He stiffens slightly when she moves to sit near him, but doesn't object, just digs out his own school notebook and pen. He holds the pen awkwardly, like no one taught him how to do it, but he follows her explanation with far less difficulty than Skan did; he copies each letter with great care and then stares at it for ten or twenty seconds and from that point seems to have it memorized, though he also sketches what seem to be little mnemonic drawings for himself, of various objects or animals that start with the letter-sound. 

"That's clever!" she says when she realizes what he's doing. "Do you want to keep doing letters or let those sit and do numbers next? - does it not work for you to hold the pen like this, it makes your hand less tired if you write a lot to hold it like this."

"Oh." He peers intently at how her fingers are arranged, then tries to imitate it; his next attempt at copying a letter is a bit clumsier, probably because he's less used to writing this way, but he nods. "I'll see if it makes my hand less tired. We could do numbers next?" Hopeful. 

"Mm-hm!" She writes out the numbers zero to ten, and says all their names, and starts in explaining how to form larger numbers by lining these up. Then she writes out simple arithmetic problems for him.

There's clearly some additional conceptual insight here; Ma'ar stares at the numbers she's writing out in puzzlement, asks a couple of questions - and then his entire face lights up. "Oh. That is such a good idea!"

The simple addition and subtraction problems seem if anything too simple for him; he squints at the numbers, and then instantly solves them in his head, he seems impressively good at mental arithmetic. 

Then he can get more complicated ones. She explains the order of operations convention for him and strings together great big numbers.

He's so excited! He picks it up with extraordinary speed. 

This is fun, it's all the least repetitious parts of teaching! She knows a little slightly more advanced math where you solve for a variable...

"- Whoa, you can do that?" He's astounded. "I wish I'd known that last year - I worked for a mage, for a bit, I helped him with his records, but the numbers they write with in the north are way worse for doing arithmetic and so I always did the figuring part in my head." 

- aww he's adorable. "Yeah, you can do that! What's wrong with their numbers?"

"Here, I can show you." He flips to a different page of his notebook and starts drawing them out. "Up to nine it's just line-strokes, like a tally," he shows her, "and exactly ten is a long rectangle like this - it's like, imagine you were looking at a tally of ten except from far away so it blurred together and just looked like a rectangle. Twenty is two rectangles stacked on top of each other, like so, thirty is three, forty is four... And then fifty is a triangle, for some reason, and a hundred is a square, like a shipping-box full of tens - or like two triangles glued together this way, maybe - and two hundred is two squares on top of each other, like boxes. And a thousand is a circle like this. But they don't have zero and there's no...place-marking...you just need to draw more and more of the symbols and long numbers take a whole line to write." 

"Oh wow. I guess that would be convenient if you very often wanted to write exactly 'a thousand'? Because it'd just be a circle. But hard to do math with."

"They use it for trade and shipping on the river, up north, because usually if you're shipping goods they're in boxes or crates that have about a hundred of whatever it is, but it doesn't matter if it's a bit more or less than a hundred as long as it's full - or I think a thousand is a circle because that's what a barrel looks like from the top, and I guess someone decided a big barrel was the right size to fit about a thousandweight of something-or-other. I'm not sure why a triangle for fifty. Maybe that's because just piling up a heap of fish or apples or something looks sort of like a triangle." 

"Huh! I have no idea why Tantaran numbers are how they are."

"I like them, though!" And he wants to dive back into trying to do the problems where you solve for a variable, which is fun even if it's harder since he'll forget to write down what he's doing and instead attempt to do it all in his head like he usually has, and then get confused and need to start over. 

She will demonstrate some of them - she needs to do them anyway to check his work, since she didn't get these out of a book. She writes down all her steps very neatly every time.

He is not nearly as patient, or as neat, about writing down his work, but gets more in the habit of it as he watches her. 

- at some point the door bangs open, and Ma'ar startles again and flings up a hand to shield himself. His other hand darts to his waist, gripping the hilt of what looks like a sheathed dagger. 

The other teenager, probably about the same age as Ma'ar but much better-nourished and a full head taller than him, rolls his eyes and goes to flop on his bunk. "- Who's she - you got a girlfriend already, huh?" 

Carefully blank look. 

:Is that a knife: "My name is Azabel. We're doing math."

Another eyeroll. "Suit yourselves, then." 

:Uhhh, yes - do you not have one: 

:No, I don't go around with a knife! Do you need it? Is he dangerous? We could go do math at my house:

He's giving her such a baffled look. :Most places it's stupid not to have a weapon: 

:...you're a mage! Also a Mindspeaker! How about I introduce you to some guards so you can call for help if anything happens, and also I know how to do shields kind of and I don't know if they're very good but they're not nothing and I can show you?: Why has this kid her own age been getting into KNIFE FIGHTS.