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The cart is still about four hours ride from the city limits, or so the driver says, when Jim insists that he and Leonard get off. Leonard sure as hell doesn’t want to walk the rest of the way, but the kid is quick to tell him that he and his Companion, Enterprise, will give him a lift.
“Look,” Jim says, “you can’t go into a population center like Haven the way you are right now. We need to finish setting up your shielding!”
Leonard knows he can’t argue with that. It was bad enough in Peach Tree, which is a small town. Here, his headache grows as they draw nearer to the city and more travelers fill the road. Now that Jim’s shown him what to look for, he can feel the weight of the emotions of everyone around pressing in on him.
“Are you sure we can’t finish in the four hours on the cart?” he asks to be sure.
“It’ll take less than four hours, but we need to get you away from people for this next part.”
Leonard grumbles, but mostly he’s just relieved.
The driver is decent enough to pull over to the side of the road so they can get off. Jim vaults to the ground with a truly disgusting show of energy. Leonard follows in a more sedate manner, grabbing his small satchel as he goes. It carries his few toiletries, two green Healer tunics, underclothing, and a small flask of the Peach Tree local brew.
“Is that everything you’ve got?” Jim asks, pointing at the bag.
“My wife got everything in the separation.” Leonard says. His mind shies away from the memory of the roiling mass of anger and pain that had been Jocelyn’s emotions, and the way they had battered at Leonard’s already fragile psyche with an almost tangible force.
“All I’ve got left are my bones,” he adds, trying to make a joke of it, but his words come out tired and bitter.
Jim looks sad and Leonard dreads the empty words of sympathy that always follow. But the kid doesn’t say anything; he just takes Leonard’s bag and ties it to one of the saddlebags that Enterprise is carrying. Then he turns on his heel and leads the way through the woodland lining the East Trade Road.
The three of them stop once they reach an empty clearing and the Companion crosses the grass to the center. She sinks to her knees, then lies down with a satisfied grunt. Jim flashes Leonard a smile before joining her, sitting cross-legged on the grass and leaning back against her. Two pairs of blue eyes pierce Leonard as he hesitates at the edge of the clearing.
“Here?” he asks.
“Get your fine ass over here, Leonard McCoy,” Jim says. Leonard rolls his eyes, but goes.
So they start.
He’s sitting in front of the Trainee and Companion, palms on knees and eyes closed. Jim guides him through the meditation exercise to ground and center, strengthening the connection to the earth that all Healers have and focusing inward on that warm, radiating energy that is the core of him. Leonard’s done this before; it’s a standard part of training.
“Okay, so you’re going to imagine a wall around your mind.”
“What kind of wall?”
“What kind of--? It doesn’t matter!” Jim says, exasperated. “A strong wall, one without any cracks or weaknesses, all right?”
“Right.” Leonard concentrates, thinking of the wall that his grandaddy built to keep back the river.
“Feel it surrounding you, leaving no space unguarded. Give it a connection to the earth through you, to give it stability and strength.” They are both quiet for a few moments as Leonard brings the mental wall into being. “Got it?” Jim asks quietly. “Now Enterprise and I are gonna poke at your shield a bit, to see if it’ll hold up.”
The probing feeling that follows is a strange one. There is the sensation of someone testing his wall and when the pushing gets stronger, Leonard makes his wall thicker in equal response to the force.
“Great job!” Jim says. “You’re a natural at this, seriously. Okay, now we’re going to practice raising and lowering your shield until you can do it without any effort at all.”
They do this for at least an hour until Jim allows for a break. Leonard is sweating from the strain of it as he gets up to stretch his tense muscles.
Jim is smiling as he hands Leonard a water flask. “You’re picking up this stuff fast, especially for someone who’s been doing without for so long. I think maybe you’ve been instinctively trying to shield yourself all along.”
“Well, goody for me,” Leonard says. He drinks from the flask and watches Jim climb a nearby tree for some apples, tossing a couple down for Enterprise to catch neatly in her teeth. He accepts a fruit of his own when Jim comes back down with half a dozen in his pockets.
“How do you know so much about mind Gifts if you were only just Chosen?” Leonard asks curiously.
Jim makes a show of thinking about it as he bites into a green-skinned apple. “My Gift showed early; Mindspeech, you know? So even though I hadn’t been Chosen, I still needed training. There’s a... friend of my family who’s a Herald. He used to come by sometimes and explain things.”
“Nice of him.”
“Right.” Jim says, sounding distracted. “Let’s go on, shall we?”
They seat themselves again and this time Jim has him work on creating more than one shield.
“What? Why?” Leonard asks.
“Imagine if something happens that overwhelms your shield? Not only would you feel that backlash of it breaking, but then you’d be unprotected.”
It’s another hour before Jim is satisfied with Leonard’s ability to hold shields in layers of two, even three. Lastly, Jim has him build a thick, strong shield and layer it, hidden, under a thinner one.
“That way you look weaker than you are from the outside. On my end, that shield doesn’t look much stronger than the natural one some people are born with.” Leonard’s expression is doubtful, but Jim tells him, “Trust me, sometimes the best advantage to have is to be underestimated.”
Then the kid proclaims him as prepared as Jim can make him.
“If we hustle, we can get to the Collegia by dinner time,” Jim says with a grin before he puts a foot into a stirrup and swings up onto Enterprise’s saddle. He extends his hand to help Leonard onto the saddle behind him.
“I’m too old for this,” Leonard groans and holds on tight to Jim’s waist as Enterprise takes off at a fast walk.
“No way,” Jim laughs. “You’re barely half a decade older than me!”
“Tell that to my bones,” Leonard grumbles.
“You and your bones.” He can’t see Jim’s face, but he’s pretty sure Jim is rolling his eyes.
After a while Jim says conversationally, “You never told me.”
“Told you what?”
“How you managed to be a Healer without knowing anything about shields. That shouldn’t even be possible, you know.”
Leonard figures at this point he owes Jim the story. “I grew up in Peach Tree,” Leonard says. “It’s about three days East of here. Near bandit country, so it’s got its own House of Healing-- which is where I went once I turned thirteen and damn near killed myself trying to Heal my cousin’s broken leg.”
“That doesn’t surprise me one bit,” the kid says over his shoulder with a smile.
“I’ve never pretended to be something I’m not,” Leonard admits with some humor. “As for the House, well, it was never a big one. Never more’n half a dozen folks and that includes the apprentices. Most only had a spark of power. M’Benga, that’s the Master-Class Healer who taught me, was the strongest.” Leonard is quiet for a while.
“You were stronger than him,” Jim says with certainty in his voice.
“Yes,” Leonard sighs. “I could do things that M’Benga had mostly only heard of.”
“Why didn’t you go the Healer’s Collegium?”
“My mama wanted me to. I would have, but there was bandit season, and then a wasting sickness; there always seemed to be something that needed doing.”
“And you were doing fine with what M’Benga taught you, or so everyone thought.”
“Yeah. I thought so too.” Leonard leans a little closer to Jim’s warmth, thinking about what to say next. “He must have not been any kind of empath, ‘cause he never said a word of it to me. I always thought it meant it was just something you couldn’t train, like it was always gonna be there and I just had to deal with it.”
“That sucks,” Jim offers. “Didn’t you have any new Healers come in on rotation?”
“We did, but they weren’t empathic enough to notice-- or I wasn’t projecting enough to draw attention, I guess.”
They ride in silence for a while before Jim asks, “So why now? I mean, I’m assuming the Collegium is where you’re headed right now.”
“You’d be right. I was hoping they might be able to do something with this empathy, though I was thinking more to turn it off.” He sighs. “Even if that meant turning off my Healing Gift, too.”
“I guess things got pretty bad, huh?”
“Yeah,” Leonard says roughly. “It did. But... you helped.”
“Just doing the Heraldic thing.”
“Well, thanks anyway.”
“No problem.”
At Enterprise’s distance-eating lope, it’s only two hours until they reach the city. Jim cranes his head to look back at Leonard as they top the last hill and have the capital city of Terra stretched out before them. “Welcome to Haven, Bones,” Jim says with a grin.
“Bones?” Leonard says blankly.
“Haven’t you ever had a nickname before?”
“Bones?” Leonard says again.
“You’ll learn to love it, I promise you.”
It’s all Leonard can do to keep from gawking like a country boy as they enter the city. The sounds are a loud discord in the air; shouts, conversation, the noise of feet and wheels and hooves walking over cobblestone, the constant vocalizations of cattle. The smells-- washed and unwashed people, manure, various animals, and the scents that rise from the merchants’ many wares.
The sheer number of people and animals and things is overwhelming to a small-town Healer even without the added pressure of outside emotions. Leonard doesn’t think he could be more grateful to Jim, annoying quirks and nicknames notwithstanding.
Enterprise seems to know exactly where to go as they slowly make their way through the city, which stands to reason. They pass through bustling markets, some residential districts, artisan shops, more residential districts, though higher class than the last... After a while Leonard realizes that the road they are following is curving endlessly inward.
“The city is actually built on a spiral,” Jim says, uncannily in line with what Leonard is thinking and Leonard has to check check his shields to make sure they’re still up, which they are.
“It has to do with making it difficult for an invading army to take the city,” Jim continues.
“Makes sense,” Leonard replies.
They approach the gates to the palace, which shares its grounds with the three collegia; Heraldic, Healer’s, and Bardic. As they draw near, a guard comes out to meet them on foot.
“Heyla, Trainee,” he says to Jim and also nods a greeting to Leonard. There’s a quick glance over their travel-stained, country style clothes, and he adds, “Welcome to Haven. Intentions?”
“Well, the Herald’s Collegium, obviously,” Jim answers with a grin. “My friend here is headed to Healer’s Collegium; I think he’s a Healing Adept, or at least close to it.”
Leonard tightens his arms around Jim warningly. “Don’t joke about that kind of stuff,” he mutters darkly into other man’s ear. Jim ignores him.
“Fair enough,” the guard is saying cheerfully. “If I can just get your names, you’re good to go.”
“Right. Well, this is Leonard McCoy,” Jim says, then pauses and seems to brace himself. “My name is James Tiberius Kirk.”
The guard drops his clipboard. “Oh my god,” he says, staring at Jim.
Things get pretty hectic after that.