“Your crown is made of the people’s bones and hunger. Your cloak dyed red with their blood. Your robe is nourished by their tears. Your scepter bears the names of the people you serve.”

Ameru, Priestess of the Jagged Cliff, pressed the tip of her dagger into my throat. “If there is any fear or doubt in you, if your heart does not wear this mantle in openness and love, it would be better for all that you leave this place and your name never to return.”

I no longer felt the tiny bite of the metal, the trickle of blood slide down the hollow of my neck. I heard the voices of my mother, Lai blend into her mother, Ina of the Free Swallows, and her mother and her mother’s mother, an unbroken magic manifest in my every cell.

My voice filled the round space. “One is for my flesh and its despair shaped to shelter our people. Two is for the eyes I blight to sharpen our prophecy. And six is for the memories I surrender until we reclaim what we have lost.”

Ameru’s slate eyes found mine. “How do you enter this spiral?” I had heard some hesitated here to take in every initiate that stood in their fixed nodes along the Nautilus, but I had seen its curved and coiled sigil all of my life, its pattern fixed even with my eyes closed. “I enter the Nautilus with perfect love and perfect trust.” Ameru’s hand was steady on the dagger. “Then, step forward and join us beyond the veil.”