Kaz’s eyes found Inej unerringly in the crowd. Ketterdam had been buzzing about the assassination of the ambassador for weeks. It had nearly destroyed Kerch-Zemeni relations and sent the Merchant Council into an uproar. The Zemeni blamed the Kerch. The Kerch suspected the Shu. Kaz didn’t care who was responsible; the murder fascinated him because he couldn’t figure out how it had been accomplished.
From Inej's perspective, we get our first glimpse into Kaz and his mind. He can always find Inej in a crowd, a rare feat that demonstrates his perceptiveness, as well as their special connection. He doesn't care about what makes Ketterdam buzz—he only cares about how it was done.
The description of Ketterdam "buzzing" gives the sense of the city being international but very interconnected. Different factions know about everything, speculating and assigning blame, functioning as different buzzing bees in the same hive.
Feeling anything for Kaz Brekker was the worst kind of foolishness. She knew that. But he’d been the one to rescue her, to see her potential. He’d bet on her, and that meant something—even if he’d done it for his own selfish reasons. He’d even dubbed her the Wraith.
I don’t like it, she’d said. It makes me sound like a corpse.
A phantom, he’d corrected.
Inej has a complex relationship to her body, after training as an acrobat and being repeatedly raped at the Menagerie. What her body can do defines her, but it's also the source of her trauma. When Kaz assigns her the name "the Wraith," Inej's first concern is that it makes her sound like a corpse, but a wraith doesn't have a body at all. In a way, "the Wraith" distances Inej from her body, even though the nickname refers to her stealth and agility.
In his own perspective, Kaz doesn't think of his choices as gambling. Maybe Inej thinking he "bet on her" indicates that she doesn't understand him as well as she thinks at this point in the narrative. He didn't bet on her; he knew her value from the outset, even if she doesn't see it that way.
Kaz narrowed his eyes. “I’m not some character out of a children’s story who plays harmless pranks and steals from the rich to give to the poor. There was money to be made and information to be had. Specht knows the navy’s routes like the back of his hand.”
“Never something for nothing, Kaz,” she said, her gaze steady. “I know.”
In this quote, Kaz references a heroic figure that matches the popular myth of Robin Hood (who steals from the rich to give to the poor). However, Kaz doesn't name Robin Hood explicitly, which aligns the reader with Kerch culture while simultaneously alienating them from the details of the narrative's world. Ketterdam is familiar, but not exactly real.
Inej's gaze is steady from her own point of view, implying that the steadiness is intentional and controlled, like most things she does. This control gives the reader the sense she's performing or lying—she wants Kaz to do something for nothing. Reflecting their final interaction, where she touches his cheek and decides it isn't enough for her, Inej wants Kaz to prove her wrong.
The knowledge that they might never see each other again, that some of them—maybe all of them—might not survive this night hung heavy in the air. A gambler, a convict, a wayward son, a lost Grisha, a Suli girl who had become a killer, a boy from the Barrel who had become something worse…
What bound them together? Greed? Desperation? Was it just the knowledge that if one or all of them disappeared tonight, no one would come looking?
In this passage, knowledge "hanging heavy" is a metaphor that evokes a coming storm. This literary device builds tension and provides an oppressive atmosphere for the team's final moment before the heist. The sentence that follows seems intentionally reminiscent of coming-of-age classics like The Breakfast Club, evoking genre stereotypes to situate the novel in the broader canon of YA literature. Using a familiar listing format makes it obvious that this is the moment they become a team—including Matthias:
"It was Jesper who spoke first. 'No mourners,' he said with a grin. 'No funerals,' they replied in unison. Even Matthias muttered the words softly."
But from this vantage point she saw the wall had been crafted in the shape of a leviathan, a giant ice dragon circling the island and swallowing its own tail. She shivered. Wolves, dragons, what was next? In Ravkan stories, monsters waited to be woken by the call of heroes. Well, she thought, we’re certainly not heroes. Let’s hope this one stays asleep.
Nina gets a new perspective on the walls of the Ice Court and sees that the structure itself is a monster. Nina thinks often of Ravkan stories and the different perspectives on events that become myth (ex: she takes down the Fjerdan army and imagines herself being the new tale Fjerdans tell their children to get them to go to sleep). She doesn't consider any of the heist crew heroes—she is more likely to associate herself, Matthias, and Kaz with the monsters.
Inej looked down at the fingers digging into her flesh. For a brief second, every horror came back to her, and she truly was a wraith, a ghost taking flight from a body that had given her only pain. No. A body that had given her strength. A body that had carried her over the rooftops of Ketterdam, that had served her in battle, that had brought her up six stories in the dark of a soot-stained chimney.
When Heleen grabs Inej, the contact triggers the trauma of being trafficked and raped. Inej's complex relationship with her body makes a turning point here, where she rejects the idea of her body bringing her only pain. She begins to love herself as Inej, in her body, instead of taking pride or solace in being the Wraith. There is still a strong dissociation in the language used around that body, as it "carries" and "serves" her, implying that her trauma isn't entirely gone, but transformed.
One of the things he’d respected most in his mentor was his mercilessness, his willingness to do hard things for the sake of the cause. But Brum had taken pleasure in what he’d done to these Grisha, what he would have gladly done to Nina and Jesper. Maybe the hard things had never been difficult for Brum the way they’d been for Matthias. They had not been a sacred duty, performed reluctantly for the sake of Fjerda. They had been a joy.
In this passage, "most in his mentor was his mercilessness" is an example of alliteration deployed smoothly and rhythmically, like a drum beat building to a point, with "ness"/"ness" used across the comma to carry the sentence's momentum. This rhetorical motion carries us to a big "But": Brum enjoys hurting the people Matthias has come to care for. Matthias's mentor is exactly the monster Nina grew up fearing. Matthias's use of "Maybe" reminds the reader that Matthias isn't confident as he critiques his mentor—he's only just now figuring things out for himself.
As soon as Nina had described the drüskelle initiation ritual, he’d known: The Fjerdan stronghold hadn’t been built around a great tree but around a spring. Djel, the wellspring, who fed the seas and rains, and the roots of the sacred ash.
Water had a voice. It was something every canal rat knew, anyone who had slept beneath a bridge or weathered a winter storm in an overturned boat—water could speak with the voice of a lover, a long-lost brother, even a god.
In this passage, Kaz reveals that he figured out a national secret just from a vague description of a ritual, demonstrating his intelligence and his ability to dismantle mythology. Sharing this information with the reader now, instead of when Kaz figured it out, is an example of the "twist" revelations common in the heist genre.
Water is a motif in the novel. For Matthias, water is literally the embodiment of his god. For Inej and Nina, journeys over water separated them from their homes and brought them into dangerous and traumatic situations. Kaz here illustrates what water means to him—water connects the traumas of his past, his homelessness and lack of safety. If we interpret "lover" to be Inej and "long-lost brother" to be Jordie, placing "even a god" beside Kaz's two most beloved people perhaps proves that he does have some of the spirituality Inej claims he lacks.
Nina shifted her gaze to his. Her eyes were ferocious, the deep green of forests; the pupils, dark wells. The air around her seemed to shimmer with power, as if she was alight with some secret flame.
“They fear you as I once feared you,” he said. “As you once feared me. We are all someone’s monster, Nina.”
Matthias sees Nina on parem and finds her gorgeous, in ways associated with wildness and secrecy. Nina's eyes being "dark wells" connects her to the water so sacred to Matthias, evoking—or perhaps, for Matthias, replacing—the deep wellspring beneath the sacred ash that Kaz uprooted to save them.
Eyes themselves can't be ferocious, so the misplaced descriptor tells us that Nina's ferocious power is focused through her eyes and expression. The simile that she is alight with fire makes sense, after taking parem, but "some secret flame" specifically uses personal, romantic language. Even when she's frightening, Matthias finds Nina worthy of the language of poetry.
This leads to "we are all someone's monster"—even though Matthias and Nina no longer fear each other, they are still seen as monsters by others. Is everyone being someone's monster inevitable? Or does the story imply that if everyone got to know each other, like Matthias and Nina, the world would be free of monsters?
The right thing to do was obvious. Kill this boy quickly, painlessly. Destroy the lab and everything in it. Eradicate the secret of jurda parem. If you wanted to kill a vine, you didn’t just keep cutting it back. You tore it from the ground by the roots. And yet her hands were shaking. Wasn’t this the way drüskelle thought? Destroy the threat, wipe it out, no matter that the person in front of you was innocent.
“Nina,” Matthias said softly, “he’s just a kid. He’s one of us.”
One of us. A boy not much younger than she was, caught up in a war he hadn’t chosen for himself. A survivor.
Six of Crows encourages the reader to ask the question Nina does here: In world-changing decisions as well as day-to-day life, what is the right thing to do? Even when it's "obvious," the right choice can still be wrong. The use of the second-person "you" in Nina's deliberation involves the reader and makes her thought process personal. Nina uses a metaphor to compare eradicating jurda parem to killing a vine, which evokes what she said in her earlier fight with Matthias: she wants Ravka to salt the earth of Fjerda. Now that she has a chance, though, she seems less sure. The word "survivor" links Kuwei—and herself and Matthias—back to Kaz (survived a plague and drowning) and Inej (survived trafficking, rape, and stabbing).
