Crown of Midnight recap

Celaena Sardothien serves as the King of Adarlan's Champion, secretly faking the deaths of the people she is ordered to kill and smuggling them out of the kingdom. She grows close to Chaol Westfall, becomes his lover, and begins to hope for an ordinary life, while her friend Nehemia presses her to use her position against the empire and Celaena refuses. Investigating the king's power, she interrogates and kills an ancient witch and learns of the Wyrdkeys, three fragments of a shattered gate that grant their holder terrible power and which the king possesses. When Nehemia is murdered in the castle, Celaena's grief turns to a cold fury: she hunts down the killer, then the man who hired him, and learns that Nehemia engineered her own death to force Celaena to act. Celaena accepts the call, claiming her true name at last. Chaol discovers it independently and, to save her from the king, has her sent overseas to Wendlyn. She departs vowing to return and destroy the man who took her kingdom, leaving Chaol in Rifthold with Dorian, whose magic has begun to surface.

Previously: Celaena Sardothien, the most feared assassin in the empire of Adarlan, was betrayed, captured, and sentenced to the salt mines of Endovier, where she survived a year of slave labour. Crown Prince Dorian Havilliard pulled her out to compete as his entrant in a contest his father had arranged to choose a personal Champion, an assassin bound to the crown. Living in the glass castle at Rifthold under the false name Lillian Gordaina, she trained under Chaol Westfall, the young captain of the guard, befriended Nehemia Ytger, the princess of occupied Eyllwe, and drew the attention of both prince and captain. Rivals in the contest began dying in horrifying ways, and Celaena eventually traced the killings to a fellow competitor who had been using the old Wyrdmarks to summon something monstrous. She killed him in the final duel and won the post. The long-dead first queen of Adarlan, Elena, appeared to her from a hidden tomb beneath the castle and charged her with a task she did not want: to find the source of the king's power and end it. Celaena took the Champion's contract, four years of killing in exchange for her freedom.

Months into her service, Celaena has established a private arrangement with the people the king sends her to kill: she stages their deaths, sends the necessary proof to the castle, and puts them on ships out of Adarlan. Only the victims and their families know. Chaol suspects she is not being straight with him but does not push. At court, Dorian keeps his distance from both of them, and the king's council has grown to include the prince's cousin Roland and the ever-present Duke Perrington, who has taken up with the fading court lady Kaltain Rompier. Nehemia is increasingly impatient with Celaena, arguing that a woman in her position could strike at the empire itself instead of playing at mercy, and Celaena refuses to hear it. Then the king names a new target: Archer Finn, Rifthold's most famous courtesan, whom Celaena knew as a child in the assassins' keep. When she corners him, Archer begs for time and tells her he belongs to a movement searching for the lost heir of Terrasen, offering to buy his life with names.

Celaena gives Archer a month to produce his information, and uses the time to investigate what the king is actually doing rather than to plan a killing. She returns to the forgotten tomb beneath the castle, where the spirit of Elena, the first queen of Adarlan, and the foul-tempered door knocker Mort press her about the Wyrdmarks and about a power far older than Adarlan, and give her almost nothing in the way of straight answers. Nehemia, who can read the marks fluently, is drawn into helping her, though both women hold things back. Chaol, whose actual orders are to keep watch on Celaena, finds himself doing the opposite: covering for her absences, keeping her name off reports, and lying to the king's people by omission. Nehemia grows more insistent that Celaena is refusing a responsibility she will not even name, and the friendship starts to strain.

The long circling between Celaena and Chaol ends, and the two become lovers. For a few weeks Celaena allows herself to imagine an ordinary future: serve out the contract, take Chaol, leave Adarlan, live somewhere nobody knows either of them. Nehemia tells her to her face that this is cowardice dressed up as a plan, that a woman in Celaena's position could strike at the empire itself, and the two of them fall out badly over it. Chaol, meanwhile, is quietly pulled further into the rebel side of the city as he tries to work out who Celaena really is and why the king's interest in her is so particular. The court carries on around them, with Duke Perrington's influence growing, Kaltain Rompier sinking further into whatever he is giving her, and the king's attention increasingly on his southern holdings.

A travelling carnival stops outside Rifthold, and Celaena visits its fortune-teller, an old woman calling herself Baba Yellowlegs. She is in fact an Ironteeth witch, centuries old, a former clan Matron with iron teeth and nails. Celaena forces the truth out of her before killing her: long before the kingdoms of men, a gate between worlds was shattered, and three keys, the Wyrdkeys, were scattered. Whoever gathers them can open the gate, command what lies beyond it, and unmake almost anything. Celaena concludes that the king of Adarlan holds at least one, and that this is how he stripped magic from the continent and how he conquered it. The witch also confirms that the Ironteeth clans have been summoned south, though not by whom or why. Celaena keeps most of this from Chaol. Dorian, alone in his rooms, finds ice forming under his hands and things breaking when his temper slips, and understands that he has magic in a kingdom where magic has been dead for a decade and possessing it is a death sentence. Chaol, following his own thread, makes contact with the small Terrasen resistance cell in the city, led by a scarred young lord named Ren Allsbrook and his grandfather Murtaugh, and begins to understand that the rebels are looking for a person, not a cause.

Nehemia is murdered in her chambers in the glass castle, killed by an intruder while the guards Chaol had assigned were pulled away. Celaena finds the body. Her grief goes past screaming into something cold and animal: she attacks Chaol, blaming him for the failure of the watch, and would have killed him if Dorian had not stopped her, using magic in front of Chaol for the first time. Celaena is dragged off and confined, and comes out of it changed, quiet, and entirely focused. She sets out to find the killer, working through Rifthold's underworld with no interest in who she has to go through to do it. Chaol, badly shaken by what he has seen in both his friends, keeps Dorian's secret and starts putting together the pieces of Celaena's past that she has never given him. The court moves on within days; Eyllwe is told its princess died at the hands of rebels.

Celaena tracks the assassin Grave, who confesses under her hands that he was hired for the killing, and dies for it. The trail leads back to Archer Finn. Confronting him in the tunnels under the city, Celaena learns the part she has refused to see: Nehemia knew the attack was coming and let it happen, arranging her own death because nothing else had moved Celaena to act. Nehemia had known all along who Celaena is, and had spent the year trying to push her toward it. Celaena kills Archer and finally says the name aloud: she is Aelin Ashryver Galathynius, the heir of Terrasen, who was supposed to have died as a child ten years ago when Adarlan destroyed her family. She commits to what Nehemia died to force from her: destroy the king, free magic, and take back her kingdom. Chaol, working the same case from the other side, has already reached the same conclusion about who she is, and is terrified of it.

Knowing that the king executes Terrasen's bloodline on sight, Chaol decides the only way to keep Celaena alive is to get her out of Adarlan, and goes to the king to ask for it, paying a price of his own to do it. The king agrees, but with an order attached: Celaena is to sail to the island kingdom of Wendlyn, the last land beyond his reach, and assassinate its royal family. Celaena accepts the commission with no intention of carrying it out. Wendlyn is where magic still works, where the Fae still live, and where she believes she can learn how to fight the king and how to use what she is. She leaves Rifthold by ship, promising herself she will come back for the throne and for the man who took it. Chaol remains behind, no longer certain what he is loyal to, guarding Dorian's magic as the secret that could destroy them both, while Duke Perrington's projects in the south continue out of sight.

Celaena kills Archer Finn in the tunnels beneath Rifthold after he confirms that Nehemia arranged her own assassination, gambling that her death would finally push Celaena into open rebellion. Celaena accepts the charge, resolving to destroy the king, free magic, and take back what is hers. Chaol, meanwhile, has learned from Archer and from the Terrasen rebels who Celaena really is: Aelin Ashryver Galathynius, the heir of Terrasen, who was believed murdered as a child. Terrified of what the king will do when he learns it too, Chaol asks the king to send her out of the country, and the king agrees, dispatching her across the sea to Wendlyn with orders to murder its royal family. Celaena sails knowing she will do no such thing; she means to find the answers she needs and come back for the throne. Chaol stays behind, having traded away his own future to buy her passage, and now guards a secret of his own: Dorian has raw, uncontrolled magic. The king remains ahead of all of them, holding the Wyrdkeys and building something in the south with Duke Perrington that nobody has yet seen.