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Summary: Chapter 37
Kaz sees Jesper’s bullet strike Kuwei and secretly jabs Kuwei’s arm with a syringe. Jesper notices how badly beaten Wylan looks, but Wylan tells him that he wanted his confession to seem believable.
Pekka Rollins catches up to Kaz, who is trying to leave the Church of Barter, and tries to fight with him. He stops abruptly, however, when Kaz produces a toy lion and tells Rollins that he has his son. A furious Rollins asks him what he wants. Kaz replies that he wants Rollins to remember how he fleeced him and his brother of everything they owned. He has buried Rollins’s son alive and will reveal the boy’s location only if Rollins can tell him the name of his brother. Rollins falls to his knees and begs, even though there are other Dime Lions present. When Kaz relents and tells him where to find his child, Rollins rushes off. Only then does Kaz reveal to Inej that he was lying, that he only guessed that Rollins had a son. He had sent Nina to Rollins’s gambling establishments to spread the fake plague, guaranteeing that they would lose the most money. He tells her, too, that Nina took her fake plague to the Menagerie. Inej smiles and Kaz thinks he’d die to earn her smile again. She holds his gloved hand and says he’s a better man than Rollins.
Summary: Chapter 38
Matthias stays with Kuwei and the medik, who announces that Kuwei is dead. They meet a man with his very pregnant wife and the medik reluctantly agrees to accompany them to the hospital. The pregnant woman is Nina in disguise, pretending to be in labor. As they all board a boat to go to the medical facility, Rotty and Specht, waiting for them by the river, stage an argument, making it possible for the others to swap Kuwei’s body for a corpse. When they arrive at a small clinic, a nurse yells at the medik for bringing them a corpse, but he leaves as quickly as possible. The gang disperses, some remaining on the boat. As Matthias heads to the rendezvous, the young drüskelle from the auction confronts Matthias with a gun, calling him a traitor. Matthias tries to reason with him and is surprised when the boy shoots him.
Summary: Chapter 39
Zoya revives Kuwei on the boat, although it takes longer than anticipated. As he awakens, they reassure him he is now safe because everyone saw him die. Zoya compliments Nina, telling her she’s a soldier and indicating how lucky they would be if she returned to Ravka. She also invites Matthias, a generous offer given the longstanding hatred between their nations. Nina wonders why Matthias is taking so long to arrive at the rendezvous but then sees him in the square. She disembarks and runs to him. He kisses her and she’s surprised, because usually she kisses him first. Nina notices that he’s bleeding badly. She asks for parem to heal him, but he refuses. Instead, he asks her to save the other drüskelle, to return to Ravka as a warrior, and to bury him so he can follow the water north. Matthias then dies in Nina’s arms. She tries to use her new powers to bring him back to life but Inej convinces her to let him go, with the promise that they will meet in the next life. As twin souls, they are destined to find each other. With this to comfort her, Nina is able to say goodbye.
Summary: Chapter 40
Matthias dreams of Nina again, but now his heart is easy. The wolves call him home.
Analysis
Fear of death, wielded both individually and communally, provides Kaz and the gang with yet another weapon. As the false plague seems to spread across the country, business as usual breaks down when the city’s population flees in terror. The auction is abandoned by those sworn to protect it, and the medik abandons his responsibility to care for the sick: the city’s norms, both of conduct and responsibility, are completely upended. Within minutes Ketterdam descends into chaos, and both the rich merchants and the global delegates are powerless in the face of their fear of death. Pekka Rollins is served this fear more personally, when Kaz makes him believe his son has been buried alive. In a short period of time, he attempts to use every power he knows to beat death: he denies, threatens, bargains, and finally begs. Rollins, who has held immense power over Kaz since childhood, is toppled by his fear, his power diminished. It’s fitting that Kaz takes down Rollins and Rollins’s businesses with widespread panic about death, as it was Rollins’s actions that led to Jordie’s death and Kaz’s ordeal on the Reaper’s Barge.
But death has other meanings in this section as Matthias’s passing casts him as a Christ-like figure in the novel. The name Matthias means “gift of God,” which parallels the way that Christ is said to be God’s gift to humanity. Matthias lived his entire life fulfilling his oaths, to serve, protect, and honor first his country and then Nina, establishing a self-sacrificing nature. Like Christ, Matthias was guided by principles to which he held fast, until he recognized that they required he abandon the most basic of human principles: to love one another. But choosing to embrace love over hate, valuing people and valor over money or profit, Matthias becomes a genuine hero and emblematic of Christ’s sacrifice. He continues to protect Nina until the very end, choosing death rather than letting her imperil herself with another dose of parem, even if it would save his life. There is a brief moment when, like Christ, Matthias is resurrected by Nina, as he says her name in his living voice when she commands him to come back to her.
In this section, too, it becomes clear that Matthias’s recurring dream throughout the novel has been foreshadowing his death. Since Nina’s experience with parem, Matthias has dreamt repeatedly of traveling through a cold landscape, hearing Nina’s voice. He thinks that this dream has something to do with Nina, his need to protect her at all costs, the way she was imperiled by the experience with parem, how he could lose her again. Rather than taking Nina from him, the “killing wind” actually foreshadows his own death. After he dies, he moves into the dream with a calm heart, and he can hear Nina’s voice coming to him from the living. He’s no longer worried about her safety because she has come into her power as the Queen of Mourning. He is returned to a place that mirrors his homeland of Fjerda. The wolves in the distance, emblematic of his own loyalty, strength, and love, no longer seem menacing but seem instead to be calling him home. His death also gives additional meaning to Nina’s embrace of the title Queen of Mourning. Regal and powerful, she is defined by loss in two ways: the change to her original Grisha powers and the death of her beloved, Matthias.
