Except losing wasn’t what made Keris’s blood run cold; it was that he knew he could win. He’d stood in on war council meetings and felt his head fill with strategies for victory, his mind all too capable of distancing itself from the realities of war, if he allowed it. And if he did it once, he had no confidence that he wouldn’t do it again and again until his hands were as drenched in blood as his father’s.
