Throne of Glass: the story so far

Arobynn Hamel sent Celaena Sardothien and Sam Cortland to Skull's Bay to collect a delivery from the Pirate Lord Rolfe, and did not mention until they arrived that the cargo was two hundred slaves. Celaena had been raised by the man who ran Adarlan's assassins and had never once been asked to do that.

She and Sam decided to steal them instead. They set a distraction burning in the town, cut the chain across the harbour mouth and put the captives on a ship out of it. When Rolfe closed in, Celaena showed him her face so that Sam could get clear, which meant the Pirate Lord now knew exactly who had robbed him and what she looked like.

They went home to Rifthold having destroyed a fortune of Arobynn's and made a permanent enemy of Skull's Bay. Arobynn beat them both nearly to death for it, and Celaena worse than Sam.

Still bandaged from the beating Arobynn had given her, Celaena was sent into exile in the Red Desert, and stopped overnight at Innish, a wet little port on the way south.

The barmaid at the inn was Yrene Towers, whose mother had been a healer and had been killed by Adarlan's soldiers, and who had spent years saving to reach the Torre Cesme in Antica without ever buying the passage. Celaena watched her be talked down to all evening and said nothing.

Then three men followed Yrene out into the alley, and Celaena put all three of them on the ground. She spent the rest of the night teaching Yrene how to break a hold, where to put a knife, and how to walk so that nobody chose her.

In the morning Celaena was gone, and so was almost all of her money, left behind with instructions to buy passage to Antica and go. She never gave her real name, and Yrene never learned who had paid for her life.

Arobynn had sent Celaena to the Silent Assassins in the Red Desert to be corrected, with instructions not to come home without a letter of approval from the Mute Master. The Master did not speak, taught by demonstration, and made her start again from the beginning like a child.

The friend she made there was Ansel of Briarcliff, exiled from the Flatlands, funny and furious and the only other outsider in the fortress. Ansel had been talking to Lord Berick, whose soldiers had been circling the place for years, because Berick had promised her an army to take her own country back.

She sold the fortress to him. She drugged Celaena and left her out in the sand to die, and the Silent Assassins woke to an attack they had not been warned about.

Celaena survived it, came back, and beat Ansel in front of everyone. Then she did not kill her. She gave her an hour's head start and told her never to be seen in the desert again.

The Mute Master gave Celaena the letter and enough gold to buy her own freedom from Arobynn.

Celaena came back from the desert with the Mute Master's letter and enough gold to buy her way out of Arobynn's house. Arobynn apologised for the beating, gave her presents, and handed her a job: Benzo Doneval, a merchant he described as a slaver, to be killed before he could close a deal.

She took it, and took Sam with her, and somewhere in the surveillance the two of them stopped pretending they were only working together. They were spotted watching the house and Sam got her out of it.

They killed Doneval. Then they found out what he had actually been doing, which was moving against the slave trade rather than profiting from it, and that Arobynn had known exactly what he was sending them to destroy.

Celaena paid Sam's debt to Arobynn out of her own money, which made him a free man for the first time since he was a child, and the two of them moved out of the Assassins' Keep together.

Celaena and Sam were living together, out from under Arobynn's roof and planning to leave Rifthold for good, and they needed money to do it. So they took a contract on Ioan Jayne, who ran the city's underworld, and on his second, Rourke Farran.

Arobynn had arranged that contract. Farran was waiting for them.

He took Sam first. Celaena found what was left of him, and what had been done to him had taken hours. She went after both men without a plan and killed Jayne, and was taken before she could finish it.

She was handed to the king's men and sentenced without a trial to the salt mines of Endovier, nine life sentences, at seventeen years old. On the road north she stopped fighting and stopped speaking. Then she saw a white stag standing among the trees, the old sign of Terrasen, the country she had never told anybody she came from, and something in her decided to stay alive.

Celaena Sardothien had spent a year in the salt mines of Endovier when Prince Dorian Havilliard pulled her out with an offer: win a competition, serve four years as the king's assassin, then go free. Chaol Westfall, captain of the guard, trained her back to fighting weight while she competed as a jewel thief called Lillian Gordaina against twenty-three thieves, soldiers and killers.

Champions began turning up torn apart. Celaena found passages behind her tapestry leading to a forgotten tomb, where the ghost of Queen Elena told her something had come through the clock tower in the courtyard and that stopping it was hers to do. Princess Nehemia of Eyllwe became her friend and taught her the Wyrdmarks, the old written magic the king had outlawed along with everything else.

She and Dorian became lovers, briefly, while Chaol watched and said nothing. The killer was Cain, the enormous soldier out of Duke Perrington's household, who had been summoning a ridderak through a Wyrdgate and feeding it competitors. Celaena killed the creature with Damaris, the sword from Gavin's tomb, and Nehemia used Wyrdmarks to heal her.

Kaltain Rompier, acting for Perrington, poisoned Celaena's drink before the final duel. Nehemia's marks and Elena's intervention burned it out of her in time. She beat Cain, and when he lunged for her afterwards Chaol put a sword through him.

Celaena signed the contract and became King's Champion. She let Dorian go and turned towards Chaol, and the king made plain that failure would cost the people she cared about first.

Celaena spent her year as King's Champion sparing everyone she was sent to kill, faking the deaths and moving the targets out of Adarlan while Chaol looked the other way. Then the king handed her Archer Finn, a courtesan running a rebel movement built around finding Aelin Galathynius, the lost heir of Terrasen.

She and Chaol became lovers. It lasted about as long as good news usually did. Archer had Chaol taken to draw her out, then told her Nehemia had been part of the rebellion and had been pushed out of it a week earlier. Celaena got back to the castle and found Nehemia butchered in her rooms. She went for Chaol's throat, blaming his guards, and only Dorian's magic, ice thrown out of him without warning, stopped her killing him.

Following the Wyrdmarks, she learned there were three Wyrdkeys that opened the gate between worlds, and that the king had found at least one of them long ago. Nehemia, reached through a portal, told her the death had been chosen and necessary. Archer turned up to gloat that he had arranged the murder himself, to aim Celaena at Chaol and the king. She killed him for it.

Chaol had her sent to Wendlyn believing he was saving her life. She told him everything first, the keys, the creature under the library, the shape of whatever the king was building, and left him a riddle about the last truth of all. He worked it out too late to stop her sailing: Celaena Sardothien was Aelin Ashryver Galathynius, the queen Terrasen had been waiting ten years to find.

Aelin drank and gambled her way through Varese until Rowan Whitethorn, a Fae warrior sworn to Queen Maeve, hauled her up a mountain to earn her answers. Maeve wanted proof she could still hold her fire before she would say anything about the Wyrdkeys. Months of brutal training followed, and the magic came back, and so did the woman underneath it.

Maeve's answer, when it came, was that the keys cannot be destroyed, only put back through the gate. Then she had Rowan tortured to make Aelin talk. Aelin bought his freedom instead with a ring that had belonged to Athril, the man Maeve had loved and killed, and Rowan broke Maeve's blood oath and swore himself to Aelin as the first member of her court.

In Adarlan, Aelin's cousin Aedion Ashryver threw in with Chaol the moment he learned she was alive. With Ren Allsbrook and his grandfather they traced how the king had killed magic, three towers spread across the continent, and found he was breeding monsters on an island. Dorian, learning to hold his power with the help of the healer Sorscha, fell in love with her.

In the Ferian Gap the three witch clans were brought together to ride wyverns for the king. Manon Blackbeak chose Abraxos, the runt nobody wanted, took the crown of Wing Leader, and began, very slightly, to feel things.

The king demanded his spy. Aedion took the blame and went to the dungeons. Sorscha confessed and was beheaded in front of Dorian, whose grief froze the room and let Chaol run. Aelin sailed for Adarlan meaning to find Arobynn, take the last key and build a court. Dorian was left alone with his father.

Aelin came back to Rifthold and went straight to Arobynn Hamel, the master who had sold her to the salt mines. He told her Aedion would be executed in three days and named his price. Lysandra, the shape-shifting courtesan Aelin had spent years hating on Arobynn's instructions, turned out to be an ally instead.

Aelin broke Aedion out during a royal party with black powder and glass flowers, then let Arobynn believe he had collared her with a Valg ring, having swapped it beforehand. Lysandra killed him. Chaol, working with the rebels and with Nesryn Faliq, could barely stand to look at her, and she at him.

Dorian was gone, a Valg prince wearing him, with one thread of himself left, and that thread was the name Manon. At Morath, Manon found Yellowlegs witches chained and bred like livestock, heard Asterin's own story, and started disobeying her grandmother. Kaltain Rompier, burning out from the inside, cut a Wyrdkey shard from her own arm, pressed it on Elide Lochan and levelled part of Morath with what was left of her. Manon got Elide out of the dungeons and sent her north to find Celaena Sardothien.

Rowan and Aedion brought down the clock tower with hellfire and magic came back to the continent. The king, cornered, admitted a Valg demon had been wearing him for years and that Erawan himself was awake at Morath. Dorian broke through and killed his own father. The glass castle came apart above the city and Aelin held the falling glass off Rifthold.

Chaol survived, paralysed. Dorian took the throne and made him Hand. Aelin, Rowan, Aedion and Lysandra rode north, and three weeks later crossed into Terrasen.

Aelin came home to lords who would call her princess and not queen. Darrow told her to buy an alliance with a marriage and refused her Terrasen's armies, so she went and collected her own. Rolfe the Pirate Lord at Skull's Bay was bought with the deed to Ilium and a demonstration of what she could do. Galan Ashryver sent ships. Maeve's warriors Gavriel and Fenrys, sent to watch her, ended up fighting beside her.

In a witch mirror, Aelin and Manon watched Elena's memories and learned the price. The Lock that seals the Wyrdgate has to be forged, only Mala's bloodline can forge it, and it takes every drop of that life. Elena had spent the first Lock early to cage Erawan, and had bought a dead child called Aelin back from death to make the next one. Aelin told nobody and went on planning.

Manon's grandmother sentenced Asterin to death over a stillborn child hidden for a century. Manon fought her, went off a cliff and was caught by Abraxos. The Matron's parting shot was that Manon's father had been a Crochan prince, which made her the last Crochan queen and the Ironteeth's enemy.

Elide and Lorcan travelled north together and fell for each other, and she did not know he had already sent word of them to Maeve.

Maeve came to the bay with a fleet and with Cairn, having spent weeks bleeding Aelin's magic dry in staged skirmishes. With nothing left, Aelin surrendered to keep Elide alive. She was whipped, masked, chained and sealed in an iron coffin, and carried out to sea. She had passed both Wyrdkeys to Manon first. Her court was left standing on the shore with allies arriving too late and no queen to give them to.

Running at the same time as Aelin's last campaign, Chaol Westfall sailed to Antica with Nesryn Faliq to beg the khagan for armies and to find out whether the healers of the Torre Cesme could give him back his legs. The khagan, mourning his youngest daughter Tumelun, gave him a healer and nothing else, while his heirs circled the succession.

Yrene Towers had every reason to refuse him. Adarlan's soldiers had burned her mother. She took him on anyway and found that what was wrong with him was not only a severed spine. Valg darkness was knotted through it, put there by the late king, and every session was a fight with something that fought back. Chaol worked, and stood, and fell, and worked, and the two of them fell in love somewhere in the middle of it. He also worked out who the stranger was who had once paid Yrene's way to the Torre: Celaena Sardothien, years earlier, in a tavern in Innish.

Nesryn went into the mountains with Prince Sartaq and his ruk riders, found the stygian spiders Maeve had penned there long ago guarding a gate between worlds, and got out with the shape-shifter Falkan Ennar. Sartaq claimed her, and the succession.

The killings in Antica traced back to Duva, the khagan's pregnant second-youngest daughter, wearing a Valg ring Erawan had sent her as a wedding gift. She had murdered Tumelun herself. She struck at Yrene, Chaol took the blow, and lost everything he had won back. The healers of the Torre poured their strength through Yrene and returned it to him for good.

Chaol and Yrene married. The khaganate's armies sailed north with them, and Yrene carried the one thing the war needed most: proof that Valg can be burned out of a body by a healer.

Aelin spent months in the iron coffin while Cairn worked on her and Maeve waited for the blood oath. Rowan, Elide, Lorcan, Gavriel and Fenrys hunted her across the continent. Fenrys, still bound to Maeve, broke his own blood oath to get her out, which should have killed him, and Aelin bound him to herself to keep him breathing. Dorian went to Morath alone for the third Wyrdkey.

Terrasen was besieged at Orynth with almost nothing to hold it: Aedion, Lysandra taking whatever shape the wall needed, and Darrow's thin garrison against Morath's towers. Manon killed the Yellowlegs Matron, was crowned queen of all witches, and brought the Crochans back into a war they had refused for five hundred years. Twelve of the Thirteen made the Yielding and blew a witch tower and much of Morath's army apart with themselves inside it. Gavriel died in the fighting, and Aedion learned what his father had been to him too late to say it aloud.

Maeve was not Fae at all. She was a Valg queen who had walked out of her own world and spent millennia pretending. Fenrys ran Goldryn through her, Aelin slid Athril's ring onto her finger, the same ring that had bought Rowan's freedom years earlier, and it unmade her. Aelin took her head. Elide pinned Erawan to the stone with Damaris, and Yrene, with Dorian feeding her strength, burned him out of existence.

Aelin swallowed the three Wyrdkeys, became the gate herself and forged the Lock. It cost her immortality and nearly all of her fire, and she walked back out of it alive, with the gods shut out of Erilea for good.

She was crowned at Orynth. Elide and Lorcan married, Aedion and Lysandra had each other, Manon's witches had a homeland, and the Kingsflame bloomed across Terrasen for the first time in a thousand years.