Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3)

by Sarah J. Maas

Birds circled above, keeping well away from the white-tailed hawk that had been perched atop a nearby chimney all morning, waiting to snatch up its next meal.

a wicked-looking tattoo was etched down the left side of his harsh face, the whorls of black ink stark against his sun-kissed skin. The markings could easily have been decorative, but she still remembered enough of the Fae language to recognize them as words, even in such an artistic rendering. Starting at his temple, the tattoo flowed over his jaw and down his neck, where it disappeared beneath the pale surcoat and cloak he wore. She had a feeling the markings continued down the rest of him, too, concealed along with at least half a dozen weapons. As she reached into her cloak for her own hidden dagger, she realized he might have been handsome were it not for the promise of violence in his pine-green eyes. It would have been a mistake to call him young—just as it would have been a mistake to call him anything but a warrior, even without the sword strapped across his back and the vicious knives at his sides. He moved with lethal grace and surety, scanning the alley as if he were walking onto a killing field.

“I’ve known a few brooding warrior-types in my day, but I think you might be the broodiest of them all.”

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

It wasn’t that the young general was a threat. Rather, it was the way Aedion prowled toward the king’s table, his shoulder-length golden hair gleaming in the torchlight as he smirked at them all. 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. Chaol put a hand on his sword, schooling his features to remain neutral, disinterested, even as the Wolf of the North came close enough to slaughter him. 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.

Not beautiful, but—pretty. Clean, elegant lines, chestnut hair woven in a braid, and golden-tan skin that suggested at least one family member came from Eyllwe.

She’d long heard the Fae existed peacefully with the humans in Wendlyn, so perhaps the terror they encountered was due to Rowan himself. The tattoo didn’t help. She had debated asking him what the words meant, but that would involve talking. And talking meant building some sort of … relationship. She’d had enough of friends. Enough of them dying, too.

The aches and pains were soothing somehow. Not comforting, but … distracting. Welcome. Deserved. She didn’t want to know what that meant about her. She couldn’t let herself look that far inward. She’d come close, that day she’d seen Prince Galan. And it had been enough.

dead. It was the dark-haired woman seated behind the desk. Maeve, Queen of the Fae. Her aunt. And then came the words she had been dreading for ten years. “Hello, Aelin Galathynius.”

white barn owl perched on the back of her chair. She didn’t bother with a crown,

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.

“Show me,” Maeve whispered with a spider’s smile. Run. Run.

Such a rare gift—the ability to summon and manipulate flame. So few exist who possess more than an ember of it; fewer still who can master its wildness. And yet your mother wanted you to stifle your power—though she knew that I only wanted you to submit to it.”

“So let me be brief: my eyes have told me that you have questions. Questions that no mortal has the right to ask—about the keys.”

But Maeve had been there—had been there at the dawn of this world during the Valg wars. She had held the Wyrdkeys. She knew what they looked like, how they felt. Maybe she even knew where Brannon had hidden them—especially the last, unnamed key. And if Celaena could find a way to steal the keys from the king, to destroy him, to stop his armies and free Eyllwe, even if she could find just one Wyrdkey …

“To what end?” Celaena asked softly, the anger and the fear dragging her down into an inescapable exhaustion. “You want me to train only so I can make a spectacle of my talents?” Maeve ran a moon-white finger down the owl’s head. “I wish you to become who you were born to be. To become queen.”

And then she said one of the foulest things she’d ever uttered in her life, bathing in the pure hate of it. “Fae like you make me understand the King of Adarlan’s actions a bit more, I think.” Faster than she could sense, faster than anything had a right to be, he punched her.

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.

Manon herself had never set foot in the former Witch Kingdom, had never seen the ruins or the flat, green expanse that stretched to the western sea. None of her Thirteen had seen it, either, all of them wanderers and exiles thanks to a curse from the last Crochan Queen as she bled out on that legendary battlefield.

The Ferian Gap—the deadly, blasted bit of land between the White Fang and Ruhnn Mountains, and one of the few passes between the fertile lands of the east and the Western Wastes.

“no one here has any exciting or rare abilities. Like shape-shifting into whatever form they want, or controlling fire”—her stomach clenched at that—“or oracular sight. We did have a female wander in with raw magic two years ago—she could do anything she wanted, summon any element, and she was here a week before Maeve called her to Doranelle and we never heard from her again. A shame—she was so pretty, too. But it’s the same here as it is everywhere else: a few people with a pathetic trace of elemental powers that are really only fun for farmers.”

She hated the expanse of stone without even touching it. It smelled wrong. It smelled like those two prisoners she’d seen with the duke. In fact, this whole place reeked like that. The scent wasn’t natural; it didn’t belong in this world.

“Wipe that smarmy, lying smile off your face.” His voice was as dead as his eyes, but it had a razor-sharp bite behind it. She kept her smarmy, lying smile. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

His smile turned quieter, more lethal. “Shut your smart-ass mouth and shift.”

“It’s none of your business.” Emrys left his shattered bowl on the hearthstones and hobbled over, anger dancing in those bright, clever eyes. “It’s my business when you come into my kitchen.” “I’ve been through worse,” she said. Luca said, “What do you mean?” He eyed her mangled hands, her black eye, and the ring of scars around her neck, courtesy of Baba Yellowlegs. She silently invited him to do the calculations: a life in Adarlan with Fae blood, a life in Adarlan as a woman … His face paled. After a long moment, Emrys said, “Leave it alone, Luca,” and stooped to pick up the fragments of the bowl.

Rowan paused his stalking. “You’re worthless.” “Tell me something I don’t know.” He went on, “You would probably have been more useful to the world if you’d actually died ten years ago.” She just looked him in the eye and said, “I’m leaving.”

“Why is my shifting so vital?” she asked at last. “Because it terrifies you,” he said. “Mastering it is the first step toward learning to control your power. Without that control, with a blast like that, you could easily have burnt yourself out.” “What do you mean?” Another stormy look. “When you access your power, what does it feel like?” She considered. “A well,” she said. “The magic feels like a well.” “Have you felt the bottom of it?” “Is there a bottom?” She prayed there was. “All magic has a bottom—a breaking point. For those with weaker gifts, it’s easily depleted and easily refilled. They can access most of their power at once. But for those with stronger gifts, it can take hours to hit the bottom, to summon their powers at full strength.” “How long does it take you?” “A full day.” She jolted. “Before battle, we take the time, so that when we walk onto the killing field, we can be at our strongest. You can do other things at the same time, but some part of you is down in there, pulling up more and more, until you reach the bottom.” “And when you pull it all out, it just—releases in some giant wave?” “If I want it to. I can release it in smaller bursts, and go on for a while. But it can be hard to hold it back. People sometimes can’t tell friend from foe when they’re handling that much magic.”

Manon stood absolutely still. Slowly, the bait beast lifted its head from the carcass, Titus’s blood dripping from his maw. Their eyes met. People were shouting at her to run, and the gate groaned open, but Manon stared into those black eyes, one of them horribly scarred but intact. He took a step, then another toward her. Manon held her ground. It was impossible. Impossible. Titus was twice his size, twice his weight, and had years of training. The bait beast had trounced him—not because he was bigger or stronger, but because he wanted it more. Titus had been a brute and a killer, yet this wyvern before her … he was a warrior. Men were rushing in with spears and swords and whips, and the bait beast growled. Manon held up a hand. And again, the world stopped. Manon, eyes still upon the beast, said, “He’s mine.” He had saved her life. Not by coincidence, but by choice. He’d felt the current running between them, too. “What?” her grandmother barked from above. Manon found herself walking toward the wyvern, and stopped with not five feet between them. “He’s mine,” Manon said, taking in the scars, the limp, the burning life in those eyes. The witch and the wyvern looked at each other for a moment that lasted for a heartbeat, that lasted for eternity. “You’re mine,” Manon said to him. The wyvern blinked at her, Titus’s blood still dripping from his cracked and broken teeth, and Manon had the feeling that he had come to the same decision. Perhaps he had known long before tonight...

“Vernon Lochan survived, but only because he was already the king’s puppet, and after Cal was executed, Vernon seized his brother’s mantle as Lord of Perranth. You know what happened to Lady Marion. But we never learned what happened to Elide.” Elide—Lord Cal and Lady Marion’s daughter and heir, almost a year younger than Aelin. If she were alive, she would be at least seventeen by now. “Lots of children vanished in the initial weeks,”

Mala, Sun Goddess and Light-Bringer, was sister and eternal rival to Deanna, Keeper of the Moon.

As she dusted the block off, an image emerged of a stag with a glowing star between its antlers, so like the one in Terrasen. She’d heard Emrys tell the story of the sun stags, who held an immortal flame between their massive antlers and who had once been stolen from a temple in this land … “Is this where the stags were kept—before this place was destroyed?”

“It forced me to go through … memories. The worst kind.” The woman’s horrified, sorrowful face gaped up at the canopy. “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.” Her parents had been assassinated. She’d seen the wounds. But the smell in their room had been so similar

I stole an Asterion mare from the Lord of Xandria. Of course Celaena had been to the Deserted Peninsula. And sought out trouble.

Leading them along the sheer face of the Northern Fang was Iskra. Her bull, a massive beast named Fendir, was a force of nature in himself. Though smaller than Titus, he was twice as nasty.

The overseer grabbed for her, but she slashed with iron-tipped fingers and sliced his hand open. He cursed, but Manon kept walking, licking his blood off her nails. She almost spat it out. Vile. The blood tasted rotten, as if it had curdled or festered inside a corpse for days. She glanced at the blood on the rest of her hand. It was too dark for human blood. If witches had indeed been killing these men, why had no one reported this?

“It is an honor to be a warrior serving in her inner circle.” Celaena hadn’t suggested otherwise, but she wondered why he felt the need to add it.

“She is eight—and she has told me that her dearest friends are characters in books.”

“I know your mother was kin to—to her, but what of your father’s line?” “My mother never admitted who my father was, even when she was wasting away on her sickbed,” Aedion said flatly. “I don’t know if it was from shame, or because she couldn’t even remember, or to protect me somehow. Once I was brought over here, I didn’t really care. But I’d rather have no father than your father.”

Abraxos continued to lie in the sun, vain and indulgent as a cat. “Warrior heart indeed.”

“You know, it might be better if you just slapped me instead.” “Instead of what?” “Instead of reminding me again and again how rutting worthless and awful and cowardly I am. Believe me, I can do the job well enough on my own. So just hit me, because I’m damned tired of trading insults. And you know what? You didn’t even bother to tell me you’d be unavailable. If you’d said something, I never would have come. I’m sorry I did. But you just left me downstairs.” Saying those last words made a sharp, quick panic rise up in her, an aching pain that had her throat closing. “You left me,” she repeated. Maybe it was only out of blind terror at the abyss opening up again around her, but she whispered, “I have no one left. No one.”

“There is nothing that I can give you. Nothing I want to give you. You are not owed an explanation for what I do outside of training. I don’t care what you have been through or what you want to do with your life. The sooner you can sort out your whining and self-pity, the sooner I can be rid of you. You are nothing to me, and I do not care.”

It would have been nice to have one person who knew the absolute truth about her—and didn’t hate her for it. It would have been really, really nice. She walked away without another word. With each step she took back to her room, that flickering light inside of her guttered. And went out.

“What are you doing?” “What?” Emrys didn’t raise his voice as he said, “To that girl. What are you doing that makes her come in here with such emptiness in her eyes?” “That’s none of your concern.” Emrys pressed his lips into a tight line. “What do you see when you look at her, Prince?” He didn’t know. These days, he didn’t know a damn thing. “That’s none of your concern, either.” Emrys ran a hand over his weathered face. “I see her slipping away, bit by bit, because you shove her down when she so desperately needs someone to help her back up.”

“She has no hope, Prince. She has no hope left in her heart. Help her. If not for her sake, then at least for what she represents—what she could offer all of us, you included.” “And what is that?” he dared ask. Emrys met his gaze unflinchingly as he whispered, “A better world.”

Why are you crying, Fireheart? It had been ten years—ten long years since she had heard her mother’s voice. But she heard it then over the force of her weeping, as clear as if she knelt beside her. Fireheart—why do you cry? “Because I am lost,” she whispered onto the earth. “And I do not know the way.”

Fire was the reason she’d been banned from the Library of Orynth when she was eight, after accidentally incinerating an entire bookcase of ancient manuscripts when she grew irritated with the Master Scholar lecturing her about decorum. It had been a beautiful, horrible relief to wake up one day not too many months after that and know magic was gone. That she could hold a book—hold what she adored most—and not worry about turning it to ash if she became upset or tired or excited.

Celaena scooped up the golden-hilted sword as she followed him. A ruby the size of a chicken egg was embedded in the hilt, and despite the age of the scabbard, the blade shone when she whipped it free, as if it had been freshly polished. Something clattered from the scabbard onto the ice—a plain golden ring. She grabbed it, shoving it into her pocket,

“What the fool learned that night was this: the creature was almost as old as the mountain itself. It claimed to have been born in another world, but had slipped into this one when the gods were looking elsewhere. It had preyed upon Fae and humans until a mighty Fae warrior challenged it. And before the warrior was through, he carved one of the creature’s eyes out—for spite or sport—and cursed the beast, so that as long as that mountain stood, the creature would be forced to live beneath it.” A monster from another realm. Had it been let in during the Valg wars, when demons had opened and closed portals to another world at will? How many of the horrific creatures that dwelled in this land were only here because of those long-ago battles over the Wyrdkeys? “So it has dwelled in the labyrinth of underwater caves under the mountain. It has no name—for it forgot what it was called long ago, and those who meet it do not return home.”

“Who was the warrior who carved out its eye?” “The fool didn’t know, and neither did the beast. But the language it spoke was Fae—an archaic form of the Old Language, almost indecipherable. It could remember the gold ring he bore, but not what he looked like.”

“How—how did you come back from that kind of loss?” “I didn’t. For a long while I couldn’t. I think I’m still … not back. I might never be.” She nodded, lips pressed tight, and glanced toward the window. “But maybe,” he said, quietly enough that she looked at him again. He didn’t smile, but his eyes were inquisitive. “Maybe we could find the way back together.”