Chapter 87: One Night Off

The instructors announced over breakfast that the next morning’s training had been cancelled, and the whole camp erupted into noise, cheers rolling down the long tables like a wave. After days of schedules, rankings, and constant assessment, the students were finally being handed one evening with nothing attached to it.

Liam declared it immediately. "We’re going out," he said. Roxanne looked up from her plate. "Where?" she asked. He grinned. "Somewhere we’re not supposed to be." Lucien, without even glancing up from his coffee, said, "No." Liam sighed theatrically. "Fine," he said. "Somewhere we’re technically allowed to be." That became the plan.

The small settlement surrounding the trial grounds had transformed for the evening, strung with lanterns and filled with food stalls, music, and little shops run by nearby packs. Smoke drifted from a dozen grills, and somewhere a fiddle was keeping rough time with a drum. It felt almost like a festival, and for once Roxanne could walk through it without a single score attached to anything she did.

Liam dragged her toward a ring-toss booth before she had even finished her first lap of the stalls, insisting it was a matter of academy pride. Roshan wandered off to study a table of handmade carvings with quiet interest, while Kai challenged Jace to a strength game that drew a small crowd, several of them already placing bets under their breath. Lucien, inevitably, ended up carrying everyone’s winnings, since he was the only one responsible enough to keep track of them.

At the ring-toss stall, Liam spent twenty straight minutes failing to win anything, and then suddenly landed three rings in a row and claimed a ridiculous stuffed wolf as his prize. He handed it straight to Roxanne. "For you," he said. She laughed. "You spent twenty minutes winning this." "Exactly," he said. "It would be embarrassing to keep it myself." She took it anyway, hugging it against her side, surprised by how pleased it made her feel to be handed something so completely useless.

Roshan, standing nearby with a carved wooden bird he’d just bought, said quietly, "He just wanted an excuse to give you something." Liam shot him a wounded look. "Traitor," he said, and Roxanne laughed so hard she nearly dropped the stuffed wolf. It struck her, in that small moment, how naturally these four had become people she spent her free time with, not just people she trained beside, and how little effort it had taken to get here.

The group thinned out when Liam and Jace stopped at another game to argue loudly about the rules, and Roxanne found herself walking ahead with Lucien. She asked about the expedition, and he admitted he had genuinely enjoyed watching her lead. "You didn’t need any of us," he said. "That’s not true," she said. "You could have done it without us," he said. She smiled. "Maybe," she said. "But I didn’t want to."

The words landed heavier than she meant them to, and she felt her own face warm as she looked away toward the lanterns strung above the path. Lucien didn’t tease her about it. He simply said, "That’s different," and let the silence after it say the rest. She wasn’t choosing them because she had to. She was choosing them because she wanted to.

Later, she found Roshan sitting apart from the crowd, watching the lanterns reflected on the dark water of a nearby stream. She sat beside him without asking. He told her the trial grounds looked completely different at night, softer somehow. "You notice everything, don’t you?" she asked. "Usually," he said. "What are you noticing now?" she asked. He looked at her for a long moment. "That you’re happier than you were when you arrived," he said.

She didn’t know what to say to that, mostly because he was right, and she hadn’t realized it herself until he said it out loud. The water kept moving in front of them, quiet and dark, and neither of them rushed to fill the silence.

On the walk back, the path wound beneath strings of hanging lanterns, and Roxanne fell a little behind the others. Kai slowed his pace to match hers without a word. They walked in comfortable silence for a while before he spoke. "You laughed a lot tonight," he said. She smiled. "Is that a problem?" "No," he said. He paused. "I like it." She looked up at him, and for a second neither of them moved.

Then Liam’s voice carried back down the path. "Are you two coming?" he shouted. Kai closed his eyes briefly, and Roxanne burst out laughing, and whatever had been building between them dissolved into the ordinary noise of the group.

Back at camp, Liam insisted on a round of cards, and it turned into a ridiculous, loud competition that spilled across half the cabin floor, with everyone talking over everyone else about rules nobody could agree on. Roxanne discovered that Lucien was annoyingly good at strategy, that Roshan caught every single attempt at cheating within seconds, and that Liam cheated so badly it barely counted as an attempt. Kai barely said a word through the entire game and still somehow won twice.

Roxanne accused all four of them of conspiring against her, throwing down her cards in mock outrage while Tessa, watching from the doorway, laughed at the entire spectacle, and Liam, grinning as he collected his winnings, said, "You know you’re basically one of us now." Her smile faltered for half a second, not because the idea bothered her, but because she realized it didn’t, and that surprised her more than anything the trials themselves had thrown at her.

Later that night, Roxanne returned to her cabin and set the ridiculous stuffed wolf on the bedside table. She glanced down and noticed the expedition bracelet still circling her wrist, the one she’d been given earlier that day. She could have taken it off easily enough. She left it there instead.

Outside, the camp had gone quiet, lanterns dimming one by one along the path, and somewhere far off a last burst of laughter faded into the dark. Tomorrow they would return to the academy, back to classes and schedules and everything that had felt so urgent only days ago. Lying in the dark with the stuffed wolf propped against her pillow, Roxanne realized something she wasn’t quite ready to say out loud. She was going to miss this place. Not because of the trials, and not because of the scoring or the competition. Because of them.