Summary
Inej and the crew arrive at Djerholm. Kaz is interested to learn that there is a sacred ash tree at the very center of the Ice Court. They observe the Ice Court guard schedule, and Kaz explains that they’ll be entering on a prison van, replacing six actual prisoners. Inej asks Matthias about Nina, and he says she’s just too much; Inej says maybe he’s not enough. They successfully waylay and then infiltrate a truck of prisoners, but they’re packed in close quarters, and Inej can tell that Kaz is panicked; she is the only one who notices when he faints.
More of Kaz’s backstory: He and Jordie investigated Jakob Hertzoon’s disappearance, but it turned out the man didn’t exist. Money ran out, and they become homeless, then ill with firepox. Jordie died, and Kaz was weak and delirious, so he was thrown on the body barge with the plague-ridden corpses. He fell asleep expecting to die, but he woke up without a fever. He waited for someone to save him, but no one came; when the tide went out, he used Jordie’s bloated corpse as a raft to swim back to Ketterdam.
In the prison wagon, Kaz wakes up to Inej jabbing him—they’ve gone through two checkpoints. Kaz feels ashamed that anyone saw his weakness, even Inej. The crew arrives in the Ice Court prison and see members of Pekka Rollins’s crew impaled on spikes. The prison guards aren’t happy with the paperwork—instead of a Shu boy, there’s a Suli girl—but negligence and laziness win, as Kaz predicted, and the prisoners are let in anyway. Men and women are separated, and Kaz sees tanks for the first time, as well as a banner that says “STRYMAKT FJERDAN” (“Fjerdan might”). The marble and bulletproof glass were all clearly made by Fabrikators. When the men are required to strip, Kaz feels intensely ill, but he remembers Inej telling him the secret to falling (getting back up) and manages to stay awake through the guard searching his naked body. The guard finds lockpicks hidden in his teeth, but not the baleen. In the holding cell, Kaz is attacked by a prisoner trying to prove his strength, and Kaz dislocates and then relocates the man’s shoulder, reminding everyone—especially himself—that he isn’t helpless.
Jesper is full of restless energy, and Wylan’s nerves aren’t helping, though Jesper does enjoy flirting with him. When they’re given water, Jesper spills it on his shirt, then Wylan’s, then digs out a pellet that was sewn into his ankle. He drops the pellet into the waste bucket, and it fills the room with chloro powder, knocking everyone unconscious, except for those with wet shirts over their mouths. Jesper then reveals to Wylan that he’s a Fabrikator, even though he’s untrained, and he pulls enough iron out of the prison bars to make a lockpick for Kaz. The crew splits up—Jesper and Matthias grab ropes from the stables, then meet Inej and Wylan at the incinerator. However, the incinerator was used today and is too hot for Inej to climb. They find Inej’s leather climbing shoes in the clothes set to be incinerated, and she decides to make the climb regardless of the heat.
Nina and Kaz search the upper prison cells, though Kaz coming wasn’t part of the plan. Nina discovers special Grisha-made cells designed to hold Grisha captives, with stains around the drains. Were they tortured? She wants to go home, back to Ravka. She can’t find Kaz, and time is up, so she heads to the incinerator and kills 3 Fjerdan guards along the way. An alarm goes off.
Inej puts on Kaz’s gloves, which feels uncomfortably intimate, and begins to climb the extremely hot incinerator with 70 feet of rope tied around her. She can do this; she’s the Wraith. But the rubber on the bottoms of her shoes starts to melt in the heat, and she knows she can’t do it. They’re all going to die because of her—No. Because of Kaz.
In a flashback, Inej remembers meeting Kaz at the Menagerie the night he purchased her indenture. Kaz explained that he got the Dregs to buy her indenture (she’s not free—she’s indebted to the Dregs, if she accepts) because when they first met, he couldn’t hear her approach, even though she had bells on her ankles. He wanted her to spy on the rich people of Ketterdam so he could use blackmail as leverage; he also wanted her to never sneak up on him again.
In the incinerator shaft, Inej muses that she hasn’t managed to sneak up on Kaz since. Her father and Heleen are both voices in her head, encouraging her to climb or let go, and Inej feels herself start to cry—but the wetness is actually rain falling down the shaft, cooling it enough for her to climb. As she reaches the top, she knows what she wants to do: Buy a ship and use it to destroy slavers and their buyers. She finally has purpose—she isn’t the lynx or a spider or even the Wraith; she is Inej Ghafa.
Kaz speeds through the upper cells of the Ice Court looking for Bo Yul-Bayur or Pekka Rollins. He remembers his swim holding Jordie’s corpse as his rebirth. It was easy to survive once he left decency behind. He took Brekker as his last name instead of Rietveld, and he studied professional thieves; he got the name Dirtyhands for taking any job. He developed a special talent for card games (and cheating at them) but couldn’t find Hertzoon until he randomly spotted him on the street and learned that he was actually Pekka Rollins—the gang leader of the Barrel. And Rollins didn’t even recognize him. In the present, Kaz finds Pekka Rollins in a cell, and he enters and closes the door behind him.
Analysis
Inej has a complex relationship with her body and selfhood, and that comes to a head during her literal trial by fire. As she climbs the incinerator shaft, Inej finds her purpose, as well as shedding her previous names—lynx, spider, Wraith—and becoming Inej Ghafa, who is all of those things and then some. Six of Crows features many transformative elemental journeys. Many people swim long distances, such as Kaz swimming away from the barge of corpses and Nina pulling Matthias’s unconscious body away from the shipwreck; the group travels over the frozen tundra, which echoes Nina and Matthias’s journey across ice; and now Inej climbs through fire to find herself.
Matthias tells Inej that Nina is “too much,” and Inej replies that maybe he’s just not enough. This echoes the end of the novel, when Inej will decide that a life with Kaz—in which he can barely force himself to be touched by her—will not be enough for her. In previous sections, characters have acted as foils for one another, but here we see these opposites attempt to match up and form connections, finding what is “enough” across their differences.
Kaz’s backstory dominates this section, as his hatred of Pekka Rollins is explained. The section’s title comes from something Inej’s father taught her—the trick to falling—and which she passed on to Kaz. Juxtaposing Kaz’s backstory with this title, which draws on Inej’s positive memories of her family, places Kaz in an interesting position: Where Inej hears her father’s voice egging her on, Kaz hears Inej, which informs the reader that, though he wouldn’t admit it, Kaz thinks of Inej as family.
Inej, prior to her trip up the incinerator, used “the lynx” and “the Wraith” to think of herself. However, she never completely lost her given name or her connection to her family. After Kaz’s trauma, he permanently lost the name Rietveld and became Kaz Brekker, then Dirtyhands; the only place “Rietveld” lives on is in Kaz’s memories, which he’s never shared with anyone, and in the R tattooed on his arm. His connection to Inej might inspire Kaz to be a bit more human, but he can never become Kaz Rietveld again.
