She turned me back to the mirror and went out to wait in the corridor with the other guests.
* * *
Yuki stood at the center of the courtyard in council formal, holding the small leather binder that contained the marriage rite she had written herself.
I walked in between my two mates.
The rite was brief. Yuki had insisted on brief. When she handed me the draft the week before, she said ceremonies only got longer when the people performing them were trying to convince themselves of something.
In her view, we were not trying to convince anyone today. We already knew.
Yuki closed the binder.
I kissed Dominic. Then I kissed Rhain.
Somewhere during the second kiss, the part of the courtyard I had been most worried about all day stopped behaving.
My family had flown up from Houston the night before. I had seated my four siblings three rows back and told them that this was a clan ceremony, not a house party. They had agreed.
They had lied.
Matt was on his feet first, whooping loudly enough to bounce off the south wall and startle a bird out of the trees. Daniel was half a second behind him. Reyna out-cheered both of them. Anthony put two fingers in his mouth and produced a whistle several elders would be discussing for years.
My family had come a long way to make noise for me. They were not going to apologize to a single dragon for the volume.
At the front, Mama smiled. She had waited a long time to hear it.
And then, by some small miracle, Rhain and Dominic managed the physical gesture they had been threatening to attempt since November.
Rhain’s open palm landed between Dominic’s shoulder blades. Brief. Careful. Brother-coded enough to make several elders look down at their programs. Dominic’s hand came to Rhain’s shoulder a second later.
It lasted two seconds and there was no collapse of civilization.
A few older Ashenmere elders registered the exchange with a half-smile. They had spent a year watching the two males evolve from carefully not killing each other to dangerously close to family.
The reception ran to midnight.
Mama danced with Dominic. This was, by my count, the single most surprising thing I had ever seen.
She stepped on his foot twice and laughed at him both times. Dominic accepted it solemnly. He was conducting delicate diplomacy and willing to sacrifice one foot to the cause.
She danced with Rhain next. She talked to him in Spanish for the entire dance. Rhain had not spoken Spanish since he learned it in school in 1968. Mama did not care. She talked. He nodded. She talked more. At the end, he laughed.
When the dance was over, she came back to me at the reception table and said one sentence.
“Sigues siendo mi hija.”
You’re still my daughter.
* **
By the time the door closed behind us, the wedding was over.
My siblings were still celebrating somewhere downstairs and Mama had hugged all three of us twice and issued enough instructions to survive a natural disaster.
For the first time all day, there was no one else in the room.
Just us.
