Celaena and Rowan spend a week traveling through harsh mountains, watched by Maeve’s wolves, before descending into the warm, magical valley around Doranelle. When the City of Rivers appears, Celaena is awed by its beauty, but Rowan has grown quiet and distant, while Celaena has been gathering her own strength for the confrontation ahead.

They enter Doranelle at night, passing through music, dancing, and abundance that make Celaena think bitterly of Terrasen’s suffering and Maeve’s refusal to help ten years earlier. Celaena reminds herself that she also abandoned her people for years, then steadies herself with the knowledge that she is a queen in her own right and will not bow to Maeve.

In Maeve’s stone palace, Rowan kneels before the queen while Maeve ignores him and addresses Celaena as Aelin Galathynius. Maeve demands a demonstration of Aelin’s power, but Aelin insists on first receiving the knowledge Maeve promised. Maeve confirms that the Wyrdkeys cannot be destroyed and can only be returned to the gate, but claims she does not know how to do that; she describes the keys as black, glittering slivers with the terrible, godlike force of multiple realms inside them.

Aelin pushes for more information and asks about the Valg princes. Maeve explains that Valg princes are bodiless beings of shadow, despair, and hatred who possess hosts, and that Brannon’s fire helped hold them back in ancient wars. Maeve also reveals that Brannon was not royal-born and that the mark on Aelin’s brow began as the nameless mark of an unwanted child, though it became sacred through Brannon’s legacy. Maeve says that in Adarlan, where magic is blocked, severing a possessed host’s collar by beheading may be the only way to kill a Valg prince.

Maeve then reveals the larger danger: the King of Adarlan can use the keys to open portals for the Valg, and with all three he could command them absolutely, even placing lesser Valg spirits into dead bodies to create an army that never tires, hungers, or breathes. Aelin panics at the scale of that threat, but a warm, powerful, feminine presence calms her and reminds her that the doom has not yet happened. This leads Aelin to focus on the fact that the king still lacks the third key and to wonder why Brannon hid the keys instead of returning them.

When Maeve asks where the keys are, Aelin lies and says she does not know. Maeve compels Rowan to reveal that Aelin knows where Brannon hid the third key but refused to tell him, then orders the twin wolves, who shift into Fae warriors, to restrain Rowan. Gavriel and Lorcan emerge with iron-tipped whips and begin flogging Rowan until Aelin gives up the secret. Rowan tells Aelin not to answer, and his defiance breaks Aelin’s restraint; she draws on the power she has been holding back, heats the stones until Rowan’s blood steams, and unleashes her fire against Maeve’s court.