"Huh! Cool." Maybe if she tells Ma'ar that he'll want to know if his is the same.

"If that is all then I had better go. I will reassure the teacher this has been addressed, and - perhaps try to give her some gentle advice on her teaching style." His lips twitch, slightly, as he glances at her in a 'this is a secret between us' sort of way. 

Lionwind is the best. She hugs him goodbye.

At their next lesson with that teacher, she acts as though nothing out of the ordinary happened, though she does stick to some particularly uncontroversial curriculum for the next couple of weeks. 

Ma'ar doesn't particularly acknowledge his most recent interaction with Azabel either, he continues to interact with her exactly the same way he did before, which includes practicing magic together in the afternoons after class, and sometimes flying with Skan or going to the library. 

The next week they have their test with the specially trained Adept who clears them for private tutoring on the use of ley-lines and eventually nodes. They both pass with flying colours (Ma'ar by a greater margin, but he's also concealing a headache afterward). For simplicity they're scheduled with the same tutor, twice a week, in the afternoons after their theory course so they won't be going into it tired. 

Ma'ar is pleased about this! 

"It'll be fun! Sharing Lionwind with somebody would be weird but I think a magic tutor will be different."

"Lionwind does seem like a different sort of teacher - I mean, if you had to tell him about me, then doing that in front of another Mindhealing student would...feel more weird..." 

"I think that would have been private even if I were sharing my normal lessons."

Ma'ar smiles slightly. "That - seems good, I guess." 

Their first lesson with the tutor is a couple of days later. He seems very surprised to have students so young, but diligently takes them out to examine some nearby ley-lines very closely and then try 'scooping' a bit of the flowing energies into their own reserves. 

Scoop! - wow that was too much too fast. What acquires something from its surroundings more, uh, slowly than that. Suppose she is.... a rock being warmed by the sunshine. The sunshine can go as fast as it wants but she will only warm up so quickly.

This results in something quite slow but it's much better than the last try. 

"Good!" the tutor says. "...Try holding the link to take it in, and casting a simple spell at the same time using the ley-line energy? A lot of people find it helpful to imagine the power coming in one hand and moving through them and coming out the other hand, but whatever works for you." 

She is a darker colored rock and will warm up faster than this. And she'll do the shield. The power will go in through the stem, that only makes sense, what would her hands be doing here?

"Perfect! At some point you'll want to ramp up the speed more, your Gift will be able to take it when you're fully-grown, but that's very good. - Ma'ar?" 

Ma'ar tries. He imagines shaping his magic-not-hands into - hmm - into a siphon, like that one kind of river-snail has, or maybe a leech, something in between those things - and he latches it onto the flowing magic and doesn't even need to suck, really, it's moving fast enough that the greater challenge is slowing it down. 

It burns a bit but this doesn't especially bother him. He pushes the power into a shield, hard, because there's a lot of it; he's drawing it in at a substantially faster rate than Azabel was. 

"That's - do you feel in control of it?" 

"Yes." It's fine. It hurts a little but lots of things do. 

"...If you say so. All right, good work, both of you. Back off and take a break, we'll try that again in a couple minutes." 

Aza spends the break brainstorming additional metaphors for various possible speeds of absorption.

It doesn't hurt anymore as soon as he stops, which leads Ma'ar to think he was right, it wasn't the kind of hurting that meant actual injury, it was more like the way your muscles hurt when you run very fast for a long time. The kind that makes you stronger. 

They do a few more exercises. Trying to take in as much energy as possible and just hold it. Trying to hold the connection while casting a slightly more complicated kind of shield. 

At the end of it Ma'ar is tired, but it's a pleasant kind of tired, and the tutor has high praise for both of them. 

Aza has settled on being a plant, after trying being a sponge and also "inhaling" the magic. She is suitably delighted by the praise.

Their lessons continue. Azabel and Ma'ar continue to be ahead of the curve in their basic-offensive-magic class, and the teaching assistant supervising them continues to let them mostly not spar and instead stand still and practice the relevant spells at shielded targets. The theory class has no more especially controversial incidents, since Ma'ar has decided it's simplest to either let Azabel talk first or just ask her about it after class. (Also the teacher and students both seem more tolerant of certain arguments after Lionwind's guest lecture and presumed private lecture with the teacher.)

Ma'ar and Azabel both graduate 'on time' with their cohort, in both classes, six weeks after joining mid-session. There's a school-wide holiday break for two weeks, after which point they're both entered in the next level of lessons, now covering more complex techniques - not Gates, yet, but permanent room-shielding and various set-spells and simple metallurgy and glasswork done with magic. 

They also have theory classes two days a week. They're now, apparently, senior enough that Urtho himself shows up for the last candlemark of the second weekly class, to observe and occasionally participate in their discussions. 

Aza is excited about non-fighting magic! She makes suncatchers and flatware and bowls and puts up shields on her house. And she is happy to talk first in theory discussions, when she has something to say, which is usually.

Ma'ar is so delighted to learn proper wards and puts every single kind they learn - and a dozen other kinds he teaches himself out of library books - on his room, to the point that it looks kind of ridiculous to mage-sight when inside it. 

Several weeks in, at one of their end-of-week sessions with Urtho watching in the back, the topic of mages in the Ceej Empire comes up. Apparently, there, the royal family carries mage-gift in their blood, and the ruler is almost always a mage - in fact, often a younger sibling is chosen as heir if the firstborn turns out not to be mage-gifted. The discussion shifts to the pros and cons of this system. 

Mages understand what can be done with magic better, someone points out, that's useful for a ruler. 

Also it'd be - harder to assassinate a mage, which is good for avoiding succession crises, someone else says. 

Someone else suggests that this is probably related to the whole thing where it's normal to compulsion your servants not to murder you, someone else argues, and there's some debate on whether the Emperor even came up with this practice originally. 

Aza thinks that being a mage is not actually a good predictor of being a good monarch, but neither is being born first. Mage-gift unlike being born first does imply that you will spend some time learning magic, which takes a lot of investment to be good enough at it for any of the pro- considerations to come up at all, and probably distracts from statecraft. It might encourage them not to always put sons on the throne, though, if they're putting other criteria first or allowing them as inputs? Though picking firstborns does not consistently have this effect and she doesn't know if picking mages does.

After a while, Urtho clears his throat. 

"Personally I believe that this practice is very unfortunate," he says, "and I hope it is never adopted in Tantara. Too much power concentrated in a single person is - never good, either for them or for the world around them that they control."