"Give them the mouth, and you give them room to build pressure."
Lucavion knew the voice before he turned. Kaireth Vaulden stood on the far side of the room with one hand wrapped around the spear propped against his bench, his pale blond hair catching the light from the upper windows, his shoulders as straight as they had been in the examination hall.
During the Combat Awareness trial, Kaireth had let his teammates' convenient mistakes find Lucavion again and again, though Kaireth himself had never once struck him. Afterward, across the safer distance of several blackstone desks, Lucavion had pointed out how well that arrangement suited them both. Kaireth had told him to take the exam.
Since then Kaireth had stopped answering his greetings, and he no longer looked long enough for a smile to turn into a challenge, which, Lucavion suspected, took more discipline than the old insults ever had.
