating his especially contemptuous view of human worth: about on par with animals, if not lower. Warden presents an immediate contrast by answering with "she."
  • Used also by Kraz Sargas when he finds Paige in the House.
    "So the concubine lets his tribute to the blood-sovereign go wandering off by itself."
• Lima Syndrome: Warden's treatment of Paige is singularly humane and considerate, which seems incongruous until we learn that he's a dissident of the Sargas regime and unsympathetic toward the violent colonization of Sheol I. He always intended to make an ally of her, should she prove trustworthy. But by looking through her memories to determine whether or not she's likely to betray him, he comes to empathize with Paige on a deeply personal level and eventually to desire more than alliance from her.
• Medal of Dishonor: Paige is less than pleased to be made a pink-jacket; under ordinary circumstances, she would have been promoted only if she'd turned someone in or otherwise proved her loyalty to her new masters, and because of this Liss and the other performers react to her with hostility upon first sight.
• Moment Killer: Nashira walks in on Paige and Warden embracing during the Bicentenary celebrations. She doesn't react well.
• Neck Snap: Nashira does this to Seb during Paige's first test, proving yet again that human life is expendable to the Rephaim.
• No-Sell: When Warden taunts her in Port Meadow during their first training session, Paige attempts to physically attack him by driving her shoulder into his abdomen. Given his size, nothing happens. He tosses her away like a sack of potatoes.
• Oh, Wait!: In Paige's final memory, when Jaxon orders her to "break into" Zeke's dreamscape, she protests that she doesn't do break-ins. He responds, "You don't do them. I see. I didn't realize you had a job description. Oh! Wait, I remember — I didn't give you one."
• Penal Colony: The plot revolves around Sheol I, a penal colony established by the Rephaim with the purpose of training, indoctrinating and subjugating human clairvoyants. Those who fail their tests are forced to live in squalor in the Rookery, starved and beaten by anyone with higher status, while those who succeed in their tests are made to fight the corpselike monsters who freely roam the land around Oxford. Also qualifies as Black Site and Extranormal Prison.
• Rousing Speech: Paige delivers one to her fellow escapees on Port Meadow, encouraging them to fight off the approaching SVD while she deals with the poltergeist guarding the entrance to the train.
• Rule of Three: A golden cord mysteriously forms between Paige and Warden once they save each other's lives three times each. Little is revealed about it except that they can use it to transmit images and emotions through the æther.
• Saved to Enslave: Nashira tells all the new white-jackets that by bringing them to Sheol I, the Rephaim have spared them from the fate that Scion would have otherwise chosen for them: hanging or nitrogen asphyxiation.
• Stealth Pun: The train was hidden beneath the training grounds the whole time. Incredibly, this seems to have been intentional on Nashira's part.
• Talking Is a Free Action: Paige gives the above-mentioned Rousing Speech even as a horde of gun-wielding Vigiles bear down on her and her fellow escapees. Given that they would have been well within shooting range as soon as they came into sight, and that it takes a lot more time to give a speech than for a group of trained soldiers to run fifty yards, it's convenient that the carnage didn't begin until after she was done.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: Michael slips a little something into the red-jackets' wine at the Bicentenary to make sure they won't be at top performance during the revolt.
• This Way to Certain Death: When Paige is dropped off in the woods for her second test, she disobeys orders and heads south through No Man's Land. Then she stumbles on a crater and a mutilated skeleton. Faced with proof that there really is a minefield, she reluctantly turns back toward Sheol I.
• Time Skip: There's a gap of four or five months between Liss surfacing from spirit shock and the Bicentenary. A few missing scenes from this gap feature in The Dawn Chorus.
  • In the timeline created by the 10th anniversary edition of this book, however, there is no significant timeskip; the events of the book are spread out across all six months of Paige's sojourn in the penal colony.
• Trying Not to Cry: Paige is far too proud to cry in front of other people, so in her last memory, where she realizes that Nick doesn't love her back, this is her internal monologue as she tries to hold it together.
  I had to focus on not crying. No matter what happened tonight, I could not, would not cry. I'd be damned if I would cry.
• Vampiric Draining: Human blood has a natural immunity against the half-urge, a kind of infection fatal to Rephaim. Warden explains this to Paige when he's injured for the second time and on the brink of succumbing to fever. He then asks to drink her blood, promising her a favour in return. Reluctantly, she consents, but not before half-jokingly asking him if he's a vampire. This example is unusual for being more or less treated as a medical procedure, albeit one Paige feels sickened by afterward.
• Visual Pun: Jaxon to Nadine, blowing a ring of cigar fumes into her face: "I wonder how long it will take the NVD to ... smoke you out?"
• We Are Everywhere: Paige says this verbatim at the beginning of the book, telling the reader that clairvoyants are out there whether we can see them or not.
• Would Rather Suffer: Paige declares that she would rather die than spend an hour in polite company with her keeper. He calls her bluff.

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No matter how much I sometimes wanted it, there was no such thing as normal. There never had been. "Normal" and "natural" were the biggest lies we had ever created, we humans with our little minds.

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