Fione steps up then, cane tapping on the floor so loud, it sounds thunderous among the council’s soft whispers.

“You will allow Malachite to walk free, or we will never tell you how to stop the valkerax coming for your last city.”

The ancestor council’s huge black pupils focus on her perfect posture and gleaming brown curls, studying her as she defies them, defies Malachite’s insistence and the world’s insistence that we sacrifice people to make things better.

I’ve never been prouder of her than in this moment. My memory flashes to her timid, tiny frame at the first banquet where I met her, and now, in contrast, she stands like an apple tree grown gargantuan, like a queen, like Archduchess Himintell.

No.

She stands like Fione.

“We know how to stop them,” she continues. “For good this time. And you will trade this information for Malachite’s total exoneration from your spiral. He will never be executed by you. He will be allowed to walk free in his homeland for as long as he lives, and you will condone this.”

“Insolent little—” an ancestor hisses.

“The spiral you have bled and killed and died a thousand years for,” Fione interrupts them like a glass cut, deep and precise. “This information can stop it. Forever.”

Yorl’s brow twitches minutely, but the rest of us are stone-faced. Yorl knows she’s not following the script—splitting the trees again won’t stop the spiral. It’ll condemn the valkerax to the Dark Below again. Not as many of them, but most. That’s not stopping the spiral—it’s simply continuing it. He thinks she’s making promises she can’t keep, Malachite and Lucien, too. They just have the court training to hide it.

But she’s not lying. She knows.

Out of everyone, she knows what I’m going to do.

And when I do it, there will be no more spiral anymore. The spiral will change. The beneathers won’t have to shoulder it alone—it will be everyone’s burden. Everyone’s fight. It may not even be a fight; maybe this time, without the Bone Tree screaming madness into their ears, the valkerax will be calm. Maybe this time, it will be different.

This time, we can try again—without using the Tree to control them. To control anyone.

“You.” The head ancestor points to Fione with one gnarled, tiny finger. “You will tell us, then. Tell us how you will stop the spiral—”

Lucien steps up. “Your Honors—”

“Alone.”

The shift of the beneather guards behind us is clear by the sound—bone armor boots stepping to us over the floor.

“Fione,” Lucien starts. “Will you—”

“I will, Your Highness,” she agrees without turning to look at us. “Every last bit.”

The plethora of guards hover, waiting without words, telling us to leave with just their towering body language.