74 pages • 2 hours read
Victoria AveyardRed Queen
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
The next morning, a royal messenger summons Mare to the summer palace. She’s been given a job as a server for the royal family, which means she won’t be conscripted. She thinks that Cal is also a servant and somehow pulled strings to get her the job. She wants to find him and “convince him to do the same for Kilorn” (55).
Ann Walsh, who goes by Walsh, introduces Mare to palace life. It’s always busy, but today is exceptionally so because it’s Queenstrial—the day where all the highborn Silver daughters compete to be chosen as the next queen. For the next several hours, Mare helps prepare an arena-like room for the trial. Finally, the king and queen appear and announce the trials, introducing the crown prince who will pick a wife. The prince, Tiberias the Seventh, waves to the crowd, and Mare drops the goblets she’s holding because “the crown prince is Cal” (62).
Chapter 7 Summary
The leader of a Silver house uses his power to rearrange the arena so there is an empty cylinder at its center. A net of electricity crackles twenty feet above the floor, and the floor opens to reveal a beautiful young girl. She grins up at Cal before demolishing everything in the arena. The electric net is to protect against flying debris, and Mare realizes the Queenstrial is a pageant “meant to showcase a girl’s beauty, splendor—and strength” (66). The goal is to pair Cal with the strongest girl so their children will be as powerful as possible.
Many girls show off their powers one after another. The final daughter, Evangeline Samos, manipulates the metal pipes in the arena, causing the entire structure to tilt sideways. Mare falls out of the box where she’s serving and lands on the electric web. She is strangely unharmed; the power makes her feel “alive with some inner fire” (72). Evangeline attacks, and Mare burns up her metal shards with lightning. The king orders his guards to seize Mare, and she runs. A wall of fire chases her, and Mare stumbles into someone who apologizes in Cal’s voice before the thickening smoke makes her pass out.
Chapter 8 Summary
Mare relives memories and nightmares from her past, including her three brothers leaving for the war. When she wakes, she’s in a cage. Queen Elara stands outside the cell. She’s been poking through Mare’s mind but can find no reason Mare should have powers. The only reason Mare is still alive is because she manipulated electricity in front of so many witnesses, and her death would be suspicious. With a final shot of pain to Mare’s mind, the queen leaves.
Later, a security officer arrives with fresh clothes that bare silver lines. Mare changes and is brought to meet with the royal family. They have decided to lie to the public. Mare’s new identity is the daughter of a lost Silver house who was raised by Reds, and she will wed Maven, Cal’s younger brother. She will also help protect the Silvers from the Scarlet Guard, but she doesn’t know how. Mare senses that the king feels more threatened than he lets on. Before accepting the royal family’s terms, Mare demands her brothers be brought home from the war and for Kilorn not to be conscripted. The king agrees, but his acquiescence “sounds less like a pardon and more like a death sentence” (87).
Chapters 6-8 Analysis
Mare’s powers emerge in Chapter 7, the catalyst for the changes to Mare’s life in the rest of the book. Mare’s unique status as a Red with powers makes the royal family fear her both her as an individual and as a harbinger for a changing society. That fear leads them to keep her close so they can watch her and to use her powers to their benefit. Mare initially feels like the Silvers have trapped her, but living among them, understanding their fears, and learning to use her powers all eventually help Mare develop inner strength that complements her external powers. Mare’s ability to evade and thwart Evangeline foreshadows how Mare is stronger than Silvers and how she bests Evangeline in the fight at the book’s end.
Queenstrial is a tournament, a common trope of young adult dystopian books. Rather than a fight to the death as seen in books like The Hunger Games, Queenstrial is a pageant where each girl competes both against herself and the other participants for Cal’s hand. The girls show off their power through destruction, each display flashier than the last. By comparison, Evangeline’s power doesn’t look like much, but it doesn’t matter because the trial is, like much of Silver life, a show. Like the televised match in Chapter 1, Queenstrial exists so Evangeline’s family can show the other Silver nobles how much better they are. Evangeline has already been chosen as Cal’s bride, meaning the competition is staged.
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