“Don’t let them make you feel like shit for being you,” he says. It’s a sentence with the weight of years behind it, but I don’t dare ask.

“Noted.”

There’s a pause, our shoes clipping on the polished stone floor as we walk through the entranceway heavy with precious gems.

“I like you,” I start. “For being you.”

“You’re the only one down here who does,” he says, his smirk lazy. “And the only one who matters.”

It’s a moment of sweetness before the bitter reality sinks in. The gems of the entranceway expand into solid emerald walls shot with gold, bands of lapis lazuli and topaz glimmering here and there in a trenchant pattern. I’m half expecting the council to be encased in glass like the High Witches, eerie and suspended. But thankfully there’s a stone table in the center, and the ancestor council sits at it in old stone chairs, their robes overflowing long on the emerald floor.

“For a moment, I was worried it was glass,” Fione whispers to me when she sees me staring at the floor.

I nod emphatically. “Me too.”

“Mind yourselves,” Lucien warns, and I look up to see the ancestor council’s frozen in their talks to stare at us.

I’ve never seen old beneathers before—just Malachite, and he’s young. The council, though, is elderly, their faces so heavily wrinkled it’s hard to see the slits of their eyes; still ruby, but with massive pupils, nearly as big as Yorl’s were in the Dark Below. They’re much smaller than I thought they’d be, too—human-child-size, like Crav. Beneathers must shrink drastically as they age. Their ears are just as long as Malachite’s, but pierced and hung with heavy garnets.

“Who approaches the durance of the ancestors?” the elderly beneather at the head of the table croaks. Despite how small he is, his voice booms like a drum in the near-empty room. Lysulli steps up instantly, making a rigid salute in their bone armor.

“Ancestor,” they start, “these upworlders claim they have information for the spiral. And one of them is—”

“Olt’reya Malachite,” Malachite says, stepping forward with them.

The ancestors at the table raise their wild white eyebrows, clicking their ringed fingers in their earrings as they glance at one another knowingly and unhappily.

“Outcasts return on punishment of death,” the head ancestor croaks out. “They have been torn from the spiral and deemed unusable. Is that why you have come? To die?”

I flicker my eyes to Lucien. Would they really kill him?

“I’ll happily put my head on whatever chopping block you’ve got.” Mal lifts his chin. “After you hear what my friend the prince of Cavanos has to say.”