The notice came on a Thursday.
A rider from the county seat nailed it to the board outside the inn — same board that carried harvest prices and road notices and the occasional lost-animal description — and by noon half the village had read it and the other half had been told about it by someone who had. Royal Mage Registry, quarterly assessment circuit, Thornwick scheduled in three days. All village residents between the ages of seven and twenty-one were required to present for aptitude testing. Non-compliance was a fine.
Arthur read it through Shadow's copy at the board and went home and sat at the kitchen table and thought.
He had known this was coming. The assessors ran their rural circuits every quarter, same villages, same schedule, predictable as weather. He had known for two years that Thornwick was on the circuit and that the day would eventually come when the Voss children were the right age for the test. He had made general plans. He had not made specific ones, because the specific ones required knowing exactly how the assessment worked and he had only pieces of that.
Now he had three days.
He set all twelve minds to work on the problem and went to find his mother.
◆ ◆ ◆
She was in the garden and she had already read the notice. He could tell from the set of her shoulders before he said a word.
'Arthur,' she said, when she heard him come through the gate.
'I know.'
'They test for magical ability. All four of you will — '
'I know. Sit down with me.'
She sat on the low garden wall, hands in her lap, and looked at him with the specific look she had when she was trying very hard not to be frightened and not entirely succeeding.
'They'll find it,' she said. 'In all of you. Clara, Lyra, Thomas. You. And then — '
'They won't find anything,' Arthur said. 'Not on any of us.'
'You can stop it? You're certain?'
He was not yet certain. He had been running the problem for about twenty minutes across twelve threads and he had a solid framework but the specific countermeasure required knowing exactly what the assessment spell did, and he hadn't fully mapped that yet.
He looked at his mother's face.
'Yes,' he said. 'I'm certain. I need a few days to prepare and I need everyone to trust me and go through the assessment normally. Don't act differently. Don't seem nervous. Just go in and do what they say and come out.'
'What will you do?'
'I'll handle the spell before it can read you properly. You won't feel anything. Neither will the assessor. You'll come out unremarkable and he'll move on to the next village.'
His mother looked at him for a long moment. He watched her decide — not whether to trust him, she had long since settled that question, but whether to let herself be reassured, which was different.
'All right,' she said.
'Tell the others tonight. Same message: act normal, trust me, it's handled.'
She nodded. Then she looked at him with the expression she used when she was going to say something she had decided to say regardless of whether he wanted to hear it.
'Be careful,' she said. 'Not just smart. Careful.'
'Yes, Mom.'
◆ ◆ ◆
He used the three days well.
Shadow's network gave him most of what he needed. The assessor's circuit had been running the same route for years — twelve villages, quarterly, always the same order — and that meant the villages ahead of Thornwick on the schedule had already been tested this quarter. People talked. A farmer two villages over had mentioned the assessment to the merchant who stopped at his road, and the merchant had mentioned it to the innkeeper at his next stop, and by the time Arthur's copy in Thornwick's inn caught the chain of gossip, he had a reasonable picture of what the assessment actually involved.
A stone. That was the centerpiece of it. The assessor carried a testing stone — a smooth disc of polished grey rock about the size of a palm, set in a brass frame, that reacted visibly to magical aptitude when someone placed their hand on it. The stone glowed. Stronger aptitude, brighter glow. No aptitude, nothing.
This told him two things.
First, the testing method was passive — it read what was there rather than actively probing for it, which meant it was looking at the surface of a person's magical state rather than investigating deeply. Second, it had a visible output, which meant the assessor was reading a result rather than conducting his own analysis. The stone did the work. The assessor just watched.
He spent the second day building the countermeasure.
The principle was straightforward: he needed a construct that could sit on a person and suppress the surface expression of their mana — not block it, not move it, just muffle the readable output the way a blanket muffled sound. The stone was looking for heat. He needed to wrap his family in something that looked cold.
The construction was more delicate than anything he had done before, but his pool was deep and his twelve threads were thorough, and by the end of the second day he had a working version. He tested it on himself: pressed his own hand against the smooth stone surface he had shaped from a river rock and applied the suppression. The mana that should have flared against the test registered as nothing. Flat. Ordinary.
He refined it twice and called it ready.
The suppression construct could be placed on a person from a distance without their knowledge or the knowledge of anyone nearby. It would last approximately four hours — more than enough for an assessment session — and it left no visible trace on the person carrying it.
He placed it on his mother and siblings the morning of the assessment, one by one, while they ate breakfast.
None of them felt it. He had made sure of that.
◆ ◆ ◆
The assessor came from the county seat in a cart with a kingdom seal on the side, accompanied by a scribe and a young assistant who carried the equipment. He set up in the inn's common room, which was the largest enclosed space in the village, and the innkeeper had moved the tables to create a clear path to a small desk near the window where the testing stone sat on its brass stand.
His name, according to the scribe's record sheet, was Aldric Vane. He was perhaps forty-five, well-fed, with the particular air of someone who had held a mid-level position for long enough that they had stopped thinking of it as mid-level. He wore the grey-and-blue of registry functionaries and had the slight boredom of someone who had done this same task in this same kind of village approximately four hundred times.
Arthur watched him set up through the copy positioned in the shadow under the inn's side window.
He noted: methodical, practiced, not paying close attention. This was the quarterly circuit for a man who expected nothing unusual in a small farming village, and everything about his manner reflected that expectation. He would test the children in order, record the results, collect his fee from the village headman, and move on.
Arthur noted also: the testing stone was more refined than the village gossip had suggested. Up close through Shadow's enhanced perception, it had a quality to it that he recognized from his own experience with magical instruments — layered construction, not simple, with a fine inner grid that suggested it was doing more than just reading surface output. It was reading something deeper too, though the deeper read appeared to produce only a minor secondary result that the assessor noted separately in a smaller column of his ledger.
He spent approximately ninety seconds re-evaluating his countermeasure.
The surface suppression was solid. But the deeper read — he needed to know what it was looking for. He pushed the copy's perception as close to the stone as he dared and watched the first three children go through.
◆ ◆ ◆