"But you haven't been trained to and - are afraid of her retaliating?" guesses the woman, glancing only briefly at Deskyl.

"She's my master, ma'am. If she doesn't want me to, I'm not going to, and I'm very sure she doesn't."

"Hm." Pause. "The instigating incident was someone - hitting a child, something like that?"

She relaxes considerably; Deskyl relaxes somewhat less in response. "Yes ma'am."

"If she lived in the Temple-Guild, there's less of that, especially among mages with their own children, but I'm not sure we could guarantee zero, and of course it still wouldn't be all right to attack them..."

"If she knew who to talk to about it, and it was taken care of reasonably quickly - within a few days - that might work. I'll need to ask her whether she expects being around whitemages to bother her, but I expect she'll just heal them more often if it does."

"Trust between the mages and the Temple-Guild servants is very important. If someone we can't replace, like a redmage's or bluemage's attendant, hits their child, that's not something straightforwardly addressable."

"I suspect that it won't actually come up, ma'am. She doesn't have a problem with hitting as a reasonable punishment, only when it goes beyond that into just being harmful. And she might agree to leave instead of attacking anyone if it does come up."

"- I don't think we can rely on a shared definition of 'reasonable'."

"I can tell you more about the situation, and a similar one that she didn't react to, if you think that would help, ma'am."

"It wouldn't hurt but I still don't think we have compatible enough assumptions. We already know one case where our concepts of reasonableness bear no mutual resemblance."

"I think it might, ma'am." And she describes the two situations, in a fair amount of detail - the smallness of the girl, the fact that she'd only fallen, Deskyl's observation that she was already weirdly scared even before her mother started beating her, suggesting a pattern of abuse, and, by contrast, the situation with the boy and his father, where the result was apparently the same, but the details made it completely uninteresting to her.

"No one else has direct access to what people are feeling."

"It's possible that she already knows whether there are any problems like that at the Temple-Guild; I'm not sure how much attention she's been paying to that sort of thing. She could check, if she hasn't been."

"People who are not now parents may become parents, but I don't know what time horizon you mean to be considering."

"I don't think I can predict what she's going to want to do with herself more than two or three years in the future in any case, ma'am, and it's probably safe to assume that the situation at the Temple-Guild will be acceptable for that long if it's acceptable now. And it's very likely that she'll have figured out how to reverse dwindling within that time frame if it's possible at all; she'll be much faster at it if she's living near the mages."

"At which point perhaps she'd care to make occasional visits from a private residence somewhere remote?"

"If she chooses to leave for her own reasons that seems likely, yes ma'am."

"If she chooses to leave for her own reasons as opposed to?"

"As opposed to if she leaves because she feels unable to work with you."

"I see. I can go and ask now about the possibility of finding a place for her to stay in or near the Temple-Guild."

"Yes ma'am. Is there anything else I should tell Xaari Deskyl about this?"

"I can answer any questions she has about our differences of opinion over the incident."

"I'm not sure we understand how you view magic use here, ma'am; would it have been better if she'd used violence rather than magic to get past the girl's father?"

"She'd still have the implicit threat of magic available for anyone who recognized her. A goldmage bodyguard in uniform is usually sufficient to deter attackers without ever needing to interfere with time. It is not legal for nonmagical persons to burgle and batter one another, but the Temple-Guild doesn't handle it."