Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass #3) by Sarah J. Maas

“Good. I’d hate to see your position compromised. His Highness has a reputation with women.” A little, smug smile. “And there are many beautiful ladies at this court.” And you are not one of them.

Sorscha nodded and took the insult, as she always did and had always done. That was how she survived, how she had remained invisible all these years.

It was what she’d promised the prince in the minutes after his explosion, when her shaking ceased and she’d seen him. Not the magic but the panic in his eyes, the fear and pain. He wasn’t an enemy using forbidden powers, but—a young man in need of help. Her help.

She could not turn away from it, from him, could not tell anyone what she’d witnessed. It was what she would have done for anyone else.

In the cool, calm voice that she reserved for her most grievously injured patients, she had said to the prince, “I am not going to tell anyone. But right now, you are going to help me knock this table over, and then you are going to help me clean this up.”

He’d just stared at her. She stood, noting the hair-thin slices on her hands that had already starting stinging. “I am not going to tell anyone,” she said again, grabbing one corner of the table. Wordlessly, he went to the other end and helped her ease the table onto its side, the remaining glass and ceramic jars tumbling to the ground. For all the world, it looked like an accident, and Sorscha went to the corner to grab the broom.

“When I open this door,” she had said to him, still quiet and calm and not quite herself, “we will pretend. But after today, after this…” Dorian stood rigid, as if he were waiting for the blow to fall. “After this,” she said, “if you are all right with it, we will try to find ways to keep this from happening. Perhaps there’s some tonic to suppress it.”

His face was still pale. “I’m sorry,” he breathed, and she knew he meant it. She went to the door and gave him a grim smile.

“I will start researching tonight. If I find anything, I’ll let you know. And perhaps—not now, but later… if Your Highness has the inclination, you could tell me a bit about how this is possible. It might help me somehow.” She didn’t give him time to say yes, but instead opened the door, walked back to the mess, and said a little louder than usual, “I am truly sorry, Your Highness… there was something on the floor, and I slipped, and—”

From there, it had been easy. The snooping healers had arrived to see what the commotion was about, and one of them had scuttled off to Amithy. The prince had left, and Sorscha had been ordered to wait here.

Amithy braced her forearms on the desk. “His Highness was extraordinarily generous, Sorscha. Let it be a lesson for you. You’re lucky you didn’t injure yourself further.”

“I’ll make an offering to Silba today,” Sorscha lied, quiet and small, and left.



Chaol pressed himself into the darkened alcove of a building, holding his breath as Aedion approached the cloaked figure in the alley. Of all the places he’d expected Aedion to go when he slipped out of his party at the tavern, the slums were not one of them.

Aedion had made a spectacular show of playing the generous, wild host: buying drinks, saluting his guests, ensuring everyone saw him doing something. And just when no one was looking, Aedion had walked right out the front, as if he were too lazy to go to the privy in the back. A staggering drunk, arrogant and careless and haughty.

Chaol had almost bought it. Almost. Then Aedion had gotten a block away, thrown his hood over his head, and prowled into the night, stone-cold sober.

He’d trailed from the shadows as Aedion left the wealthier district and strolled into the slums, taking alleys and crooked streets. He could have passed for a wealthy man seeking another sort of woman. Until he’d stopped outside this building and that cloaked figure with the twin blades approached him.

Chaol couldn’t hear the words between Aedion and the stranger, but he could read the tension in their bodies well enough. After a moment, Aedion followed the newcomer, though not before he thoroughly scanned the alley, the rooftops, the shadows.

Chaol kept his distance. If he caught Aedion buying illicit substances, that might be enough to get him to calm down—to keep the parties at a minimum and control the Bane when it arrived.

Chaol tracked them, mindful of the eyes he passed, every drunk and orphan and beggar. On a forgotten street by the Avery’s docks, Aedion and the cloaked figure slipped into a crumbling building. It wasn’t just any building, not with sentries posted on the corner, by the door, on the rooftop, even milling about the street, trying to blend in. They weren’t royal guards, or soldiers.

It wasn’t a place to purchase opiates or flesh, either. He’d been memorizing the information Celaena had gathered about the rebels, and had stalked them as often as he’d trailed Aedion, mostly to no avail. Celaena had claimed they’d been looking for a way to defeat the king’s power. Larger implications aside, 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 couldn’t stop a shiver down his spine as he touched the Eye of Elena and realized the derelict building, with this pattern of guards, positively reeked of the rebels’ habits. Perhaps it wasn’t mere coincidence that had led him here.