The Assassin and the Desert (Throne of Glass, #0.3)

by Sarah J. Maas

sweating, her nomad guide had told her, was a good thing—it was when you didn’t sweat that the Red Desert became deadly. Sweat reminded you to drink. When the heat evaporated your perspiration before you could realize you were sweating, that’s when you could cross into dehydration and not know it.

“Tomorrow will be better. It might be only a foot more than today, but it will be a foot longer that you can run.”

Arobynn encouraged cutthroat behavior. Even when they were children, he’d set her and Sam against each other, use their victories and failures against them. He’d made her see everyone but Arobynn and Ben as a potential enemy. As allies, yes, but also as foes to be closely watched.

Weakness was never to be shown at any cost. Brutality was rewarded. And education and culture were equally important—words could be just as deadly as steel. But the Silent Assassins . . . Though they, too, might be killers, they looked to each other for learning. Embraced collective wisdom.

while they were all competitors, it appeared that an invisible link bound them together. Something had brought them to th...

they could find whatever they were looking for in the silence.

Legend claimed that the Fae had made them from the four winds—spirit from the north, strength from the south, speed from the east, and wisdom from the west, all rolled into the slender-snouted, high-tailed, lovely creature that stood before her.

And for that one heartbeat, when there was nothing more to it than that, she tasted bliss so complete that she tipped her head back to the sky and laughed.

“Where do men find it in themselves to do such monstrous things? How do they find it acceptable?”

The old man danced to a rhythm Celaena could not hear or make out, and looked more like someone’s benevolent, clumsy grandfather than the master of some of the world’s greatest assassins.

“To making amends—and fond memories.” “To being the most fearsome and imposing girls the world has ever seen.”

for a while, she had felt like one of their own—felt, for the first time in a long, long while, like she had a place where she belonged. Where she might learn something more than deceit and how to end lives.

“If you can learn to endure pain, you can survive anything. Some people learn to embrace it—to love it. Some endure it through drowning it in sorrow, or by making themselves forget. Others turn it into anger. But Ansel let her pain become hate, and let it consume her until she became something else entirely—a person I don’t think she ever wished to be.”

“When you give your master his letter, also give him this. And tell him that in the Red Desert, we do not beat our

disciples.”