The favourite who cheated

THE SURE THING

Everyone in the glass castle assumed Cain would win. He assumed it hardest of all.

Cain came out of the White Fang Mountains, descended from the freefolk, a soldier in the King's army sponsored by Duke Perrington: enormous, ox-shouldered, shaven head gleaming in the torchlight, towering over the other twenty-three Champions. He was the favourite from the first Test, and Celaena — hiding that she was Adarlan's Assassin — held herself back and let him out-place her. On the surface he is just the big rival every tournament needs. Underneath, from the very first Test, something else was already feeding him, and it was making him bigger by the week.

THE BUTCHER IN THE CASTLE

Competitors kept turning up opened, with runes drawn in their own blood.

The bodies started early — Bill Chastain ripped wide open, then Xavier Forul and Verin found eviscerated, chest cavities emptied, a hole bored in the crown of the skull, faces shredded, Wyrdmarks written in the victims' own blood around each corpse. Cain was sacrificing his rivals to a summoned creature and channelling their stolen strength into himself through an obsidian ring — which is precisely why he kept visibly swelling over the weeks. And when Celaena read the runes drawn around Xavier's body, she understood the worse thing hiding in them: Cain knew exactly who she really was.

THE THING HE LET IN

The demon he summoned is the first Valg the series ever shows the reader.

Down in the castle's secret passages, Cain used Wyrdmarks to summon the ridderak — a Valg creature out of another world — and sealed Celaena in with it to be devoured like the others. She survived only by reaching Gavin's ancient sword Damaris from Elena's hidden tomb and killing the beast with it. This is the small, early rehearsal for everything Morath eventually becomes: Wyrdstone, blood sacrifice, a parasite fattened on human power. Cain is a foot soldier in a war that nobody in that glittering castle has been told is already happening.

THE SHORTCUT THAT LOST

Poison, a stolen demon, and he still ended on the floor with a staff at his throat.

In the final duel the King's people had poisoned Celaena with bloodbane, and Cain — swollen with borrowed strength — beat her half to death, taunting her about waking between her murdered parents' bodies. Then Nehemia summoned Queen Elena, who drew the poison out, marked Celaena's brow with a glowing blue Wyrdmark, and ripped the demon clean out of Cain, leaving an ordinary man. Celaena put him on the ground, disarmed. He grabbed a dagger for her back anyway — the King's order still in his hand — and Chaol killed him first. Chaol's first kill. All that reaching for power, and Cain dies a knife somebody else threw away.