Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Six of Crows, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Greed
Friendship and Difference
Trauma, the Past, and Moving Forward
Identity, Values, and Growing Up
Summary
Analysis
Nina stumbles away from the group, trying to escape the smell of the burning bodies. It’s been easy to forget that Matthias is a killer who hates her, and she’s been thinking about what he said about Yul-Bayur. But Nina knows she can’t squander Matthias’s chance at the pardon. After the shipwreck, they’d spent three weeks wandering Fjerda, trying to stay alive and heckling each other. Nina discovered, disturbingly, that Brum was a father figure to orphaned Matthias—and that Matthias had heard of Zoya and feared her in the same way as Nina feared Brum. She explained to him how she and the other Grisha escaped the cages using the broken handle of the water cup, and she teased Matthias for being so prude and uptight. They flirted. Finally, one day, Nina slipped and almost fell into a crevasse. Matthias saved her, and they finally exchanged names.
The narrative continues to develop Nina’s character as extremely principled: as much as she’d like to kill Yul-Bayur, she currently believes it’s more important to do right by Matthias and make sure he gets his promised pardon. The flashback suggests that during the three weeks they spent together a year ago, they learned to humanize each other—and began to fall in love. Noting that Matthias feared Zoya like Nina feared Brum suggests that there’s fear and hatred on both sides, while their burgeoning relationship shows that it’s possible to overcome that fear and hatred.
Themes
Now, it’s been a year since the shipwreck. Nina tells herself that they weren’t actually friends then: they were just telling themselves lies to survive. Matthias runs after Nina. They scuffle, and Nina asks what she’ll see at the Ice Court. He assures her they don’t use pyres anymore, but before he can tell her more, the rest of the crew speaks up from behind her and tells her to stop. Matthias tells them that Nina is a liar. He explains that after they traveled together for three weeks, he was ready to leave everything behind and buy them passage to Kerch. He asks Nina to finish the story, and Nina admits that she told the Kerch captain that Matthias was a slaver. Matthias asks if she’d accuse him again—and Nina, not willing to share her real reasons for her actions, says she would.
Fjerda might not use pyres anymore to execute Grisha, but this is beside the point as far as Nina is concerned. Matthias is still loyal to a country that believes she shouldn’t exist, and that is willing to murder her simply because she does. While it’s perhaps shocking to learn that Nina accused Matthias of being a slaver, readers understand that Nina had some other reason for accusing him that likely wasn’t just to get back at him. For now, though, only Nina knows this, which keeps Nina and Matthias from patching up their relationship at this point.
Themes
Suddenly, the ground rumbles and rock slabs shoot up. It feels like an earthquake, but Nina points to a spot in the sky: they’re being attacked by a flying Grisha. The Grisha must be under the influence of jurda parem. Wylan tosses a bomb at the Grisha, and Jesper takes the opportunity to shoot the Squaller out of the sky. Nina realizes there’s another Grisha on the ground, causing the earthquake. Kaz vaults Inej up over the rock slabs and within moments, the earthquake stops. Wylan blows a hole through the rock, and the group joins Inej, who’s next to the trembling Grisha. Nina recognizes him as Nestor, a classmate—and now, he asks for “a little more.” Nestor is a Fabrikator, and what he just did shouldn’t be possible. He refuses Nina’s help and wobbles a few steps, cursing the Shu who gave him parem, until he collapses and dies.
Keep in mind that aside from Kaz, this is everyone else’s first time seeing jurda parem in action—and it’s wildly disturbing, not to mention terrifying. Parem seemingly deprives Nestor of any desires beyond getting more parem, which speaks to the dehumanizing nature of the drug, as giving it to Grisha seemingly requires the giver to not care that they’re condemning a fellow human being to this fate.
Themes
Nina rushes to Nestor, but his body has been too damaged by the jurda parem to survive his injuries. Kaz and Jesper return from sweeping the area and report that there’s a band of people heading south, likely a group from Shu Han. The Shu don’t fear Grisha and normally wouldn’t use them as mercenaries, but they still see them as subhuman. Parem might’ve changed things. Kaz wonders if the Shu maybe want to keep Yul-Bayur from giving away the formula, or maybe they’ll use drugged Grisha to break into the Ice Court. He says they need to move, but Nina argues that she wants to bury the Grisha. Matthias agrees to stay, help her, and catch up to the rest of the group by nightfall.
With the revelation that the Shu gave Nestor and the other Grisha parem and seemingly used them as weapons, the novel reveals that parem is changing how countries worldwide think about their Grisha populations. Based on what Shu Han and Kerch have done to Grisha thus far, it doesn’t bode well for Grisha, as it suggests they’ll be used, abused, and persecuted differently (and more destructively) than they have in the past.
Themes
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Matthias and Nina begin to dig with pickaxes at the hard earth, and Matthias explains that in Fjerdan spirituality, being buried is like going home and taking root (they burn Grisha so they can’t go home). Nina observes that Nestor shouldn’t have been able to use his power like he did—but Matthias suggests that Fjerdans see all Grisha the way that she saw inebriated Nestor. As they dig, he asks if she always planned to sell him out at the end of their journey a year ago. Nina shares that there were Grisha spies in the town, and they recognized both her and Matthias. Nina convinced them she was undercover to protect Matthias. But when Grisha showed up on the docks, Nina knew her only chance of getting away from them was to accuse Matthias of slavery, securing passage to Kerch.
Finally, both Matthias and Nina open up and speak honestly. Matthias’s willingness to help bury Nestor, an act that goes against everything he believes, suggests he’s beginning to see Grisha as more human (or, at least, he cares about making Nina happy). Still, what he says about Fjerdans’ view on Grisha suggests that their hatred is based in fear that doesn’t seem entirely valid. Nina’s story, meanwhile, indicates that she was trying to make the best of a difficult situation and save Matthias from arrest or death by accusing him of slavery.
Themes
Nina explains that once they got to Kerch, though, she couldn’t see a judge to try to put things right—but she also couldn’t tell the truth, as that would compromise her Grisha colleagues still in the field. Matthias is angry she never told the truth, but Nina insists she was just trying to protect Grisha, whom Matthias and the drüskelle have been trying to murder. Then, Matthias notes that Nina certainly can’t, in good conscience, let Bo Yul-Bayur live: parem will destroy Grisha. Nina argues that she can’t jeopardize Matthias’s pardon, but Matthias insists he also wants to make sure parem stays a secret—more than he wants the pardon. They decide to work together to kill Yul-Bayur and betray Kaz.
Nina’s well-intentioned mistake had major consequences: Matthias spent almost a year in prison. However, they now find common ground as they decide to kill Yul-Bayur, something that brings them closer together. It’s important to keep this moment in mind for later, as Nina makes it clear here that while she tried to save Matthias, she also prioritized her Ravkan Grisha colleagues over him.
Themes
