And Ma'ar takes concert-work and emergency medicine as well as the practice sessions casting from nodes, which is a very heavy course load but he is, at this point, fairly sure he can keep up fine.

The teachers are decent and the students are easier to get along with, maybe by dint of being older. 

Ma'ar finds Azabel after his second concert-work class (the first one was just discussing theory.) 

"Hi! How'd it go?"

"It was fun! - Uh, I don't think you should take it yet, some of the other students were really not that good at shielding once we were doing something weird with it. But I can teach you the basic exercise and if you're good enough at it then no one will be able to read your mind by accident." He makes a face.

"I'm glad I didn't sign up, then. Was it very awkward, or -" She knows she's unusual but she cannot reasonably be unique in all the world.

Shrug. "It didn't bother me. I think maybe some other people were embarrassed but it's not like people don't know that sometimes other people think about sex or whatever." 

"Well, yes, but they don't know what specifically the other people think about it or when." It's also not like people don't know that sometimes other people go to the bathroom but mercifully she has never had to explain that this, too, is private, to Ma'ar.

"I think I figured out what kind of shielding I have to practice to make sure I don't pick up things from other people, on top of them not reading me. I'll tell you if that works, and then if I teach you before you take the class then it should be fine? Uh, if you don't mind that other students might read each other's minds by mistake, but not yours." 

"I mean, they'll do that whether or not I'm there, presumably."

"Presumably," Ma'ar agrees, cheerfully. 

"And it doesn't especially matter to me if I'm in the room or not at the time. Thanks for checking it out - I mean, I know you wanted to do it anyway, but thanks for finding out what I need to know to do it later."

"You're welcome! How was the preservation spell class?"

"It was fun! We won't get to anything that can do books - and still let you, like read them - till later, so we're starting on spells for stuff like food and walls."

"Ooh, preserving food sounds like it could be useful though! If you wanted to go on a long trip or something. How well does it work?" 

"It's not something you'd want to bother with for, like, a household, but if you have a big store of emergency grain it's good for keeping mold or pests out of it. I guess if you were going on a long trip it'd be good."

"Maybe if we both finish all our other work before the weekend then you can teach me," Ma'ar suggests. "Has Urtho said anything about the book draft yet?" 

"Not yet, I'll pester him about it sometime if he doesn't get back to me but if I'm picking the timing I might as well wait till I'm not especially busy."

"That makes sense. I hope he didn't forget - I guess probably the hertasi would remind him..." Shrug. "I'm going to go study more." 

"Have fun."

The session continues. They learn a mage-gift technique for how to stop bleeding in an emergency; it basically uses a very local burst of heat to cauterize open blood vessels, so it needs cleaning up by a real Healer later, but the teacher has some testimonials about how it's Saved Lives. They move on to learning targeted heat-spells when people are in a bad way because of exposure to cold weather. 

Ma'ar thinks he's gotten the hang of how to manage his personal shields so he can neither read anyone else's mind nor have anyone else read his, even though at least some of the students in his concert-work class are definitely not up to speed on this. (He doesn't mind either thing much, so he's tested this by deliberately partnering with the worst students and then not shielding properly.) He can teach Azabel if she wants? 

Azabel thinks her emergency medicinal magic class is very cool even if it probably won't come up. "Yes please!"

Then Ma'ar can set aside a time that weekend to show her what he's been learning! 

First he offers to demonstrate a few rounds of lowering his low-level shields, the part relevant to allow concert melds of reserves, first while keeping everything else up and then doing it sloppily and then alternating some more. "You can watch me with Mindhealing Sight, if that helps," he adds. 

"Oh, it would, yeah, thank you -" What is his clockwork doing when he does this.

It's really interesting, actually! He - seems to have built in a pathway to a part of his mind that would normally be totally subconscious, something that would happen without his even having to think about it. And there are two versions of that pathway, now - one of them is sort of hasty-looking, thrown into place without much attention to exactly where it landed, and another is very very carefully placed to only turn this gear, right here, while touching nothing else. 

"Ooooh - show me again both ways?"

Ma'ar is content to repeat it as many times as she finds useful! He's still at the point where further practice is valuable for him as well, and with the more-precise method in particular he's concentrating very hard to get it to work.