In Six of Crows, which takes place in the fictional countries Kerch and Fjerda, 17-year-old Kaz leads five fellow gang members on a wild heist to rescue a scientist from a Fjerdan prison. Greed motivates nearly all characters in the novel, both good and bad. But greed, the novel suggests, robs people of their humanity and can lead them to do truly cruel things to others. Van Eck disowns his son, Wylan, because Wylan can’t read and therefore can’t inherit the family shipping business. Slavery, while technically illegal in Kerch, thrives in its capital city Ketterdam in various forms, making the wealthy and powerful, like Tante Heleen and Councilman Hoede, even wealthier. And Kaz’s archnemesis, fellow gangster Pekka Rollins, regularly tricks young people into trusting him and giving up their life savings. Greed on this scale requires refusing to see—or not caring about—others’ humanity and suffering.
While Kaz is a clear “good guy,” this doesn’t mean his greed doesn’t also cause him to act in cruel or immoral ways. For instance, Kaz shares a mutual crush with Inej, but rather than say anything kind to her or admit his true feelings, he insists he only cares about money. He similarly denies other members of his crew kindness, companionship, or support, both because past trauma makes it difficult for him to be emotionally vulnerable and because he greedily prioritizes earning (or stealing) money over forming genuinely supportive relationships with others. Through Kaz, Six of Crows suggests that while greed is certainly one tool people can use to manipulate others and buy loyalty, it prevents them from forming meaningful, genuine relationships with others.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Greed ThemeTracker
Greed Quotes in Six of Crows
It would have been easy enough to make peace. Kaz could have told Jesper that he knew he wasn’t dirty, reminded him that he’d trusted him enough to make him his only real second in a fight that could have gone badly wrong tonight. Instead, he said, “Go on, Jesper. There’s a line of credit waiting for you at the Crow Club. Play till morning or your luck runs out, whichever comes first.”
“The Barrel is a den of filth, vice, violence—”
“How many of the ships you send sailing out of the Ketterdam harbor never return?”
“That doesn’t—”
“One out of five, Van Eck. One out of every five vessels you send seeking coffee and jurda and bolts of silk sinks to the bottom of the sea, crashes on the rocks, falls prey to pirates. One out of five crews dead, their bodies lost to foreign waters, food for deep sea fishes. Let’s not speak of violence.”
“Do you want to know the best way to find Grisha who don’t want to be found?”
Jesper scrubbed the back of his neck, touched his hands to his guns, returned to his neck. He always seemed to be in motion. “Never gave it much thought,” he said.
“Look for miracles and listen to bedtime stories.” Follow the tales of witches and goblins, and unexplained happenings. Sometimes they were just superstition. But often there was truth at the heart of local legends—people who had been born with gifts that their countries didn’t understand.
“I’ll go back in a minute. I just needed some air. And don’t feign concern for Inej when you’re planning to send her climbing up six stories of chimney with only a rope and a prayer.”
“The Wraith can manage it.”
“The Wraith is a sixteen-year-old girl currently lying unconscious on a table. She may not even survive the night.”
“That seems like cheating,” Kaz had whispered to Jordie.
“It isn’t cheating,” Jordie had snorted. “It’s just good business. And how are ordinary people supposed to move up in the world without a little extra help?”
What would Jordie say if his little brother lost their chance at justice because he couldn’t conquer some stupid sickness inside him? But it only brought back the memory of Jordie’s cold flesh, the way it had grown loose in the salt water, the bodies crowding around him in the flatboat. His vision started to blur.
Get it together, Brekker, he scolded himself harshly. It didn’t help. He was going to faint again, and this would be all over. Inej had once offered to teach him how to fall. “The trick is not getting knocked down,” he’d told her with a laugh. “No, Kaz,” she’d said, “the trick is in getting back up.” More Suli platitudes, but somehow even the memory of her voice helped. He was better than this. He had to be. Not just for Jordie, but for his crew.
What bound them together? Greed? Desperation? Was it just the knowledge that if one or all of them disappeared tonight, no one would come looking? Inej’s mother and father might still shed tears for the daughter they’d lost, but if Inej died tonight, there would be no one to grieve for the girl she was now. She had no family, no parents or siblings, only people to fight beside. Maybe that was something to be grateful for, too.
Inej looked down at the fingers digging into her flesh. For a brief second, every horror came back to her, and she truly was a wraith, a ghost taking flight from a body that had given her only pain. No. A body that had given her strength. A body that had carried her over the rooftops of Ketterdam, that had served her in battle, that had brought her up six stories in the dark of a soot-stained chimney.
The voice of God. There was always truth in legend. Kaz had spent enough time building his own myth to know. He’d wondered where the water that fed the Ice Court’s moat and fountains came from, why the river gorge was so very deep and wide. As soon as Nina had described the drüskelle initiation ritual, he’d known: the Fjerdan stronghold hadn’t been built around a great tree but around a spring. Djel, the wellspring, who fed the seas and rains, and the roots of the sacred ash.
“Chaos will come, and I will be its master. Its very wealthy master.”
“You will be ensuring slavery and death for Grisha everywhere,” Inej said.
Van Eck raised a brow. “How old are you, girl? Sixteen? Seventeen? Nations rise and fall. Markets are made and unmade. When power shifts, someone always suffers.”
“When profit shifts,” Jesper shot back.
Van Eck’s expression was bemused. “Aren’t they one and the same?”
