Chapter 36: A Battle Against Motherhood

I blinked.

That was the entirety of my response. My mouth was open and no words were coming out of it, so I just blinked.

Fenna took the silence as encouragement.

"Oh, and you’ll want to start on your hips," she added, gesturing vaguely at mine with one hand. "Beastkin births are no joke, especially a first litter. There’s a squat routine, I’ll write it down for you, my aunt swears by it. Loosens everything up. You want to be ready, because I’m thinking five, minimum."

"Five what?"

"Pups," Fenna answered casually. "Five pups. To start. A fox-wolf cross is supposed to be gorgeous, and I’ve got good hips in my line, and you’ve got, well." She looked me over again, slower this time, and grinned so wide the chipped fang came all the way out. "You’ve got everything else. So, five. For now, anyway. We can talk about more later, once we see how the first litter turns out."

I continued to say nothing, because my brain had left the building and was standing in the parking lot.

"Anyway." Fenna straightened up out of her slouch, which took a while. "Good talk. Get some rest, don’t hurt yourself training tonight, I want you fresh tomorrow. It’s more fun when they’re fresh." She turned to go, got two steps, and then looked back over her shoulder, put two fingers to her lips, and blew me a kiss.

Then she ambled off down the stands with her hands in her pockets, whistling.

I sat there.

"...KOHAKU," Lily said, at a volume that turned heads. "What was THAT? What did she. Five WHAT? Kohaku? You’re not, you didn’t AGREE to anything, did you? KOHAKU."

"I need to go home," I said faintly, and got up, and went home.

---

Back in the dorm, I lay face-down on my bed for a while.

Then I rolled over, stared at the ceiling, and made the mistake of thinking about it properly, which is to say I remembered the worldbuilding.

Here’s the thing about being an author who reincarnated into her own trash. Most of what I wrote, I wrote for the plot, and the plot was about Lily. Lily, of course, was a human. So the human stuff mattered. Kingdoms, academies, love interests, the war. That all got used.

But I also wrote a whole pile of stuff purely because I thought it was neat, in the margins, for flavor, and none of it ever came up, because it never touched Lily. And a lot of that margin material had to do with beastkin.

I gave the beastkin their own everything. Their own customs, their own courtship, their own family structures, because old me wanted the fox girls to feel real and also, let’s be honest, thought it was hot.

And I remember, now, lying on this bed, exactly what I wrote about wolf-clan courtship, because I wrote three paragraphs of it for a side character who got cut.

Wolves court by declaration. You announce your intent, publicly, in front of witnesses, and then you settle it through a contest of some kind, and beastkin society treats the outcome of that contest as binding, and a "harem" in wolf-clan terms isn’t a euphemism, it’s a documented household structure with a whole set of rights and obligations attached, and the person who wins the contest has the standing to formalize it, and—

[Oh my fucking god, I gave them all of that. I gave them binding courtship duels. And I made it apply to any beastkin, because I never once imagined it would matter, because in the novel the only person it could possibly matter to was a background wolf who got cut in editing. But I’m a beastkin now. I’m a fox. Fenna’s a wolf. She declared, publicly, in front of the entire stands, with witnesses, and tomorrow we fight, and if she wins that fight, then as far as an enormous chunk of this continent’s population is culturally concerned, I am... I’m...]

I sat bolt upright.

[I’M NOT READY TO BE A MOTHER!!!]

I was silent but in my heart the declaration was loud enough to shake trees.

[I don’t know anything about kids! I’ve never held a baby! I killed a houseplant in my first life! I forget to eat! I sleep until noon! I cannot be responsible for five small living creatures, I can barely be responsible for the weasel, and the weasel does most of the work in our relationship!]

The weasel, on the pillow, opened one eye at me.

[And FIVE. She said five to START. What kind of a number is five to start!? Do you know what my body would go through? Fenna’s talking about squat routines like this is a settled matter, like the only open question is my hip flexibility, and I’m over here realizing I don’t even know if fox-wolf pups come out as foxes or wolves or some third thing, because I NEVER WROTE THAT DOWN, I left it in the margins as an exercise for the reader and now I’M the reader-]

I put my hands over my face.

[Okay. Okay. Priorities. Let’s re-examine the priorities. Priority one, previously, was: win the Duel Festival, take the Champion’s Benediction, hand the divine core to Lily so she survives the Calamity Queen in four years and the world doesn’t end. That’s still important. Obviously. The world. The war. Very important. But...]

I lowered my hands and looked at the ceiling with the grim focus of a woman who had finally identified her true enemy.

[But tomorrow, before any of that, I have to beat Fenna Greywild. Not for the bracket. Not for the core. Not for the continent. I have to beat her so I don’t become a mom!!!]

The weasel padded up onto my chest and loafed there, warm and unbothered, radiating the calm of a creature with no reproductive obligations whatsoever.

[Forget the festival,] I thought, staring into the dark. [Forget the war. Forget the Benediction, forget the plot, forget all of it. This is a battle against motherhood. And I am going to win.]