Throne of Glass

The elaborate competition to become the King of Adarlan's Champion comes down to Celaena Sardothien facing Cain, the brutal fighter sponsored by Duke Perrington, in the final match. Over the course of the contest, competitors have been dying mysteriously, and Celaena discovers the cause: Cain has been using Wyrdmarks, remnants of banned magic, to summon a monstrous creature through a portal linked to the castle's clock tower. The creature corners her in the castle's secret passages; she retrieves the ancient king's sword, Damaris, from a hidden tomb and kills the beast, though not before it bites her. Princess Nehemia, using Wyrd magic she has kept hidden, heals the wound and saves her life.

Before the deciding duel with Cain, Lady Kaltain Rompier poisons Celaena's drink at the urging of Duke Perrington and the king himself, hoping to guarantee Cain's win. Weakened and disoriented in the ring, Celaena is aided again by Nehemia, who summons the spirit of the long-dead Queen Elena to draw the poison from her body. Restored, Celaena defeats Cain and is declared the King's Champion. In defeat, Cain lunges to kill her, but Chaol Westfall, the Captain of the Guard, kills him first, shaken but resolved that it was the right choice.

In the aftermath, the tangled feelings among Celaena, Dorian, and Chaol come to a head. Dorian finds Celaena and Chaol in an embrace and senses there is more between them than either has admitted. Celaena tells Dorian that she cannot continue a romance with him while bound to serve as King's Champion; he wants to keep seeing her secretly, but she insists on simply remaining friends, and he accepts this. When Chaol later comes looking for Dorian to apologize for what he interrupted, Celaena tells him plainly that things with Dorian are over, leaving her bond with Chaol charged with unspoken possibility.

The book closes with Celaena signing the king's contract to formally become his Champion. The king makes clear that her cooperation is not optional: if she fails to serve him faithfully, he will have Chaol, Nehemia, or Nehemia's family harmed. In exchange for four years of loyal service carrying out his will, she is promised her eventual freedom. The larger mystery Queen Elena warned her about — the corrupted magic, the opened portal, and the greater evil stirring behind the king's throne — remains unresolved as Celaena steps into her new, precarious role.

As Crown of Midnight begins, Celaena Sardothien has just won a brutal royal competition and become the King's Champion of Adarlan, the tyrannical kingdom that conquered her homeland and outlawed magic a decade earlier. She spent the prior year enduring hard labor in the Endovier slave camp before Chaol Westfall, Captain of the Guard, brought her to the castle at the request of Crown Prince Dorian Havilliard, who needed a competitor to win the contest on his behalf. She competed under the alias Lillian Gordaina to hide her true identity as the infamous assassin trained since childhood by Arobynn Hamel, after her parents were murdered when she was eight. Her beloved fellow assassin, Sam Cortland, was killed before her imprisonment, a loss she still carries.

During the competition, Celaena formed a close friendship with Princess Nehemia Ytger of Eyllwe, trading language lessons for lessons in Wyrdmarks, remnants of the old magic. She also grew close to both Dorian and Chaol, developing romantic tension with each. Cain, a rival competitor backed by Duke Perrington, turned out to be using dark magic to summon a monstrous creature into the castle through a portal tied to the clock tower; the creature killed several competitors before Celaena destroyed it with the ancient sword Damaris, aided by Nehemia's secret healing magic. The ghost of Queen Elena, an ancestor of Adarlan's original royal line, appeared to Celaena multiple times warning her that something evil beyond the portal threatens the world and that she has a special role to play in stopping it — a thread left open.

In the final duel against Cain, Lady Kaltain Rompier drugged Celaena's drink on orders from Duke Perrington and the king, but Nehemia's magic (channeling Elena) purged the poison in time for Celaena to win. When Cain tried to kill her afterward, Chaol killed him. In the story's final turns, Celaena ended her budding romance with Dorian, choosing to stay only friends, while her bond with Chaol deepened, left unresolved and charged. She then signed the king's contract, agreeing to serve as his Champion for four years in exchange for eventual freedom — under explicit threat that the king will harm Chaol, Nehemia, or Nehemia's family if she doesn't comply.

Going into the next book, Celaena is now bound in service to a king she despises, forced to carry out his violent commands while secretly hoping to undermine him. Her friendship with Nehemia, her unresolved feelings for both Dorian and Chaol, the mystery of the Wyrdmarks and the opened portal, and Elena's cryptic warnings about a larger evil tied to Adarlan's magic-suppressing king are all live threads carried forward.