Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3)

by Sarah J. Maas

“Oh, it was horrific,” Luca cut in. “You said you were out with Bas and the other scouts on border patrol today!” Emrys barked, then gave Rowan a look that suggested he’d better test his next meal for poison.

Emrys cleared his throat and was soon staring at the table again, lost in thought. “What the fool learned that night was this: the creature was almost as old as the mountain itself. It claimed to have been born in another world, but had slipped into this one when the gods were looking elsewhere. It had preyed upon Fae and humans until a mighty Fae warrior challenged it. And before the warrior was through, he carved one of the creature’s eyes out—for spite o...

“So it has dwelled in the labyrinth of underwater caves under the mountain. It has no name—for it forgot what it was called long ago, and those who meet it do not return home.”

“Who was the warrior who carved out its eye?” “The fool didn’t know, and neither did the beast. But the language it spoke was Fae—an archaic form of the Old Language, almost indecipherable. It could remember the gold ring he bore, but not what he looked like.”

Emrys pinned the prince with a stare. “No more adventures.” Rowan glanced at Luca, who seemed about to explode with indignation. “Agreed.” Emrys didn’t back down. “And no more brawling.” Rowan met Celaena’s stare over the table. His expression yielded nothing. “We’ll try.” Even Emrys deemed that an acceptable answer.

🧝🏼‍♀️🦅🫦

“When my mate died, it took me a very, very long time to come back.” It took her a moment to think of what to say. “How long ago?” “Two hundred three years, twenty-seven days ago.” He gestured to the tattoo on his face, neck, arm. “This tells the story of how it happened. Of the shame I’ll carry until my last breath.”

🦅 lore The story of Lyria

Others come to you to have their own grief and shame tattooed on them.”

“Gavriel lost three of his soldiers in an ambush in the southern mountains. They were slaughtered. He survived. For as long as he’s been a warrior, he’s tattooed himself with the names of those under his command who have fallen. But where the blame lies has little to do with the point of the markings.”

🦁 lore

“Were you to blame?” Slowly, he turned—not quite all the way, but enough to give her a sidelong glance. “Yes. When I was young, I was … ferocious in my efforts to win valor for myself and my bloodline. Wherever Maeve sent me on campaigns, I went. Along the way, I mated a female of our race. Lyria,” he said, almost reverently. “She sold flowers in the market in Doranelle. Maeve disapproved, but … when you meet your mate, there is nothing you can do to alter it. She was mine, and no one could tell me otherwise. Mating her cost me Maeve’s favor, and I still yearned so badly to prove myself. So when war came calling and Maeve offered me a chance to redeem myself, I took it. Lyria begged me not to go. But I was so arrogant, so misguided, that I left her at our mountain home and went off to war. I left her alone,” he said, and again looked at Celaena. You left me, she had said to him. That was when he’d snapped—the wounds of centuries ago rising up to swallow him as viciously as her own past consumed her. “I was gone for months, winning all that glory I so foolishly sought. And then we got word that our enemies had been secretly trying to gain entrance to Doranelle through the mountain passes.” Her stomach dropped to her feet. Rowan ran a hand through his hair, scratched at his face. “I flew home. As fast as I’d ever flown. When I got there, I found that … found she had been with child. And they had slaughtered her anyway, and burnt our house to cinders. “When you lose a mate, y...

🦅 lore The story of Lyria

“How—how did you come back from that kind of loss?” “I didn’t. For a long while I couldn’t. I think I’m still … not back. I might never be.”

🦅 lore 💔

“But maybe,” he said, quietly enough that she looked at him again. He didn’t smile, but his eyes were inquisitive. “Maybe we could find the way back together.” He would not apologize for today, or yesterday, or for any of it. And she would not ask him to, not now that she understood that in the weeks she had been looking at him it had been like gazing at a reflection. No wonder she had loathed him. “I think,” she said, barely more than a whisper, “I would like that very much.” He held out a hand. “Together, then.” She studied the scarred, callused palm, then the tattooed face, full of a grim sort of hope. Someone who might—who did understand what it was like to be crippled at your very core, someone who was still climbing inch by inch out of that abyss. Perhaps they would never get out of it, perhaps they would never be whole again, but … “Together,” she said, and took his outstretched hand. And somewhere far and deep inside her, an ember began to glow.

🦅🧝🏼‍♀️❤️‍🩹

It could make a difference in whatever battles lie ahead.” “It didn’t make a difference ten years ago.” Ren’s face was a mask of ice, and then Aedion remembered. Ren hardly had a drop of magic. But Ren’s two elder sisters … The girls had been away at their mountain school when everything went to hell. A school for magic.

Ren lore

“I’ve … done things,” Ren said. “Bad things.” Aedion had suspected as much from the moment Ren gave them the address of the opium den. “So have we all,” Aedion said. So has Aelin.

“All I want,” he snarled, “is for my people to be free and my queen restored to her throne.” “They burned the antler throne, Aedion. There is no throne for her.” “Then I’ll build one myself from the bones of our enemies.”

🧔🏼‍♀️🫶🏼🗡️🧝🏼‍♀️

“My only wish,” Aedion said, growling in Ren’s face, “is to see her again. Just once, if that’s all the gods will allow me. If they grant me more time than that, then I’ll thank them every damn day of my life. But for now, all I’m working for is to see her, to know for certain that she’s real—that she survived.

🧔🏼‍♀️🫶🏼🧝🏼‍♀️

“Noll isn’t much—just the tower and town we built around it. But the volcanoes were sacred, and ten years ago, maybe a bit longer, apparently we … not my men, because I wasn’t there, but rumor says the king took a legion into those volcanoes and sacked the temple.” Jensen shook his head. “The locals spit on us, even the men who weren’t there, for that. The tower of Noll was built afterward, and then the locals cursed it, too. So it was always just us.”

🏰

“Our reports say, general, that we killed them—arrows to the throat. Quick and clean. But …” Aedion leaned closer. “Not a word leaves this table.” A vague nod. “The truth was, by the time we got our archers ready, the men who went mad had already bashed their own skulls in. Every time, as if they couldn’t get the pain out.”

🏰

“My parents were very old when they conceived me.” Not old in the human sense, she knew. “I was their only child in the millennia they’d been mated. They faded into the Afterworld before I reached my second decade.”

🦅

“Because if I free Eyllwe and destroy the king as Celaena, I can go anywhere after that. The crown … my crown is just another set of shackles.”

🧝🏼‍♀️

She waited for the scolding, saw it simmering in Rowan’s eyes. But then he quietly said, “What do you mean, another set of shackles?”

“Why did you stay with Arobynn?” “I knew I wanted two things: First, to disappear from the world and from my enemies, but … ah.” It was hard to look him in the eye. “I wanted to hide from myself, mostly. I convinced myself I should disappear, because the second thing I wanted, even then, was to be able to someday … hurt people the way I had been hurt. And it turned out that I was very, very good at it.

🧝🏼‍♀️

His eyes gleamed with near-predatory intent. “Oh, not a chance, Princess. You can tell me what you want, when you want, but there’s no going back now.”

🦅🧝🏼‍♀️🫦

She lifted her tools again. “I’m sure your other friends just adore having you around.”

A feral smile, and he grabbed her by the chin—not hard enough to hurt, but to get her to look at him. “First thing,” he breathed, “we’re not friends. I’m still training you, and that means you’re still under my command.” The flicker of hurt must have shown, because he leaned closer, his grip tightening on her jaw. “Second—whatever we are, whatever this is? I’m still figuring it out, too. So if I’m going to give you the space you deserve to sort yourself out, then you can damn well give it to me.”

🦅🧝🏼‍♀️🫦

“You cannot pick and choose what parts of her to love.” He pitied Chaol, he realized. His heart hurt for his friend, for all that Chaol had surely been realizing these past few months. “Just as you cannot pick which parts of me you accept.”

Dorian to Chaol about 🧝🏼‍♀️

“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.”

Dorian to Chaol

But he had seen her—seen glimpses of the person beneath, regardless of name or title. And he knew, deep down, that she had not blinked at his magic but rather understood that burden, and that fear. She had not walked away or wished him to be anything but what he was.

Dorian about 🧝🏼‍♀️

“I’ve already made my decision about her. And when the time comes, regardless of whether you are here or in Anielle, I hope your choice is the same as mine.”

Dorian about 🧝🏼‍♀️

Murtaugh turned to Aedion. “Answer me truthfully, boy: do you know who General Narrok is?”

“Call me boy again,” Aedion said with lethal calm, holding the old man’s stare, “and you’ll find yourself back squatting in shanties and sewers.”

🧔🏼‍♀️😤🫦

Aedion gave him a slow, vicious smile, and then, almost too fast to register, the general was in his face, arms braced on the wings of the chair. Chaol wondered if Aedion would strike him, or kill him, as the general’s features turned more lupine than he’d ever seen them, nose crinkled, teeth exposed. Aedion said, “When your men have died around you, when you have seen your women unforgivably hurt, when you have watched droves of orphaned children starve to death in the streets of your city, then you can talk to me about sparing innocent lives. Until then, the fact remains, Captain, that you have not picked a side because you are still a boy, and you are still afraid. Not of losing innocent lives, but of losing whatever dream it is you’re clinging to. Your prince has moved on, my queen has moved on. But you have not. And it will cost you in the end.”

🧔🏼‍♀️😤🫦

Maypoles would be raised, hawthorn bushes decorated—that was about as much as the king would allow. There would be no small gifts left at crossroads for the Little Folk. The king permitted the bare bones only, with the focus squarely on the gods and planting for the harvest. Not a hint or whisper of magic. Bonfires would be ignited and a few brave souls would jump across for luck, to ward off evil, to ensure a good crop—whatever they hoped would come of it. As a child, she had run rampant through the field before the gates of Orynth, the thousand bonfires burning like the lights of the invading army that would too soon be encamped around the white city.

Beltane festival 🏰🌳🌱🪵🍃

It was her night, her mother had said—a night when a fire-bearing girl had nothing to fear, no powers to hide. Aelin Fireheart, people had whispered as she bounded past, embers streaming from her like ribbons, Aedion and a few of her more lethal court members trailing as indulgent guards. Aelin of the Wildfire.

🧝🏼‍♀️ lore

she felt her fire and the music meld and pulse against her bones. The music was a tapestry woven of light and dark and color, building delicate links in a chain that latched on to her heart and spread out into the world, binding her to it, connecting everything.

🧝🏼‍♀️🎼

The Wyrdmarks were—were a way of harnessing those threads, of weaving and binding the essence of things. Magic could do the same, and from her power, from her imagination and will and core, she could create and shape.

🧝🏼‍♀️🌳🌱🪵🍃

Curled as she was against her knees, he could see the whole expanse of ruined flesh, each scar from the lashings. “Who did that do to you?”

🦅😤🫦

“How long?” he asked after a moment. She braced herself for the pity, but his face was so carefully blank—no, not blank. Calm with lethal rage.

🦅😤🫦

when he’d seen it, his heart had clean stopped—and for a moment, there had been an overwhelming silence in his mind. He felt his magic and his warrior’s instincts honing into a lethal combination the longer he stared—howling to rip apart the people who had done that with his bare hands.

🦅😤🫦

In the flickering dark, he said roughly, “You’re staying with me from now on.”

🦅😤🫦🫶🏼🧝🏼‍♀️

“I don’t want your pity.” “This is not pity. Maeve decided not to tell me what happened to you. You have to know that I—I wasn’t aware you had—” She slid an arm across the bed to grasp his hand. She knew that if she wanted to, she could strike him a wound so deep it would fracture him. “I knew. At first, I was afraid you’d mock me if I told you, and I would kill you for it. Then I didn’t want you to pity me. And more than any of that, I didn’t want you to think it was ever an excuse.” “Like a good soldier,” he said. She had to look away for a moment to keep from letting him see just what that meant to her. He took a long breath that made his broad chest expand. “Tell me how you were sent there—and how you got out.”

🧝🏼‍♀️❤️‍🩹🦅

She yawned, and Rowan rubbed his eyes, his other hand still in hers. But he didn’t let go. And when she awoke before dawn, warm and safe and rested, Rowan was still holding her hand, clasped to his chest. Something molten rushed through her, pouring over every crack and fracture still left gaping and open. Not to hurt or mar—but to weld. To forge.

🦅❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹🧝🏼‍♀️🫶🏼 🧝🏼‍♀️ healing after telling 🦅 of her story

But if she didn’t know better, she’d say he was fussing.

🦅🥹

Emrys and Luca visited once to see if she was alive, took one look at Rowan’s stone-cold face, heard the ripple of a growl, and took off, saying she was in more than competent hands and promising to come back when she was feeling better.

“You know,” Celaena said, propped in bed with her fourth mug of tea of the day, “I highly doubt anyone is going to attack me now, if they’ve already put up with my nonsense for this long.” Rowan, who was yet again poring over the map of the location of the bodies, didn’t even look up from his seat at his worktable. “This isn’t negotiable.”

🦅 fussing and protective 🫦

She leaned over to set down her tea, but he was already moving, so swift that he intercepted her mug before it could hit the table. He took it from her with surprising gentleness, saw that she’d drained it, and poured another cup.

🦅 fussing and protective 🫦

He reached for a slice of bread and a bowl of beef broth. “Eat this.” “It pains me to say this, but one more bite and I’ll be sick all over the place.” Oh, he was definitely fussing, and though it warmed her miserable heart, it was becoming rather irritating. The bastard just dipped the bread into the broth and held them out to her.

🦅 fussing and protective 🫦

She took the bread and the broth. While she ate, he made sure the room passed inspection: the fire was still high (suffocatingly hot, as it had been since morning, thanks to the chills that had racked her), only one window was cracked (to allow in the slightest of breezes when she had hot flashes), the door was shut (and locked), and yet another pot of tea was waiting (currently steeping on his worktable). When he was done ensuring all was accounted for and no threats lurked in the shadows, he looked her over with the same scrutiny: skin (wan and gleaming from the remnants of those hot flashes), lips (pale and cracked), posture (limp and useless), eyes (pain-dimmed and increasingly full of irritation). Rowan frowned again.

🦅 fussing and protective 🫦

“Well, there’s the carranam.”

The Old Language word was beautiful on his tongue—and if she’d had a death wish, she might have begged him to speak only in the ancient language, just to savor the exquisite sounds.

“It’s hard to explain,” Rowan went on. “I’ve only ever seen it used a handful of times on killing fields. When you’re drained, your carranam can yield their power to you, as long as you’re compatible and actively sharing a blood connection.” She tilted her head to the side. “If we were carranam, and I gave you my power, would you still only be using wind and ice—not my fire?” He nodded gravely. “How do you know if you’re compatible with someone?” “There’s no way of telling until you try. And the bond is so rare that the majority of Fae never meet someone who is compatible, or whom they trust enough to test...