Fifteen steps to a boat he never got on.

THE KEEP

Raised in a house full of knives. Came out gentle.

Arobynn had two prodigies and one of them was Celaena, so Sam spent his childhood being the other one. Good enough to be second-best in the deadliest guild in Rifthold, and that was the ceiling, permanently, because of who was standing on it. His mother was a courtesan. His face could have made someone a fortune in her trade and she left him with assassins instead, and then she died. So he was raised by the man who would one day have him killed, in a building where every single person was being sharpened into something — and he came out of it kind. Not soft. Kind, on purpose, in there. We'll never be normal about it.

SKULL'S BAY

Sent to collect a debt. Emptied two ships instead.

They went to Skull's Bay as rivals, to collect for Arobynn, and found out the debt was a slave deal their own master was brokering with Rolfe. Two ships — the Loveless and the Golden Wolf. They emptied both in the dark, started a bar fight that ate the whole city for cover, and went for the Ship-Breaker so the freed ships could actually get out of the bay. That's the thing about Sam. He never had a crisis about it. No weighing the odds, no working out what it would cost him — he looked at it, knew immediately, and the rest was logistics. Arobynn made them both pay for it when they got home, and Sam kept screaming threats at him the entire time he was hitting her.

THE SEWERS

The first kiss happens in a sewer and we wouldn't take it anywhere else.

She had spidersilk sewn into his fighting suit. Over his heart. Paid for his and not hers, and never said why — and then somebody shot him and the arrowhead didn't reach skin. She'd bought his life before either of them admitted a thing. Then under Doneval's house they flooded a chamber with her in it, and Sam heard her screaming and got the grate up with two strangers and his hands as the water closed over her head. And then he told her he'd been in love with her for years. In a sewer. Filthy, wrecked, after the worst night either of them had had. Best first kiss in the series and it is not close.

THE LIFE THEY BOOKED

An apartment. The symphony. A bank account emptied to the last coin.

They got a flat. That's the detail that finishes us — after all of it, the plan was an apartment. They went to the symphony. He fought in the Vaults for money he wouldn't discuss and she hated it and he went back anyway, because leaving had a price and he'd decided to carry his half of it. Arobynn named his figure for their freedom and it was the entire contents of her bank account. Every contract she had ever taken. She paid it without arguing once. Sam booked passage to the southern continent. Two weeks of ordinary life, a flat in Rifthold, and a boat that neither of them ever got on.

AFTER

Everything we call Throne of Glass is the bill for this.

Arobynn's reason, when it finally surfaced, was that he didn't like to share his belongings. That's it. That is the entire engine of the series. Sam loved her, so Arobynn had him taken, and when she went after the men responsible she ended up in front of the king and then in the salt mines of Endovier. Books later she is still counting him. Heir of Fire lists him among her beloved dead, and she never gets over it — she just gets further away from it. And in Kingdom of Ash, locked in an iron box with nothing left, she says his sentence back with her own full name inside it. He gave her that line before either of them knew it was a goodbye. She was still using it at the end of everything.