Crooked Kingdom: A Sequel to Six of Crows

Kaz sends Nina to four locations in the Barrel. At each destination, she opens the sample of tissue she collected at the morgue and uses her altered Heartrender powers to send trails of dead cells crawling over people’s skin. Nina makes the black marks spread from person to person, imitating a swift and deadly contagion. At each location, the result is panic. The last epidemic swept through Ketterdam eight years ago, and the survivors keenly remember the losses and terror they suffered during the Queen’s Lady Plague.

The stadwatch abandons the blockades, citizens quarantine in their homes, and businesses shut down as the city shelters from “the one thing” that frightens it more “than the Shu, the Fjerdans, and all the gangs of the Barrel put together” (454). Of course, Nina knows that she didn’t actually make anyone sick. Her strength grows and her desire for parem fades as she uses her new power. She realizes that death connects everything just as life does, and she embraces the gift she once reviled.

Inej uses her familiarity with the cathedral’s roof, her acrobatic experience, and the new protective layers of padding in her clothes to disrupt Dunyasha’s rhythm and draw first blood. Dunyasha rattles Inej by calling her “a murderer and a thief” (458). Inej reflects on the crimes she committed to protect herself and her friends and decides that innocence is a luxury, not something her Saints require of her.

Kaz advised her to look for Dunyasha’s tells, and Inej sees that her opponent takes deep breaths before striking. The knowledge allows Inej to stab Dunyasha, who claims to have royal blood. Inej speculates that every girl dreams of being a princess “with magical powers and a grand destiny,” but “the nobodies and the nothings, the invisible girls” like Inej must “learn to hold [their] heads as if [they] wear crowns” and “wring magic from the ordinary” (460). Dunyasha blinds Inej with dust and forces her to the edge of the roof, but Ketterdam is Inej’s home, and she knows the city better than anyone. Inej moves to the side, and Dunyasha steps on a loose part of the roof and plummets to her death.

Disguised as a Zemeni delegate, Jesper asks a guard to escort him from the cathedral when the band of blue-robed Grisha appears. Jesper knocks the guard unconscious, but one of the Shu Kherguud soldiers seizes Jesper before he can get into position for the next phase of the plan. Memories of his friends flash through his mind, and he remembers the chemical that Wylan developed to destroy the sugar. Inej brought the unused vials to Colm’s hotel room, and Jesper absentmindedly pocketed one of them during his argument with his father. Jesper kills the soldier by shoving the vial into the man’s mouth.

Inej arrives with Jesper’s rifle; since weapons weren’t allowed at the auction, she kept it for him. Nevertheless, Jesper fears that he’s too late to fire the rubber bullet that will allow them to fake Kuwei’s death. He imagines parem unleashed upon the world and Grisha “pressed into military service, devoured by this curse of a drug” (470). Jesper’s mother told him that their Grisha powers are a blessing and taught him how to shoot. He compares himself to a “bullet in a chamber, spending his whole life waiting for the moment when he would have direction” (470). Unable to see Kuwei from his current position, Jesper uses his Fabrikator powers to guide the bullet.

After the rubber bullet strikes Kuwei to the ground, Kaz injects him with a syringe of poison to slow his pulse. Two police officers, Matthias, and a medic take Kuwei away on a stretcher. More stadwatch officers and the swindled Merchant Council members swarm around Van Eck. Kaz instructs Jesper to stay with Wylan while the police question the merchling. Rollins corners Kaz and Inej in one of the chapels. The Dime Lions’ leader wants to settle things in a brawl to the death, but Kaz stops him cold by claiming to have buried Rollins’s son alive.

Kaz tells Rollins that he and his brother were two of the “pigeons” whose lives Rollins ruined, and he says that he’ll give Rollins his son’s location if Pekka can tell him his brother’s name. Rollins wracks his memory to no avail, so he begs Kaz on his knees, “eyes wet with tears, pain carved into the lines of his flushed face” (478). Kaz directs him to a location outside the city, and Rollins hurries away. To Inej’s surprise and relief, Kaz reveals that Rollins’s son was safe at home all along. Tricking Rollins into fleeing the city will cast even more suspicion on Pekka and Van Eck, and Kaz dealt a serious blow to Rollins’s finances by making three of Pekka’s businesses the sites of apparent plague outbreaks. Inej gives Kaz “a smile he thought he might die to earn again” when he tells her that he also sent Nina to the Menagerie (480).

The officers help Matthias and the medic place Kuwei on a boat and then report to their station. The boat’s other occupants are a Dreg posing as a fisherman and Nina, who is disguised as a pregnant woman. While Nina distracts the medic by acting as though she is about to give birth, the Dregs swap Kuwei for a corpse that Genya tailored to look like him. At the hospital, the staff place the tailored body in storage for the bodymen to collect, and the medic hurries away to quarantine himself.

One of the drüskelle in the Fjerdan delegation follows Matthias from the church and charges him with treason. The boy is only 14, and Matthias tries to show him that “[f]ear is how [the drüskelle] control” people (487). When Matthias tells the boy that he was once like him, the boy angrily declares that he is “nothing like” Matthias and shoots him with a pistol (487).

Nina joins Kaz, Inej, Genya, Zoya, and Sturmhond on the ship where the Dregs placed Kuwei after exchanging him for the tailored body. The poison Kaz injected Kuwei with to “mimic death” has done an “uncomfortably convincing job” (489). Nina sees in Kuwei both the Grisha’s best hope for an antidote to parem and “a boy who deserved a chance to live without a target on his back” (489). Zoya uses her Squaller powers to summon lightning and shock Kuwei’s heart back into rhythm. The disguised Ravkan king thanks Nina for her service to Ravka and says that she and Matthias are welcome in his country.

Matthias nears the boat. He and Nina share a kiss, and then she sees that he has been shot. She wishes in vain that she had parem, thinking the drug would give her the strength to save him. Matthias makes Nina promise to return to Ravka and try to save the other drüskelle from their prejudice and fear. With his dying breath, he tells Nina that he is already home. Nina uses her new power to summon Matthias back from the dead, but Inej helps her realize that she cannot keep him like this. Nina lets him go, praying that they will meet again in another life. During Matthias’s final moments, he dreams of Nina and no longer fears that the killing wind will claim her. He knows that she will “find shelter from the cold” (497).

Back at the church, Wylan and Jesper congratulate one another on the plan’s success. Wylan watches as an “officer [claps] shackles on his father, who was thrashing like a fish caught on a line” (500). Kaz quietly informs Van Eck that he replaced the will in Van Eck’s safe with a forgery that gives Wylan total control of his father’s wealth. The merchant declares that his son is unfit to inherit the family’s business empire due to his inability to read. For Wylan, this is “the nightmare he’d had countless times as a child—standing in public, his deficiencies exposed” (503).

Wylan maintains his composure and pretends to read a legal document by reciting it from memory, which convinces the other members of the Merchant Council that Van Eck is delusional as well as deceitful. Van Eck decries this as another one of Kaz’s tricks and tries to attack Wylan. Jesper prevents the attack, demonstrates his acceptance of Wylan by telling Van Eck that he’ll read to the merchling, and encourages Wylan to reclaim his old home.

After sunset, the boat carrying Jesper’s father, Kuwei, Inej, and Nina arrives at the Van Eck mansion’s dock. Jesper helps carry Matthias’s body from the vessel, and Wylan expresses the ache in all of their hearts by saying, “We were all supposed to make it” (510). The Dregs say their goodbyes to their fallen friend and to one another. Kaz reveals that he funneled 40 million kruge to the Shu to pull off the auction scheme but kept four million for each of them. Nina says that she’ll bury Matthias in Fjerda as he wished and use both their shares to make a difference in the world. Inej plans to use the money to buy a ship and gather a crew. Wylan will use his share to help run his newly acquired empire—a responsibility Jesper will help him bear. Jesper earns Kaz’s forgiveness when he asks Kaz to put his share under his father’s name to protect the sharpshooter from temptation. Kaz says that he’ll use his own money to “[b]uild something new” and “[w]atch it burn” (512).

Jesper promises to visit his father on the farm, and Colm suggests that Jesper meet his fellow Grisha when he returns to Novyi Zem. Nina thanks her friends for all the big and little ways they saved her, certain they will meet again someday. The Dregs transform the boat to look like one of the bodymen’s barges. The vessel carries Colm, Kuwei, Nina, and Matthias’s body to the manufacturing district. They gather the Grisha refugees, who pretended to be the Council of Tides, from the Ravkan embassy and then meet the Ravkan ship waiting for them in the harbor.

In the three weeks after the auction, Kaz settles into his role as the Dregs’ new leader and Wylan brings his mother home. Inej stays with Wylan and Jesper at the mansion. Sometimes, Inej slips into the Dregs’ headquarters to leave information, but she avoids seeing Kaz. A long prison sentence looms before Van Eck, and Rollins remains in the countryside. Rollins’s prolonged absence threatens to cost him his businesses and his gang’s loyalty, but Kaz remains on guard, certain that “Rollins [will] dig himself out of the rubble” (518).

Kaz receives a letter from Ravka, which he burns after reading. Then he leaves his office to deliver a message. The members of the real Council of Tides surround Kaz and threaten to kill him and his friends unless he gives them Kuwei’s location. Kaz retorts that he can make the Tides’ towers “epicenters of disease” (520), compromising their cherished anonymity. The Tides call Kaz a monster, promise future retribution, and take their leave.

Inej spends her time studying ships, seeking information on slavers, and hoping that her voyages will lead her back to Nina and her long-lost family. Kaz sneaks into the mansion and leaves a note telling her to meet him at the harbor at sunrise. Inej reflects on the moments that showed her “the scant glimmer of what he might become if he let himself” (523), such as when he changed her bandages and paid her contract. She dreads seeing Kaz hide behind his armor again, but she resolves to go to the harbor and end “this thing that never had a chance to begin” (523).

At the harbor, Kaz gives Inej a warship newly dubbed The Wraith. Inej asks Kaz to be the monster Ketterdam needs and help rid the city of everyone who profits from slavery. He leaves his gloves off and takes Inej’s hand in his. Kaz has one final magic trick up his sleeve: As part of the deal with Sturmhond, the privateer searched for Inej’s parents and sent them on a ship to Ketterdam. As Inej races to meet her parents with Kaz following behind, she exults, feeling that the “world [is] made of miracles” (529).

Paranoia, doubt, and fatigue overwhelm the man who was once the ruthless, scheming king of the Barrel. He hides away in his country estate with his son, Alby, and his guards. Rollins remains haunted by the thought of his boy being buried alive and by the fear that others like Kaz will come for revenge. One day, Rollins feels like his old self again and begins to calculate how he can reclaim control of Ketterdam’s streets.

That night, Inej slips past Rollins’s guards and barred windows, slashes the skin over Pekka’s heart, and promises to finish him off if he even thinks of returning to Ketterdam. After she leaves, Rollins hurries to check on his son and finds him fast asleep, but Inej replaced the boy’s stuffed lion with a crow. Rollins orders his men to begin packing his belongings so he can flee with his son as far from Ketterdam as possible. Rollins reflects on his role in creating Dirtyhands, the Wraith, and the rest of their “rotten little court of thugs” who are “hungrier for vengeance than for gold” (536), and he pities the fools that Kaz and his crew come for next.