So this is it. My very first Multi-Chapter story. Oh dear, I am so excited. I loved writing this, and I hope ya'll like it! Title is totally outta the blue, really doesn't have much a meaning. A real attention getter though. =]

Review please.

Disclaimer: I do not own Tamora Pierce's characters.

Year one

So it began today. The day I would become an official page. I had come to the palace a couple days before eager and scared at the same time. I wasn't sure what lay ahead, but I welcomed it whole-heartedly, I wanted the pain to come. I was looking forward to broken fingers and bruises. My marks of hard work.

Gods, I am such a masochist.

I shook my head, I was in a long hall standing outside what would be my room for the four years I would be spending here in Corus. Looking around I saw other boys my age, I blinked, no, there were only three boys, to my right wasn't a boy it was a... girl. I ended up staring. I got the feeling she was pretending not to notice, or, she really didn't notice. I didn't have time to ponder this because from down the hall I heard foot steps and voices, quickly I straightened myself and forced myself to look straight ahead as Lord Wyldon and the older pages came in. Faleron had told me about this, the first thing done tonight, before dinner, was the task of picking sponsors for the new comers. I didn't need help, no more than that girl needed to be here. But I got a sponsor anyway, at least it was some one I knew, Faleron my cousin. Even the girl got a sponsor, a smart mouth boy who, to me, seemed too old to be a page.

After sponsors were assigned the group of pages, I myself included, went to the mess hall to eat dinner. But of course the girl and her snotty sponsor had to be late, preventing us all from eating until they arrived. I shared the feelings of the grumbling pages next to me.

Little did I know that things would get much worse. And then much better... And then much worse, again.

Training started well enough, for me and the other first years... Except Kel. Yes the girl has a name. I didn't like her at first, it seemed to me she was always showing off, but if I looked closer just a bit, an emotion, barely there, would leak through. She wasn't trying to show off. What got me furious with this girl wasn't the fact that she was a natural warrior, it was the fact that she couldn't stand to see other people get picked on. She had to help the defenseless. So, naturally, it had to be me.

An older page by the name of Joren was constantly hazing me. Every one knew hazing the first years was all apart of being a first year, but Kel didn't like the way Joren and his friends did it. She thought they took it way too far. The worst part about that is, I agreed with her. But I didn't know I agreed with her. You see, she saved, yes saved, me from Joren. She just sort of waded into them and tried taking three nearly grown boys all at once. On more than one occasion. After the second incident, I realized something.

I wasn't the masochist. She was.

The funny thing about that girl? She didn't care what people said about her. She took it and let it shape her... I liked her for that. I begrudgingly liked her for that. I thought we were the same, except she was a girl and I wasn't.

She was well tempered. I wasn't.

It took me a while but eventually I joined her and Neal's study group, which gradually got bigger. Now I had invaluable friends that I sensed I would go through alot with. We were always sticking up for eachother... mainly Kel. Our group became closer as each summer passed, I wish I knew then what I know now. I could have saved us a lot of trouble.

I think how I'm gonna do this, is Chpt. 1 will be Year one. Chpt 2 will be The First Summer and so on. Each chapter will be a small snippet of what's going through... the secret characters mind.

I don't know if I want to reveal who the character is until the end.... Oh well, I think I gave some pretty big hints in there... okay, REALLy big hints. Like, Billboard hints. But I wont say the characters name until near the end. Just to be sneaky. =]

Alyss M.