I'll Hold Another Banquet

Tohru struggles to absorb everything Kureno has told her, above all the discovery that Akito is a woman raised as a man. As Kureno lays out the poisonous history between Akito and her mother Ren and the strange truth of the zodiac bond, Tohru is left frozen until her friends draw her back toward hope.

Kureno explains that Ren demanded Akito be brought up as male, and that mother and daughter despise one another. At the estate, Akito rages at Ren for speaking with Hatori, and their argument turns violent as Akito tackles her mother through the walls before Hatori pulls them apart. Ren insists Akito's bonds with the zodiac are false, while Akito screams that Ren abandoned her own child. Kureno recounts how he, Shigure, Ayame, and Hatori all woke weeping the morning Akito was conceived, having sensed her arrival in a dream. Now that his curse is broken, he concedes Ren may be right about the bond being unnatural, yet he cannot abandon the crying girl who needs him.

That night Saki and Megumi find Tohru still numb with shock and take her in. Saki gently warns that Tohru's habit of placing everyone above herself could one day crush her. Arisa bursts in, apologizes for making Tohru cry, embraces her, and tells her she is loved and far from useless. Elsewhere, Ren catches Rin sneaking about and offers to help her, sensing what she is after.

Tohru returns home renewed, puzzling over how her lost scarf reappeared. Kyo admits he found it in the street and washed it for her, offering to replace it if she is unhappy. She wears it anyway, thanking him, and Yuki smiles at the pair as Shigure needles Kyo over Yuki's dreadful cooking. The episode ends with Tohru heading to school, resolved to understand what Kureno has revealed.

The title is drawn from a line of Tohru's. The episode adapts three chapters, and Ren's encounter with Rin originally appeared later, as a flashback, in the source. The opening narration over the legend of the zodiac and the four elder Sohma shown in their animal forms as they sense Akito's conception were both created for the anime, which also staged Akito and Ren's fight far more brutally than the manga, adding Akito strangling and shoving her mother through paper panels before pinning her outside.