"HAAAAAAAAH???!!! I get that you’re in pain, but this... Prepare for reckoning, bitch!"

They met in the middle and the first handful of hair was seized before either of them had managed to sit up. Iris yanked Ayame’s ponytail sideways, Ayame grabbed a fistful of Iris’s and wrenched back, and they rolled across the moss in a tangle of dark hair and armored limbs, both hissing through the rite’s agony while trying to establish dominance through scalp damage.

The maids at the edge of the moss watched the spectacle with the weary fondness of women who had seen this exact fight play out in the training yard, the kitchen, the armory, and once even in the bath before breakfast.

On the far side of the moss, Vex managed to push herself upright.

The Hexwitch braced both palms against the greenery and shoved her torso vertical, red eyes sweeping the courtyard. Her gaze tracked left, right, past the writhing bodies of teary elves, past the tangled alley cats on the moss, past the maids, past Rosie’s trunk.

No armor, no visor, no smirk.

Her chin turned a fraction to the left, as if he might be standing just outside her peripheral vision and she had simply missed him.

He was not.

"...Hubby truly left us behind while we were suffering."

The pout arrived in full. Her lower lip pushed forward, her chin lifted to address the empty air above the canopy, and her head turned to the side with the precise angle she reserved for moments of peak yandere indignation, aimed at a man who was not present to receive it.

"How dare he?"

Under the low eastern branch, Natalie had Blossom’s head in her lap.

The dogkin’s blonde ears were flat against her mother’s thigh, twitching with each pulse of the rite, and Natalie’s fingers ran a slow steady path between them in the rhythm that had soothed her daughter since she was small enough to carry in one arm.

Blossom’s blue eyes were half-shut. The pain was still there, rolling through her in waves, but the waves had started to break a little shorter, and the small whimpers she had been producing for the last hour had softened into the quiet breathing of a girl whose body was beginning to accept what was being written into it.

"This reminds Blossom..." she murmured against her mother’s thigh, her voice dreamy and thin through the ache, "of the time Blossom scraped her knee."

Natalie’s fingers paused between the blonde ears.

"Mama kissed it and it stopped hurting right away," Blossom continued, her tail giving a weak wag at the memory. "But Blossom liked it so much that she asked Mama for more kisses even after it healed..."

A giggle slipped out of her, soft and fond.

Then her ears shot straight up.

"Ah." Blossom’s blue eyes went very round.

In her moment of carelessness, Blossom just told on herself!!

She tilted her head back in Natalie’s lap and looked up at her mother with the wide, caught expression of a girl who had kept a secret for years and dropped it in broad daylight. Her lips pressed together. Her tail went still.

Natalie looked down at her daughter’s upturned face, and the laugh that left her was low and warm and not surprised in the slightest.

"I knew, Blossom."

"What!"

"You limped for three extra days on the wrong leg."

Blossom’s mouth fell open. Her ears flattened in fresh betrayal, because the discovery that her performance had been transparent the whole time was somehow worse than the confession itself.

Natalie’s thumb traced a slow line behind one drooping ear.

"Are you pretending now too?"

The question was gentle, and Blossom’s lips trembled. She shook her head once, small and earnest, pressing her cheek harder into her mother’s thigh.

"No..." Her voice cracked at the edge. "It hurts."

Natalie’s hand settled between her daughter’s ears and stayed there, steady and sure.

"Hang in there."

Around the courtyard, the mood had shifted.

The screaming had thinned. The cursing had mellowed into grumbling, save for two certain delicate lips, which were getting more and more into it.

But for the others, the agony was still there, carved into every face on the moss, but the bodies that had been fighting it were beginning to settle into it instead, the way a cold swimmer stops thrashing and starts to float.

Kaelira had uncurled enough to prop herself on one elbow. Serika had rolled onto her back and was studying the canopy with a wry half-grin. Kitsara’s three tails had resumed their languid sway. Even Feng, who had been face-down like a dead fish and groaning since the ribbons hit, had managed to turn over and was watching the Iris-Ayame wreckage with visible amusement.

Emily caught the shift first.

The maids had been cycling water and cool towels since the rite began, but the head maid’s eyes traveled the courtyard once, read the change in the air, and decided the women had graduated from survival to recovery.

She turned toward the kitchen entrance with a nod so small only the staff who were watching for it would have caught it. Clarisse was already moving, and the twins, Anna and Beatrice, Quinlan’s first two maids, fell into step behind her. Within a minute the three of them returned with trays that carried more than water.

Sliced fruit fanned across lacquered plates. Warm towels instead of cool ones. A pot that smelled like ginger and honey, already steaming.

The maids swapped the old trays for new ones, and the first piece of honeyed pear that reached Sera’s lips pulled a sound out of the Dawnbringer that was, by any reasonable standard, far too pleased for a woman eating fruit.

Sylvaris’s arms had not let go of her daughter. Neither of them had moved from the hug, and neither of them planned to.

More minutes passed, and the pain kept fading.

Then the air split.

The warp gate tore open at the edge of the courtyard in a seam of dark light, and Quinlan stepped through in full armor with Lucille at his side.

He stopped.

Eighteen women looked back at him from the moss, and the faces that met his were not the tear-streaked, writhing mess he had left behind. They were tired and flushed and sitting in the wreckage of hours of suffering, but the eyes that found him were different from the ones he remembered.

Sera lifted her chin off her mother’s shoulder and grinned at him, bright and exhausted and proud.

"Quin! We passed!"