Throne of Glass Throne of Glass #1

“You could rattle the stars," she whispered. "You could do anything, if you only dared. And deep down, you know it, too. That's what scares you most."

He was just a man--a man with too much power. And in that one heartbeat, she didn’t fear him.

Find the evil in the castle ... But the only truly evil thing in this world is the man ruling it.

"Celaena," Chaol said gently. And then she heard the scraping noise as his hand came into view, sliding across the flagstones. His fingertips stopped just at the edge of the white line. "Celaena, he breathed, his voice laced with pain and hope. This was all she had left - his outstretched hand, and the promise of hope, of something better waiting on the other side of that line. Moving her arm made sparks dance before her eyes, but she extended it until her fingertips reached the line of chalk, and stayed there, not a quarter of an inch from Chaol, the thick white mark separating them. She lifted her eyes to his face, and found his gaze lined with silver. "Get up,” was all he said. And in that moment, somehow his face was the only thing that mattered. She stirred, and couldn’t stop her sob as her body erupted with pain that made her lie still again. But she kept her focus on his brown eyes, on his tightly pressed lips as they parted and whispered, "Get up.”

"Mt name is Celaena Sardothien," she whispered. "But it makes no difference if my name's Celaena or Lillian or Bitch, because I'd still beat you, no matter what you call me."

"You bear many names, and so I shall name you as well. I name you Elentiya." She kissed the assassin's brow. "I give you this name to use with honor, to use when other names grow too heavy. I name you Elentiya, 'Spirit That Could Not Be Broken.'"

[...] what terrified him even more was that he trusted her. And he didn't know what that meant about himself.

"When I play, I'm not... for once, I'm not destroying. I'm creating."

"Idiot," she said, grinning now.

"Crazed criminal," he returned, grinning too.

"I can survive well enough on my own—if given proper reading material."

"Well, who wants to be hated? Though I'd rather be hated than invisible."

—and sometimes the absence of him hit her so hard that she forgot how to breathe.

It was easy to be mean, but it was also getting far too easy to be nice.

Through a clearing in the swirling mass, a cluster of stars could be seen. He couldn't help thinking that they gazed down at her.

Pure, fresh, warm sunlight. Sunlight that she could bask in day after day if she got her freedom, sunlight to drown out the endless dark of the mines.

She' d felt everything- the reverberations of tne key turnıng in the lock of her irons, then again as they loosened and fell to the floor. She could still feel the ghost chains hovering just above her skin.

She tried to think of music, tried to think of a celebratory tune, but Could only recall a solitary line from the mournful bellowing of the Eyllwe work songs, deep and slow like honey poured from a jar: And go home at last..

Celaena's lovely visions exploded like dust from a slammed book.

"My freedom?" At the sound of the word, she saw a land of pine and snow, of sun-bleached cliffs and white-capped seas, a land where light was swallowed in the velvety green of bumps and hollows- a land that she had forgotten.

She could destroy the king as he had destroyed her

I'm not an idiot, though I was foolish enough to be captured, and I can see that this is some sort of secret business. Why else would you leave the capital and venture this far? You've been testing me all this time to see if I am physically and mentally sound. Well, I know that I'm still sane, and that m notbIO- ken, despite what the incident at the wall might suggest. So I demand to be told why you're here, and what services you wish of me, if l'm not destined for the gallows.