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Summary: Chapter 15
Zoya leads Nina and Matthias into a secret half-room under the Ravkan embassy garden. There, they find fifteen Grisha seeking sanctuary from the Grisha hunters. The Ravkans try to shackle Matthias, but Nina intercedes. With Zoya, Nina sees both Genya, a renowned Tailor and member of the Grisha Triumvirate, and one of her former instructors. Nina offers to help them get the Grisha out of Ketterdam using one of Van Eck’s ships. While Zoya and Genya debate this proposal, Nina and Matthias finally kiss. They become so swept up in this intimate moment that they don’t even notice Zoya and Genya’s return. The two senior Grisha announce their decision to accept the gang’s help. Another Grisha gives Nina a poisonous pill to take if she’s ever captured by the Shu, which upsets Matthias.
The sight of the pill continues to upset Matthias as they head back toward the gang’s hideout. As they walk, he recalls Nina’s horrifying ordeal of withdrawal, on the ship back from Fjerda. Raging and in pain, Nina begged him for parem, which he had vowed never to give her. Finally, she had begged him to tell her stories to help distract her, and he shared with her how he had gotten his isenulf, Trass, when he was twelve. Trassel was a “troublemaker” and Nina had told Matthias that he has a weakness for nonconformers, like herself and Trass. This story proves hard to tell on the ship and has become even more painful to remember as Matthias wonders what happened to his wolf now that the drüskelle think they killed Matthias for being a traitor. Wolves who lose their drüskelle have a hard time, and for poor Trass everything must be worse. Matthias also thinks about the fact that his recurrent dream of the killing wind began at this time.
Nina realizes that, after using her powers on the bones, she feels better. Her craving for parem is not as pronounced, and for the first time in a long while, she is hungry. She and Matthias rejoice, but their happiness is cut short when they see a “wanted, dead or alive” poster for Matthias with a fifty thousand kruge reward.
Summary: Chapter 16
The gang is delighted that Nina is hungry, and everyone beams at her as she wolfs down crackers. Nina shows them Matthias’s wanted poster, and Jesper shares that there are wanted posters of him, Kaz, and Wylan, all with bounties on their heads. They discuss who will join Kuwei in seeking safety in Ravka. Inej declines, saying she wants to captain her own ship. Jesper says he will stay in Ketterdam and then take his father back to Novyi Zem once they have gotten their money.
Jesper realizes that Kaz knew that Wylan’s mother was alive. Kaz says he sent Wylan to Olendaal so that he could finally accept what a monster his father truly is.
As they prepare for the job, Wylan tells Jesper they could go to Ravka so Jesper could learn how to use his powers, but Jesper declines. He says he prefers to be a criminal, but, touching Wylan tenderly, admits that this is not all that he wants.
Jesper thinks back to his childhood, recalling how his mother told him stories and, no matter how busy her day was, always made time for him. She also taught him to shoot and shared her Grisha powers with him. He also remembers she died saving a young girl who was poisoned by metal. His father had always feared for her and didn’t want Jesper to use his powers.
Matthias talks to Jesper and Kuwei, eager to understand how parem has changed Nina’s powers. During the conversation, Jesper remembers they used to use jurda stalks to counteract parem’s stimulant effects, and they realize that they might be able to use jurda to neutralize or counteract the effects of parem. Suddenly the windows shatter, and they see people’s shadows in the cemetery.
Analysis
Disguises serve as protection in the novel, and they also shed light on shifting identities. Nina and Matthias’s Fjerdan disguises protect them as they travel through Ketterdam, suggesting they are refugees seeking asylum from the Ravkan embassy. Yet these disguises also hide a more complex truth. In some ways, Matthias really is a Fjerdan seeking refuge with Nina, the Ravkan woman he loves. Because of their bond, his national identity increasingly feels like an ill-fitting costume or disguise. He realizes that the narrow tenets of his old life no longer suit his evolving self and expanding perspective. For example, facing the force of his love for Nina, his vitriol toward Grisha and the courtship customs of Fjerda become increasingly untenable. At the same time, Nina’s disguise as a Fjerdan throws into relief for Matthias how far removed he is from both the home he always knew and the person he was when he was there. He is attracted to Nina in the traditional garb, but to the others who know Nina, the disguise is laughable because she’s so ill-suited to be Fjerdan: she is fiercely herself, a force that constantly upends the propriety, tradition, and coldness associated with Fjerda.
The story of the isenulf parallels the love between Nina and Matthias, illustrating that for Matthias, love always entails a promise of loyalty and fidelity. With his oaths of fidelity, Matthias commits himself wholly to care for and protect his partner. As a boy, Mattias had been distant from the other drüskelle, so, when he meets Trassel separate from the other isenulf pups, he is drawn to the wolf as a kindred spirit. Matthias seems to intuit that the isenulf needs only constancy and someone to remain with him, even if the young wolf sometimes lashes out in violence. This is not so different from how Nina and Matthias fell in love as they bitterly fought each other, sometimes lashing out in anger or frustration. Indeed, Nina nearly cost Matthias his life when she turned him into the authorities in Six of Crows. That Matthias tells Nina this story as she suffers is a testament to Matthias’s fierce love for Nina. Even though it causes him pain to speak of Trassel, who is lost to him forever, Matthias recounts the story of their meeting in gripping detail for Nina, willing to face this pain if it will enable him to save someone he loves.
A paradoxical relationship between illness and cure also recurs throughout this section. Most obviously, Jesper notes that it is his mother’s generosity with her powers that leads her to become ill, powers that could have saved her had she been just a bit stronger. Similarly, parem is a powerful and dangerous drug—but it may be that another part of the plant from which the drug is made could offer an antidote to parem’s dangerous power. Less literally, Jesper wonders if his restlessness, arguably the result of his own neglected Grisha powers, might be curbed were he to learn to harness its energy. A similar theme runs through Matthias’s narrative as well, as he too learns from seeing his own awkward loneliness in the isenulf pup that fellowship with a similar kind of creature might heal them both. Falling in love with Nina represents a departure for Matthias, as she is warmer and more social than her Fjerdan lover, perhaps suggesting that his previous relationship with Trassel healed him more than he had realized.
