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Chapter 40: Nina
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
Matthias watches as Nina’s pupils dilate. She steps forward, kills the Heartrender instantly, and then tells the soldiers to stop and go to sleep. Wylan, Inej, Jesper, Kaz, Matthias, and Nina walk through the soldiers to get to the harbor, but before they get there, Jarl Brum and several drüskelle, all masked and wearing chain mail, appear behind them. Brum snarls that Nina can’t affect them at all, as they’re wearing Grisha-made armor that Grisha can’t get through. He shoots Matthias, but Nina heals the wound immediately. The drüskelle then shoot at Nina, but she heals every wound and makes several sleeping Fjerdan soldiers stand up and take the armor off of the drüskelle. Then, she causes them agonizing pain.
Importantly, Nina doesn’t begin by hurting the Fjerdan soldiers. She just puts them to sleep, highlighting her generally kind nature. It’s not until Brum and the other armored drüskelle approach and begin attacking her that she fights back violently. Even on jurda parem, this suggests, Grisha don’t uniformly become people they’re not. This suggests that the Grisha who didn’t do as expected in the beginning of the novel, like Anya, hurt people because they were pushed to do so, not because the parem makes them violent.
Themes
Matthias knows all the drüskelle who are now screaming and bleeding. He knows that Brum taught them all to be hateful monsters, but he also knows that they’re just boys, like him. He tells Nina that he learned to be “something better,” and these boys could learn, too. She lets the drüskelle fall to the ground, but she pulls Brum’s hair out of his head before following the crew to the Ferolind. The schooner slips out to sea.
Nina’s love for Matthias persists even under parem’s influence, so she’s willing to listen to him and choose mercy. He offers some hope that Fjerda in general and the drüskelle in particular might be able to learn a different way of being—just as he did, they may learn to acknowledge and respect others’ humanity.
Themes
