The girls learn more magic while they have the chance, since Dahar's biding her time. They break the spell on A'at, who promptly becomes snuggly with Bid. When they think they know enough that it's better to confront Dahar than to wait for her to go on the offensive and risk hurting bystanders, they ambush her in her palace. There is an enormous fight, but they manage to break several important magic devices she's made (and the arch), and defeat her and her allies. The girls hesitate at killing Dahar, who, once deprived of her beads and her magic items, isn't an immediate threat. So they break the spell on Ikati, and Ikati and A'at do it themselves.

The girls mop up the few remaining magicians - they don't outright kill them, but they do turn them over to the populations they governed. They send the pagets they'd missed before to the ranch. They help set up replacement provisional governments and hang out in Datékaln for a few weeks smoothing over initial problems. And once it looks like things are running pretty smoothly - and they've been truant from school for a rather long time - they go back home.

The pagets vote to stay on Earth. Keeda's babies (a litter of three) are born: a red boy with a tan front called Tipko after his father, a yellow boy with a silver front called Ketet after Tipko's brother, and an orange girl they name Kaede after Rowan's grandmother. The girls have to decide what to do about the beads, all of which they now have. It is suggested that they could perhaps destroy them.

They look at Susie.

They decide not to destroy the beads.

Instead, they decommission the beads, turning them back into the normal animals they were made from, with the sole exception of each of the three beads that give them wings. Those, they keep, with the understanding that if any one of them goes rogue and starts stomping Tokyo or taking over island nations or anything like that, the other two will gang up on her and make that stop and decommission her last bead. The animals, they put in a zoo, which Kristi and Susie operate together - Rowan's not interested, though they give her a small share of the profits out of courtesy. The zoo also houses the magicians, including Kworil, who were sent to Earth instead of being turned over to their people - for them, it's not so much a zoo as it is a prison, and they aren't technically an exhibit, but if they want, they can go out to an area where people can look at them and talk to them.

In addition to the zoo, Susie makes her movie, which is somewhat limited by the reduction in her number of beads by the time they start shooting, but is a moderate success anyway. The plot and writing are fairly terrible, but people like Susie, and she continues to take secondary character roles in films for most of the rest of her life. In between, she makes brief excursions to Datékaln, where she picks up animals to add to the zoo (and checks to make sure that the Datékali governments are behaving). She hopes to establish a breeding population of fluffy domesticated thephrises, but is held back by laws about invasive species, and winds up just having a flock of them managed carefully within the zoo. Thephrises, it turns out, love radishes.

Kristi works at the Datékali animal zoo, and also helps pagets liase with humans as they gradually expand the circle of people who know about them. Eventually, she gets into a mid-tier law school; being a lawyer makes the liasing process go more smoothly. Many of the pagets get jobs and keep her on their community's payroll after it becomes embarassing for her to live with her parents. This takes enough time away from the zoo that eventually she and Susie have to let the staff they accumulate take care of the day-to-day business. When Bid and A'at get married and have children, they name a little blue girl the nearest approximation of Kristi's name that makes sense as a paget name ("Kitty"). Kitty's brother is named Tipko - it's a very popular name.

Rowan travels. A lot. Airplanes are not involved - she flies everywhere under her own power or Myaldin's, flagrantly violating international travel laws and magicking her way out of miscellaneous scrapes from assault to language barriers to cash shortfall. Then, when she's nearing the end of her twenties and is running out of places to go, she takes out a loan and starts a magic school, not far from the zoo and the center of paget habitation. More humans have magical potential than just the three girls, and with a bead, they're easy to pick out from pools of applicants. The school explodes in popularity and about half of the first six years' worth of classes are recruited as teachers to keep up with demand. While the basic concept of doing magic is simple, the applications are subtle and numerous, and eventually the school shakes out into departments that do research and write dry papers and so on. After the institution doesn't need so much close supervision, Rowan appoints a successor to run it, and instead supervises spinning it off into branch campuses, all around the world.