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).