Chapter 123: a day out of her head

Chapter 123 — A Day Out of Her Head

Roxanne woke determined to follow Healer Mara’s advice and have a perfectly ordinary day. She made it as far as sitting up.

Isla’s porridge smells like cinnamon and regret, her wolf announced.

Good morning to you too.

Also the dormitory smells like old socks. Yours.

They are clean socks.

They are old, clean socks.

Roxanne pulled her uniform from the wardrobe and dressed with great dignity. The wolf watched, in whatever way a wolf watched from inside someone’s head, and sighed.

That collar is too tight. You keep tugging at it. Choose something else.

I don’t need commentary on every decision.

You asked me to be honest.

I asked you not to narrate.

It is the same thing, the wolf said, and Roxanne firmly refused to change her clothes. It was a matter of principle now. She buttoned the collar to the top.

"Are you talking to yourself?" Isla asked from the mirror, a hairbrush frozen halfway through her hair.

"Rehearsing," Roxanne said. "For the drama club."

"At seven in the morning?"

"Dedication." She grabbed her bag and fled before the follow-up question arrived.

Tessa caught her outside Strategy that afternoon, planting herself in the doorway with her arms folded. "Town. Lunch and shopping. You and me. No excuses."

Roxanne’s stomach dipped. Crowds, strange smells, a hundred sounds layered together. "I don’t know. It might be a lot."

"We leave the moment you say so. I’ll even pretend I’ve remembered an urgent appointment." Tessa’s expression softened a fraction. "Please. You’ve spent three days looking like someone is chasing you."

Roxanne thought about the healer’s card in her pocket, and the way her world had been shrinking by inches since the clearing. She did not want her new circumstances to decide where she was allowed to go.

"All right."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Without a dramatic reason?" Tessa grinned as they headed for the gate. "You’re accepting an invitation just because you want to. I’m very proud."

"I will push you into a fountain."

"That’s the Roxanne I know."

The market near the academy was louder than she remembered. Stalls crowded the square, awnings flapping, vendors calling prices over each other, a fiddler somewhere playing against a drum. Tessa dragged her toward a table of hair ornaments and held up two clips.

"Silver or bronze?"

"Neither. They’re both the colour of a doorknob."

"Bronze, then. You have no taste."

"You’ve just asked for my opinion and rejected it."

"I asked for it so I could disagree."

Roxanne laughed, and tried to enjoy herself, and found it hard. The scents arrived in layers, leather and frying onions and wet stone and a hundred bodies, and the sounds piled on top. She closed her eyes for a second and took them one at a time, as Mara had taught her.

Bakery, her wolf said abruptly. Left. Twenty paces. Butter and sugar and something with cinnamon.

I don’t need a pastry.

Yes you do.

I am not letting you steer me through a market by my nose.

Roxanne walked on three steps, then stopped. She did, in fact, want something sweet, badly. It was only that she had been told so by a wolf.

Fine, she thought. But because I want it.

That is all I ever suggested.

They bought two cinnamon twists, still warm, and sat on a low wall at the edge of the square. Tessa told a story about a first-year who had set his own eyebrow alight in Alchemy, and Roxanne laughed so hard she nearly dropped her pastry. The fiddle and the drum and the crowd noise washed over them, loud and cheerful and no longer frightening. The wolf was there, a quiet warmth at the back of her mind, one more part of an ordinary afternoon.

Tessa licked sugar off her thumb. "How are you feeling? Since the trouble in Wolf Control?"

Roxanne turned the pastry in her hands. "I’m dealing with something new. I’m not ready to explain it yet."

"All right."

"That’s it?"

"That’s it." Tessa shrugged. "Friendship shouldn’t need you to hand over everything before you’re ready. If you want to tell me, I’ll listen. If you don’t, I’ll steal your pastry."

"Thank you."

"Don’t thank me, it’s the bare minimum."

Roxanne watched a pigeon inspect a crust. "How do you cope with feeling behind everyone else?"

Tessa was quiet a moment, which was unusual. "I’m not as confident as I look," she said. "I worry about failing all the time. Tournaments, grades, being good enough. I just don’t let the worry make the decisions."

"That’s very wise."

"It’s mostly stubbornness." Tessa grinned, but her eyes were warm. Roxanne felt, with some surprise, that she had been given something precious.

They finished their pastries and wandered back toward the gate. Outside a small sporting-goods shop, a tall figure stood with a long canvas bag over his shoulder.

"Kai," Roxanne said.

He turned. "Roxanne. Tessa."

"I’m collecting equipment," he said at once. "For a training session. I’m not following you."

"I didn’t think you were," said Roxanne.

"Good. I wanted that clear."

Tessa glanced from one to the other, hummed, and announced that she had always wanted to inspect the ribbon stall, and vanished with astonishing speed.

Kai looked at Roxanne a moment longer. "You seem more alert than usual. Is something wrong?"

"I’m adjusting to a few things."

He nodded. He did not ask which things. "I’m heading back to the academy. If you are."

They walked together up the long road, and the conversation stayed easy. He told her about a cracked practice staff and the dispute over who had cracked it. She told him about the boy and the eyebrow. Then a large group of students surged out of a side street, shouting and laughing, a drumming tide of voices, and Roxanne flinched. The noise hit her like hands on her ears.

Kai did not say a word. He simply shifted to her other side and steered them over to where the pavement was clear and the crowd thinner, as though he had always meant to walk there. He did not take her arm. He did not look at her. The noise dropped back to something she could bear.

She noticed. She noticed that he hadn’t asked for credit or treated her as though she might break. He had simply made the moment easier.

"You don’t have to rearrange your whole path for me," she said.

"I wasn’t rearranging anything," Kai said. "I was walking with you."

She opened her mouth and found nothing at all in it. They went on up the road in silence.

Back at the academy, Tessa waved her off at the gate with the air of a woman who had seen everything and would be mentioning it later.

"Did you enjoy yourself?" she asked first.

"Parts of it were overwhelming," Roxanne admitted. "But I’m glad I went."

"Good."

That evening, she sat on her bed and practised the scent exercise for a few minutes, with tea and soap and a sprig of mint. When her head began to ache at the edges, she set them aside.

Stopping is wise, her wolf said, sounding faintly approving.

I know.

You stopped before you lost your temper. That is new.

Roxanne smiled. She understood something, as she screwed the lids onto the tins. Living with her wolf did not mean obeying every instinct, nor avoiding every difficult place. It meant choosing, each time, how to answer.

Late that night, she stood at the mirror brushing out her hair when her wolf grew suddenly alert.

Wait.

Roxanne paused with the brush in the air. What?

You smell different.

She lifted her sleeve and sniffed it, then her hair, wondering what she had carried home from the market.

The wolf went quiet. When she spoke again, her voice was low.

No. It is you.

Roxanne stared at her own reflection, at the pale face and the steady eyes, and wondered what was changing, when she had not been trying to change anything at all.