"Yeah. I don't think we need to worry about this very much." She copies all the results, less their own answers, into her notebook, then discards the papers.

"Thank you for doing that." 

"You're welcome." And the hertasi thought it was fun, too.

Their classes continue. The next classroom session with Urtho does drift back to a much less controversial topic, that of how much mage-work ought to be allocated by funding from the Crown for projects versus by independent merchants and landholders paying for mage-services in their local spheres. Urtho seems more warmly inclined toward Azabel than before, or at least he calls on her a couple of times to ask her opinion on something, and smiles at her when she answers. Nobody mentions the poll. 

In their mage-practice lessons and tutoring, they keep learning more varieties of set-spells and permanent spells build on focus-stones - how to shield rooms against other Gifts, Farsight and Mindspeech in particular, how to make a renewable mage-barrier anchored on a focus that can be triggered by a non-mage. In their private tutoring they get more comfortable with ley-lines, and by the end of the three-month session they can both use even the most powerful of them, at least for short periods, and know how to set up a passive link to weaker ley-lines, to absorb energy even while they're not actively focusing on it. 

Ma'ar finds books in the library on all sorts of additional kinds of shields and wards, and plays with them on his own as well as with Azabel. Practicing magic is most of what he does in his spare time, which he has more of because he's not also a Mindhealing student. By the time their final exams for the practical class roll around, they're both well ahead of the others. The teaching assistant says they can pick up to two mage-courses to take for the next session after their break, since they can clearly handle it. 

Ma'ar opts for one on crafting more advanced artifacts - still not that complex, they're less than a year into their training, but ones that can do things like light up or produce heat in the absence of a mage there to maintain the spell. He also wants to take a course that's technically for older students, but which the teacher thinks he can handle, on more advanced combat magic, trap-spells and force-nets and such. He's not sure if Azabel would prefer to do something else, though. 

Azabel would not prefer to take advanced combat magic! She likes the artifacts course, and would be up for weather magic or illusions for the second choice.

The illusions course is pretty advanced for someone who's been in training less than six months, but she has very good control and it doesn't require a lot of power, and the teacher thinks she can handle it. Weather-magic is less complicated in some ways but also takes more power - weather, after all, happens at a large scale - and he thinks she might enjoy it more once she's strong enough to handle nodes. 

Sounds like good advice to her! She will take the illusions class and learn to make pretty things and ask the teacher why all the illusions she's ever heard of are only visual, can't you do other senses.

Ma'ar is kind of excited that they're going to be taking different classes, actually. He thinks he's had enough practice now to hold his own and not say anything stupid - and if he isn't sure he can always Mindspeak her, they've both got the range for that - and then afterward they can tell each other about it! Azabel doesn't need to take the fighting class but maybe there'll be a really good trick that doesn't hurt people and still works even if you can't run or do footwork, and then he could teach her she'd have a way to defend herself even if she were being attacked by more people than she could set-command. Ma'ar thinks he's probably terrible at illusions, Azabel's always had better fine control, but she could still show him what she figures out and he could help her test ideas. 

"Yeah, it'll be lots of fun! I'm going to need to find out who else is in the class and ask them to take notes for me the first class or two if I'm late, though, sometimes the roads between here and my dad's house are bad and it takes longer than expected." Presumably a roster is available and she has some idea who in this class has ever taken a note.

She can easily get a roster, at least of everyone signed up so far, sometimes people don't pick their classes until the veeery last day of break. She doesn't know who most of the people are, since they're now several cohorts ahead of the one they started with, but this handful of names are familiar and this girl was a teaching assistant back in their very first class with Snowstar and seems like the type who might ever have taken a note. 

"I hope you don't get bothered by bandits," Ma'ar says earnestly. "I guess if you do you can set-command them, but then you'd have to fix it on your own or go a really long way to get Lionwind." 

"I'm pretty sure I can do it by myself now if I have to. Also I can shield and I don't go alone and it's Tantara, not Predain. Anyway, I'll see you next term!"

And she gets in her coach and rolls away when the last classes are wrapped up.

Ma'ar is a little nervous about starting his first week of classes alone without Azabel there - especially the combat magic class, nearly everyone else is fifteen or older and they're huge, Ma'ar has grown a bit after a few months of regular meals but he's still very small for his age. And most of them know each other already, he's the odd one out, and he can't even read their minds so he has warning if they're planning to bully him... Though he's gotten a lot better at reading people's faces, probably he'll notice. 

He's gotten a lot better at not being scared on purpose, though, and he arrives at the first lesson one minute early and looks around but not in a scared way, makes eye contact with the other students. There's a girl in the class who's older than him but still small for her age, standing by herself in the Work Room waiting for the teacher, and he joins her. 

The teacher arrives, and Ma'ar knows the answers to all eight of the questions they ask in the introduction, though he only raises his hand for some of them, when no one else is. He gets a smile for it, both from the teacher and from the girl he's standing near. 

Maybe this is just going to be fine. 

Aza makes it to her dad's house without incident and he's taken the week off work to watch her do magic and talk about books they have both read and try to convince her to come fishing (she does, but only to see if magic makes fishing interesting; it turns out that it can but at the cost of scaring away all the fish and making him raise an eyebrow at her). She is cooed over by various people who have been vaguely aware of her since she was a baby and they don't write to her but they are permitted to assess her increased height and impressive Gifts. She picks up a Mindhealing patient, a neighbor with postpartum depression who Aza can meaningfully improve in the time available and who can probably make do with occasional check-ins whenever she's back in town for another visit; she writes up the notes on what she did and gives them to the patient in case she needs to see a different Mindhealer at some point, such as if Aza's struck by lightning or something.

She gets on the coach going the other way, and is a tiny bit late for next term. She'll need to get notes from her classmate on the first class of illusions, and from Ma'ar on artifacts, but she'll catch up.

When she gets home, her mother has a note from the Healers' building. Apparently Ma'ar is there and there's some sort of problem and he put her down as his contact person but then she wasn't home. 

...well, shit. This note is old enough that she doesn't think she ought to call Skan and have him bus her over there pronto but she does quickly change out of her dusty travel clothes and walk to Healers' still munching her welcome-home snack.

Conveniently the Healer on duty in front recognizes her, since she's been over with Lionwind before to see patients who were also Mindhealing patients. "Aza! You're here for Ma'ar? I think he'll be very relieved to see you, poor thing, he's got no one here with him." 

"Yeah - what happened to him please?"

"Oh, you hadn't heard? He, er - he can probably tell you more than me, but what I heard is he picked a fight with some older students in his class, for some reason I cannot fathom at all." 

"...I see. Where is he please? Will he be okay?"

"This way." The Healer starts walking. "He should make a full recovery but he'll be here another few days - oh, and it'd help if you can convince him to sleep, I think he just - refused to, for some reason, stayed awake all night." 

...she can't really hurry but she can take slightly longer steps.

Ma'ar is curled up in a cot looking very small, with one arm splinted and in a sling and the other bandaged, and he looks exhausted and also so, so relieved to see her. "Aza," he says hoarsely, starting to sit up and then making a pained noise and changing his mind. 

Oh no oh no! "Ma'ar what happened? And why haven't you been sleeping?"

Talking is hard and his head also hurts but Mindspeech is tolerable. :I was scared - I don't like sleeping in strange places if I can't put up wards... I'll try to explain but it's - complicated...: 

He hasn't cried at all up until this point and now he really really wants to, for some reason, even though that doesn't make sense at all.