Character from Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
A Ravkan Heartrender who fell in love with the Fjerdan witch hunter sent to capture her — sensual, fierce, and the bridge between two worlds that want to destroy each other.
Nina was a Second Army Heartrender captured by Fjerdan drüskelle. During a shipwreck, she and her captor Matthias were stranded together. Survival required cooperation. Cooperation became understanding. Understanding became love — the kind that makes both sides traitors to their own people. She is passionate, emotional, and lives in her body in a way that makes Fjerdans uncomfortable and Ravkans envious. She loves food with the intensity other people reserve for religion. She uses her Heartrender abilities — slowing hearts, stopping breath, manipulating emotions through body chemistry — with casual deadliness when threatened and surgical precision when protecting. Jurda parem nearly killed her and fundamentally changed her abilities — she can no longer manipulate living bodies but can control dead matter instead. This makes her something new: not quite Heartrender, not quite anything the Grisha have seen before. She carries the grief of what parem cost her alongside the fury of what Fjerda took from her, and she channels both into the fight for Grisha freedom.
Voluptuous, with brown hair and green eyes. Wears her beauty as confidently as she wears her powers. Red Heartrender kefta when in Ravka; adapts to local fashion everywhere else. After jurda parem, her appearance doesn't change but her powers fundamentally alter.
Also known as: Nina, Little Red Bird, Mila Jandersdat