Summary
Six of Crows opens in third-person point of view following Joost, a young stadwatch guard, as he patrols Councilman Hoede’s mansion. Joost has fallen for Anya, one of Hoede’s indentured Grisha, but she has gone missing. All guards are called to the boathouse, where Joost sees that Anya is kept in a large box with a young boy. At Hoede’s command, a guard cuts the boy’s arm with a knife, and Anya uses her Corporalnik powers to heal him. She’s ordered to swallow the contents of a packet called parem. The guard cuts the boy’s arm again. Visibly high, Anya heals the boy easily, then tells the guard to shoot the glass of the cage she’s in—he does; Joost realizes Anya made him obey. She tells the other guards to “wait,” and Joost is overcome with expectation, though he doesn’t know what he’s waiting for. He watches Anya command Hoede to enter the box and pick up the knife.
After this first chapter, we move into a limited third-person point of view, now following Inej Ghafa.
As Inej Ghafa crosses the canals of Ketterdam, on her way to meet Kaz Brekker, she muses that people misunderstand him—they say that Kaz, aka “Dirtyhands,” doesn’t need a reason to kill, betray, or ruin, but Inej knows Kaz always has a reason. They just aren’t always good reasons. Kaz waits with the Dregs, a small but up-and-coming gang Kaz manages. Jesper Fahey, a Kaelish-Zemeni sharpshooter, and some of the other Dregs discuss the recent assassination of a Zemeni trade ambassador. The assassination was impossible, and Inej knows Kaz doesn’t care who did it—he only cares because he can’t figure out how it was done.
The Dregs convene on neutral territory (the Exchange) to meet with Geels from the rival Black Tips gang. Inej is skeptical, but Kaz moves forward anyway without explaining anything to her. Jesper gives up his guns, then joins a boy named Big Bollinger in the meeting with Kaz. Inej, “the Wraith,” heads to the top of the Exchange—she’s a talented acrobat who can get in and out of places undetected. Inej observes as Kaz and Geels discuss Fifth Harbor, which the Dregs control but from which Geels wants part of the profit. Geels threatens to have Kaz killed by snipers, but Kaz encourages him to shoot; at Geels’s command, a sniper shoots Big Bollinger. Kaz reveals he knows the two stadwatch men Geels bribed to back him up, and he has blackmail to control the sniper who shot Big Bollinger, who was actually working for the Black Tips. Inej runs across the rooftops and subdues the other sniper before he can shoot Kaz. Geels pulls a gun on Kaz, who explains that if he is killed, Geels’s secret girlfriend will be burned alive. When Geels drops the gun, Kaz breaks his wrist with his cane. He tells the bleeding Bollinger that he has until tonight to get out of Ketterdam or Kaz will kill him. Inej considers helping Bollinger, but instead says a prayer for him and leaves.
In Kaz’s point of view, the Dregs rejoice—except Jesper, who is angry that Kaz didn’t let him on on the plan with Big Bollinger. Kaz gives Jesper money to gamble. Kaz has been a Dreg since he was 12, and over the last five years he’s made it a respectable gang, though the man in charge, Per Haskell, thinks the improvement is his own doing. Kaz feels almost happy, but he knows Inej is shadowing him. They bicker about the meetup, the story about burning Geels’s girlfriend (she was never in danger; it was a bluff), firing a dealer, and religion (Inej believes in the Suli Saints, and she accuses Kaz of worshipping nothing but greed). After Inej leaves, Kaz is attacked by a man who can walk through walls who subdues him with a syringe.
When Kaz comes to, he finds he’s been taken by Jan Van Eck, a wealthy merchant. They argue about ethics, and Kaz breaks free of his restraints, putting a knife to Van Eck’s throat; Van Eck calls for Mikka, a Grisha Tidemaker who can walk through walls thanks to jurda parem. Van Eck explains that the Merchant Council wants Kaz to perform a heist to get jurda parem’s creator, Bo Yul-Bayur, out of Fjerda so that he can be granted asylum in Kerch. The prison (the Ice Court in Fjerda’s capital city, Djerholm) has never been breached. Van Eck shows Kaz the members of the stadwatch who were at Hoede’s house when Anya was given parem—all of them are still waiting, and Anya is dead; she drowned trying to swim back to Ketterdam to get more parem. Kaz agrees to free Yul-Bayur for 30 million kruge. When Van Eck asks why Kaz always wears gloves, Kaz tells him to pick a popular story—stained with blood, covered in scars, demon claws instead of fingers—and believe it. They’re all true enough.
Inej can sense the moment Kaz returns to the Dregs’ hideout, the Slats. She eavesdrops on his conversation with Per Haskell, who is unhappy Kaz didn’t run Big Bollinger by him. She follows Kaz to his room, where he offers her 4 million kruge to help liberate Bo Yul-Bayur. He takes off his shirt and gloves to wash himself (his hands are normal), and Inej wishes he wouldn’t do this in front of her—she lost a lot of her modesty in the Menagerie, but there are limits. He tells her to gather Jesper and a few others, then fence a massive ruby tie pin he stole from Van Eck as payment for having him jumped.
Kaz walks through Ketterdam and passes the Emerald Palace, a gambling house owned by Pekka Rollins, who Kaz hates and plans to destroy “brick by brick”—simple death would be too good for Rollins. Kaz goes to the House of the White Rose, a wealthy pleasure house, and meets Nina Zenik, a confident, flirty Ravkan Grisha. She is a Heartrender, and she uses her powers to ease people’s heartrates and muscles, as well as a Tailor, slightly altering people’s appearances. He tells her about parem and the heist, and asks her to help; she says absolutely not, until Kaz says he’s willing to free Matthias Helvar from Hellgate to get in.
Nina and Kaz ride a rowboat toward Hellgate, Ketterdam’s prison, dressed in capes and masks as if they’re going to a party. She’s surprised to discover other boats, as well as a member of Pekka Rollins’s gang collecting entry fees. Inej joins them. They are led to a fighting pit, where prisoners battle monsters to the death for the upper class’s entertainment, called the Hellshow. She watches a prisoner spin a wheel, then get eaten by a venomous desert lizard. Nina remembers when she first arrived in Ketterdam and how Rollins tried to recruit her, until Inej slipped through her window with an offer from Kaz instead; though she works with him, she still finds Kaz infuriating. Her musing is interrupted by Matthias coming into the Hellshow.
Matthias looks different after a year in Hellgate, but Nina would recognize him anywhere. He spins the wheel, and it lands on wolves; Nina begs Kaz to stop this, horrified that Matthias will have to kill creatures sacred to Fjerdan culture. Matthias kills the wolves, despite crying. Kaz, Inej, and Nina break into Matthias’s cell. Nina alters the appearance of a fellow Dreg to make him resemble Matthias and his injuries, plus a bad case of firepox—he’ll be quarantined, and hopefully they’ll be back from Fjerda before Hellgate realizes he’s not Matthias. When Matthias wakes up, he says Nina’s name, then begins to choke her.
Analysis
In this opening section, we are introduced to Ketterdam, an international hub of commerce and crime, where you’re either a pigeon (a mark) or a survivor. The depiction of the city emphasizes the wealth disparity across Ketterdam (Hoede and Van Eck’s opulent houses, compared to the small rooms of the Slats), as well as the different kinds of power. Merchants are powerful, but so are the gang leaders who control the Barrel—while Kaz is a criminal, his clever management of properties like Fifth Harbor means that he, like the Merchant Council, influences the flow of Ketterdam.
This first section also introduces us to trauma, a theme that will be explored and complicated throughout the novel. All of the protagonists suffer from their pasts in some way: Inej was taken from her Suli caravan and sold into indentured prostitution. Nina doesn’t want to live in Ketterdam but feels trapped by her treatment of Matthias, who has spent a year fighting in a prison colosseum. Kaz is sickened by human touch, and Jesper would rather be shot at than think for a minute. Kaz and Inej’s PTSD in particular will be influential in the narrative, as we see Inej turn her relationship with her body into strength, while Kaz’s inability to engage with his trauma will end with him losing Inej, both emotionally and literally.
This section only has Kaz, Inej, and Nina’s perspectives. They are the three most independent characters—and, arguably, the three most powerful—and they are the ones with the most-explored traumatic backstories. Jesper and Matthias get perspectives in later sections. The sixth member of the heist crew, Wylan, doesn’t even make an appearance in Part 1; he doesn’t get any of his own chapters at all until the sequel, Crooked Kingdom.
Six of Crows is a fantasy heist, and it adapts the traditional heist movie structure into a novel, relying heavily on flashbacks to do so. A heist follows a set of steps: assemble the crew; make the plan; things go wrong; outsmart and out-plan the enemy; the showdown; the exchange/getaway/victory. Part 1 shows the crew assembly phase, though it hasn’t been completed by the end. We see from this first section that the novel isn’t divided by heist structure but rather by emotional waves of the characters—the personalities matter more than completing this “phase” of the plot.
