They they can head out to the stables together, and then ride around the Palace grounds. Savil is trying to discreetly stay away from the areas he's spent the most time in before, but unfortunately quite a lot of it is still familiar. 

If he had noticed her steering he would have appreciated it, but he's too busy flinching at all the familiar things for that sort of sophisticated other-people-modeling. He tries to get a conversation going but his train of thought keeps derailing into a ravine of  Tylendel is DEAD.

Yfandes does her best to prod him out of the ravine every time he falls into it, and Savil, who's also making attempts at conversation, does seem to notice that something is wrong. Or maybe the familiarity is bothering her too. She cuts the ride short after less than a candlemark, suggests he go have a look at the library. 

"...Oh, and by the way, Lancir's scheduled you for the graduation tests tomorrow morning," she adds. "Jaysen will be examining you. He's - strict, but not quite as bad as Starwind." 

Aaaa tomorrow morning that's way too soon actually the less time he has to stew the better. And a strict examiner is good; less chance of passing without actually being qualified. "Okay. Will I find out the results right afterwards, or is there a wait?"

"Same day – they'll probably stick you in a room while Jaysen talks to the rest of the Senior Circle, I remember hating that bit, it felt like about a year but it was only a candlemark or so." 

"I am absolutely going to hate that bit. I should bring a book or something."

"Excellent idea, I wish I'd done that." Savil will part ways with him outside the stable, she wants to catch up with some of her friends in Haven. She suggests that Abras could check in with Mardic and Donni, or Shavri, they probably want to see him at some point. 

That's a good idea. Polite tap on Mardic's shields?

Mardic is available! So's Donni. They're only in town for a couple more weeks, before being assigned to their first circuit (together), but for now they'll have him over for tea. 

He will go over for tea!

"Hi. Congratulations on graduating; I'm glad I was back in time to see you before you left."

Way too much of the time he's spent with Mardic and Donni also had Tylendel being there. Having the three of them at a table without him feels wrong, asymmetrical, incomplete.

Donni is going to fill every second of otherwise-silence with chatter. She's good at that. She's very excited for a real border circuit where they will get to FIGHT with MAGIC which is AWESOME.

Mardic makes a face every time she mentions this. 

Chatter is great but he's going to join Mardic in face-making. And wish he knew a polite way to ask "Aren't you scared you're going to have to kill someone?". Eventually he does ask, "Have either of you ever been in a fight before? What's it like?"

“Only one real one,” Donni says wistfully, and then describes, in gory detail, taking on a foreign hedge-wizard who had set up camp near the southeastern border and been extorting money and goods from the locals in exchange for not burning down their farms. It was a while before anyone was brave enough to call in the Heralds. The hedge-wizard was captured alive for questioning, but he didn’t go quietly. Donni has a cool scar to show off from when one of his fireballs got through her shields. Mardic makes a very unhappy face about this.

"Woah. I'm glad you're okay." Abras shivers. Fighting other mages feels like a very different thing from fighting Pelagirs beasts; the closest he's been to it was that mess with the bloodpath mages where he couldn't do anything, or possibly that time running away from the bounty hunters where he also couldn't do much of anything, and he's not looking forward to the inevitable next time.

"...I was really scared," Mardic admits, glancing over at Abras and then sort of shaking his head helplessly in Donni's general direction. "Scared that he would hurt me, or hurt Donni. Scared that I would hurt him more than I really needed to. It's...hard." 

Sympathetic nod. "There aren't really a lot of good ways for a fight to go, are there. Just different bad options. And the hope that you can end it without anyone getting hurt, and the fear that aiming for that will make things worse."

"That's exactly it. It's such a hard tradeoff to balance – trying to judge what the minimum force you can get away with is, and if you misjudge it then maybe you get hurt, or your friends do, or you just end up in a corner and have to escalate to lethal force. Herald Shallan told us some stories." He shrugs. "But it'll be easier for you. The trickiest is when you're fighting someone more powerful, but who's going to be stronger than you?" 

A mage in all black with an army behind him, the certainty that only Abras can stop him and then only with his death . . .

"It sounds like you two know what you're doing. That counts for a lot. More than power, sometimes." He wants to say "I'm sure you'll be fine," but he can't make the lie come out of his mouth.

Mardic must notice something in his expression, because he changes the subject, asking Abras what sorts of Tayledras magic he learned while he was in k'Treva. 

Abras can talk, almost animatedly, about weather-barriers and all the kinds of shield and learning a language with Mindspeech and how he learned to center and ground from a direct demonstation, until tea is over and he leaves to go look for Shavri.

Shavri is in the library (she spends a lot of time there), reading a book and making lots of faces at it. 

Abras knows he wouldn't be happy about someone interrupting his reading, so he grabs a book on the history of Karse and sits at the opposite end of the table Shavri is sitting at and starts reading.

The book has lots of facts about early Karse that his grandfather's library didn't, which are alternately uplifting (one of the first Sons of the Sun tirelessly campaigning for literacy within the priesthood and for every village temple to have at least one book – at the time, in a mostly illiterate society of sheep-herders) and horrifying (a systematic murder campaign against one of the minority ethnicities in newly-annexed land a century into the kingdom's existence.)

Shavri looks up a couple minutes in, smiles at him, and keeps reading until the end of the section, then carefully marks her spot. "Abras! I'm so happy you're back! Was the journey very exciting?"