Summary
From High Blade Xenocrates’s perspective, we see him questioning Rowan informally at Goddard’s now-empty mansion. Xenocrates feels relieved by Scythe Goddard’s death, but he still implies that an investigation must be made—Goddard’s robe and ring weren’t found, after all. Rowan calls Esme in, asking Xenocrates to take her home (with a wink). An unspoken agreement is made: Xenocrates will call off the investigation, and Rowan will keep Esme a secret. Rowan clearly warrants more attention than Xenocrates thought.
On January 2 in the Year of Capybara, Scythe Curie drives Citra to Fulcrum City for her final test, which is delivered the night before Winter Conclave. Citra asks her to tell her what the final test will be, saying Scythe Curie’s unbreakable fairness puts Citra at a disadvantage, but Curie asks Citra to trust her and Faraday. There are four candidates for scythehood, and Citra is chosen randomly to be tested last.
In the testing room, Citra faces a panel of five scythes—the bejeweling committee—and a table covered in weapons. At the other end of the room in a spotlight, tied and gagged with a bag over his head, is her brother, Ben. She has to kill him to pass. He won’t be gleaned, but he’ll remember, and so will she. By random draw, she has to render Ben deadish with a knife. She can’t do this—but Scythe Curie’s voice in her head tells her that she can. Citra asks the panel why she has to do this, and it’s clear that some are strongly against her, while some strongly support her. Scythe Meir explains that they’re testing how she’ll glean and whether she has the inner strength needed. She picks up the bowie knife.
She talks to Ben, explaining that this won’t be a gleaning, but it will hurt. He asks to hold the knife, and she comforts him, telling him to think of the ice cream at the revival center—as he says he wants a hot fudge sundae, she stabs him through the heart, like Scythe Curie. His body is removed by revival medics. The panel is split on her performance—it was inefficient but compassionate—and Citra is released. Scythe Curie tells her that two other candidates couldn’t complete the task, but Rowan pulled the trigger before the panel even finished reading him the instructions. Citra realizes that Scythe Curie has been right all along—Rowan is not the boy Citra used to know.
Rowan and Citra’s immunity expires at midnight, and every scythe in the world knows their names, waiting to hear what will happen in this unprecedented Winter Conclave. Rowan arrives dressed in black, the one color scythes don’t wear. Some scythes hate him; others invite him to tea. Citra arrived earlier, overhearing tasteless jokes about Tonists being gleaned by Goddard. Scythe Curie, uncharacteristically emotional, invites Citra to stay on as her junior scythe if she wins the scythehood today. When Rowan enters, Curie encourages Citra to not even look at him. It’ll just make today harder on both of them. If she’s granted the scythehood, Citra won’t defy the edict to glean Rowan—but she does have a plan that just might save both of them.
Rowan knows Citra will glean him if she wins. He’s afraid to die, but he’d rather be gleaned than be the person he’s become—the person who shot his mother so easily last night. If he wins the scythehood, he’s decided he’ll defy the edict, citing the tenth commandment (scythes are beholden to no law at all, outside the ten commandments, so he’d say the Scythedom can’t create a law for him). He’ll refuse to glean Citra, and he’ll make any scythe deadish who tries to hurt her. They can’t even glean him in retaliation, since he’d be a fully ordained scythe at that point, so gleaning him would break the seventh commandment—though they could kill him over and over again for eternity. Better just to be gleaned by Citra when she wins.
Winter Conclave is controversial, as High Blade Xenocrates advocates banning fire as a weapon to avoid what happened to Scythe Goddard and his disciples. The motion passes, though the Scythedom seems divided. Rowan and Citra are finally called to the front of the assembly to meet their destiny, one way or another.
Citra and Rowan greet each other but are silenced by High Blade Xenocrates. Scythe Mandela, representing the bejeweling committee, says that Citra Terranova shall wear the ring of the scythehood. Everyone cheers, and Rowan congratulates her. Citra chooses to be known as Scythe Anastasia, after the youngest member of the Romanov family. Xenocrates tells her that this is a bad choice—the czars of Russia are remembered for their excess, not their contributions to humanity, and Anastasia Romanov did nothing of note. Citra says that this is exactly why she chose Anastasia: she was the product of a corrupt system that denied her her life. The Scythedom, led by Scythe Curie, gives Scythe Anastasia a standing ovation.
Scythe Anastasia announces that she’ll glean Rowan by blade, but before she does, she punches him in the face, using her new scythe ring, “accidentally” granting him immunity by touching the diamond to his blood. He can’t be gleaned for a year. High Blade Xenocrates commends her for her slyness, but he and the Parliamentarian intend to imprison Rowan for a year and glean him then. As the scythes around the hall discuss this loudly, Citra leans over and whispers to Rowan that he’s got a tray full of knives beside him and a car waiting out front. He says he loves her, and she replies, “Same here. Now get lost.” Rowan escapes with pandemonium behind him. Citra kisses her own ring, getting some of Rowan’s blood on her lips. Rowan gets into the car out front, where he’s greeted by Scythe Faraday. The two drive off into the night.
The novel ends with an excerpt from the gleaning journal of H.S. Anastasia, in which she reflects on humanity’s conflict and the rot growing within the Scythedom. She documents the rumor that someone is hunting down corrupt, despicable scythes and ending their existence by fire. Though he’s not an ordained scythe, people call him Scythe Lucifer. She is both terrified that it’s true and terrified that she might want it to be true. She’s devoting her attention to gleaning with compassion and conscience, and she hopes that if Scythe Lucifer comes her way, he’ll see her as one of the good ones, the way he once did.
Analysis
In the final section of Scythe, Citra and Rowan face their final tests. In doing so, they embody the tactics of the old guard and the new order. Citra kills inefficiently but compassionately, and Rowan kills coldly but efficiently. The bejeweling committee's reactions illustrate the divide in the Scythedom. Citra takes far too long for some; Rowan is too callous for others. Rowan's final test is not presented in his own point-of-view narration, which legitimizes Citra's concerns about whether he's changed—the last time the reader was privy to Rowan's thoughts, he was thinking about being the executioner of eagles and watching a burning monastery char his mentor's bones. For all the reader knows, Rowan has become the ruthless killer the Scythedom fears him to be.
In Rowan's perspective, it's clear that he's in high-performance mode, wearing all black (which scythes never wear) and crafting elaborate plans to protect himself and Citra. He doesn't worry for the future of the Scythedom, or about the old guard versus the new order, or about whether fire will be banned as a gleaning tool; he cares about Citra. Rowan's schemes contrast Citra's vague "hopefully my plan will work" hint, which provides a fairly large clue to the reader about who will be granted the scythehood: when a novel describes someone's plan in detail, it's almost guaranteed to fall through, if only because reading the same thing twice is boring.
When Citra is granted the scythehood, everyone cheers. The decision to give her the ring was clearly colored by suspicion around Scythe Goddard's death. People might be glad that Scythe Goddard and his junior scythes are gone, but that doesn't mean they support Rowan—in fact, one scythe even refuses to touch him, recalling Rowan's ostracized position at his high school, pre-apprenticeship.
The difference between high school and this moment in front of the Scythedom is that Citra is beside him now. Before he escapes, Rowan and Citra say that they love each other. Scythe Faraday instructed them specifically not to do this, but then again, they've done many things they weren't supposed to do, including beheading scythes, evading arrest, and granting immunity with face punches. Their declaration of love is not explicitly romantic, but it's clearly full of admiration on Rowan's part, and it's very intimate on Citra's, as shown by her intentionally getting Rowan's blood on her lips by kissing her new scythe ring. Besides being intimate, the purpose of this gesture is rhetorically ambiguous. Blood is not a frequent motif in the novel, though eating is, so perhaps the act of putting Rowan's blood on Citra's lips is a way to pay respects and foster a connection, like Scythe Curie's cooking.
Ending the novel with an excerpt from a gleaning journal provides first-person insight into Citra's mind, completing her narrative arc, showing Honorable Scythe Anastasia as a compassionate, patient, considerate scythe. This journal entry also deals with the unknown: Scythe Lucifer, and what will happen if/when they meet. Citra hated the unknown, but Scythe Anastasia demonstrates character growth here as well, confronting unknowns without becoming irritable.
As a final note on the form of Scythe, it's interesting that Shusterman ends on a journal excerpt, as they usually precede and inform an upcoming chapter. The reader, over the last 400 or so pages, has gotten accustomed to journal entries coming before content, so ending with a journal entry leads the reader naturally into the next book. Scythe Anastasia's closing notes double as an introduction to the next installment, leaving us searching for the next chapter, even though we've turned the final page.
