Throne of Glass

After all, you aren’t Adarlan’s Assassin for nothing.

“My 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.”

He didn’t know why, but seeing her made him feel like a man.

I am Celaena Sardothien, Adarlan’s Assassin. If these men knew who I was, they’d stop laughing. I am Celaena Sardothien. I am going to win. I will not be afraid.

When she awoke every morning, she repeated the same words: I will not be afraid. For a year, those words had meant the difference between breaking and bending; they had kept her from shattering in the darkness of the mines.

She became all too aware of the three long scars down her back. Even if she won her freedom . . . even if she lived in peace in the countryside . . . those scars would always remind her of what she’d endured. And that even if she was free, others were not.

However, she faltered as she beheld the mounds of bone-colored rock at the far end of the compound, and the small figures going in and out of the many mouthlike holes cut into the mountains.

Work had already begun for the day, work that would continue without her when she left them all to this miserable fate. Her stomach clenching, Celaena averted her eyes from the prisoners, keeping up with the captain as they headed to a caravan of horses near the towering wall.

“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.

“I should hope not!” Celaena interjected.

“Your Highness,” Chaol Westfall snapped at her.

“What?” Celaena asked.

“You will address him as ‘Your Highness.’ ”

Celaena gave him a mocking smile, and then returned her attention to the prince.

She shifted on her feet as he frowned, surveying her in turn. “I thought I asked you to clean her,” he said to Captain Westfall, who stepped forward.