Summary
As the alarms blare, Jesper waits for Kaz, who shows up at the last second covered in blood. The crew climbs the incinerator using rope Inej drops. Nina can’t heal Inej’s feet, so Jesper uses his Fabrikator abilities to pull the rubber from her flesh. The group is angry with Kaz for deviating from the plan; they see the guards set up a new checkpoint and feel hopeless, but Inej has an idea—she and Nina can sneak in with the Menagerie.
Inej doesn’t feel nervous as Kaz lays out his new plan, which involves activating the Black Protocol, splitting up, and stealing “something shiny.” She gives Kaz his gloves back and touches his cheek for the first time ever—he doesn’t pull away, but she can see that it hurts him, which isn’t enough for her. She and Nina infiltrate the Menagerie girls, but Inej is flagged as suspicious and not allowed through the checkpoint, so she and Nina are separated.
Matthias shows Kaz the second way onto the White Island: a secret drüskelle ice bridge that only strong, successful aspirant drüskelle are told about. Jarl Brum himself told Matthias about it before his initiation. They subdue two drüskelle, and Matthias gets a gun, but he decides to not shoot Kaz. Kaz reveals that this was a test—he also had access to a rifle all along, but he knew Matthias wouldn’t shoot him.
Jesper loves the risk and adrenaline as he and Wylan crawl across a roof toward one of the Ice Court gates. They see a massive tapestry made from thousands of Grisha kefta. Jesper climbs down to immobilize some guards, but more arrive, and Wylan sings to create a distraction. Once they’re inside, they see that the gate mechanism runs on steel chains, not ropes; Jesper starts weakening the links with his Fabrikator skills.
Nina enters the Ice Court ballroom disguised as the Menagerie’s Kaelish mare. She sees the Fjerdan queen, as well as Kaz and Matthias in drüskelle uniforms. Various men approach her, including the one person she never wanted to see again, a fellow survivor the drüskelle shipwreck: Jarl Brum.
Jesper and Wylan talk as they work on the chains, and both share that they like boys. They manage to break the link. Jesper grabs a rifle and prepares for all hell to break loose.
Inej is detained with other suspicious partygoers. Heleen Van Houden sees Inej and reveals that she’s a criminal from Ketterdam, and Inej overcomes her horror at Heleen grabbing her; she overpowers and chokes Heleen, but the guards pull her off. As Inej is taken away, Heleen laughs and says she always knew Inej would wear Menagerie silks again—now she’ll hang in them.
In the ballroom, Nina worries Brum will recognize her, but he flirts with her. He takes her to the treasury, promising to show her a Grisha; his complicated necklace is the key to the doors. Brum reveals that the treasury has been converted to a laboratory, where they have around 30 captive Grisha, most of whom are addicted to jurda parem. Nina plans to torture Brum somewhere private, but she enters the room first and finds herself locked in a cell. Brum threatens to gas her with parem—even more effective than swallowing it—but decides that revenge should be taken by someone else: Matthias. Matthias steps out of the shadows and tells Nina he wants her to suffer; he wants to see her kill her own kind, then turn around and beg him for her next fix of parem. The bells of the Black Protocol begin ringing.
Brum congratulates Matthias on resisting Nina’s beauty. Brum explains that he had these cells built 15 years ago, knowing Grisha would be valuable resources. Brum intends to build an army of Grisha under Fjerda’s control using parem—parem is a tool, no more wrong or evil than a gun or a knife. Matthias knows (mostly thanks to spending time with Nina) that the Fjerdan cause is wrong—Grisha are humans, and ignoring that would make him a monster. He knocks Brum out. Through flashback, we learn that Matthias and Kaz plotted this out from the moment they saw Brum approach Nina in the ballroom. Matthias takes the master key necklace from Brum and heads back to Nina, toward the future.
Jesper expects guards to attack him and Wylan, but instead he sees that they’re fighting Shu Tidemakers. The Tidemakers pull the blood from the Fjerdans’ bodies, then start on Jesper and Wylan; at Wylan’s urging, Jesper uses his Fabrikator powers to shoot tiny bits of metal at the Tidemakers. When they try to shift into mist to get away, the metal merges with their physical forms, causing them extreme pain and possibly killing them. Jesper runs, but he feels like he leaves part of himself behind.
Nina is unsure when Matthias opens her cell, but only for a moment; they embrace. They head to Bo Yul-Bayur’s cell/laboratory, where they find a Shu teenager. When they say the codeword, sesh-uyeh, he is relieved; he is Bo’s son, Kuwei, and his father is dead. Kuwei can recreate the parem formula. Nina almost kills him, but she doesn’t when Matthias calls Kuwei “one of us” and urges her not to. They destroy the lab (Kuwei is an Inferni—his father, also a Grisha, developed parem in an attempt to hide their powers) and flee onto the White Island. They are captured by drüskelle initiates led by Lars, one of Matthias’s old friends, who has a barbed whip/cable. Lars is attacked from behind by Kaz, and the sacred ash is bombed and felled; there is a giant hole beneath it. Kaz pulls Kuwei down the hole, telling Matthias and Nina not to use the baleen until they hit the bottom—still held to Kuwei by Lars’s whip, they are pulled into the dark.
Kaz recounts prepping the bombs to uproot the sacred ash, then waiting for Matthias and Nina to emerge from the treasury. He hits the river at the bottom of the hole beneath the sacred ash—he knew as soon as he heard about Hringkälla that the Ice Court was built not around a tree, but around a water source he could use to escape. As the river carries him, Kaz thinks of Inej, and of breaking his leg falling during a heist on the bank Pekka Rollins used to scam him. The baleen gives out, and he hears Jordie tell him that he’s cheated death too many times. He tries to hold on, but his last thought is of Inej before the water rushes into his lungs.
Analysis
Jer mole pe oonet. Enel mörd je nej afva trohem Verret. / I have been made to protect you. Only in death will I be kept from this oath.
This is the vow of drüskelle to Fjerda, and it’s what Nina and Matthias swear to each other. When they use this Fjerdan phrase, they literally replace national identity with personal identity, giving up their allegiance and uniting—though this identity is still defined by loyalty to another person. This section is called “the ice does not forgive,” another part of a Fjerdan saying. While Matthias earlier used “the ice does not forgive” to threaten Nina, in the context of their new relationship, it communicates that they will stand strong against those who have used and abused them.
As the end of the heist nears, Kaz’s brilliant planning is revealed. He bombs the sacred ash and uncovers a river that the crew can use to escape. He was smart enough to figure out a national secret—something that maybe no one else in the world knows—just from a vague description of a ritual, then use that to his advantage. As he destroys the symbol of Matthias’s now-dead national alliance, he proves that he is a criminal mastermind.
Other characters have been dealing with previous trauma through flashbacks and elemental journeys, but this section shows a character becoming traumatized. As Jesper is first learning to embrace his Fabrikator identity, he’s forced to use it in a horrible, scarring way. He doesn’t even know how to use his powers, and those powers are already forcing him to leave a bit of his humanity behind. While he’s killed people before, it was using his guns, not his self—watching the Shu Tidemakers suffer hurts, rather than exciting him or distracting him like a shootout.
The heist is complete; the remaining elements of the heist structure include the getaway and the reward, neither of which will be easy, as indicated by this section’s cliffhanger ending.
