More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Isn’t that all you pretty males are good for?”
“One day, I’ll come to claim that debt, too. Consider tonight a warning.”
“Brute.” “Brat.”
Especially when someone threatens to cut off his manhood.” “At least I said it would be a big mistake,” she said with a fiendish grin. “I was tempted to say ‘little.’ ”
“Are you studying them so you can replicate them when you take my form, shape-shifter?”
Rowan knew all along...
Shifters: spies and thieves and assassins able to demand any price for their services; the bane of courts across the world, so feared that they’d been hunted nearly to extinction even before Adarlan had banned magic.
It explained so much. You and I are nothing but beasts wearing human skins.
“So you’re a full-powered shifter,”
“No. And what kills me is that I can’t remember what my real face was. That was the danger of shifting—that you would forget your real form, because it’s the memory of it that guides the shifting. I remember being plain as a dormouse, but … I don’t remember if my eyes were blue or gray or green; I can’t remember the shape of my nose or my chin. And it was a child’s body, too. I don’t know what I would look like now, as a woman.”
She strode to Rowan, taking the heavy arm from him, and waved at the prince with the creature’s stiff fingers. “Stop that,” he hissed. She wriggled the demon’s fingers a bit more. “It’d make a good back-scratcher.” Rowan only frowned. “Killjoy,” she said,
She carefully monitored the battle between the two beings inside that body. At last it said, “Stevan.” “Stevan,” she said. The man’s eyes were clear, fixed on her. “Stevan,” she said again, louder. “Quiet,” the demon snapped. “Where are you from, Stevan?” “Enough of—Melisande.”
“You smell like ash.”
The clothes Sam would have wanted her to wear reminded her of life.
“I miss you,” she said. “Every day, I miss you. And I wonder what you would have made of all this. Made of me. I think—I think you would have been a wonderful king. I think they would have liked you more than me, actually.” Her throat tightened. “I never told you—how I felt. But I loved you, and I think a part of me might always love you. Maybe you were my mate, and I never knew it. Maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering about that. Maybe I’ll see you again in the Afterworld, and then I’ll know for sure. But until then … until then I’ll miss you, and I’ll wish you were here.”
With a gentleness that cracked her heart, he set it on the headstone beside her own pebbles.
“The thing that opened the door was a beautiful man—a man with golden hair and a collar around his neck. But he was not a man. There was nothing human in his eyes.” One of the princes—it had to be. “I—I’d pretended to fall so I could buy myself more time to see who opened the door. When he saw me on the ground, he smiled at me—and this darkness leaked out of him …” She lurched toward the bucket and leaned over it, but didn’t vomit. After another moment, she said, “I managed to look past him into the room behind.”
“From what I saw, they’ve delivered at least one baby each. And are already about to give birth to another.”
“They are not witchlings. They are not babies,” Elide spat, covering her face with her hands as if to rip out her eyes. “They are creatures. They are demons. Their skin is like black diamond, and they—they have these snouts, with teeth. Fangs. Already, they have fangs. And not like yours.” She lowered her hands. “They have teeth of black stone. There is nothing of you in them.”
“They have them chained to tables. Altars. And they were sobbing. They were begging the man to let them go. But they’re … they’re so close to giving birth.
Aelin never really liked me
I endured Vernon because of her. Because of the hope that she got away, and my mother’s sacrifice wasn’t in vain. I thought that one day, Aelin would come to save me—would
It was what Arobynn wanted—for her to think of him as she rubbed the oil into every inch of her skin. For her breasts, her thighs, her neck to smell like almond—his chosen scent.
“Then I’d hope you’d join me for a hunt, Prince.”
That man has many, many debts to pay before he meets his end.”
“You said you wanted to see me in this dress,” she said a bit hoarsely. “I hadn’t realized the effect would be so …” He shook his head.
“Welcome home,” Arobynn purred.
He was in green—green for Terrasen,
Rowan moved deeper into the entry hall, every step laced with power and death, coming to a stop at her side. “You can call me Rowan. That’s all you need to know.” He cocked his head to the side, a predator assessing prey. “Thank you for the oil,” he added. “My skin was a little dry.”
This was where she’d last seen Sam, he realized. And her master knew it.
She would never forget this room. It still haunted her dreams.
Seventeen-year-old Rowan wouldn’t have known what to do with you. He could barely speak to females outside his family.
teeth. He would probably have been even more scandalized to learn I’m not wearing any undergarments beneath this dress. The table rattled as Rowan’s knee banged into it.
Then, faster than she could react, he slid the Wyrdstone ring onto her finger.
He and Aedion would take a long, long time ending Arobynn’s life.
Lightning gleamed on the blade, a flicker of quicksilver. For Wesley. For Sam. For Aelin. And for herself. For the child she’d been, for the seventeen-year-old on her Bidding night, for the woman she’d become, her heart in shreds, her invisible wound still bleeding. It was so very easy to sit up and slice the knife across Arobynn’s throat.
Here there was no escape.
Arobynn was dead. Word had come an hour ago that Arobynn had been found murdered.
FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!
One last time—you have to wear this mask one last time, and then you can bury Celaena Sardothien forever.
“It is my will,” the Master read, “that the sole beneficiary of all my fortune, assets, and holdings should be my heir, Celaena Sardothien.”
“You burned the originals?”
Then she lifted her father’s sword and severed Arobynn’s head from his body. It rolled to the side with a vulgar thud, and she smiled grimly at the corpse. “Just to be sure,” was all she said.
“We’re not whores for your men to use.” “You are sacred vessels,” the duke said. “It is an honor to be chosen.” “I find that a very male thing to assume.”
they called him Erawan, the Dark King.”
“So they built him a sarcophagus of iron and some sort of indestructible stone. And they put it in a sealed tomb beneath a mountain—a crypt so dark … so dark that there was no air, no light. Upon the labyrinth of doors,” she read, “they put symbols, unbreakable by any thief or key or force.”
“Morath,”
“What are the odds,” she said, “that the king is sending his forces down to Morath by mere coincidence?”
His eyes shifted—turning green, turning clear. It was with a young man’s voice that he said, “Kill me. Please—please kill me. Roland—my name was Roland. Tell my—”
Manon could have sworn he sighed.
Gold eyes had always been prized among Blackbeaks. She’d never wondered why.
Dorian—they needed Dorian on the throne. Needed this shut down.
