Summary
Matthias dreams of Nina—in good dreams, he kills her; in bad ones, they kiss. When he fully comes to, he begins to choke her, but Kaz dislocates his arm with his cane. Matthias doesn’t believe they can escape Hellgate, but then screaming starts—Jesper opened all of the Hellshow animal cages. Hellgate is chaos as they cross the Hellshow arena (Inej kills the venomous lizard easily) to their escape boat. When Matthias tries to fight Inej, she trips him, and Nina uses her Grisha powers to put him to sleep.
Matthias wakes fully healed (which he hates—better clean pain than Grisha corruption). When Kaz asks him to help break into Fjerda, Matthias says no. He won’t betray his country a second time. Kaz offers him a full pardon, which would give him the ability to become a drüskelle again—Matthias agrees, planning to kill Nina and then Kaz as soon as the job is done. Kaz introduces the group to the final member of their 6-person team, Wylan Van Eck, their demolitions expert and Councilman Van Eck’s son, who they will use as leverage against Van Eck if they need to.
In Jesper’s perspective, Jesper and Inej argue against taking Wylan—he’s too pampered, young, and new—but Kaz insists. Matthias describes the Ice Court, and Wylan sketches it out; it sounds impenetrable to Jesper, but Kaz is confident. Nina reveals that a Fjerdan ceremony called Hringkälla is coming in 2 weeks, so they could sneak in with the entertainers, but Kaz explains that they’re going to enter as prisoners and leave through the embassy. They’ll leave Ketterdam as soon as they’re ready.
Kaz sends for supplies: cold-weather gear, explosives, and tailoring tools for Nina. Matthias asks to speak to him alone, then grabs Kaz to look for the pardon—the feeling of skin on skin repulses Kaz—but Kaz takes Matthias down easily, telling Matthias that he might think he’s strong, but Hellgate would have been a paradise for Kaz as a child. This attack was Matthias’s one free pass, but Kaz kicks him an extra time for good measure.
On their last night in Ketterdam, Inej remembers the love her Suli family shared, especially her father’s love of her mother; he taught Inej everything she knows, including her spirituality. She walks past the pleasure houses of the West Stave, daring herself to look at the Menagerie, where she was kept with the name “lynx” under Heleen Van Houden. Heleen grabs her and threatens her, promising Inej she’ll wear the Menagerie silks again. As Inej walks on, she recites the names of her knives to calm herself down. She’s late to the crew meetup at the harbor, so she’s too late to warn Kaz that they’re surrounded before their ship, the Ferolind, explodes.
Jesper loves when people are shooting at him because he can’t think of anything else. After a shootout, Kaz sends the crew to the real Ferolind (the one that exploded was a decoy—always take precautions). Jesper wonders if Nina or Inej knew Kaz’s real plan, and he feels jealous. He looks forward to getting four million kruge to erase his gambling debts. As the rest of the crew fights to the ship, Wylan sets off a bright explosion, and Jesper shoots their blinded enemies.
Inej fights on the outskirts of the battle, killing members of multiple other gangs. She’s stabbed by Oomen, Geels’s right-hand man, and she stabs him in the crotch, then forces herself to climb away, hearing her father encouraging her. Right as she’s about to take her own life rather than be captured by the Black Tips, Kaz grabs her. She remembers the day he bought her indenture from Heleen, then passes out.
Kaz gets the Ferolind moving and takes Inej to Nina to be healed. Jesper, Kaz, and Wylan speculate about who gave their plans away to the Black Tips; Kaz asks Oomen, who is uncooperative, so Kaz cuts his eye with an oyster knife, then pulls his eyeball out. Wylan vomits. Oomen admits that Pekka Rollins hired the Black Tips and some others to stop Kaz from leaving Ketterdam—Kaz figures out that Rollins is also going after Bo Yul-Bayur. He throws Oomen overboard, upsetting Wylan, and goes below deck, pleased that he’ll get to snatch 30 million kruge from Rollins’s fingers.
Nina is a Heartrender, not a Healer, but she does her best to help Inej. She wishes she’d trained more. She was part of the recruiting team for Ravka’s Second Army, and she was taken by drüskelle, including Matthias, and kept on a ship full of other captured Grisha in horrible conditions. The Fjerdans were led by Jarl Brum, an infamously brutal drüskelle captain. Nina begged Matthias for fresh water, and he gave her a tin cup that would eventually save her life. In the present, Nina wakes up from a quick nap; Matthias is in the cabin with her and Inej. He calls her a monster and asks if she ever dreamed of him. He certainly dreamed of her. He says he might have loved her once, before she betrayed him.
Matthias goes up to the deck and vomits, feeling seasick and ashamed and angry that Nina had him imprisoned as a slaver. Wylan has Matthias label all of his drawings of the Ice Court. Kaz gives the crew baleen, which will allow them to breathe underwater for 10 minutes (Wylan accidentally bites down on his and panics). Kaz reveals that he plans to have Inej climb the prison’s incinerator, a basically impossible feat, and tells everyone to relax about Pekka Rollins. Matthias can tell that Kaz hates Rollins and gets the sense there’s something more going on.
Analysis
All six crew members have now been introduced, and they function essentially as foils in this section. Matthias’s rigid rage and conservative beliefs provide a foil to Nina’s flexible devotion and love of pleasure. Wylan, in these chapters, is a source of comic relief, as well as being the novice against which Kaz’s street smarts and genius can be demonstrated. Jesper is risk-obsessed, and Inej is risk-averse; from his perspective, we learn that he feels very jealous of her connection to Kaz.
This section shows Inej experiencing trauma-related paralysis, after encountering Heleen on her way to the docks. On page 141, Inej thinks “Little lynx. Her blades were reliable. And they made her feel like she’d been born with proper claws.” She fights with knives because they make her feel like she was born a clawed animal instead of made one—the “little lynx” identity she was given as a prostitute has become a part of her, and in a way being a “lynx” is something she uses to protect herself. This is similar to Kaz naming her the Wraith, though not exactly; though she didn’t choose either name, "lynx" was given to imprison her, and Wraith was given in an attempt to liberate her—possibly a failed attempt. By the end of the novel, she’ll have found her purpose and will identify with her own body, as Inej, again; for now, she uses her claws to comfort herself.
Kaz has a similar trauma-related incident when Matthias grabs him, because he can’t stand the feeling of bare flesh. Kaz, like Inej, has layers of names: his birth name, Kaz Rietveld; his assumed name, Kaz Brekker; and Dirtyhands, given to him in his early days as an established criminal. Unlike Inej, Kaz funnels his trauma into revenge. His kicking Matthias while he’s down exemplifies his belief that you need to strike once, hard, to prevent someone from coming at you again.
As far as heist structure, the crew has been assembled, and they’ve begun to make a plan. The plan will be mostly revealed in the next section, though, and while the “crew” has been assembled, they aren’t a team yet—Matthias tries to fight basically everybody, and he decides that he will kill at least Nina and Kaz by the end of the heist. Pekka Rollins’s attack on the decoy Ferolind is the first road bump on the path to Djerholm; Kaz hiding the real Ferolind perfectly suits a heist, where plans, counter-plans, and twists are required.
