He did it slower.
Slow enough that every part of the movement was seen. He talked through it quietly while he moved.
Lyra watched the stick the whole time.
When he finished, she just stood there, clearly lost in thought. He could see her mentally rehearsing the steps.
"The shoulder," she said. "It moves before the hip does."
"Yes."
"I was trying to fix it by tightening my front arm."
"But that just makes the whole movement stiff."
She nodded in understanding. Then she placed her left foot three degrees out and did the move again.
Whoosh.
She was a fast learner.
He'd shown her the foot angle once. She adjusted it differently on the second try, finding her own version of it rather than copying his exactly.
"Okay," she said, resetting for the sixth time.
"What else."
He looked at her form. His multiplier was running in the background, comparing each repetition to each other.
"Your off-hand," he said.
She glanced at her left hand. "What about it."
"It's holding tension at the end of the move. Like you're expecting to pull the spear back immediately."
"I am," she said. "I'm trying to get back into my defensive stance."
"But you're doing it too soon. You haven't even finished the reach yet, and it's making your aim miss by just a bit."
She looked at the lake for a moment. Then she did the move again. She finally let her arm go all the way out and finished the hit.
The tip went exactly where it was supposed to go.
"I've been fighting myself," she said.
"A little bit, yeah."
She smiled. "My instructor spent three weeks not seeing that."
"Your instructor probably wasn't looking at your hands."
She glanced at him sideways. "what do you think he was looking at then?"
Holden thought hard on how to answer her. He didn't want to compliment how good looking she was.
"Maybe your footwork" he said.
She looked at him for a second. Then she went back to her spear.
——————————————————
At some point, it stopped being a lesson and became something else.
One minute he was watching her practice, the next they were just talking. She described a problem she'd been having with the third form of her spear art, and he was trying to remember if the footwork principle in Gale-Step applied to spear transitions the same way it applied to sword skills.
"It should," he said. "The footwork doesn't care what you are holding. The principle is the same. The weight transfer leads the weapon, not the other way around."
"Spear requires more lead time," she said.
"The tip has to start moving before your body moves, or you lose the first beat of the extension."
"So you're working with two separate timelines."
"Three," she said. "Foot, body, tip. They are all doing different things at different speeds and they have to arrive at the same point at the same time."
He thought about that.
He'd never really talked about this with anyone before.
Maeve was brilliant but wasn't a fighter. The kids in the village quarter were interested in hitting things, but that was different. The few instructors he knew had the knowledge but not the patience for that conversation.
Lyra had both.
She asked good questions. And when he said something she disagreed with, she said so plainly and explained why.
"Try it with the three-timeline thinking," he said. "Foot first, then body, then the tip catches up."
She did it.
Whoosh.
Better.
She held the end position.
"Strange," she said.
"Good strange or bad strange."
"Good." She lowered the spear slowly.
——————————————————
The moon had moved considerably by the time either of them noticed.
"We've been here a while," she said.
"We have," he agreed.
The conversation was going so well that neither of them wanted to stop, even though it was getting late. Then Lyra held her spear and looked at him with an honest face. She wasn't being careful or testing him anymore. She had made up her mind about him, and she was finally being herself.
"You're not what I expected," she said.
"What did you expect."
"I heard a first-year student won first place, even though they don't belong to a rich family and never had a real teacher," she said. She paused for a moment. "I thought they just got lucky."
"And now?"
She considered it. "Not lucky," she said.
"Something else."
He waited to see if she was going to name it. She didn't. He wasn't sure he had a name for it either.
"The other first years talk about you," she said. "Most of them are trying to know if you're a threat."
"Am I?."
"To their class rank? Probably. To anything else, I don't think so."
She looked at him closely. "You're not trying to prove anything to anyone."
He thought about that. "Not really," he said. "I just have somewhere I need to get to."
She nodded in understanding.
Then her expression changed. She gave the look of someone who was finally ready to mention something they'd been holding onto for a while.
"There's something you should know," she said.
He waited.
"Draven Cayne," she said.
"The second-place finisher. He's more than that."
She placed her spear on the floor.
"The Cayne family has three academy instructors in their personal debt. Two of the senior ones went to school with his father. He's been told his whole life that first place was his." She paused. "And then it wasn't."
Holden said nothing.
"He's been building a gang since the results board was up," she continued. "Mostly second and third-year students who owe him favors or want to be owed favors by him. That's how it works in the inner ranks." She looked at the lake for a moment. "They're planning something before the monthly evaluations. I don't know the specifics. But I know the shape of it."
"An ambush," he said.
She looked back at him. "Yes."
"How do you know this," he said.
"Because I grew up in the same circles he did," she said.
"Different house, much smaller by the way, but the same circles. I know how he thinks. I know what losing first place means to someone like him." She paused. "It's not about the estate. It's about what the estate represents."
"A story," Holden said.
"He had a story about himself," Holden said. "First place, top of the intake, all of it already decided. I interrupted the story." He thought about Cormac at the gate. "I know people like that."
She was quiet for a moment.
"Yes," she said. "That's what it is."
"Thank you," he said. "For telling me."
"Don't thank me," she said. "Just don't walk into it."
"I won't."
She picked up her spear and put it on her back.
"You're going to do something at the evaluations," she said.
It wasn't quite a question.
"Probably," he said.
She looked at him for a moment.
"I'll watch for it," she said.
She walked back toward the main grounds.
He watched her go.
Then he stood alone beside the lake in the dark, and thought about ambushes, monthly evaluations, and the Vanguard Credits he needed for Maeve's protective wards.
He looked at his hands.
They looked normal, but his bones were now 4-Star level and incredibly strong.
Before the monthly evaluations, she'd said.
He started walking back.
He needed to know exactly when those evaluations were.