Chapter 1934: Proposed

Quinlan Elysiar stayed on one knee on the boards of Jasmine’s sickroom, and the question he had just asked hung over ten women.

Will you become my empresses?

For one full breath, the only sound in the room was Gina Argentis, who squealed into her daughter’s hair.

Then Ayame stepped forward.

She came off the bedpost with eyes wide, body shaking.

"You asked properly," the samurai whispered in disbelief. "You actually asked. I thought you’d chicken out and just keep saying we were already your wives."

She crossed the last step between them, and both her hands came up.

Ayame drew his head against her womb, against the mark he had given her, and held it there. Her fingers slid into his hair and began to stroke, slow and gentle, as if he were the one who needed steadying.

She looked down at him with the tenderest smile he had ever seen on her face.

"I accept."

He closed his eyes against her and breathed out, and for a moment the Primordial Villain was only a man being held by the first woman who had ever chosen him.

Then the rest of the room went off at once.

"Hubbyyy!!" Vex was losing it.

All of them were.

"YES!!!!" A thumbs-up from Serika, green eyes wet.

"Blossom accepts!!" Blossom’s tail was moving with such speed she nearly took off like a helicopter. Then she went down. Rosie caught her by the back of her dress, propped her against the bedframe, and stayed there until the dogkin’s eyes opened again.

"Rosie can be an empress too?!"

"You’re the princess," Quinlan told his daughter.

"...Rosie will allow it."

"I can already hear my new nickname... Slutty Empress..." Kitsara complained, all the while wiping her tears. Then she began pondering. "No, wait, is it Slutty Empress Foxy? I’m not the only slut in the gang, but I’m the only foxkin... Hmm..."

"Y-yes," Kaelira said to the doorframe, and went scarlet to the ears.

"Yes." Aurora paused, then began crying. "...Yes."

"I gotta tell Mom!!" yelped Seraphiel. Then her eyes narrowed. "I can’t believe you started your proposal with a sex joke! Quin!!"

Lucille said nothing at all for a moment, touching her heart with both hands, and then laughed. "I was wrong. I do want a proper ceremony."

Jasmine came last, sitting up off her pillows with her hair down and her eyes still flickering between blue and gold.

"Yes, my love," said the Tyrant of Commerce. "Please treat me well!"

Quinlan rose to his feet, and the whole room rose with him.

"Then it’s decided. The ceremony is tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?!"

Eleven voices. Gina’s head came up out of her daughter’s hair.

"Before Rosie’s clock runs out," the Primordial Villain said, meaning the twenty-four hours left on his daughter’s blessing.

Once the barrier was down, and it was possible to leave Iskaris, none of them would ever be this idle again. He knew the mood wouldn’t be the same.

"It has to be now," he confirmed with a nod.

The panic began with Serika, which nobody would have predicted, least of all Serika.

"What does a bride wear?!"

She said it to the ceiling, both hands in her red hair, and the question went through the sickroom like a thrown chair.

"What does a bride do?" Kitsara demanded of the room in general. "Besides the obvious. I have the obvious covered."

"Is there a rite? Sera, is there an elven rite?!"

"Of course there’s an elven rite! There’s an elven rite for almost anything! But I never cared for them!!" Seraphiel had come off the bed with her hands up. "MOOOOOOOOOM! Help!!"

"Ah, she’s a lost cause," Aurora decided. "Then who-"

Every head turned at once, and every head turned in the same direction.

Lucille had been a wife once. An innkeeper’s, maybe, but it made her the only woman among the girls who had ever been anyone’s wife at all.

"Why are you all looking at me?"

"You were married!"

"To an innkeeper! What I know is how to marry an innkeeper! Which is to sign the papers and be done with it!"

The Bloodmonger was mobbed regardless, and went down under Serika, Kitsara, and Vex in a heap on the rug, still explaining that she had never owned a dress worth the word.

Between them, the women in that room had been heirs, fugitives, slaves, and sovereigns.

Every one of those jobs had skipped the wedding. They had knelt kings and ended a dwarven throne, and, one innkeeper aside, none of them had ever once been asked to walk down anything. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ

"We need a list," Jasmine decreed, getting out of bed.

She counted on her fingers, and her voice got thinner with every finger. "Dress. Rings. Vows. Venue. Witnesses. Food. Music. Some kind of... officiant? We have none of those."

"We have food," Lucille said from under Kitsara.

"Rosie will grow flowers!!" Rosie had climbed onto the bed to be heard.

"Blossom will...!!" Blossom thought for a long second. "Blossom will look pretty in her dress!"

"There is no dress!"

"Blossom will look pretty in the absence of the dress!!"

"Use your head, dummy! Without a pretty dress we’re just horny bitches in heat!" Kitsara screamed.

"Ahh!!" Blossom gasped. "Blossom needs a dress!"

Jasmine had gold already bleeding back into her eyes. Her mother took her by the shoulder and returned her to the pillows with the ease of long practice.

"Governor, you’ve been awake for a quarter of an hour."

"Mother, there are four apex predators on my road and a wedding in twenty-four hours and I have no quartermaster-"

"And no slippers."

"Hubby!" Vex surfaced from the pile on the rug. "Aren’t you going to do something?!"

Quinlan stood at the foot of the bed, nonchalant, while the most dangerous women on the continent lost their minds over hemlines.

Then he grinned.

"I did do something."

Before the Hexwitch could ask what he meant, Black Fang stepped through the sickroom door and took the corner. The noise had carried the length of the house, and she had come to see what was breaking.

The Venomborne Terror stood with her back to the wall and her arms folded, violet eyes moving once across the wreckage of the room: the pile on the rug, the governor being held down by her mother, the dogkin and foxkin having a meltdown while a certain century-old woman cried for her mother.

Her gaze reached Quinlan last.

He looked back at her across the noise, and the look asked her the same thing he had just asked the rest of them.

’Wanna join the fun?’

"No," said Black Fang.

The grin that spread across the Primordial Villain’s face was the same one he had worn reading the last line of his daughter’s blessing.

"Challenge accepted. You may escape your fate today, but I’ll put a ring on that finger of yours."

Black Fang gave that no answer.

But her eyes went down to her own left hand where it rested against her arm. They stayed there long enough that Ayame, watching from the edge of the pile, quit moving to watch her sister look at her fingers.

"I have my doubts," the Venomborne Terror finally replied, and took her eyes off her hand.

Quinlan’s grin only got wider.

"Master!!"

Vex hit Black Fang at full speed.