He spent the next hour thinking about something else the assessment had shown him.
The village had fourteen children in the testing age range. Of the fourteen, three had produced readings worth noting — two low-aptitude flickers and one mid-level glow that had made the assessor sit up slightly and write more carefully in his main column. That boy was twelve, a miller's son named Pell, and he had walked back to his mother with the dazed expression of someone who had just been told that the kingdom now had a claim on their future.
The fee Vane had collected from the headman was per-child tested. Flat rate, everyone, regardless of result. That was standard.
But the assessor had also accepted a smaller private payment from the miller after the testing, handed over in the inn doorway while the scribe was distracted, and pocketed it in a way that was practiced and quick. Arthur had watched this through the copy. The miller had looked relieved afterward, the specific relief of a man who had just secured something for more than it should have cost.
He thought about this.
The boy Pell had registered mid-level aptitude. With that registration, the kingdom had a right to evaluate him for academy placement. If he was placed, he would go to the capital. If he wasn't placed — which was the more likely outcome for a rural mid-level child from a family that could not afford to support a prolonged evaluation period — he would come back, registered, with a mark next to his name in the central ledger that labeled him a mage-potential who had not been developed.
That mark had implications. Some employers wanted it. Some didn't. Some noble families paid finders' fees to assessors who directed registered potentials toward their private magical programs rather than the academy pipeline.
The miller had paid Aldric Vane to not record his son.
And Vane had taken the money.
Arthur sat with this for a while. He thought about the fourteen children who had sat down at that desk today. He thought about Pell, who was twelve and had a real gift and whose father had just paid a corrupt assessor to make sure no one official ever knew about it, which protected the boy from the academy pipeline but also ensured he would never be taught properly. He thought about every other village on Vane's circuit, and the quarterly fee, and the private payments, and the ledger that was presumably missing entries that had been quietly purchased out of it.
There were no protections built into this system. None. The assessor had total authority over what went into his ledger and no oversight he encountered in a rural village. The stone read the truth and the man recorded whatever he chose. The gap between those two things was where Aldric Vane made his real living.
He thought: someone should do something about that.
He thought: that someone is not me. Not yet. I am seven years old and I have a family to protect and I do not yet have the reach or the resources to fix a kingdom-wide problem with its mage assessment infrastructure.
He thought: but I could file it. I could note what I now understand about how this works. And I could remember Pell's name, and where he lives, and what he can do.
I could keep track.
He filed it: the system was corrupt and the corruption was structural and there were children in every village on this circuit who were either being falsely registered or falsely cleared, depending on what their families could afford to pay. He filed Pell's name. He filed Vane's face and manner and the private payment he had watched through the copy.
He filed: not now. Not yet. But eventually.
Then he stood up from the kitchen table and went to find his family to tell them it was over and everything had gone fine.
◆ ◆ ◆
They were all in the main room.
Clara was on the floor with Kiiro curled in her lap, apparently in the middle of telling Kiiro about the assessment in detail. Lyra was on the couch with a book and Tsuki in her customary neck-scarf position. Thomas was in his chair by the window doing the thing he did where he appeared to be doing nothing but was actually thinking through several problems simultaneously. Their parents were at the table, clear distress in their eyes. Anxiety, from the thought of the kingdom taking possession of their young children, seen on their faces.
Arthur stood in the doorway and said: 'It worked. You all came back ordinary. He's already left the village.'
His mother let out a breath she had been holding since morning.
'He asked about us,' Thomas said. Not a question.
'Just general things. Nothing specific. He's gone.'
Thomas nodded and went back to his thinking.
'Did anyone register?' Lyra asked.
'Pell. The miller's son. Mid-level.'
Mira looked up, 'Oh poor Pell, he's a good boy. So, what happens to him?'
'His father handled it with money,' He didn't elaborate. 'So Pell won't be going anywhere.'
She looked at him for a moment, reading something in the answer. Then she went back to her book.
Clara looked up from her one-sided conversation with Kiiro. 'Are we going to have to do this every year?'
'Every year until you're 18. Then you're off the testing schedule.'
'So for years.'
'Yes.'
'And you can do what you did today every time?'
'Every time. It's easier now that I know exactly what the stone is reading.'
Clara considered this. Then, with the air of someone whose mind had moved on to a new subject: 'What actually happens? If you get taken. To the academy.'
The room was quiet for a moment.
'You go to the capital,' Arthur said. 'There's a school there for magically gifted children. You board there. Train there. Come home for maybe a few weeks a year, if the distance isn't too far.'
Clara looked up fully. 'A few weeks.'
'If you're lucky. Some of the more intensive programs — less than that.'
Clara sat with this for a moment. She looked at Lyra. She looked at Thomas. She looked at her mother, who was standing at the kitchen counter and had gone very still.
'So you'd just — never see everyone?' Clara said. 'For most of the year? Every year? Your all alone? How terrifying'
'That's generally how it works from what Shadow heard.'
'You're so attentive, Miss Shadow! But anyway, that's terrible,' Clara said, with complete conviction. 'That's an absolutely terrible idea, and I want no part of it.'
She scratched Kiiro behind the ear with the finality of someone who had considered a proposal and rejected it.
But his mother hadn't moved from the counter.
Arthur watched her. Mira had her hands flat on the surface and she was looking at the window in the particular way she looked at things when she was thinking something she hadn't said yet.
'Mira?' Edric said, from the table.
'I'm thinking,' she said.
The kitchen waited.
'You all have real ability,' she said finally, turning around. She looked at each of them in turn — Thomas, Lyra, Clara, Arthur. 'Real ability. The kind the stone would have lit up for, if Arthur hadn't — right? ' She stopped, started again. 'The academy isn't nothing. Noble titles go to those who do well enough. Good marriages. Opportunities that don't exist out here.' She folded her arms across her chest, not defensively but in the way she did when she was holding a thought in place while she examined it. 'I wonder sometimes if I'm doing right by you. Keeping you here. Hiding what you can do.'
No one spoke.
'You could have more,' she said quietly. 'All of you. And I'm making sure no one knows it.'
Clara opened her mouth.
'Don't say it's fine just to make me feel better,' her mother said.
Clara closed her mouth.
Lyra said, carefully: 'I don't want to go anywhere.'
'You're still a child. You might feel differently when your grown.'
'I might,' Lyra said. 'But I'd want it to be my choice.'
Thomas hadn't looked up from his hands, but he said, in the way he said things when he had waited long enough and had something to contribute: 'The family needs us and the farm needs people who know it. That's not nothing either.'
Edric had been listening to all of this from his chair. He set down his cup.
'I wouldn't trust anyone else to raise my children,' he said. Simply, with the quality he had of saying things once because once was enough.
Mira looked at him.
'They come every year,' he continued. 'Same assessor, same stone, same schedule. That means every year for the next several years, Arthur can keep doing what he did today, and our children stay home.' He looked around the table at each of them. 'When you're older — when you know what you want — we talk about it again. If any of you decide you want to go to the city and sit in a school and earn a title, we discuss it then. The choice doesn't go away just because we wait.'
He picked up his cup.
'Until then,' he said, 'you're all staying put. That is not up for discussion.'
The kitchen was quiet for a moment.
Clara looked at Kiiro. Kiiro looked at Clara. Some agreement appeared to pass between them.
'Good,' Clara said, and settled back with the air of someone whose position had been officially confirmed by the head of household and required no further debate.
His father, who had been quietly watching all of this from the table, looked at Arthur with the particular expression he used when he had a thought that was going to stay mostly to himself.
'Thank you,' Edric said. 'For today.'
'It's nothing.'
His father's expression said, clearly and without words: it is not nothing, and we both know it, and I won't make a fuss about it because you don't like a fuss, but it is not nothing.
Arthur held the look for a moment.
'Yes, yes, you're welcome. I don't want any of us splitting up. At least not for a long while,' he said again, and went to sit by the fire.