Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3)

by Sarah J. Maas

“I’ve known a few brooding warrior-types in my day, but I think you might be the broodiest of them all.” He whipped his head to her, and she drawled, “Oh, hello. I think you know who I am, so I won’t bother introducing myself. But before I’m carted off to gods-know-where, I’d like to know who you are.”

“I like the new scar, Captain,” he said, jerking his chin toward the slender white line across Chaol’s cheek. The scar Celaena had given to him the night Nehemia died and she’d tried to kill him—now a permanent reminder of everything he’d lost. Aedion went on, “Looks like they didn’t chew you up just yet. And they finally gave you a big-boy sword, too.”

She had debated asking him what the words meant, but that would involve talking. And talking meant building some sort of … relationship. She’d had enough of friends. Enough of them dying, too.

The aches and pains were soothing somehow. Not comforting, but … distracting. Welcome. Deserved.

It was the dark-haired woman seated behind the desk. Maeve, Queen of the Fae. Her aunt. And then came the words she had been dreading for ten years. “Hello, Aelin Galathynius.”

The blood rushed from Celaena’s head. She forced herself to take a breath. And another. Then she said in a too-quiet voice, “Aelin Galathynius is dead.” Just speaking her name aloud—the damned name she had dreaded and hated and tried to forget

“You want me to train only so I can make a spectacle of my talents?” Maeve ran a moon-white finger down the owl’s head. “I wish you to become who you were born to be. To become queen.”

Left. Nehemia. Right. You made a vow, and you will keep it, by whatever means necessary. Left. Training. Queen. Right. Bitch. Manipulative, cold-blooded, sadistic bitch.

She didn’t even have a throne, or a crown, or a court. Didn’t want them. And she could bring down the king as Celaena Sardothien, thank you very much.

What Maeve didn’t understand, what she could never understand, was just how much that little princess in Terrasen had damned them a decade ago, even worse than Maeve herself had. She had damned them all, and then left the world to burn into ash and dust.

It was not his fault that Nehemia died, not when the princess had orchestrated everything. Yet he had kept information from her. He had chosen the king. Even though he’d claimed he loved her, he still loyally served that monster. Maybe she had been a fool for letting him in, for dreaming of a world where she could ignore the fact that he was captain to the man who had shattered her life again and again.

He brought his canines so close to her neck that one movement would have him ripping out her throat. “Here’s an idea,” he growled. “I don’t know what the hell you’ve been doing for ten years, other than flouncing around and calling yourself an assassin. But I think you’re used to getting your way. I think you have no control over yourself. No control, and no discipline—not the kind that counts, deep down. You are a child, and a spoiled one at that. And,” he said, those green eyes holding nothing but distaste, “you are a coward.”

“We are the Thirteen, from now until the Darkness claims us.”

if he could find out not only how the king had stifled magic but also how to liberate it before he was dragged back to Anielle, then Dorian’s secret might be less explosive. It might help him, somehow. And Chaol would always help him, his friend, his prince.

He was helping. And he was willing to meet a horrible fate in order to keep her alive. He hadn’t left her alone. She hadn’t been alone.

“Shift!” was the only warning she gave Rowan. There was a flash of light to tell her he’d obeyed. Then she ripped everything from that well inside her, ripped it out with both hands and her entire raging, hopeless heart. As she fell, hair whipping her face, Celaena thrust her hands toward the skinwalkers. “Surprise,” she hissed. The world erupted in blue wildfire.

Badass as fuck

“Cut me open bit by bit, then took the bones here and—” “I can see very well what happened, and know exactly how it’s done,” she said, stomach tightening. Not at the injury, but—Sam. Sam had been strapped to a table, cut open and broken by one of the most sadistic killers she’d ever known. “Was it you,” Rowan said quietly, but not gently, “or someone else?” “I was too late. He didn’t survive.”

“Why was it different this time?” he pressed. “Because I didn’t want you to die to save me,” she admitted. “Would you have shifted to save yourself?” “Your opinion of me is pretty much identical to my own, so you know the answer.”

The witch and the wyvern looked at each other for a moment that lasted for a heartbeat, that lasted for eternity. “You’re mine,” Manon said to him. The wyvern blinked at her, Titus’s blood still dripping from his cracked and broken teeth, and Manon had the feeling that he had come to the same decision. Perhaps he had known long before tonight, and his fight with Titus hadn’t been so much about survival as it had been a challenge to claim her. As his rider. As his mistress. As his.

“Dorian, please,” Chaol said. “I’m doing this for you—I swear it.” “I don’t care,” Dorian said, staring them down as he walked out. “I will carry your secrets to the grave—but I want no part of them.” He ripped his cold magic from the air and turned it inward, wrapping it around his heart.

The first shred of Aelin’s court. The court he’d raise for her to shatter Adarlan’s chains. He could keep playing the game—for a little longer. “When she returns,” Aedion said quietly, “what she will do to the King of Adarlan will make the slaughtering ten years ago look merciful.” And in his heart, Aedion hoped he spoke true.

Those human bastards cut off your spikes, so I’m going to build some for you. Iron ones. Like mine,” she said, and flashed her iron nails for him to see. “And fangs, too,” she added, baring her iron teeth. “It’s going to hurt, and you’re going to want to kill the men who put them in, but you’re going to let them do it, because if you don’t, then you will rot down here for the rest of your life. Understand?” A long, hot huff of air into her hands. “Once all that is done,” she said, smiling faintly at her wyvern, “you and I are going to learn how to fly. And then we’ll stain this kingdom red.”

I want to go to the nearby town to question the citizens, but …” His mouth twisted to the side, then he shook his head at some silent conversation with himself. “But I need your help. It’ll be easier for the mortals to talk to you.” “Is that a compliment?” He rolled his eyes. Perhaps yesterday’s outing to the healers’ compound hadn’t been out of spite. Maybe he’d … been trying to do something nice for her.

She could die for love of this speed, this surety in her bones. How had she been afraid of this body for so long? Even her soul felt looser. As if it had been locked up and buried and was only now starting to shake free. Not joy, perhaps not ever, but a glimmer of what she had been before grief had decimated her so thoroughly.

Rowan raced beside her, but made no move to grab her. No, Rowan was … playing. He threw a glance at her, breathing hard but evenly. And it might have been the sun through the canopy, but she could have sworn that she saw his eyes alight with a glimmer of that same, feral contentment. She could have sworn he was smiling.

She tossed the leg right in front of his massive mouth and tucked her hands into the folds of her red cloak. He snuffed at it, his new iron teeth glinting in the radiant light, then stretched out one massive, claw-tipped wing and— Shoved it aside. Manon rubbed her eyes. “Is it not fresh enough?” He moved to sniff some white-and-yellow flowers. A nightmare. This was a nightmare. “You can’t really like flowers.” Again those dark eyes shifted to her. Blinked once. I most certainly do, he seemed to say. She splayed her arms. “You never even smelled a flower until yesterday.

“You smell like shit and blood.” Her grandmother didn’t turn from her desk, and Manon didn’t flinch at the insult. She was covered in both, actually. It was thanks to Abraxos, the flower-loving worm, who had just watched while she scaled one of the nearby cliffs and brought down a braying mountain goat for him. “Brought down” was a more elegant phrase than what had actually happened: she half froze to death as she waited for some goats to pass on their treacherous climb, and then, when she’d finally ambushed one, she’d not only rolled in its dung as she’d grappled with it but it had also dumped a fresh load on her, right before it went tumbling out of her arms and broke its skull on the rocks below.

“You left me,” she repeated. Maybe it was only out of blind terror at the abyss opening up again around her, but she whispered, “I have no one left. No one.” She hadn’t realized how much she meant it, how much she needed it not to be true, until now. His features remained impassive, turning vicious, even, as he said, “There is nothing that I can give you. Nothing I want to give you. You are not owed an explanation for what I do outside of training. I don’t care what you have been through or what you want to do with your life. The sooner you can sort out your whining and self-pity, the sooner I can be rid of you. You are nothing to me, and I do not care.”

You better grovel to the high heavens Mr

She didn’t know why it happened, because she had been so dead set on hating him, but … it would have been nice, she supposed. It would have been nice to have one person who knew the absolute truth about her—and didn’t hate her for it. It would have been really, really nice.

Why are you crying, Fireheart? It had been ten years—ten long years since she had heard her mother’s voice. But she heard it then over the force of her weeping, as clear as if she knelt beside her. Fireheart—why do you cry? “Because I am lost,” she whispered onto the earth. “And I do not know the way.”

But right where she’d gripped his forearms, the clothes were burned through, the skin beneath covered in angry red welts. Handprints. She’d burned right through the tattoo on his left arm. She was on her feet in an instant, wondering if she should be on her knees begging for forgiveness instead. It must have hurt like hell. Yet he had taken it—the beating, the burning—while she let out those words that had clouded her senses for so many weeks now. “I am … so sorry,” she started, but he held up a hand. “You do not apologize,” he said, “for defending the people you care about.”

But she was surprised when Rowan took a spot at the sink and helped clean up after the evening meal. They worked in an easy silence. There were still truths she hadn’t confessed to, stains on her soul she couldn’t yet explore or express. But maybe—maybe he wouldn’t walk away whenever she did find the courage to tell him.

Emrys didn’t back down. “And no more brawling.” Rowan met Celaena’s stare over the table. His expression yielded nothing. “We’ll try.”

“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.”

Oh Rowan baby

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 had nothing. No one. At that point, I hoped serving her might get me killed, and then I could see Lyria again. So when I returned to Doranelle, I wrote the story of my shame on my flesh. And then I bound myself to Maeve with the blood oath, and have served her since.” “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.”

“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.

“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.” She studied him for a moment, their breath mingling. “Deal,” she said.

“She was not becoming anything different from what she always was and always had the capacity to be. You just finally saw everything. And once you saw that other part of her …,” Dorian said quietly. It had taken him until now, until Sorscha, to understand what that meant. “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.”

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. I’ll come back for you. So he stared down his friend, even though he knew Chaol was hurting and adrift, and said, “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.”

“I’m sweating to death, I’m starving, and I want a break.” “Resorting to whining?” But a cool breeze licked up her neck, and she closed her eyes, moaning. She could feel him watching her, and after a moment he said, “Just a little while longer.”

His breath caught, harsh enough that she looked over her shoulder. But his eyes weren’t on her face. Or the water. They were on her bare back. 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?”

She noticed then that his arms were bandaged, and more bandages across his broad chest peeked up from beneath his shirt. She’d burned him again. And yet he had held on to her—had run all the way here and not let go once.

The gods knew he’d seen plenty of harrowing injuries. He’d bestowed plenty of them on his enemies and friends alike. In the grand sense of things, her back wasn’t even close to some of those wounds. Yet 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. Then he’d just left, hardly making it out of the baths before he shifted and soared into the night.

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.”

There would be more time to tell him of what happened next—of the Wyrdkeys and Elena and Nehemia and how she had become so broken and useless. 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.

“So you mean to tell me that whenever someone comes close to burnout, she not only goes through all this misery, but if she’s female, the males around her go this berserk?” He set down his pen and twisted to examine her. “This is hardly berserk. At least you can defend yourself by physical means when your magic is useless. For other Fae, even if they’ve had weapons and defense training, if they can’t touch their magic, they’re vulnerable, especially when they’re drained and in pain. That makes people—usually males, yes—somewhat edgy. Others have been known to kill without thought any perceived threat, real or otherwise.”

Oh can i please have one?

“Tell me which one of your little cadre is the handsomest, and if he would fancy me.” Rowan choked. “The thought of you with any of my companions makes my blood run cold.” “They’re that awful? Your kitty-cat friend looked decent enough.” Rowan’s brows rose high. “I don’t think my kitty-cat friend would know what to do with you—nor would any of the others. It would likely end in bloodshed.” She kept grinning, and he crossed his arms. “They would likely have very little interest in you, as you’ll be old and decrepit soon enough and thus not worth the effort it would take to win you.” She rolled her eyes. “Killjoy.”

Bet you could handle her just fine

So that is why I must be Celaena, not Aelin—because being Aelin means facing those things, and unleashing that monster. Do you understand?” “For whatever it’s worth, I don’t think you would destroy the world from spite.” His voice turned hard. “But I also think you like to suffer. You collect scars because you want proof that you are paying for whatever sins you’ve committed. And I know this because I’ve been doing the same damn thing for two hundred years. Tell me, do you think you will go to some blessed Afterworld, or do you expect a burning hell? You’re hoping for hell—because how could you face them in the Afterworld? Better to suffer, to be damned for eternity and—” “That’s enough,” she whispered. She must have sounded as miserable and small as she felt, because he turned back to the worktable. She shut her eyes, but her heart was thundering.