Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3)

by Sarah J. Maas

And he’d been willing to make that sacrifice; he’d make any sacrifice to keep Celaena and her secrets safe. Even now that he knew who—what she was. Even after she’d told him about the king and the Wyrdkeys. If this was the price he had to pay, so be it.

Because Celaena was Aelin Ashryver Galathynius, heir to the throne and rightful Queen of Terrasen.

Nehemia’s death had shattered her. What he had done, his role in that death, had shattered her, too. He knew that. He just prayed that she could piece herself back together again. Because a broken, unpredictable assassin was one thing. But a queen …

Handsome was a light way of describing what Aedion was. Overwhelming was more like it. Towering and heavily muscled, Aedion was every inch the warrior rumor claimed him to be. Even though his clothes were mostly for function, Chaol could tell that the leather of his light armor was of fine make and exquisitely detailed. A white wolf pelt was slung across his broad shoulders, and a round shield had been strapped to his back—along with an ancient-looking sword. But his face. And his eyes … Holy gods.

They were Celaena’s eyes. Ashryver eyes. A stunning turquoise with a core of gold as bright as their hair. Their hair—even the shade of it was the same. They could have been twins, if Aedion weren’t twenty-four and tanned from years in the snow-bright mountains of Terrasen.

Why had the king bothered to keep Aedion alive all those years ago? Why bother to forge him into one of his fiercest generals? Aedion was a prince of the Ashryver royal line and had been raised in the Galathynius household—and yet he served the king.

Considering the trophies the king had collected from Celaena as Champion, the items in that satchel wouldn’t be mere gold and jewels. But to collect heads and limbs from Aedion’s own people, Celaena’s people …

Chaol had to clamp down on his terror as he beheld what glinted on Aedion’s finger. A black ring—the same that the king, Perrington, and most of those under their control wore. That explained why the king allowed the insolence: when it came down to it, the king’s will truly was Aedion’s.

As Aedion reached for the water, Chaol glimpsed the hilt of his sword. Dull metal flecked with dings and scratches, its pommel nothing more than a bit of cracked, rounded horn. Such a simple, plain sword for one of the greatest warriors in Erilea. “The Sword of Orynth,” Aedion drawled. “A gift from His Majesty upon my first victory.” Everyone knew that sword. It had been an heirloom of Terrasen’s royal family, passed from ruler to ruler. By right, it was Celaena’s. It had belonged to her father. For Aedion to possess it, considering what that sword now did, the lives it took, was a slap in the face to Celaena and to her family.

Perhaps Celaena’s skills and cunning weren’t unusual in her bloodline. But Aedion was an Ashryver, not a Galathynius—which meant that his great-grandmother had been Mab, one of the three Fae-Queens, in recent generations crowned a goddess and renamed Deanna, Lady of the Hunt. Chaol swallowed hard.

Take nothing with you, leave nothing behind.

The second man also didn’t get the chance to scream before she gutted him with two swipes of her iron nails. But the third farmer came looking for his companions. And when he beheld her standing there, one hand twisted in his friend’s insides, the other holding him to her as she used her iron teeth to tear out his throat, he ran.

They had always known her, the Little Folk. Even when Adarlan’s shadow had covered the continent, they still recognized what she was. Small gifts left at campsites—a fresh fish, a leaf full of blackberries, a crown of flowers. She’d ignored them, and stayed out of Oakwald Forest as much as she could.

“They still live.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name—” “It’s Sorscha,” she said, though there was no anger in it, as there should have been. The spoiled prince and his entitled friends, too absorbed in their own lives to bother learning the name of the healer who had patched them up again and again. She finished wrapping his hand and he said, “In case we didn’t say it often enough, thank you.” Those green-flecked brown eyes lifted again. A tentative smile. “It’s an honor, Prince.” She began gathering up her supplies.

“We keep records of our patients,” Sorscha said softly—so no one else passing by the open doorway could hear. “But sometimes we forget to write down everything.”

Maeve was fearsome in her perfection, utterly still, eternal and calm and radiating ancient grace. The dark sister to the fair-haired Mab.

There were legends whispered over fires about the other skin Maeve wore. No one had lived to tell anything beyond shadows and claws and a darkness to devour your soul.

“They broke my laws, you know. Your parents disobeyed my commands when they eloped. The bloodlines were too volatile to be mixed, but your mother promised to let me see you after you were born.” Maeve cocked her head, eerily similar to the owl behind her. “It would seem that in the eight years after your birth, she was always too busy to uphold her vow.” If her mother had broken a promise … if her mother had kept her from Maeve, it had been for a damn good reason. A reason that tickled at the edges of Celaena’s mind, a blur of memory. “But now you are here,” Maeve said, seeming to come closer without moving. “And a grown woman. My eyes across the sea have brought me such strange, horrible stories of you. From your scars and steel, I wonder whether they are indeed true. Like the tale I heard over a year ago, that an assassin with Ashryver eyes was spotted by the horned Lord of the North in a wagon bound for—”

She scanned the night sky until she located the Stag, the Lord of the North. The unmoving star atop the stag’s head—the eternal crown—pointed the way to Terrasen. She’d been told that the great rulers of Terrasen turned into those bright stars so their people would never be alone—and would always know the way home. She hadn’t set foot there in ten years. While he’d been her master, Arobynn hadn’t let her, and afterward she hadn’t dared.

No other coven was needed if the Thirteen were present.

With her moon-white hair, alabaster skin, and burnt-gold eyes, she’d been told by ill-fated men that she was beautiful as a Fae queen. But what those men realized too late was that her beauty was merely a weapon in her natural-born arsenal. And it made things so, so fun.

Yet her grandmother’s gold-flecked black eyes, the heirloom of the Blackbeak Clan’s purest bloodline, were bent on the northern horizon, toward Oakwald Forest and the towering White Fangs far beyond. The gold-speckled eyes were the most cherished trait in their Clan for a reason Manon had never bothered to learn—and when her grandmother had seen that Manon’s were wholly of pure, dark gold, the Matron had carried her away from her daughter’s still-cooling corpse and proclaimed Manon her undisputed heir.

To fly again, to soar through the mountain passes, to hunt down prey the way they’d been born to … They weren’t enchanted ironwood brooms. But wyverns would do just fine.

Mate—not husband. The Fae had mates: an unbreakable bond, deeper than marriage, that lasted beyond death.

“He’s a stone-cold killer and a sadist is what he means,” Luca added. “The meanest of Maeve’s personal cabal of warriors, they say.”

The kitchen sounds turned muffled as she let herself spiral down, contemplating that horrible realization again and again: she could not remember what it was like to be free.

Even though Asterin was her cousin, she wasn’t a friend. Manon didn’t have friends. None of the witches, especially the Thirteen, had friends. But Asterin had guarded her back for a century, and the grin was a sign that she wouldn’t put a dagger in Manon’s spine the next time they were knee-deep in battle. No, Asterin was just insane enough to wear the broken nose like a badge of honor, and would love her crooked nose for the rest of her not-so-immortal life.

“Coward. You’re a coward who has run for ten years while innocent people were burned and butchered and—” She stopped hearing him. She just—stopped.

If magic was the only weapon against wights, then her hands would be useless. Still, the wight lingered beyond the threshold.

“You can kill me or torture me or throw me off a cliff, but I am done for today. In that darkness, I saw things that no one should be able to see. It dragged me through my memories—and

She didn’t mean to, but she met his gaze—those sapphire eyes so bright in the late afternoon sun streaming through the small window. “I did not mean any offense, Your—”

She hadn’t known he was the prince the day she first saw him, striding through the gardens, the captain in tow. They were barely into their teenage years, and she was an apprentice in hand-me-down clothes, but for a moment, he’d looked at her and smiled. He’d seen her when no one else had for years, so she found excuses to be in the upper levels of the castle. But she’d wept the next month when she spied him again, and two apprentices had whispered about how handsome the prince was—Dorian, heir to the throne.

“We are the Thirteen, from now until the Darkness claims us.” She said it quietly, but knew all could hear her. “Let’s remind them why.”

Become Wing Leader, command the Ironteeth armies, and keep control of those armies once the Matrons eventually turned on one another. Manon nodded. It would be done.

“The day the king presented me with the Sword of Orynth, he also offered me a ring. Thanks to my heritage, my senses are … sharper. I thought the ring smelled strange—and knew only a fool would accept that kind of gift from him. So I had a replica made. The real one I chucked into the sea. But I always wondered what it did,” he mused, tossing the ring with one hand and catching it. “It seems the captain knows. And disapproves.”

Aedion Ashryver had been called Wolf, general, prince, traitor, and murderer. And he was all of those things, and more. Liar, deceiver, and trickster were his particular favorites—the titles only those closest to him knew. Adarlan’s Whore, that’s what the ones who didn’t know him called him. It was true—in so many ways, it was true, and he had never minded it, not really. It had allowed him to maintain control in the North, to keep the bloodshed down to a minimum and a lie. Half the Bane were rebels, and the other half sympathizers, so many of their “battles” in the North had been staged, the body count a deceit and an exaggeration—at least, once the corpses got up from the killing field under cover of darkness and went home to their families. Adarlan’s Whore. He had not minded. Until now. Cousin—that had been his most beloved title. Cousin, kin, protector. Those were the secret names he harbored deep within, the names he whispered to himself when the northern wind was shrieking through the Staghorns. Sometimes that wind sounded like the screams of his people being led to the butchering blocks. And sometimes it sounded like Aelin—Aelin, whom he had loved, who should have been his queen, and to whom he would have one day sworn the blood oath.

But now the sword, that weight he’d embraced for years, felt … lighter and sharper, far more fragile. Infinitely precious. The world had slipped from beneath his feet.

“I know it was a risk,” the captain said. “But the men who have those rings—something changes in their eyes, a kind of darkness that sometimes manifests physically. I haven’t seen it in you since you’ve been here. And I’ve never seen someone throw so many parties, but only attend for a few minutes. You wouldn’t go to such lengths to hide your meetings with the rebels if you were enslaved to the king, especially when during all this time the Bane still hasn’t come, despite your assurances that it will be here soon. It doesn’t add up.” The captain met his stare. Perhaps not quite a fool, then. “I think she’d want you to know.”

Wendlyn. Land of nightmares made flesh, where legends roamed the earth.

“Why was it different this time?” he pressed. “Because I didn’t want you to die to save me,” she admitted. “Would you have shifted to save yourself?” “Your opinion of me is pretty much identical to my own, so you know the answer.”

Manon drew Wind-Cleaver. It was a dagger compared to the mass of him.

Celaena was Aelin Galathynius. He had danced with her, kissed her, slept beside her, his mortal enemy. I’ll come back for you, she’d said her final day here. Even then, he’d known there was something else behind it. She would come back, but perhaps not as Celaena. Would it be to help him, or to kill him?

“She doesn’t have to do a damn thing to earn our loyalty.”

“When she returns,” Aedion said quietly, “what she will do to the King of Adarlan will make the slaughtering ten years ago look merciful.” And in his heart, Aedion hoped he spoke true.

So she moved away from the carving of the mythical stag, instantly cold as she severed contact with the delightful heat living within the stone. Part of her could have sworn that ancient, strange power was sad to see her go.

“Have you ever heard of a creature that can feed on such things? When I glimpsed it, I saw a man—a beautiful man, pale and dark-haired, with eyes of full black. He wasn’t human. I mean, he looked it, but his eyes—they weren’t human at all.”

She’d become a killer. A damn good one, if this apartment was any indication.

“I grew up being told we were bringing peace and civilization to the continent. What I’ve seen recently has made me realize how much of it is a lie.”

“You know who I am,” Manon said, gazing into those endless black eyes, not giving one inch to fear or doubt. “I am Manon Blackbeak, heir to the Blackbeak Clan, and you are mine. Do you understand?”