Mended hands

Innish

She is working the White Pig Inn when four mercenaries corner her in the alley behind it. A hooded stranger puts all four down, and then does something stranger: spends the whole night teaching her enough to defend herself on the road. In the morning the stranger is gone, and there is a leather pouch on her bed — gold, a ruby brooch, and a note. Yrene spends it on getting to Antica and the Torre Cesme, and keeps the note in a locket for years without knowing whose handwriting it is.

The captain she did not want

Years later Hafiza assigns her the paralysed Chaol Westfall, and she refuses. He served the King of Adarlan, and Adarlan is why she has no family. She takes him anyway, and finds that the injury is not only an injury: something Valg-derived is woven into his spine, feeding. Undoing it means going into it repeatedly, which means going into him — and into what she thinks about Adarlan — over and over until one of those things gives.

The Torre, and what was under it

A young healer who looks like Yrene is murdered inside the Torre, and Yrene's research on the Valg is taken out of the library. Her response is exact: she has Chaol teach the healers to fight, which is the lesson she was given in an alley, handed on at scale. In the hidden library she reads the Wyrdmark texts Hafiza keeps locked and finds the Fae healers' origins and the shape of the Valg. Then she and Chaol go down into the catacombs and find Princess Duva possessed — and Yrene does the thing nobody has done before, and takes the demon out without killing the woman it is wearing.

The chain

Chaol is fatally wounded protecting other people. Yrene channels a healing through a human chain of Torre healers — an unprecedented working — and pulls him back. They marry quietly at the end of it and sail north with an army. On the voyage she finally shows him the note from the locket, and he recognises the handwriting: Aelin's, from the years she was Celaena, from an alley in Innish.

Unmaking a king

At Orynth she and Dorian Havilliard lure Erawan away from the fighting. He is speared to the ground with Damaris, and Yrene pours healing magic into him — pushing the darkness back and back until she can see the shrivelled Valg thing at the centre of it, and kills that. It is the only way he could have been ended, and it is not done by a warrior. Afterwards she and Chaol settle in Adarlan and she starts building a northern Torre, so that the next girl in an alley has somewhere closer to go.