Tower of Dawn (Throne of Glass, #6)

by Sarah J. Maas

“And there is another favor I would ask of you.”

Yrene knew him well enough to understand that despite the easy, unruffled manner he presented to the world, the disciplined soldier who obeyed his father’s every order and fearlessly commanded his terrestrial armies … beneath that smiling face lay a churning sea of grief. Wondering what he could have done differently.

“Be careful, Captain Faliq,” Sartaq said as Nesryn

“There is beauty in my father’s lands,” the prince went on while Kadara ripped into that monstrous carcass, “but there is much lurking beneath the surface, too.”

“Just so you know,” Yrene hissed as she shut the doors loudly behind him, “your piss-poor attitude helps no one and nothing.”

It showed a woman with eyes of blue flame and hair of pure gold poised above him, dagger raised and angling to plunge into his heart. He wished. He sometimes wished that she hadn’t been stopped. The scar on his face—from the nails she’d gouged into it when she first struck him … It was that hateful wish he thought of when he looked in the mirror. The body on the bed and that cold room and that scream. The collar on a tan throat and a smile that did not belong to a beloved face. The heart he’d offered and had been left to drop on the wooden planks of the river docks. An assassin who had sailed away and a queen who had returned.

Yrene laughed, and the sound … Beautiful as the sound was, it was nothing like the smile on her face. The delight. He’d never seen a face so lovely.

“I was joking, Yrene. I … am with Nesryn.”

Even across the nearly hundred feet of polished marble and towering pillars, the space between them went taut. As if that white light he’d glimpsed inside himself two days ago was a living rope. As if she’d somehow planted herself in him that afternoon.

But Sartaq turned to her, examining her from head to toe and back again. There was little that he missed. “They didn’t mention that you’re beautiful.”

But even as the night moved on, as Nesryn sang in that beautiful mountain-hall, she felt Sartaq’s stare. Different from any he’d given before. And though she told herself she should, Nesryn did not look away.

He was standing. He was walking. And he was kissing her.

It was like waking up or being born or falling out of the sky. It was an answer and a song, and she could not think or feel fast enough.

Aelin frightens everyone.” He snorted. “But not him. I think that’s why she fell in love with him, against her best intentions. Rowan beheld all Aelin was and is, and he was not afraid.”

“I loved you before I ever set eyes on you,” he said. “Please,” Nesryn wept. Sartaq’s hand tightened on hers. “I wish we’d had time.” A hiss behind him, a rising bulk of shining black— Then the prince was gone. Ripped from her hands. As if he had never been.

“We wait for the Queen of the Valg,” the spider purred, rubbing against the carving. “Who in this world calls herself Maeve.”

“When I was seven, my older brother sired a bastard daughter off a poor woman in Rifthold. Abandoned them both. It has been twenty years since then, and from when I was old enough to go to the city, to begin my trade, I looked for her. Found the mother after some years—on her deathbed. She could barely talk long enough to say she’d kicked the girl out. She did not know where my niece was. Didn’t care. She died before she could give me a name.”

“Find her,” Falkan said, taking a step toward the horrors churning below. “My fortune—all of it is for her. And I may have failed her in this life. But not in my death.”

Ruk riders. Each bearing a flaming arrow. Each now pointing downward. Like a rain of shooting stars, the arrows fell upon the darkness of Dagul.

“But if you are kind to yourself, if you—if you love yourself …” Yrene’s mouth trembled. “If you love yourself as much as I love you …”

“Then it is a good thing, Yrene Towers, that I love you as well.”