“Gaudy doesn’t even begin to cover it,” I agree, following Malachite past the guards and farther into the barred room.

“You have no idea how long it took me to get used to the way humans ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over the pathetically tiny gems in their jewelry,” Malachite snorts.

When we come to a solid diamond set of doors, Fione shows a guard a topaz orb dangling with red thread, and the guard nods. I watch in awe as the bioluminescent moss glitters in the diamond, in all its facets and rainbow crevices. Rainbow, like Evlorasin when it escaped from Vetris. Like the rainbow aura that clings to valkerax when they fly.

“It’s the strongest gem.” Malachite sees me ogling. “But beneathers consider it the unluckiest.”

“Because it’s rainbow,” I mutter. “Like valkerax when they fly.”

He blinks in surprise, and then ruffles my hair with a grin. “Smart is a real bad color on you, Six-Eyes.”

“What color would you prefer, then?” I sniff, but my indignation is short-lived as the diamond doors finally yawn all the way open, revealing a perfectly square room loaded to the ceiling with weapons of all shapes and sizes—Cavanos-style swords, Avellish spears, pneumatic Helkyris harpoon guns using the same jet technology as their airships do, circular throwing blades, jade-encrusted rapiers, swords and axes and knives bent over and around one another, tied together at the ends, so old and bizarre and foreign they might as well be indecipherable puzzles of steel and leather.

“Celeon belduri. How do beneathers even use this?” Yorl muses, strapping on a pair of bladed foot gauntlets. “You don’t have the auxiliary tendons for it—or the paw shape.”

“Nobody uses all this shit—we just like to collect shiny upworld things.” Malachite throws me a wicked toothed dagger just like his, and I strap it to my thigh. “You know, just in case the upworlders accidentally invent something real good at killing valkerax.”

“Aren’t you going to use the matronic, Yorl?” I chirp.

“The council said they’d bring it to the rendezvous point,” Fione says.

“Generous of them,” Yorl murmurs thoughtfully.

“Yeah, well. They’re not the High Witches,” I say. “They want us to succeed.”

“A white mercury sword,” Lucien marvels at a pale, gorgeous ruby-inlaid blade mounted on the wall.

“Not the real thing,” Malachite asserts. “An old prototype.”

“Still functional as a blade,” the prince insists.

“You’re better off with a piercing weapon with valkerax, considering you humans aren’t strong enough to cleave through their scales with something heavier.”

“Are you calling your prince weak?” Fione calls from across the room. She sits on a stone table, a polymath tool in one hand and her crossbow cane in the other as she tinkers with its gears and levers.

Malachite shoots a smirk at Lucien. “Yeah, real weak compared to me. He’s a flexible little shit, though, I’ll give him that.”