[b]Piripiri![/b]

“Don’t give me that,” Uusha says, and straightens under her own power. Her muscles are taut and trembling with the exertion. “If she’d grabbed your bound wrists and ignored your squeals, that’d be different. [i]That[/i] would be different. But you were unbound, everything was war and chaos around you, and the witch barked out orders because that’s what witches do. She made that call because I couldn’t drag you off to fight that [i]rotting[/i] knight. So let me cut to it.”

Her eyes are piercing. Wickedly so. Her body is as tense as a held bowstring. When she speaks, it’s with authority, as if being lectured by an older relative. “You serve the Dominion. Don’t fish for sympathy here, in this room, knowing what happens to me next. You can punish me, let me accept your anger and crush it between my teeth, or you can go and let it fester until your heart’s gone rotten with it, but I won’t pretend that you’re uniquely wronged. Unless you intend to tell me that your [i]owner[/i] means to let me go and leave my home, it’s just a cut. Just a failure on her part, and thus mine, and that’s the only reason I’d even offer to be your whipping girl.”

Is she right? What is her likely doom, Piripiri of Hymair?

***

[b]Han![/b]

“I should go apologize,” Lotus says. She sits with her hands in her lap, her body like a flower at night with its petals folded in on themselves. “I can’t believe I— that I made you think— I led her on, Han!”

Emli pours tea into a steaming cup in the Ember Stateroom, where you ended up pulling Lotus (running into oh-so-helpful Emli on the way). The tea tray slides up in front of the two of you as Emli loudly does not offer any commentary on whatever you two might be talking about.

“I just thought she was being nice, and— and now she’s going to think you’re [i]not[/i] nice just because I made her think— and I wasn’t doing it on purpose, you know that, right?”

When she looks at you, she’s trembling and so, so vulnerable. Like a flower being torn at by the wind, almost pulled from its stem. “Right?” She whispers, hands not moving from where they sit, clenched, in her lap.

Emli gives you an expressive Look that you are completely and totally unable to decipher, but it sure is saying something super loudly. What do you assume is it saying, o dragoness, o guardian of little petals?