The Assassin's Blade recap

Five linked novellas covering the last year of Celaena Sardothien's life as Adarlan's most feared assassin, before Endovier. Sent to Skull's Bay with her rival Sam Cortland, she discovers that her master Arobynn Hamel has gone into the slave trade, frees two hundred captives, burns the Pirate Lord's fleet, and is beaten nearly to death for it. Exiled to the Red Desert to train with the Silent Assassins, she stops in a coastal town and quietly changes the life of a would-be healer named Yrene Towers, then survives a betrayal by her closest friend at the desert fortress. Back in Rifthold she and Sam become lovers, take a job against a slave trader, and decide to buy their way out of the guild and leave Adarlan altogether. Arobynn hands them a last contract on the crime lord who rules the capital. Sam goes after the crime lord's second alone and is tortured to death; Celaena, hunting the man responsible, is captured, betrayed, and sentenced to the salt mines of Endovier.

Celaena Sardothien, sixteen and the most celebrated assassin in Rifthold, is sent to Skull's Bay in the Dead Islands with Sam Cortland, the rival she has spent years despising, to conclude business for their master Arobynn Hamel with the Pirate Lord Rolfe. The business turns out to be a slave-trading partnership: Arobynn has agreed to supply the pirates with two hundred captives. Celaena, who has never before questioned an order from the man who raised her, refuses to be part of it. She and Sam free the captives, sabotage and burn Rolfe's ships in the harbour, and put the freed people on a vessel bound for a friendly port, blowing up the deal and Arobynn's standing in the process. The two of them stop being rivals somewhere in the middle of it. They return to Rifthold expecting consequences and get them: Arobynn has them both beaten, and does most of Celaena's himself, then sends her away to the Red Desert to train with the Silent Assassins and earn her way back into his favour.

On the road south, Celaena stops in Innish, a grim little port town, and takes a room at an inn where a young woman named Yrene Towers works the taproom. Yrene comes from a line of healers in Fenharrow, all of them killed when Adarlan conquered it, and has been saving coins for years toward passage to the great healing academy in Antica without ever getting close to the fare. Celaena, travelling under a false name, watches the girl be worn down by the place and then kills the men who corner her in an alley. She spends the night teaching Yrene how to fight back, and leaves before dawn, having emptied most of her money into Yrene's bag along with a note telling her to go to Antica and become what she was meant to be. Celaena continues south toward the desert, still carrying the injuries Arobynn gave her and still assuming she will be going home to him when she is done.

At the Silent Assassins' fortress in the Red Desert, Celaena is taken in by the Mute Master, who trains in patience and restraint rather than in flourish, and who is unimpressed by her reputation. She befriends Ilias, the Master's son, and Ansel of Briarcliff, a red-haired girl her own age who was driven out of the Western Wastes as a child when a warlord took her family's lands and who talks constantly about going back for them. The friendship is the first uncomplicated one Celaena has ever had. It ends badly: Ansel has been working with the local lord besieging the fortress all along, and she drugs Celaena, betrays the Silent Assassins, and leaves the Master badly wounded in a bid to buy an army for her own war. Celaena stops the attack, and when she has Ansel at her mercy she gives her a head start instead, on condition that she never come back. The Master sends Celaena home with his letter of approval and a warning she does not yet understand.

Back in Rifthold, Arobynn greets Celaena with apologies and expensive gifts, and she takes both while trusting none of it. She and Sam are given a contract on Doneval, a businessman trading in people, and told to retrieve documents he is holding. Working the job together, the two of them stop pretending about each other and become lovers. Celaena also meets Lysandra, a courtesan of Arobynn's household whose debut he paid for, and the two dislike each other on sight. The job is completed, but it exposes how thoroughly Arobynn manages the people around him and how much he has been arranging behind Celaena's back, including the beatings and the exile. Celaena decides she is finished: she will pay off her debt, buy Sam's contract as well as her own, and leave the guild and Adarlan entirely. She tells Arobynn so, and he agrees to a price with a graciousness that should worry her more than it does.

Celaena and Sam take an apartment together and plan to sail for the southern continent as soon as the debt is cleared. Arobynn offers them one last enormous contract: kill Ioan Jayne, the crime lord who owns Rifthold's underworld, and his second, Rourke Farran. Uneasy but needing the money, they take it and split the targets. Sam goes after Farran alone, and Farran captures him and kills him slowly. Celaena finds what is left of him and goes after Farran herself. She is taken, beaten, and handed over to the king's guard, and is sentenced without a trial to the salt mines of Endovier, where prisoners last months. Wesley, Arobynn's bodyguard, kills Farran in revenge for Sam and is killed for it in turn, and the message that reaches Celaena is that Arobynn arranged her capture to stop her leaving. At seventeen she goes into Endovier with nothing left of the life she had.

The collection ends with everything Celaena has been building for destroyed in a matter of days. She and Sam are days away from buying their freedom and leaving Adarlan when Sam goes alone after Rourke Farran, and Farran takes him and kills him slowly. Celaena finds the body. She goes after Farran to settle it and is captured instead, beaten, handed to the king's guard, and sentenced without trial to the salt mines of Endovier, a place nobody survives for long. Farran is killed in revenge for Sam by Arobynn's bodyguard Wesley, who pays for that with his own life, and the word that reaches Celaena afterward is the one thing worse than the sentence: Arobynn Hamel arranged her capture himself, to bring his investment to heel. She goes into Endovier at seventeen years old with no name, no allies, and no reason left to trust anybody, which is exactly where the first book of the series finds her.