The Assassin's Blade

Throughout all five novellas in The Assassin’s Blade, Celaena experiences poignant moments of self-reflection. These moments of reflection help her gaining a greater understanding of herself and a greater sense of self-empowerment. At the beginning of The Assassin and the Pirate Lord, Celaena bucks Arobynn’s orders to not risk capture to retrieve Ben’s body. This is a small act of rebellion while Celaena is still under Arobynn’s thumb. However, in Skull’s Bay, she pushes back against the orders from Arobynn that she deems unjust. She thinks to herself, “Back then, she hadn’t had any choice. When Arobynn offered her this path, it was either that, or death. But now …” (44). She realizes that she now has more power than she did as a child when she was an orphan relying on Arobynn for survival. She no longer has to go along with everything that he says: She has the power to make her own choices and push back against the injustices around her. 

In the final novella, The Assassin and the Empire, after witnessing Farran’s brutality, Celaena interrogates her own identity as an assassin:

Before Skull’s Bay, she’d done it all and had rarely questioned it. She’d pretended that she had some moral code, lied to herself and said that since she didn’t enjoy it, it meant that she had some excuse, but … she had still stood in that chamber beneath the Assassins’ Keep and seen the blood flow toward the drain in the sloped floor (385).

Here, Celaena takes responsibility for her own role in the carnage that occurs in the Assassins’ Keep. She acknowledges that she deluded herself into thinking that her actions were just as long as she put a moral code upon herself and told herself that the killing was not enjoyable. She realizes that sometimes she did like the killing, but now she no longer wants to take pleasure in the suffering of others. Since Skull’s Bay, she wants to use her influence and skills to make positive change. 

Celaena’s self-discoveries do not only relate to her ideals of justice and morality. Her feelings for Sam become more nuanced and complex. In Skull’s Bay, she’s shocked by the positive feelings that his physical touch elicits within her, feelings she describes as “warm” and comforting. While in the Red Desert, she also thinks that “it would have been nice, she realized, to have Sam with her” (177). This complicates her feelings of friendship, as it is not only platonic feelings that make Celaena want Sam, given that she pictures his face when she rejects the Ilias’s romantic overture. 

The Red Desert also empowers Celaena: She pushes herself to run further in the dunes when she wants to give up, she opens herself up to the possibility of friendship with Ansel, and through her kindness to Ansel, she earns the money to purchase her freedom from Arobynn. The Mute Master gives her enough gold to pay the debts Arobynn saddled her with by training her extravagantly. When he gives the gold to Celaena, the Mute Master says, “When you give this to your master, hold your head high” (224). The Mute Master gives Celaena the tools to empower herself to leave Arobynn. He does not force her to leave, but instead he gives her the choice, a choice Celaena then makes to free herself, which she discovers she wants after returning to Rifthold.