She didn’t fear the night, though she found little comfort in its dark hours. It was just the time when she slept, the time when she stalked and killed, the time when the stars emerged with glittering beauty and made her feel wonderfully small and insignificant.

The time when she has frightful nightmares about her year of slavery– what’s that?  Not even an inkling of a lingering concern?  Yeah, Cally’s ‘traumatic’ nightmare continues to be a trifling event.

And her ‘assassin’ job continues to look more like a movie ninja than anything else.

Cally sits in bed and mopes about the feast she’s missing, but as she stares in emoish misery at a tapestry, she notices it’s moving.  She looks behind it and finds a secret door.

Really, guys?  Not only did you fail to remove ‘all’ weapons from the room, you put her in one that has a secret door in it?

Cally does at least think it’s odd that the tapestry moved with the door closed, so something was going on there, and she gathers up some string, chalk, and extra candles before she decides to go exploring.  She even props the door open just in case.  Kudos, Cally.

The passage is dusty and clearly unused.  She comes to a three-way split, takes the middle passage, and finds it leads somewhere damp.  Turns out that ‘where’ is a giant sewer, right before it dumps into the river.  There’s even little boats there, since it’s supposed to be an escape route.

Seriously, why was she in a room that led here?  There’s no guards, and the only gate has an opening mechanism so it barely even counts.  She has a direct, unencumbered path to escape, which just makes Chaol and everyone under him look unbelievably incompetent.

Frankly, I’m even a bit unsure about this being a good escape hatch.  It’s a terribly weak and obvious entry point.  Cally thinks that it’s a forgotten thing, but a cursory examination of the castle by an enemy would reveal the giant sewer with the half-open gate.  If Chaol were doing his job, he should be thinking like an enemy and looking for weak points, which means he should have found this one and closed it.

But Chaol’s not doing his job; he’s babysitting Cally all day.  He was doing god-knows-what before she showed up.  Probably just playing cards with his buddy Dorian.

She briefly thinks about running, then decides not to because of the obvious reasons.  Better to be pardoned than a fugitive.  I thought we already went over this?  She decides to stock up provisions for an escape just in case.

She walks back, and when she comes to the three-way split, she wonders what else is down there.  Yes!  Finally, a bit of curiosity from her!  Or from any YA heroine, for that matter.  The left-hand passage has a weird breeze and purple prose ominousness, so I guess that leads to the clock tower.  Cally decides she’s not that curious about it after all and takes the right-hand passage instead.

That one leads to a peep-hole into the Great Hall, where all the feasting is going on.

Were these tunnels for spying?

…did that only just now occur to you?  It’s like the most common reason to build a secret passage, and that just now occurred to you?

Now even by your own definition of the word, you are a terrible, terrible assassin.

Although, it does kind of make sense.  She sees no point in listening to servants do anything except genuflect, so of course she’s never heard of any secret passages before.

We get exactly zero descriptions of this feast, despite it being a major holiday.  All we really know is that Chaol is there and so are a few other Champions.  The only people we know weren’t allowed are her and Cain.

even the pimply-faced Pelor sat near Chaol! A half-rate boy assassin!

Ever think that the ‘half-rate’ part is the reason he was allowed to attend?

Wait, wasn’t he Mr. Poison?  And he’s allowed into a feast?  aka, “event full of stuff that you can easily slip a poison into”?

She bared her teeth. How dare she be denied an invitation to the feast?

Where did you get this entitlement from in the first place?  Assassins aren’t usually invited to feasts in a normal run of things.

She notices Dorian there and thinks he’s still hot, even if she’s mad at him for not inviting her.  She then notices Chaol is leaving and runs back to her rooms, just in case he’s coming to check on her.

Instead, we get a POV switch to Dorian as he goes up to her rooms.  Only he’s doing it at 2am, and Cally is asleep when he gets there.

A book lay by her side, open and still waiting for her to turn the page. He remained in the doorway, fearful that she’d wake up if he took another step. Some assassin. She hadn’t even bothered to stir.

It’s nice when the book makes fun of itself for me.

Whatever happened to those squeaky hinges, anyway?

But there was nothing of the assassin in her face. Not a trace of aggression or bloodlust lay across her features.

…every time he’s see her she’s giggling and flirting.  What bloodlust?  We know she swears death on everyone for minor slights, but Dorian’s not been around for those bits.

He knew her somehow. And he knew she wouldn’t harm him. It made little sense.

If you ever find yourself writing this line or anything remotely like it, stop what you’re doing and go back to the drawing board.  All you’ve managed to say is “I need the characters to act like this, but I can’t be arsed to come up with a good reason.”

Dorian stands there in a sleeping girl’s room thinking about how much he likes her, which is just ungodly creepy.  She’s unconscious, asshole.  Daydream about her in your own room.  Fortunately, Chaol comes by and calls him six kinds of idiot and throws him out of the room.

You know, I kind of like Chaol.  He’s the worst Captain of the Guard ever, but he’s the only sensible character in this book so far.  If they’d just made him some random friend of Dorian’s, it would work so much better.

We switch to Chaol’s POV, apparently just to spite me for saying I liked him, because it turns out his berating Dorian was just because he’s jealous, not because Dorian was six kinds of idiot.

She was still in her clothes, and while she looked beautiful, that did nothing to mask the killing potential that lay beneath. It was present in her strong jaw, in the slope of her eyebrows, in the perfect stillness of her form. She was a honed blade made by the King of Assassins for his own profit. She was a sleeping animal—a mountain cat or a dragon—and her markings of power were everywhere.

There’s something deeply disturbing to me about a powerful woman being described as powerful while she’s in the most submissive position possible.  She is literally on her back, unconscious, and at his mercy, but the book tries to pull this shit on us.  Why not show off her ‘marks of power’ with…I don’t know, showing us these things.  Preferably while she’s awake. 

You know what would be a better marker of skill than the ‘slope of her eyebrows’?  Calluses.  You need calluses for most weapon or martial arts, because they protect your hands, so it’s not like she could even be scraping or lotioning them away, and then she’d have to try and cover them up with gloves to preserve her ‘Lady Lillian’ cover story.

Chaol goes in to wake her up, and instead of snapping up because someone is in her room in the middle of the night, Cally just rolls around like a sleepy teenager.  Chaol gives her a ring, which was a party favor being handed out at the feast, then lets her go back to sleep.

Next chapter, Cally has another dream.  This one seems to be prophetic instead of faux-traumatic.  She’s walking down the secret passages again until she comes to an old tomb with two sarcophagi in it, depicting an old king and queen.  The queen’s image has a wyrdmark carved in it, which for some reason freaks Cally out, even though she has no idea what the wyrdmarks mean or even what they are.  Eh, chalk it up to dream logic, I guess.

Cally gets generally freaked out for a bit, but she’s entranced by the queen’s purple-prose-ness and stays.  Finally she notices that this queen has Fae ears, so she can identify her as Elena, who was a princess of Terrassen, Cally’s home country.  Great, so not only is Cally a princess, she’s part elf, too. 

This freaks out Cally even more, because the tomb is…sacred?  Is that part of their culture, then?  She wonders why it’s not better cared for.  Is this more dream logic, or does she really think that tombs from thousands and thousands of years ago get regular maintenance?  Is that part of their culture?  Is she just really infatuated with the story of this royal couple, or is maintaining old burial sites actually a thing?

The king’s sarcophagus has a sword on it, and it seems to be important.  King’s name is Gavin.

Suddenly Elena shows up!  Her ghost, at least.  Elena explains that the gargoyles on the clock tower are guardians to another world and did we just slip into a different book all of a sudden?  Where is this coming from?  I guess this is what all that ominous description of the clock tower was leading up to, but can you really call it ‘leading up to’ when it was really just two random pages of descriptions?  Those two bits stuck out of the story every bit as much as this one does, so the whole thing feels like an extra plot line that got unceremoniously shoved in here.

Elena says there’s some great evil in the castle that Cally has to destroy.

“You must win this competition and become the King’s Champion. You understand the people’s plight. Erilea needs you as the King’s Champion.”

Dafuq is that going to do?  From all appearances, the position is something the current king just made up, and he might as well call it King’s Thug.  Why is it so cosmically important for her to get the title?

Elena declines to explain further, then gives Cally a protection charm and tells her to run because something’s coming.

Cally wakes up in her bed and thinks it was all a dream, but she’s got the charm in her hand and the secret passage door is ajar, so maybe it wasn’t even a dream at all?  She sits on her bed and wonders about what just happened.

Become the King’s Champion—she could do that. She was going to do that, anyway.

Yes, how convenient, that.

Call wonders how she’s supposed to destroy the great evil, or even what it is, but of course she has no answers.  Then she wonders if she should go back down to the tomb to look for clues.

…not tonight, apparently, because she goes directly from that thought to sleep.

Drinking Game Count:  Epithets – 7, Bragging – 1, Exclamation Marks – 16

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