The duel had done something to the way people looked at her.
Brina noticed it in the days that followed, the way conversations would pause when she walked past, the way eyes tracked her longer than they used to. Admirers had grown in number, men and women alike, drawn in by what they had witnessed at the training ground. She noted it the way she noted most things that didn't directly concern her mission, acknowledged it and moved on. She hadn't fought Evereth to collect followers. She had fought him to get her friends back, and she had won, and that was the beginning and end of what mattered to her.
True to his word, the commander released Elena, Mira, Sophia, and Jen from their remaining duties the following day.
Losing capable personnel was never a comfortable arrangement, and Evereth knew it as well as anyone. Good fighters didn't grow on trees and the ones he was releasing weren't replaceable overnight. But he was a man who thought in terms of outcomes, not feelings, and the outcome he had already calculated before Brina ever brought the bet to the table told him that holding this particular line wasn't worth the cost. She was not the type to be blocked by a wall and simply turn around and walk away. He had seen enough of her by then to know that much.
What fewer people knew, or had pieced together after the fact, was that Evereth had not simply lost.
He had chosen the shape of his losing carefully.
He hadn't trained in the days before the duel. He hadn't woken early, hadn't warmed up properly, hadn't eaten breakfast before showing up half-asleep to the training ground. People assumed that was laziness and in part it was, because Evereth was genuinely not a man who exerted himself without a compelling reason. But there was something else underneath it. When Brina's riposte landed clean and sent him to the ground, he had already been out of stamina for longer than the crowd realized. He could have held on a little further. He chose not to.
It was a quiet, deliberate piece of tactical thinking dressed up as a comfortable loss. He gave Brina her victory in a way that let him appear to have simply been outfought, which cost him very little in terms of real standing, and in exchange he shed a personnel situation that would have become increasingly complicated the longer it dragged on. The math worked out in his favor. It usually did, when he bothered to do it.
Only a few had actually seen it for what it was. The commanders of the town guard had been watching from a distance, gathered at the far edge of the training ground with the unhurried calm of men who have spent enough years reading fights to know what they are looking at. They had exchanged glances near the end without saying much. They didn't need to.
Anyways. The important thing was that Brina's friends were now standing in the Knight's barracks, which was a sentence that would have seemed unlikely to all five of them not long ago.
A specialized quarter for female personnel had been arranged and opened up, which was its own small administrative achievement. But before any of that could proceed, the four of them had to be formally registered as Brina's retinue. It was a practical designation as much as anything else. Once registered, their wages, housing, meals, and equipment would all be accounted for under the Knight Order's provisions. What fell outside that, the personal comforts, the small expenses, the things that made a bunk feel like somewhere you actually lived, those they would handle on their own. It was a fair enough arrangement, all things considered.
The paperwork was processed. The acknowledgment was signed and sealed. And then the five of them were walking toward their quarters together for the first time, and Brina, who had spent the better part of the past several days maintaining the composed and measured bearing expected of a probie knight, lasted approximately thirty seconds inside the door before dropping it entirely.
"Kyaaa, I'm so glad you're all here with me again!"
She pulled them in before anyone had a chance to react, and the room became briefly chaotic in the warm way that only reunions between people who have genuinely missed each other can produce. There was laughing and overlapping conversation and more than a few complaints about how long this had taken, and Brina stood in the middle of it with an expression on her face that had nothing to do with swords or rank or any of the things she spent most of her time being serious about.
This was what she had been fighting for. Not prestige, not a title, not anyone's approval. Just this.
The four of them had already been talking among themselves since the day of the duel, picking it apart the way friends do, going over every round, every moment, asking each other what they thought was going to happen and what they thought it meant now that it had. There was real excitement in it, not just the excitement of watching Brina win, though that had been its own extraordinary thing, but the excitement of what came next. A new chapter, a new arrangement, a new set of risks and possibilities that all of them were stepping into with eyes open.
The pay alone was worth considering seriously. Joining as Brina's retinue meant roughly twice what they had been earning before, which sounded generous right up until you thought carefully about what kind of work a probie knight known for hunting powerful beasts was likely to be assigned. The two things were connected. Better pay usually meant better chances of something large and dangerous trying to remove you from the world, and nobody in that room was naive enough to pretend otherwise. Beast hunting was already familiar territory for all of them, but the scale of what Brina would be tasked with was likely to be a step above what they had handled before.
They had weighed all of that and decided it didn't change anything. They were here because she was here, and because the adventure of it was theirs to share, not just hers to carry alone.
Training would fall under Brina's responsibility, which suited her. She had opinions about how to prepare for a fight and she had never been shy about sharing them. The four of them already knew this about her and were already bracing for it with the cheerful resignation of people who understand that being pushed hard by someone who cares about you is better than being left to coast.
A mission would come soon. It always did.
For now, though, the five of them were together in a room that was theirs, and nobody was being assigned to separate postings, and the evening ahead had nothing in it except rest and conversation and the quiet particular satisfaction of having gotten exactly what you set out to get.
Brina sat down on the edge of her bunk and listened to her friends argue cheerfully about who had claimed the best sleeping spot, and she said nothing, and she smiled at nothing in particular, and it was enough.