The River of Silver recap

The River of Silver is a companion collection to the Daevabad trilogy: a set of short pieces, outtakes and deleted scenes told from the viewpoints of characters the novels mostly kept at a distance, among them Manizheh, Duriya, Hatset, Muntadhir, Jamshid, Zaynab, Dara, Ali and Nahri. The pieces are not arranged as a continuous story and are not confined to one point in the timeline: they range from long before The City of Brass to after the close of The Empire of Gold, and several of them depend on knowing how the trilogy ends. The book finishes with an alternative epilogue to The Empire of Gold, a version of the ending that was not the one published, followed by a short closing piece from Nahri. It is written to be read after the three novels, not alongside them.

A note before starting: The River of Silver is a companion collection rather than a fourth novel, and its pieces are scattered across the whole timeline, from decades before The City of Brass to after the final page of The Empire of Gold. It assumes you have finished all three books, and it will spoil them. Previously, in the Daevabad trilogy: Nahri, a con artist in Ottoman Cairo, discovered she carried the blood of the Nahids, the healer family that once ruled the hidden djinn city of Daevabad, and was brought there by Darayavahoush the Afshin. She was installed in the palace of King Ghassan al Qahtani, whose ancestors took the city from hers, married to his heir Muntadhir, and befriended his younger son Alizayd. Dara was killed on the city's lake and raised again by Banu Manizheh, the Nahid healer everyone believed dead, who is Nahri's mother and also, it emerges, the mother of Jamshid e-Pramukh. Manizheh seized Daevabad during the Navasatem festival, killing Ghassan and most of the city's Geziri, and the city lost its magic when Alizayd fled with Suleiman's seal. Nahri and Ali returned from exile with allies and a marid bargain; Manizheh was defeated and killed, Ali was gravely changed by the magic that saved him, and Nahri ended the seal's absolute power rather than claim it, restoring Daevabad's magic and leaving the city to a shared government that includes the shafit for the first time.

The first run of pieces is told from the viewpoints of Manizheh, Duriya, Hatset, Muntadhir, Jamshid and Dara. They sit outside the novels' main narrative, filling in the lives, histories and private calculations of characters the trilogy largely showed from the outside or from an unfriendly angle. They are not in chronological order relative to one another, and several are set well before the events of The City of Brass.

The middle of the collection continues with further pieces from Jamshid, Ali, an observer identified only as the Scout, Nahri, Ali again, Zaynab and Muntadhir. Like the earlier entries they move back and forth across the trilogy's span rather than advancing a single storyline, and they increasingly assume knowledge of events from the later novels.

The collection closes with an alternative epilogue to The Empire of Gold, an account of how the trilogy's final scene might have gone in a version that was not published, and then a last short piece from Nahri's perspective. Both belong after the trilogy's conclusion and both take its outcome as read.

The collection has no single plot to resolve. It closes with two pieces that sit at or after the trilogy's last page: an alternative epilogue to The Empire of Gold, presenting a version of the ending that the published novels did not use, and a short final piece from Nahri's perspective. Because so many of the entries depend on knowing how the trilogy turns out, the collection as a whole is a full-spoiler companion to the three novels rather than a way into them.