Summary
Inej wakes up and learns that Kaz killed Oomen and the others who attacked her. She and Nina talk about the scar on her wrist where she used to have her Menagerie tattoo, as well as Kaz naming Inej “the Wraith.” Nina sings horribly to entertain Inej; Inej remembers the day slavers took her from her Suli caravan and sold her to Heleen. She asks Nina to teach her the song, and they sing together.
Six days before they arrive at the Ice Court, Jesper is so bored he wants pirates to attack them just so they have something to do. He talks to Wylan, but they’re very different people. When Inej is well enough to stand, he helps her walk around the deck—she notices Nina and Matthias avoiding each other; she asks if Kaz visited her, and Jesper admits he didn’t; Inej reveals that Wylan’s father writes to him every week but Wylan doesn’t open the letters; Jesper reveals that he’s deeply, deeply in debt and got his father to take out a loan to pay his “student fees.”
It takes another two days before Kaz can get himself to talk to Inej—it’s a combative conversation about their plans, and he surprises himself by telling her that Pekka Rollins killed his older brother, Jordie. He tries to tell himself that he doesn’t want Inej, he just finds her useful and familiar. Through a flashback, we learn the first part of Kaz and Jordie’s backstory: They were tricked into giving away their life savings by a man named Jakob Hertzoon, who then disappeared.
Matthias finds it difficult to see Fjerda for the first time in over a year. When Nina tailors his appearance, he’s humiliated by how much he likes watching her—she savors everything. The Ferolind docks in a whaling port north of Djerholm, and the group makes a days-long trek over the frozen tundra (Matthias loves the cold; the others don’t). Kaz tells them parts of the plan to sneak, trick, and possibly bomb their way into the Ice Court. Matthias feels like a traitor.
We get the second part of Matthias and Nina’s backstory from Matthias’s perspective: A storm capsized the drüskelle ship, and Matthias awoke to Nina swimming with his unconscious body, saving his life (she used the tin cup he gave her to free herself). They survive a long, painful journey to safety by warming each other and arguing flirtatiously.
In the present, the group finds a pyre where three Grisha were burned by Fjerdans. Burning Grisha is technically illegal in Fjerda, but it still happens. Nina is horrified. Jesper shoots one of the burning Grisha, who was still alive. Nina and Matthias argue in earnest—she says she hopes Ravka burns Fjerda to the ground and salts the earth, with Matthias there to see his friends and family burned on a pyre. He says that Grisha already burned his family and village, including his infant sister, so he has nothing left to lose. Nina laughs—there’s always more to lose.
Nina can’t shake the horror of seeing the pyres. She remembers the three weeks she spent with Matthias after the shipwreck. They talked about food and their cultures, and Matthias saved her from a frozen lake. In the present, the group encourages Nina and Matthias to make peace, and Matthias tells them that Nina betrayed him at the end of those three weeks—she told a Kerch trader that he was a slaver who had taken her prisoner, and that was what got him locked up in Hellgate. The group is attacked by Grisha sent by the Shu: a Squaller on jurda parem who can actually fly, not just control air currents, and a Fabrikator named Nestor that Nina trained with back in Ravka. He is addicted to parem, and he resists Nina’s healing and dies. Matthias offers to stay behind with Nina to bury the bodies. Nina reveals that she said he was a slaver because there were Grisha about to take him prisoner and interrogate/possibly execute him. She and Matthias agree that jurda parem is too dangerous—they plan to betray the crew and kill Bo Yul-Bayur.
Analysis
Section 3 features very little action in the frame story: The crew travels through the tundra, finds Grisha pyres, and then is attacked. However, the frequent flashbacks establish themes that will be explored in later sections, including trust, nationalism, trauma, and power. This is perhaps the most “fun and games” of the sections, in which we get to know the heist crew—particularly Nina and Matthias.
Matthias and Nina still don’t unite with the heist “team” by the end of this section, though they do become a duo, uniting over their plan to kill Bo Yul-Bayur rather than let jurda parem become common across the world. Their allegiances to their respective nations are still too strong for them align with Kaz and the rest of the crew.
The back half of the section is dominated by Nina and Matthias, which is fitting because they have the largest personal conflict to overcome. It is clear that in the past, they had a lot of passion for each other. Matthias isn’t angry that Nina got him stuck in Hellgate; he’s angry that she betrayed the trust he hadn’t given any other person since his family was killed. (An argument can be made that he trusted Jarl Brum, but we learn later that he never really knew Brum; his allegiance there was to Fjerda and the drüskelle, which Brum represented while actually acting in his own interest.)
