Tower of Dawn (Throne of Glass, #6)

by Sarah J. Maas

These were her people. The skin in varying shades of brown and tan. The abundance of that shining black hair—her hair.

Here there were no slurs hissed in the streets. Here there would be no rocks thrown by children. Here her sister’s children would not feel different. Unwanted.

An observer of the game who was now to be a prime player. With the stakes unbearably high.

this was the holiest of temples. And deadliest of labyrinths.

You must enter where you fear to tread.

But the salt of her tears had been cleansing.

With only those foreign stars to witness, Nesryn smiled.

Fear will get you killed as easily as a weapon.”

“Don’t you waste one heartbeat being afraid of a coward who hunts women in the darkness,”

Yrene went to him, unable to stop herself, as if that smile were a beacon in the dark.

“Perhaps one day, whoever takes the throne will end it. Love their siblings more than they honor the tradition.

Yrene was smiling, and then she was laughing, as if she could not contain it inside her. Chaol thought it was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.

beauty was fleeting, yet power … power was a far more valuable currency.

Indeed, she was already tracing the swirling letters he’d asked the jeweler in Antica to engrave on the front. She turned it over to the back— Yrene put a hand to her throat, right over that scar. “Mountains. And seas,” she whispered. “So you never forget that you climbed them and crossed them. That you—only you—got yourself here.”

he realized that here, amongst the dunes and stars … Here, in the heart of a foreign land … Here, with her, he was home.

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

BITCH WHAT

Everything he had done, Aelin had come to rip it apart. Starting with his honor.

You offer this of your own free will? Yes. With my entire heart. It had been his from the start, anyway.

we have Aelin Fire-Bringer fighting for us, don’t we? If she can produce flame, surely she can produce smoke.”

“Kadara pretends to be a noble mount, but she’s more of a mother hen than anything.”

The world he laid at her feet. She trembled at it. What he so freely gave. Not the empire and crown, but … the life. His heart.

Every step, all of it, had led here. From that keep in the snow-blasted mountains where a man with a face as hard as the rock around them had thrown him into the cold; to that salt mine in Endovier, where an assassin with eyes like wildfire had smirked at him, unbroken despite a year in hell. An assassin who had found his wife, or they had found each other, two gods-blessed women wandering the shadowed ruins of the world.And who now held the fate of it between them. Every step. Every curve into darkness. Every moment of despair and rage and pain. It had led him to precisely where he needed to be. Where he wanted to be.

A moment of kindness. From a young woman who ended lives to a young woman who saved them.

He did not regret. He did not look back. Not with Yrene in his arms, at his side. Not with the note she carried, that bit of proof … that bit of proof that he was exactly where he was meant to be. That he had always been headed there. Here.

Chaol smiled back at his wife, at the light he’d unknowingly walked toward his entire life, even when he had not been able to see it.