:I guess, all right. ...Lots of places you're even less safe if people know that you're a mage but not trained yet. Maybe that's not as true at a school where everyone's a mage though. Where's your house?: 

:It's about ten minutes' walk from the base of the tower. If you walk, usually I fly but I don't know if my gryphon friend can carry both of us: She neatly whisks away all the math and shuts her notebook and leads him out of the room.

Ma'ar seems if anything more tense outside in the hall; he moves close to the wall, eyes wary, and jumps a bit every time someone comes around the corner. 

Poor guy. All her lists of things that can go wrong with people's minds when bad things happen to them (such as KNIFE FIGHTS) are spinning through her brain right now.

She takes him to the nearest guard office and tells him everybody's names, and buttonholes a passing hertasi to get him their name as well, and then continues out of the tower to bring him home with her.

(This is an overwhelming number of people to be introduced to, Ma'ar's head is buzzing with it, and it's stressful that he can't read Azabel's mind to help figure out what she wants here. Her body language isn't hostile, though. And she's even newer to being a mage than he is, and clearly not used to being in fights, it seems likely he could win if she wanted to start one for some reason. ...Unless Mindhealing is useful in combat, he's never met another Mindhealer before and doesn't really know what the Gift does.) 

He relaxes a little out in the courtyard, where he can see his surroundings better, and follows Azabel without speaking. 

"Do you want me to ask Skan if he can maybe carry two people our size, or no, you look a little like I dumped a bucket of buttons on your lap and expect you to pick them all up."

The metaphor gets a nonplussed look, but he nods. "I don't really want to go flying on a gryphon right now," he says - cautiously, like he expects something to go wrong somehow if he chooses the wrong words. 

"Okay, we'll walk. Ranara won't be home and all my old notes on math and everything are there too." Is he scared of heights or just of people, Skan is both things. Not important enough to ask about right now...

Ma'ar's main experience with gryphons so far has been that they're four times his size and have beaks that could swallow his entire head and claws larger than his fingers, and also when he was approaching the Tower on foot some of them were flying around and seemed to think it was very funny to dive right at people on the path and get them to shriek in surprise about it. He would prefer it if they stayed well away from him, at least until he knows how to shield better and can do it all the time, right now maintaining a physical shield over himself is very tiring. 

He follows Azabel all the way out to her house. 

She sets them up with math on the kitchen table. He really doesn't look like he eats enough. "Do you want some bread and cheese?"

"Yes, please, if that's all right." Ma'ar has been avoiding the dining hall for the last couple of days because there were some boys there who thought it was hilarious to mime being about to throw food at him and make him jump, and he hasn't figured out their schedule yet in order to avoid them. It's easier to ignore hunger than to ignore having stuff maybe thrown at him. 

She goes and slices bread and cheese and brings him a plate. "If you stab somebody and they didn't stab you first you will be in very big trouble, you know. So it only makes sense to have a knife if you're only going to threaten with it, not use it - only everybody else can figure that out if they're smart so they'll know it's probably a bluff - or if you really expect somebody to stab you."

He gives her an uneasy, dubious look. "Do people not try to stab you very often here." 

"Some older boys did attack me just the other day but not with a knife and I was fine. And that was the only time it's happened!"

"Oh." Ma'ar looks at his plate of food; it takes him visible effort not to immediately wolf it down and to instead eat at a polite speed. He switches to Mindspeech while his mouth is full. :How long have you lived here?: 

She's not eating, she's writing him math problems, so she continues to reply in Tantaran and translate in Mindspeech so he can practice. "In this house? Since I was a baby. Ranara moved here when I was still tiny."

:And you only had people attack you once?: Ma'ar looks SO doubtful of this claim. 

"Yeah, just the once. I guess it could help that I'm a girl, I think boys are fightier, and it could help that I'm friends with Skan, since he's a gryphon. But I don't think people get attacked a lot."

Ma'ar is pretty sure that in most places being a girl would do the OPPOSITE of help. "Mmm. Why did the boys attack you this time?" 

"They thought it was funny I don't like mindreading and snuck up on me and one tried to bust through my shield," because they SUCK as PEOPLE, "and when I did a Mindhealing thing to him his friend tried magic but then my mage-gift woke up and I did shields, even though apparently that's weird for first magic to do, and also I did the same thing to him. And then their other friends ran away and I got Skan to catch them and called the guards. And my teacher to help me undo the Mindhealing thing."

He shivers. "It seems really unfair when people think something is funny just because you hate it. There were some boys at the dining hall who thought it was funny to mime throwing food at me because it'd make me jump," he adds, sympathetically. "Why don't you like mindreading?" 

"I can't think right if somebody might be watching me do it." It's like having to be diplomatic with her brain. Diplomatic, not thinking of pink elephants, graded on her performance like it's one of Skan's flying competitions except for thoughts, she can't do all that at once and also get any useful thinking done especially if she might need to do any of it about pink elephants.

"Huh. Can you also not, uh, write, or - I dunno, do math problems on paper, if someone's watching?" Ma'ar hasn't ever considered that being a reason to disprefer mindreading. He would prefer people who want to harm him not find out his weaknesses, but that seems different. 

"I can do math problems but it depends what I'm writing."

Nod. There is probably no helpful rather than unhelpful way to say he won't read her mind even though this is scary, and besides, he can't anyway, her shields are too good. 

He finishes chewing the last bite of bread and cheese. "I could do more math problems now."