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Summary: Chapter 41
Wylan, Jesper, and Alys sit in the church while Van Eck is investigated by the council. Wylan realizes that Kaz replaced his father’s will and that Wylan is now set to inherit the entire Van Eck estate. Van Eck calls his son a cretin who can’t read. The council is horrified, and Van Eck tells them to make him read something. Wylan agrees and reads the Transfer of Authority. In reality, though, he is reciting the document from memory, as he had heard Jesper read out loud the previous day at Saint Hilde. Van Eck continues to make unhinged accusations as he’s arrested, causing the council to question his sanity. Wylan is now free to return to his home, while Alys will go to the lake house she loves, where she is very excited to see her music teacher, Bajan.
Summary: Chapter 42
Jesper, Wylan, and Alys go to the house that now belongs to Wylan. Jesper is restless and worried about his father. When the rest of the gang returns, Nina is with Matthias’s body. She lies with him in the garden and they all place flowers on his chest.
Kaz says he kept thirty million kruge instead of transferring it to the Shu, so they each get four million kruge. Matthias’s share will go to Nina. It is enough money for Inej to get the ship she wants to captain, to chase down enslavers. Jesper puts his money in his father’s name because he’s not ready for the responsibility.
The gang converts a boat into a sick boat. Kuwei, Colm, and Nina all pretend to be corpses, with Nina lying next to Matthias’s body. Rotty will ferry them to meet the fifteen Grisha refugees, who had pretended to be the Council of Tides. Kaz disappears without saying goodbye.
Summary: Chapter 43
An indefinite amount of time has passed. Back at the Slat, Kaz has expanded his empire now that he has driven out Pekka Rollins, Van Eck, and Per Haskell. Inej occasionally leaves Kaz information, but they haven’t seen each other in a while. He is summoned to meet with the real Council of Tides, who threaten him with drowning. They want to know where Kuwei is, but Kaz insists he’s dead. The Council threaten to ruin him, but Kaz is unmoved, threatening to bring a plague to them.
Summary: Chapter 44
Inej is comfortable at Wylan’s house, but a note from Kaz disrupts her calm. She decides to end their relationship, believing he’ll pretend that nothing ever existed between them. But when she meets him, she notices that Kaz is not wearing gloves. He hands her a looking glass to peer through and she sees that he has purchased her a warship, named The Wraith. In return for this gift, he asks that she come back to Ketterdam eventually. She says she’s not done with the city and hopes he will join her in eliminating the slavers and their accomplices. She brushes his hand with hers and he grasps hers in return, as they gaze at the sea together. Then he suggests she look through the glass again. Amazed, she sees her parents getting off a ship. She nearly collapses but is able to ask Kaz how he found them. He tells her that Sturmhond’s assistance in locating them was part of the deal he struck. She asks him to come with her to meet them and runs to her parents. Kaz stays where he is.
Summary: Chapter 45
Rollins is recovering from his financial losses and worries constantly about his son, haunted by images of him buried alive. He wakes one night to find Inej on top of him, pinning him down with knives. She cuts him and says if he ever returns to Ketterdam, she’ll cut him again. He rushes to his son’s room and sees he’s fine, although the baby holds a crow in the place of a lion. Rollins packs to leave the city permanently.
Analysis
Both Van Eck and Rollins suffer downfalls that mirror the nature of their crimes. Though Van Eck struggles to maintain his authority and power over the Mercher Council and the Church of Barter, he is discredited at every turn by his son, someone he consistently undervalued. Van Eck had imprisoned Marya in an asylum and made others think that she was insane, and now he appears to be losing his mind. As Kaz and Wylan weave an airtight case against him, his accusations seem increasingly divorced from reality. Van Eck claims to proudly uphold the values of commerce and morality, so it is especially fitting that his downfall is managed by the very principles that he has so arrogantly enjoyed. Similarly, Rollins, who caused Kaz to suffer in unspeakable fear for years after his brother’s death, is plagued by fear of his own son’s death. Just as Kaz spent his life distrusting people and struggling to trust anyone else because of Rollins’s betrayal, Rollins flees from Ketterdam in fear, suspecting at every turn that his son could be harmed. Kaz’s ultimate revenge on Rollins is not to take his life or cause him physical violence, but to disabuse him of the notion that he moves through the world impervious to pain, grief, and fear.
In the novel, boats represent a freedom earned through overcoming immense adversity. For example, the gang converts the boat to a fake sick boat, which Kaz helps to build. Colm, Kuwei, and Nina, clutching Matthias’s body, use it to escape Ketterdam by pretending to be corpses. This is a bookend to the way Kaz had come into Ketterdam as a child on the Reaper’s Barge and illustrates the depth of his own transfiguration: he is no longer a terrified passenger nor subject to forces that act upon him. Instead, Kaz is the architect of a different kind of “death” barge, and of his own destiny. Kaz uses the money he’s earned from the scheme to present Inej with two boats that are gifts of love and freedom. One is the ship that fulfills her dream: not only will it enable her to seek revenge on slavers like the ones that stole her past life, but it will also be a vessel that Kaz and Inej will sail on together. The second ship bears Inej’s family, returning to her the people she loves most in the world and, in a sense, returning the self that the slavers took from her. These ships mark the promises of new beginnings for the entire gang and the potential of love for Inej and Kaz.
Through their adventures together, the characters come into their own personal power. At the end of the novel, Wylan has inherited the empire that his father told him he could never run and gained a chosen family to support him. With Jesper’s aid, for example, he’s able to easily run the business even though he can’t read, while also developing his other talents. Wylan has liberated his mother from the asylum, suggesting that he’s righting his father’s many wrongs and creating a different kind of life for himself and his family. Kaz, standing next to Inej on the docks, wears no gloves and is able to touch her bare skin. This suggests that through the intensity of their shared ordeals, and the loyalty and love they’ve shown each other throughout their time together, he’s partially healed from the trauma that marked his life in the past. No longer focused entirely on revenge and violence, Kaz looks with Inej toward a future that they’ll create on their own terms. Nina fulfills her promises to Matthias, first returning his body to the Fjerdan land he loved and then rejoining the Ravkan forces to continue the fight that the lovers began toward acceptance for all.
