Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3)

by Sarah J. Maas

One by one, like shadows emerging from the mist, they appeared. The faces of the people she had loved with her heart of wildfire. And then there was Lady Marion, smiling beside her husband. “Get up,” she whispered, her voice full of that hope for the world, and for the daughter she would never see again. A tremor in the darkness. Aelin still lay before her, hand still reaching. The Valg princes turned. As the demon princes moved, her mother stepped toward her, face and hair and build so like her own. “You are a disappointment,” she hissed. Her father crossed his muscular arms. “You are everything I hated about the world.” Her uncle, still wearing the antler crown long since burned to ash: “Better that you had died with us than shame us, degrade our memory, betray our people.” Their voices swirled together. “Traitor. Murderer. Liar. Thief. Coward.” Again and again, worming in just as the King of Adarlan’s power had wriggled in her mind like a maggot. The king hadn’t done it merely to cause a disruption and hurt her. He had also done it to separate her family, to get them out of the castle—to take the blame away from Adarlan and make it look like an outside attack. She had blamed herself for dragging them to the manor house to be butchered. But the king had planned it all, every minute detail. Except for the mistake of leaving her alive—perhaps because the power of the amulet did indeed save her. “Come with us,” her family whispered. “Come with us into the ageless dark.” The...