57 pages • 1 hour read
A. B. PoranekWhere the Dark Stands Still
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A 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 8-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “House-Spirits”
The next morning, Liska discovers that a skrzat has taken up residence in the kitchen and tidied the room for her. The Leszy takes his breakfast in the kitchen with her, and she expresses curiosity about his magic. He explains that he can pass fragments of his power into the objects he touches, imbuing them with temporary souls. The Orlicans’ pagan ancestors worshiped primordial demons, and the language used by these old gods is still used to cast spells.
To thank Liska for saving his life, the Leszy offers to give her something using his nearly limitless powers. She requests a garden with enough food to last them the winter. Liska is awed by the enchanted garden the Leszy creates and smiles at him, feeling unafraid of his power for the first time. She asks him if there were other humans at the manor before her, and he admits that he’s had other companions before warning her not to pry into his past.
A few days later, Liska tries to make the midnight door reappear with her magic, but internalized guilt and shame prevent her from succeeding. She remembers Father Paweł telling her that “women are more susceptible to temptations of darkness” and urging her never to use her power (78). Trying another tactic, Liska pricks her finger and offers the blood to the house. The midnight door appears at once. The skrzat, whom Liska names Jaga, takes the form of a cat and follows her.
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Manor with a Soul”
On the other side of the door, Liska discovers a beautiful library filled with live trees and flowers. Jaga explains that the hidden room is a memory “of the manor that the Leszy put to sleep” 200 years ago (83). The sentient manor guides Liska to a letter written by someone named Florian. In the letter, Florian bids his love farewell and asks them to forget him. Jaga’s memories have faded since the Leszy neglected the manor, but she remembers that he wept when he read the letter and that a forget-me-not fell out of the parchment. Liska resolves to find out what happened to Florian. She recalls seeing a forget-me-not in a glass orb on the Leszy’s desk, and she concocts a plan to get into his study.
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Girl Who Cried Hound”
Liska lures the Leszy out of his study and sneaks Jaga inside by claiming that she saw the hound in the garden. The Leszy thinks that she is seeing things due to sleep deprivation, but he reinforces his wards. Touching the orb with the forget-me-not restores some of Jaga’s memories. She informs Liska that the Leszy let the estate fall into disrepair after Florian’s death, which he blames himself for. When Jaga urged the Leszy to stop mourning, he banished her. Jaga agrees to help Liska continue investigating Florian’s disappearance, but the hearth-spirit warns the girl not to trust the Leszy.
Just then, the Leszy enters the room. He’s surprised to see that Liska summoned the hearth-spirit back, and he asks for Liska’s help. A man was killed in the Driada, and he hopes that she can identify which village the victim is from. The mystery around Florian’s death makes Liska feel even more uneasy around the demon than usual, but she wants to help him because he seems uncharacteristically concerned and polite. The Leszy transforms into a stag and carries Liska into the spirit-wood.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Doors to the Dead”
The Leszy has the power to open spelldoors from the forest to any location in the nation of Orlica. He uses this ability to transport himself and Liska to a region of the Driada about four hours from her village. Based on the victim’s clothing, Liska determines that he is from Żabki, a village that is an hour from the forest. This suggests that a spirit escaped the Driada and dragged the man into the woods. The Leszy doesn’t understand why a spirit would do this, and his distress causes Liska to realize that he cares about humans. He explains that he used to be human and that he created the Driada to protect the human realm from demons.
The corpse turns into a strzygoń and attacks Liska, and the Leszy slays the demon. Liska feels “an entirely new sort of panic” when the handsome Leszy makes sure that she is uninjured (103). She falls asleep on the way back to the manor, and the Leszy carries her to her bed.
The next morning, Liska finds the Leszy in the kitchen making breakfast. Her presence has thrown the Driada out of balance. However, he thinks that he is ultimately responsible because he is the spirit-wood’s warden. Although she still sees her magic as a wicked, dangerous force, Liska asks the Leszy to teach her to control her power so that she can protect her mother and the rest of the villagers.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Return of the Red-Eyed Hound”
The Leszy gives Liska a knife with a doe on the hilt. He explains that many people with magic, who are called czarownik, died in wars or petty feuds with one another. The rest were driven into exile or hiding by the Church. A czarownik made Liska’s dagger, imbuing it with the power to kill demons. He begins teaching her combat. When he abruptly ends their training session, she protests, “You always leave like this, as if you’re afraid I may burn you if you’re with me too long” (114). Although he apologizes, he avoids her for the rest of the day.
The Leszy leaves a book out for Liska entitled Czarologia: A Study of the Arcane. Jaga questions the girl’s wisdom in accepting this gift, but she maintains that she is simply doing what she must to protect her home. That evening, the ghost hound appears in Liska’s room and motions for her to inspect the ground beside the well.
Chapter 13 Summary: “A Grave in the Garden”
The next morning, Liska goes to the spot the ghost hound indicated and digs up the creature’s skull. She demands answers from the Leszy. She reveals that she found the hidden library and that she knows Florian is dead because of him. Furious, the Leszy banishes the hound’s spirit by burning the skull. He tells Liska that the hound, Mrok, belonged to Florian, who was his apprentice 200 years ago. Florian and the Leszy argued, and he decided to leave. Something in the Driada attacked Florian and Mrok. The hound limped back to the manor alone and died despite the Leszy’s attempts to save it. The Leszy admits that he loved Florian, “[i]f anything a demon feels can be called love” (121). He storms away. Liska keeps one of Mrok’s teeth. Although she weeps with sympathy for the Leszy, she cannot trust him because she knows that he is still keeping secrets from her.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Demon, Disarmed”
The Leszy is absent from the manor the day after his and Liska’s confrontation. To pass the time, she begins reading Czarologia. The spellbook explains that magic comes from “the realm of spirits, the place between death and life” (125). She’s afraid to admit to herself that she sometimes misses the connection she had with her powers when she was a child. When the Leszy returns, she apologizes for their confrontation, and he says that he hid the truth from her because he didn’t want to frighten her.
The Leszy theorizes that Liska’s mind sealed her magic away as a defense mechanism. By using a soul-reading spell, he hopes to find her locked-away magic, like “diving into a lake to retrieve a sunken object” (131). For the spell to work, Liska must remain receptive to him. He gives her an opportunity to back out, but she decides to proceed because this could be her best chance to restore balance to the Driada.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Memories”
The soul-reading spell stirs up Liska’s worst memories. Her father died when the roof he was repairing collapsed under him. He was arguing with a neighbor named Pan Prawota at the time. Prawota claimed that Liska misled the other children, which angered Liska’s father. The young Liska overheard the argument, and she fearfully wished for the shouting to stop. Her magic responded by making the roof collapse. In the next memory, she sees Marysieńka fall to the ground. Clouds of magical periwinkle butterflies fill Liska’s mind. Assuming the form of branches, the Leszy’s magic shelters her from the butterflies.
The spell is dangerous if the two minds become too intertwined, but Liska doesn’t know how to let go. To save them both, the Leszy cuts Liska’s palm, and the pain brings her back to her body. He magically heals the cut, explaining that more severe injuries require “extreme amounts of energy” to repair (137). He doesn’t judge Liska for the memories he saw.
Chapters 8-15 Analysis
In the novel’s second section, Liska and the Leszy’s relationship shifts as the protagonist turns the once forbidding manor into a home. On her social media pages, Poranek compares the novel’s central love story to the dynamic between Sophie and Howl in Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Both fantasy novels feature slow-burn romances between powerful, haughty men and the women who enter their lives as servants but later become their true loves. Like Howl, the Leszy bargains his heart away to a demon in exchange for magical power. In addition, Jaga the hearth-spirit fills a similar supporting role as Calcifer, the fire demon who lives in Howl’s fireplace and becomes the hero’s ally. The influence of Howl’s Moving Castle can also be seen in the whimsical, domestic scenes in this section, such as when the Leszy conjures an enchanted garden for Liska in Chapter 8 and when he prepares breakfast in Chapter 11. By constructing parallels between her work and Diana Wynne Jones’s beloved fantasy, Poranek guides the reader’s expectations about the novel’s characterization and romance.
The love story begins to take shape as the two central characters grow closer in these chapters. Moments of protective, considerate behavior from the previously aloof Leszy indicate this shift, such as when he asks for Liska’s help identifying a body: “Liska wavers, taken aback by the fact that he seems to be asking her consent, not to mention her opinion” (95). Similarly, Liska’s regard for the Leszy grows when she realizes how much he cares about humanity, and she begins to fall for him after he protects her from a spirit: “Their eyes meet, and it feels like the world tilts” (103). Despite this growing intimacy, secrets and distrust remain a source of conflict between the two characters as demonstrated by their confrontation over Mrok’s skull.
Despite their differences, Liska and the Leszy are alike in The Quest for Redemption and Belonging. The revelations about the deaths of Florian and Liska’s father in this section explain why they both feel the need to atone. Increasing their yearning for redemption, both Liska and the Leszy consider themselves responsible for the imbalance in the Driada that threatens the human realm. As a result, Liska begins learning magic in an effort to atone even though she still wants to trade her power for a sense of belonging: “When all this is over, I’m going to leave magic behind, and I will go home. But for now I need to make sure I still have a home to return to” (115). Liska and the Leszy’s shared desire for redemption unites them and advances the plot.
These chapters explore how religious trauma comes between Liska and The Magic of Self-Acceptance. Like all the children in Stodoła, she was taught that “[m]agic is a sin” (124), and that “women are more susceptible to temptations of darkness” (78). Orlicans’ hostility toward magic can be traced back to the introduction of Christianity and the establishment of a monarchy: “Not much history was taught in the village, but there was one piece every child learned: the arrival of the first king to Orlica and his quest to unite all its pagan tribes” (71). The king’s ethnocentric “quest” presupposes that the Indigenous tribes were inferior and needed an outside authority to rule over them and change their way of life. Thus, learning magic allows Liska to reclaim her ancestors’ wisdom. The manor offers time and distance from her village and its scathing lessons. Although she lets herself express curiosity about the Leszy’s magic and revels in the enchanted garden he creates, she still encounters a mental block when she tries to draw upon her magic: “In her mind, warning voices have begun to churn, reminding her that using magic is wrong, always wrong, so deeply wrong” (77). For Liska to gain the magic of self-acceptance, she must confront a concerted, centuries-long effort to prevent women from exercising their power.
Animal symbolism underscores the Leszy’s changing relationship with the protagonist. In Chapter 12, he gives Liska a dagger with a handle “done in the likeness of a doe with glittering turquoise eyes” (109). Because one of his guises is a stag, the blade symbolically marks Liska as his other half. She later learns that he gave her the dagger when he abandoned his schemes of sacrificing her to Weles and planned for her to kill him instead. This immense shift in the Leszy’s stratagems reflects his growing understanding of the protagonist’s capability and her compatibility with him.
