Six of Crows

Kaz remembers his time in Ketterdam with Jordie. The money from Hertzoon ran out, and when Jordie brought the loan agreement between himself and Hertzoon to the bank, they discovered it was “worthless paper” and no one had heard of Hertzoon. Thrown out of the boardinghouse, they spent a few nights on the streets before both fell victim to the firepox outbreak. They lay together in “a pile of broken-up wooden boxes” until Jordie died and his body turned “cold and hard” (274).

Both Jordie and Kaz were collected on a sickboat and dumped in Reaper’s Barge, where Kaz dreamed of happy memories with Jordie and woke with his brother’s body beside him, “swollen with rot […] like some kind of gruesome deep sea fish” (275). Kaz’s own fever passed, but he wondered if he should simply give up; then he realized “vengeance for Jordie and maybe for himself, too” awaited back on land (276). Kaz used his brother’s body as a raft to guide himself back to land and then let Jordie’s body float away. Kaz knew he must live, for “someone had to pay” (276).

Kaz wakes in the prison wagon, where Inej tells him they’ve passed the first two checkpoints. The wagon stops and opens, and the prisoners are led forward, their hoods ripped off. They find themselves in a courtyard where guards confirm each prisoner is on the driver’s list. Kaz is surprised to find the Ice Court a “dreamlike” place “so white it almost glow[s] blue” (278), a place Nina comments must be the work of Fabrikator Grisha. Nina points out five bodies impaled on spikes over the courtyard, including one with a Dime Lion tattoo. Kaz wonders if one of the other bodies belongs to Rollins, but hopes none do—in Kaz’s mind, Pekka Rollins and his death “belong […] to him” (279).

The guards fuss over the disparity between the driver’s paperwork and Kaz’s team, but they decide to take them into the prison and “let the next shift sort them out” (280). The prisoners separate into male and female groups, and each must be touched by a “human amplifier”—a person who can detect Grisha by touch. The amplifier lets Nina pass, either because of the paraffin in which they’d coated Nina’s arm, or because the woman simply let her go. Kaz has a moment of panic as Inej is led away from him; he relied on her as the one who “brought him back from the dark” after the episode on the wagon (281).

The male prisoners are taken to a room with hoses, where they’re forced to strip down. The task brings Kaz back to the “bodies crowding around him” in the sickboat (282), and he nearly faints again but manages to stay conscious, though a guard discovers the two lockpicks hidden in his mouth. After being hosed down, the prisoners are given uniforms and deposited in holding cells of “dank gray rock and iron bars” (284), where Kaz’s ungloved hands feel impossibly bare and, without his cane, he must limp.

In the prison, Jesper struggles to contain his restless energy, the same energy that drove him from his father’s farm to Ketterdam, where he’d hoped to find direction at the university but ended up consumed by gambling and gang warfare. As they wait, Jesper tries to coax a terrified Wylan to share more about his past, but Wylan reveals only that his father took him everywhere until something significant changed.

When a guard brings water, Jesper gets himself and Wylan wet, then opens the stitches on his ankle and pulls out a pellet Nina had buried inside him. He warns the crew to pull their shirts over their heads, then puts the pellet in a waste bucket, emitting a chloro gas that causes the other prisoners to pass out. Jesper goes to the prison bars and manages to pull iron from it; as Matthias observes, Jesper is actually a Fabrikator Grisha, if a weak one. Jesper pulls two slim needles of iron from the bars, and Kaz uses them to pick the locks. The crew splits up to complete their assignments.

Jesper and Matthias run to the stables, grab rope, and head to the rendezvous point in the basement. Wylan and Inej enter the trash room, where they discover a problem: The incinerator now runs in the afternoon rather than in the morning. The team cannot carry explosives above the still-smoldering coals, and they’re not sure if they can climb the shaft at all. Kaz and Nina have already left to search the prison for Yul-Bayur, just in case he’s somewhere inside, even though they were supposed to wait for Jesper and Matthias to accompany them. Wylan finds Inej’s leather shoes discarded in the laundry. With the help of those “magic slippers,” Inej feels sure she can make the climb.

Nina wonders why Kaz has insisted he and Nina climb the upper floors of the prison alone as they dodge guards, searching through the prisoners and finding no Shu among them. Nina passes through a steel door to a strange room with walls of “white so clean it hurt to look at” and one wall half of glass, which must be “Fabrikator made” (297). Through the glass, she sees cells of the same brilliant white, a floor drain “surrounded by reddish stains” (297), and only one item: a button with the insignia of a Grisha Squaller. She surmises that Grisha slaves had constructed this trap for Grisha prisoners, creating a place their magic would not allow them to escape.

Horrified by what she’s seen and yearning to return home, Nina rushes back to the meeting spot but doesn’t see Kaz. She returns to the basement, using her powers to break the neck of a guard who intercepts her, and then the Elderclock sounds with a “shrill clamor”: an alarm.

Wearing Kaz’s gloves retrieved from the laundry—she can’t touch the incinerator walls with bare skin—Inej holds heavy ropes and scales six stories with “the fires of hell burning below” (301). She struggles, the bricks so hot her shoes literally melt, slipping as she realizes “there was no one to save her” (303).

Inej remembers the night Kaz came to collect her from the Menagerie. The Dregs’ boss, Per Haskell, had bought Inej’s indenture. Kaz explained that Haskell’s contract, unlike Tante Heleen’s, will eventually allow Inej to pay off her debts and become free; he doesn’t promise her safety or happiness. Inej prefers his “terrible truths” to “kind lies” and accepts his offer.

Now, in the incinerator shaft, Inej blames herself for trusting Kaz, allowing him to “lead her to this fate” (309). Inej can’t return home after the shame of working at the Menagerie and killing for the Dregs, and she considers giving up—but she can’t abandon the others who are relying on her. Suddenly she feels raindrops, cooling the walls and her melting shoes. Her strength renewed, she climbs quickly while imagining a storm, a future in which she seeks revenge and “hunt[s] the slavers and their buyers” (311).

Kaz rushes through the prison, searching for Pekka Rollins, feeling “like a wild animal” (312), as he did after Jordie’s death. He remembers his first days alone, how the firepox and Jordie’s demise “burned away every gentle thing inside him” (313). Kaz slashed the feet of a young boy working at a gambling house in order to take his job, and while cleaning for the gambling house, he learned how to steal and fight. Discarding his family’s surname, Rietveld, “like a rotten limb” (314), Kaz took the name Brekker from a piece of machinery so he wouldn’t be recognizable to Jakob Hertzoon.

At the gambling house, Kaz learned that Hertzoon’s con was a frequent tactic in the Barrel. Kaz also discovered his own “gift for cards” (315) and was soon banned from play from every gambling house. One day Kaz saw a man he recognized as Hertzoon, with his “florid cheeks and tufty sideburns” (315) and followed him to a gin shop where the guard wouldn’t let Kaz inside. The guard told Kaz the man wasn’t Hertzoon, but Pekka Rollins, a legendary Barrel gang boss. Rollins looked through the shop window, right at Kaz, and didn’t appear to remember the boy.

That evening, Kaz realized if he wanted to take everything from Pekka, he needed the strength of a gang behind him. The next day, he asked Per Haskell if he could work for the Dregs. Though Kaz began as a “grunt,” he knew “the Dregs would become his army” (316).

Now, in the Ice Court prison, Kaz finally finds Pekka’s florid face. Asleep in his cell, Pekka has recently received a bad beating. Kaz picks the lock and enters the cell to find Pekka smiling; he was faking sleep. Pekka asks if Kaz has come to gloat, and Kaz lets the cell door close.

As the alarm blares and boots stomp above, Jesper wonders where Kaz has gone. Inej has made it to the roof and dropped rope for Wylan, Matthias, and Nina to climb, and now Jesper waits for Kaz, alone in the basement. Finally, Kaz bursts in, his clothing covered in blood, and Jesper begins to climb with Kaz behind him.

They find Matthias and Wylan on the roof, while Inej and Nina have already moved on to the embassy. The four use the rope and a sliding sling Inej has constructed to transfer to the lower embassy roof, where Nina and Inej hide against a skylight dome. Nina tries to heal Inej’s burned feet and orders Jesper to help her, thus revealing his Fabrikator status to the entire crew.

The crew demands an explanation for Kaz’s disappearance, and he admits he was searching for Pekka, but claims he couldn’t locate the man. On the White Island below, the crew sees guards organizing partygoers, creating another checkpoint before the glass bridge, likely a precaution after the prison alarm. Inej notices girls from the Ketterdam brothels have arrived for the celebration, and she knows how she and Nina will get through the checkpoint: they’ll “enter with the Menagerie” (327).

Kaz points out that there must be another route to the White Island besides the bridge, and Matthias admits he knows of one, but it’s “messy.” Kaz asks Wylan if he can disable one of the embassy gates and keep it shut to trigger Black Protocol—the highest state of emergency—which will cause the bridge to close and trap the guards on White Island.

Inej and Nina disguise themselves as members of the Menagerie, using Grisha magic to create tattoos. The entire crew shares a moment before they depart for their missions, knowing they might not make it out alive. They all repeat the Dregs’ motto: “no mourners” and “no funerals” (332). Inej pulls Kaz aside and gives him his gloves, recovered from the laundry. Then she tells them after the heist, she’s leaving the Dregs. Kaz starts to speak, and Inej touches his cheek— “the first time she had touched him skin to skin” in their two years together (333). Kaz allows the touch but appears to be “waging a war with himself” (334)—not pulling back is “the best he [can] offer,” but for Inej, it’s “not enough” (334). She makes a last silent prayer for Kaz and leaves him, knowing her true purpose will lead her away from him.

Inej and Nina crawl through air ducts until they’re above the room where the Menagerie girls are searched before entering the White Island. Nina uses magic to strip and bind the girls, taking the place of two of them and hiding the rest in a closet. Nina passes the guards’ inspection, but Inej is flagged as suspicious and taken back to the checkpoint.

Matthias, Kaz, Jesper, and Wylan cross a rope to the roof of the drüskelle building. Matthias feels at home here, but in his new status as invader, it’s “home turned on its head” (343). Matthias admits that his feelings for Nina, and the relief he’d felt when she emerged alive from the incinerator, have overtaken his loyalty to the drüskelle. Kaz and Matthias rappel to the shores of the ice moat, leaving Jesper and Wylan behind, and Matthias locates the secret, partially submerged bridge across the moat, shared only with drüskelle initiates. The Dregs cover themselves with white powder from a wall, to hide themselves from the guards, and walk across the bridge as the icy waters soak their feet. Kaz picks the gate lock, and they enter the White Island near the guards’ barracks.

Two guards pass, and Matthias knocks one unconscious with a rifle. He realizes Kaz is unarmed, and that he could shoot him and betray the Dregs, but he chooses not to—something Kaz affirms is a test. Matthias is no longer loyal to the drüskelle guards he once called brothers, and along with Kaz, he puts on a fallen guard’s uniform, ready to continue the Dregs’ mission.

Jesper and Wylan cross the drüskelle roof to the gatehouse, Jesper drunk on the “adrenaline crackl[ing] through his body” (349). Through a glass skylight, Jesper sees a banner made of cloth in Grisha colors and realizes they’re trophies of dead Grisha. His mood now sober, Jesper remembers his father urging him to hide his Grisha powers, for “the world can be cruel” to those who possess magic (351).

At the gatehouse, Jesper starts to rappel down to disable a single guard, but two more guards emerge while he dangles above them. Suddenly, Jesper hears a voice singing in Fjerdan; it’s Wylan, impersonating a drunk and dancing on the gatehouse walkway. The guards laugh and sing as well, giving Jesper the advantage he needs to land on one and wring his neck. Wylan joins the fight, and they disable all three guards. Wylan explains he learned Fjerdan from his tutors, and Jesper is impressed.

Inside the gatehouse, Wylan is dismayed to see steel chains rather than rope controlling the gates. They will have to rely on Jesper’s Grisha power to cut through the metal.

Nina crosses the glass bridge with the rest of the Menagerie, disconcerted by the thought that the bridge must be “Fabrikator craft.” She enters a palace that seems “hollowed out of a glacier” (358), arriving in a ballroom full of ice sculptures of wolves. Heading for a group of soldiers, she reasons that a military officer will know where Yul-Bayur is being kept. She steps into a soldier’s path so that he’ll trip her, and the nearby general will come to her rescue. The general appears interested in Nina, but then a nearby man makes a joke, and Nina turns to discover he’s Jarl Brum, the drüskelle leader she’d believed was “at the bottom of the ocean” (360).

Jesper, using magic, and Wylan, using scissors, struggle to weaken one link of the gate chain. The task is taking too long and Jesper decides they’ll instigate the Black Protocol, then “shoot at the winch until it gives up” (360). Wylan remarks on Jesper’s love of guns, and Jesper asks what Wylan loves. Wylan responds with “music. Numbers. Equations” (362). Jesper comments, “If only you could talk to girls in equations” (362), and when Wylan asks if Jesper is only interested in girls, Jesper admits that he’s not.

The two turn the winch, raising the gate and triggering the Black Protocol. They let go of the winch so the gate falls, but the weakened link still doesn’t break. Finally, with both boys hanging on the chain like “crazed squirrels,” the link breaks, and the gate can no longer open.

Inej waits in the embassy entryway with other detainees. She makes a scene, demanding an escort to the embassy gate as part of her escape plan. Tante Heleen appears, exposing Inej as “the Wraith […] one of the most notorious criminals in Ketterdam” (366). Heleen grabs Inej, demanding to know the location of the girl Inej replaced; Inej truly feels like “a wraith,” a spirit “taking flight” from the body Heleen has beaten and sold to men.

Inej remembers her body has also “given her strength” (367), and she brutally twists Heleen’s wrist before the guards pull her away. Suddenly the Black Protocol rings out, and the guards take Inej out a gate that seals shut behind them, while Inej is haunted by the echoes of Heleen’s laughter.

Nina flirts with Jarl Brum, hoping he doesn’t recognize her in her costume, so different from the “filthy and frightened” (368) prisoner she was before. She pretends to be curious about seeing a Grisha in person, and he asks if she wants to see one that night. She agrees, and he leads her out of the palace to a building that resembles a tomb: the old treasure vault, he explains, which has since been “converted into a laboratory” (374). He leads her to cells where nearly 30 Grisha are imprisoned. Clearly dosed with jurda parem, the Grisha have hollow eyes and scratch at themselves.

Still flirtatious, Nina says she wants to spend time with Jarl alone, hoping she can torture him and get him to reveal Yul-Bayur’s location. Jarl tricks her into a cell, locks her inside, and states her name—he remembers her “stubborn little face” (377). He tells her if he presses a button outside the cell, it will send jurda parem gas into the cell. Then he disappears, and Matthias’s face appears outside the cell door. He tells her he “came to warn Brum as soon as [he] could” (377), putting “country before self” (378).

Matthias tells Nina, “Now our debt is paid” (378), as the Black Protocol sounds.