Disclaimer: In case, over that long wait between the last chapter and this one, you somehow managed to forget what I've been drilling into your head for months, I don't own…Mercedes Lackey does.

I know, it's been a long time. Feel free to kick me, etcetera. School is bad. Being a sophomore is a lot more work than I thought and I haven't had a lot of time to just sit down and write. I haven't been so happy with the way the story is going either. I'm trying to make it work, but I feel like I'm making things too idealized and without enough detail and such. Anyway, I'll do better about updating, I hope.

First, though, reviews!

Fireblade: Thanks! You're right about the Healer's Collegium. That's one reason why I chose it, I'm not so good at REFERRING TO THE TEXT, lol, and of course, I was interested. –cringes- Sorry I haven't been updating…or reviewing. The last few chappies of Like the Moon were awesome, by the way.

Violet Rush: I think I may have meant halfway through the plot, I don't really remember. I'll do my best though.

Wizard: -cringes- Yeah, not doing so well on the chapter posting, am I?

Lurks in Shadows: Probably. Of course, she'll be out on circuit a lot, so she won't be around incredibly much.

Tenshi: Thanks. I really didn't feel like having to have him work around a prejudice, although it might have dealt with some of my idealism problems.

Vaches: Thanks!

Anyway, on with the chapter! Skipping a tiny bit to try to get the story on track again, but its only a matter of hours, so it shouldn't be a problem. Sorry about the rushed-ness, I really wanted to publish tonight. Maybe I'll revise and republish, so forgive any typos or bad paragraphs at the very end, please.

Chapter 15: First Day

Treet awoke the next morning in his very own bed, a luxury he allowed himself a few seconds to savor before rolling out onto the cold wooden floor. While he didn't have the sore, swollen eyes that had signaled his awakening the previous morning, nor the pounding headache, the small shielding that the room in the House of Healing had offered from the Waking Bell of the Collegia was no longer in effect.

He groaned and stretched, the lively pealing seeming incongruous for the time of morning in question. Dawn's rosy cheeks had just begun to show over the horizon and his whole room seemed bathed in a warm light.

Treet looked around, realizing as he had not realized before how empty his room seemed. He was used to being packed into a small space with groups of other people whenever he was indoors. Generally, those others weren't exactly happy for him to be there. Having this much room to breathe was an extravagance to Treet, even more so than waking up in his own bed.

He could have stayed there and pondered the luxury indefinitely, lying on the floor where he had rolled out of bed, but the insistent clanging of the waking bell reminded him that he had places to be and with that awareness, a feeling like molten lead flowed into his stomach.

People hurt you. He wasn't even conscious of saying it to himself, but after this long it had become instinctive. People hurt you. Even here, they hurt you. Maybe they have a good reason, but they still hurt you.

Almost mechanically, Treet got up, made the bed and grabbed some clean clothes, after some initial confusion during which his subconscious mind attempted valiantly to convince him that those green, dress-like things in the closet couldn't possibly be his, then walked down the hallway, as nonchalantly as he could, for a bath.

Because he pressed his body against the wall and was wearing a fairly generic sleeping shirt, the other Trainees ignored him. They were nowhere near as rowdy as his brothers, and nothing close to as disturbing as he had expected. In fact, they all radiated a sort of comforting silence, a greenness that soothed his mind the way most other presences rubbed it raw.

On his way back down the hallway, freshly dressed and bathed, he remembered to grab his schedule from where it had been pinned to his door, marveling that nobody had stolen or shredded it yet.

Looking at the paper, with its neat and precise handwriting, Treet somehow thought of Lirain. He wondered if he would ever see her again, but he doubted it. It was fine for her to talk of being his friend and to comfort him when they had been thrown together, but surely, surely she would have no time for him, would not want to spare time for such a cowardly weakling as he knew himself to be.

He sighed and tried to put Lirain out of his mind, as he had so many anguish causing things, placing her in her own special mental box, which he lovingly and somewhat frivolously imagined to have her name traced on it in curling gold script.

Then, with much mental regret, he shoved the box into the deepest, darkest corners of his mind, somewhere it couldn't hurt him. Well, he amended ruefully; somewhere it can't hurt me much, anyway.

With that, he blanked his mind as best as he could, unsure of what he was doing. His mind felt unsteady, unbalanced. At times, he felt wide open to everything around him. Other times, he couldn't feel anything at all.

Blinking furiously, Treet stumbled down the hallway to the room where Lirain had told him that his Orientation class would be. From what he had gathered, for his first moon at the Collegium, he would spend a decreasing amount of time here from the entire morning down to a Candlemark, learning about why he was at the Collegium.

'That,' he thought wryly, 'is a lesson I could certainly do with.'

Unwilling to bear with another fit of melancholy, he firmly squashed all of his doubts and fears into a ball in the other dark corner of his mind, grasped his courage in his hands and twisted the doorknob, walking into a room that seemed the size of an entire pasture filled with people, although in reality it was little more than thrice the size of his new bedroom.

Treet gulped, and confronting the sea of new faces seemed less like something he could maybe jolly himself into and more like something to run away from, very fast.

Too late. He'd been spotted. A Healer, wearing the same thing Treet was, except in a darker shade of green and of finer materials, smiled in what Treet supposed was meant to be a reassuring fashion and beckoned towards Treet to have a seat on the rug with the rest of the people there.

Treet took an unconscious step back. He had had quite enough, thank you very much, of people trying to cajole him into things. He felt a sudden spark on anger, born in fear, but it died as quickly as it had struck, leaving Treet feeling very much alone.

Somewhere deep in his mind, so deep that he barely noticed it and did not think about it, a small and previously unused portion of his mind twanged with a message of comfort and reassurance.

Treet didn't notice any of this, and what he didn't notice, he couldn't object to. All he knew was that he suddenly felt as though he might be able to force his clumsy feet into those last few steps. Somehow, he managed, taking a seat as far to the back as he could and smiling tentatively at the friendly overtures a few of the other boys made towards him.

Before long, the Healer at the front of the room coughed gently and the collective attention of the class, which Treet could now see was only around fifteen children of approximately his age, turned with varying degrees of reluctance to the man who fairly dripped with an aura of friendliness to Treet's mind.

"Hello everyone," he said with an agreeable smile and a nod that made his thick brown hair, cut just above his shoulder, shake and sway at the ends.

"Now, does anyone know why we're here today?"

To Treet's amazement and great admiration, the boy a few rows in front of Treet shot his hand up.

"Yes, Mardic," the teacher said, with another smile that would have been condescending on anyone but him.

"We're here to learn to be Healers," Mardic said, with more shortness and deliberateness than Treet would have given him credit for.

"Yes, we are," the Healer said. "Or, rather, you are. I'm here to help you get started. My name is Healer Josh, and you'll be seeing rather a lot of me for the next moon. Now, can anyone tell me what a Healer does?"

A blonde girl on the other side of the room from Treet answered in a quiet voice "Healers help people. When they're sick, they make them better. When they get hurt, Healers fix it."

"Very good," Josh praised. "Now, does anyone know how they do that?"

"They use the things any village herbswoman would use," another boy Treet couldn't see answered. "But they also have a special Gift for Healing, and that's what brings them, us, here."

"That's right. You're all here because you have the Healing Gift, which allows you to see and correct sickness and injury. You'll learn more about that in your Gift classes. You also have one of the mindmagic Gifts traditionally attributed to Heralds, although this one seems to be almost always unique to Healers when it appears in any strength at all. Does anyone know what that is?" Josh asked.

"Empathy!" A group of people called out.

"Exactly so. For those of you who don't know, Empathy is a special Gift that allows us to feel what others are feeling, if they or we are unshielded or untrained, or if their emotions are powerful enough."

Treet sat with his mouth open, absorbing everything he could. His little green book hadn't made more than a cursory mention of the Healing Gifts, and although the textbooks already in his room had, their terms had been so arcane that Treet hadn't managed to get past page ten of any of them.

By the end of that morning, it had begun to sink in for Treet. He was really going to be a Healer. Maybe someday he would have a job he could do, a place of his own. He wouldn't be the odd little black sheep in a flock of white ones, or worse, but more aptly, a sheep in a flock of maddened bulls.

On his way out the door, he heard Healer Josh call after him. "Trainee Tretin? Could you come here for a second?"

Immediately all the good cheer that had built up inside Treet vanished, as surely as if it had never been. In his experience, a summons from an adult never meant anything good. The walk back through the room seemed to take forever, yet not long enough. He frantically riffled through his memories, trying to think what he could have done.

Could the Dean want to see him again? He shuddered inwardly. Anything but that! Well, not anything, but, please, he begged any power that might be listening. Not that again.

Healer Josh could see that the child was anguished, but he firmly checked his first impulse, which was to soothe and comfort. That would do no good in the long run. If this child was to be a Healer, he would have to learn on his own that the other Healers meant him no harm and not through the insidious emotional projections that Josh or any other Healer was capable of coloring his perceptions with.

As Treet approached the front of the room, he stopped cold, unconsciously bracing himself for a blow. He ducked his head, staring steadfastly at the floor, and clasped his hands in front of him, waiting.

Josh frowned. "Child, I'm not going to hurt you," he said, gently and slightly reproachfully.

Treet did not reply, but allowed himself a moment's cynical thought to the effect of 'That's what they all say. Next comes the 'it's for your own good' speech, which never precedes anything good.'

Josh seemed to sense some of Treet's skepticism and Treet blushed, realizing the implications of that day's lessons.

"Exactly." Josh said, breaking the silence. "Tretin, you are not properly shielded. Now, I can guess why that is, and I understand that it's not your fault, but we have to correct this. One of the first things a strong Empath must learn is how to keep their emotions to themselves."

Treet blushed even redder and felt an acute stab of fear at the memory of why he seemed to have none of these things called shields.

"No, nothing like that." Josh said, knowing that it was better to reassure Treet early on than to allow him to retain the illusion that his mind was not wide open. "I'm just going to teach you how to shield properly. First, we ground and center."

Treet remembered those words from one of the textbooks he had tried to read. He had had no idea what they meant, but they had seemed important.

"First," Josh continued in a soothing monotone, "I want you to look inside your mind. Look for the most stable, least chaotic place you can find."

Somewhat to Treet's surprise, he found it fairly easily, a sturdy pillar of glowing green in one of the dusty forgotten parts of his mind.

"Good. Now, you should see some sort of pillar or connection to the ground."

"I see it." Treet said cautiously.

"Good, now follow it." Josh instructed. "Follow it until you find a stable place in the earth, then root yourself to it. You'll never lose it once you find it."

Treet did, and with a click like a door fitting into its frame, he snapped himself into it.

"Very good." Josh sounded faintly surprised. "You're doing very well, for someone with no training. Now, use the energy you found to build up walls around your mind. Make sure you can take then down again if need be, but make them strong."

Treet remembered how it had felt when he had touched Herald Karissa's mind, the shields and how they had been constructed. After two or three tried, he managed to erect something that would stand up on its own.

When he came up to the surface again, Josh was smiling at him. "Good work. You see, I told you I wasn't going to hurt you. Now run along or you'll miss lunch."

Treet stood there for a moment, basking in relief. The silence he hadn't had in his mind for moons, if not years, and never realized he had missed, was back, so delightful. Then his stomach broke him out of his daze and he left, hoping he could remember how to find the dining hall.