Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3)

by Sarah J. Maas

“Symbols have power,

Aedion standing before them, still hooded. The general drew his fighting knives and purred, “None of you are leaving this alley alive.” They didn’t.

“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.” She hadn’t realized how much she meant it, how much she needed it not to be true, until now. His features remained impassive, turning vicious, even, as he said, “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.” There was a faint ringing in her ears that turned into a roar. And beneath it, a sudden wave of numbness, a too-familiar lack of sight or sound or feeling. She didn’t know why it happened, because she had been so dead set on hating him, but … it would have been nice, she supposed. It would have been nice to have one person who knew the absol...

the old male looked him up and down and quietly said, “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.”

Emrys met his gaze unflinchingly as he whispered, “A better world.”

Fireheart—why do you cry? “Because I am lost,” she whispered onto the earth. “And I do not know the way.” It was what she had never been able to tell Nehemia—that for ten years, she had been unsure how to find the way home, because there was no home left.

“You are the keeper of your own fate,” Rowan

“You cannot pick and choose what parts of her to love.”

Boom! Mic drop.

“As for Celaena,” he said again, “you do not have the right to wish she were not what she is. The only thing you have a right to do is decide whether you are her enemy or her friend.”

“What do you suppose,” Aedion breathed, staring into the darkness, “the people on other continents, across all those seas, think of us? Do you think they hate us or pity us for what we do to each other? Perhaps it’s just as bad there. Perhaps it’s worse. But to do what I have to do, to get through it … I have to believe it’s better. Somewhere, it’s better than this.”

That was when they noticed that every musician on the stage was wearing mourning black. That was when they shut up. 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. When the final note finished, the conductor turned to the crowd, the musicians standing with him. As one, they looked to the boxes, to all those jewels bought with the blood of a continent. And without a word, without a bow or another gesture, they walked off the stage. The next morning, by royal decree, the theater was shut down. No one saw those musicians or their conductor again.

For a long moment, he said nothing. But his brows narrowed slightly. “To whatever end?”

And when she grasped the dagger, its weight lighter than she remembered, Rowan looked into her eyes, into the very core of her, and said, “Fireheart.”

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

he whispered into her ear, “I claim you, too, Aelin Galathynius.”

It was a message to the world. Aelin was a warrior, able to fight with blade or magic. And she was done with hiding.