Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3)

by Sarah J. Maas

just as she’d been ordered by his Grand Imperial Majesty and Master of the Earth, the King of Adarlan.

There was nothing left in her, not really. Only ash and an abyss and the unbreakable vow she’d carved into her flesh, to the friend who had seen her for what she truly was.

Because Celaena was Aelin Ashryver Galathynius, heir to the throne and rightful Queen of Terrasen. It made her his mortal enemy. It made her Dorian’s enemy.

“Looks like they didn’t chew you up just yet. And they finally gave you a big-boy sword, too.”

And then, just to really make him soil his pants, she flicked her wrists in the air between them. The iron claws shot over her nails in a stinging, gleaming flash.

In her bones, in her blood and breath and soul, she was so, so tired. Talking to anyone was too taxing. Which made Rowan the perfect companion: he didn’t say a single word to her.

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.

And then came the words she had been dreading for ten years. “Hello, Aelin Galathynius.”

Left. Nehemia. Right. You made a vow, and you will keep it, by whatever means necessary. Left. Training. Queen. Right. Bitch. Manipulative, cold-blooded, sadistic bitch.

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.”

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.

There were few sounds she enjoyed more than the groans of dying men, but the wind was one of them.

But the edge she’d gone over the night Nehemia had died, the night she’d gutted Archer, the day she’d told Chaol the horrible truth … Chaol had helped shove her over that edge. She was still on the fall down. There was no getting up, because there was no bottom.

Slaughtered like animals. The wounds were so vulgar, so gaping and deep, and her parents looked so—so— Celaena vomited. She fell to her knees, her bladder loosening just before she vomited a second time.

With a silent prayer for forgiveness, Chaol looked straight at Aedion. “Aelin is alive.”

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.

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.”

As she fell, hair whipping her face, Celaena thrust her hands toward the skinwalkers. “Surprise,” she hissed. The world erupted in blue wildfire.

Aelin Galathynius had spent a year in that labor camp. A queen of their continent had been a slave, and would bear the scars of it forever.

“I will carry your secrets to the grave—but I want no part of them.” He ripped his cold magic from the air and turned it inward, wrapping it around his heart.

“When she returns,” Aedion said quietly, “what she will do to the King of Adarlan will make the slaughtering ten years ago look merciful.”

“you and I are going to learn how to fly. And then we’ll stain this kingdom red.”

Her mother had called her Fireheart. But to her court, to her people, she would one day be Queen.

It was thanks to Abraxos, the flower-loving worm, who had just watched while she scaled one of the nearby cliffs and brought down a braying mountain goat for him.

“We’re flying, you rutting coward.” He tucked his head toward his belly, his tail wrapping around him. He was pretending he couldn’t hear her.

Elentiya. Spirit that cannot be broken. Lies, lies, lies.

Fireheart—why do you cry? “Because I am lost,” she whispered onto the earth. “And I do not know the way.”

Celaena had been everything Aelin wasn’t. She had embraced that life, even if Celaena’s accomplishments were death and torture and pain.

She had never been in control. Even as Celaena, control had been an illusion. Other masters had held her reins.

“I told her I would not help, so she orchestrated her own death. Because she thought …” She laughed—a horrible, wild sound. “She thought that her death would spur me into action. She thought I could somehow do more than her—that she was worth more dead. And she lied—about everything. She lied to me because I was a coward, and I hate her for it. I hate her for leaving me.”

“Because if I free Eyllwe and destroy the king as Celaena, I can go anywhere after that. The crown … my crown is just another set of shackles.”

“She was not becoming anything different from what she always was and always had the capacity to be. You just finally saw everything. And once you saw that other part of her …,” Dorian said quietly. It had taken him until now, until Sorscha, to understand what that meant. “You cannot pick and choose what parts of her to love.”

He did not know all of her story, did not know what had been truth and what had been lies, or what it had been like in Endovier to slave beside her countrymen, or to bow to the man who had murdered her family.

Oh, he was definitely fussing, and though it warmed her miserable heart, it was becoming rather irritating.

“When they would let me out, so much of my mind had shut down in the darkness that the only thing I could remember was that my name was Celaena. Celaena Sardothien, arrogant and brave and skilled, Celaena who did not know fear or despair, Celaena who was a weapon honed by Death.”

And he’d returned to Celaena with chocolates, since he claimed to be insulted that she considered his absence a proper birthday present.

Sometimes, though, her dreams were of a brown-eyed man in an empire across the sea. Sometimes she’d awaken and reach for the warm, male body beside hers, only to realize it was not the captain—that she would never again lie next to Chaol, not after what had happened. And when she remembered that, it sometimes hurt to breathe.

Working with him was so effortless. There was no judgment, no need to explain herself. She knew no one would ever replace Nehemia, and she never wanted anyone to, but Rowan made her feel … better. As if she could finally breathe after months of suffocating.

So she left Rowan in the hall. But it did not stop her from wishing she could keep him.

No, all she could see were the slaves she’d left behind, the ashy mountains and those mass graves they dug every day, the faces of her people, who had worked beside her—her people whom she had left behind. Whom she had let herself forget, had let suffer; who had prayed for salvation, holding out hope that someone, anyone would remember them. She had abandoned them—and she had been too late.

Oh, Chaol. He understood completely now why he had sent Celaena to Wendlyn—understood that his return to Anielle … Chaol had sold himself to get Celaena to safety.

“I have been forced to do many, many things. Depraved, despicable things. Yet nothing made me feel as filthy as I did today, thanking that man for murdering my people.”

And when the conductor raised his arms, it was not a symphony that filled the cavernous space. It was the Song of Eyllwe. Then the Song of Fenharrow. And Melisande. And Terrasen. Each nation that had people in those labor camps. And finally, not for pomp or triumph, but to mourn what they had become, they played the Song of Adarlan.

“I claim you, Rowan Whitethorn. I don’t care what you say and how much you protest. I claim you as my friend.”

She had lied to him. She had wanted to save lives, yes. But she had gone out there with no intention of saving her own.

“Wear it, and know that you are loved, Fireheart—that you are safe, and it is the strength of this”—she placed a hand on her heart—“that matters. Wherever you go, Aelin,” she whispered, “no matter how far, this will lead you home.”

That. That moment Lady Marion had chosen a desperate hope for her kingdom over herself, over her husband and the daughter who would wait and wait for a return that would never come. That was the moment that had broken everything Aelin Galathynius was and had promised to be.

She had taken Lady Marion’s sacrifice and become a monster, almost as bad as the one who had murdered Lady Marion and her own family. That was why she could not, did not, go home.

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.

It would not take a monster to destroy a monster—but light, light to drive out darkness. She was not afraid.