"Why would just understanding a thing make you evil? That seems - stupid - it's important to understand things even if they're bad things, it's even more important if they're bad..." 

"If you trust everyone to have the same values as you, you want them to also be good at predicting the world! If you mostly don't think they have the same values as you, though, or if you don't have values that point the same way no matter who is holding them, and most people don't, then it can absolutely be threatening for people to understand an argument, because they might be persuaded by it, and then act against your interests. If there were a convincing argument for murdering me I would probably prefer no one understand it."

"Huh." Ma'ar scrunches up his face. "I guess. It - seems kind of bad, if the only reason I'm not getting murdered is that no one understands the argument for why they should? Because it...relies on people being stupid, I don't know." He wriggles his shoulders. "Urtho was there and - he wasn't mad at me but he didn't say anything about what he thought? He just interrupted the debate and had us do something else for the rest of class. He's not stupid, I would've thought he'd be able to understand arguments for things..."

"What do you know about the political situation in Tantara?"

Ma'ar frowns. They've talked about Tantara's history, in history class, but less about its present, and the snippets he's picked up from mindreading are very scattered and hard to fit together into a picture in his head.

"Tantara has a king. King Leodhan, right now. People think he's not as good a king as his father but that he's all right. People think he listens to Urtho a lot? He made Urtho the Archmage when he took the throne, but I don't really know what that means. I - probably know other things but I don't know which things are about the political situation instead of about something else." 

"Are there other Archmages or just Urtho? If Urtho's school was teaching things the King found threatening, would the King shut down the school, or make it harder for it to run, or ask Urtho to expel those students, or warn Urtho that supporting those students was a kind of undermining Tantara? If something happened to the King, who'd be in charge after that? All of those things are inputs into what Urtho will tolerate in his school."

"Oh. Hmm. I think Archmage is something there's only one of? And sometimes there weren't any, a hundred years ago there wasn't one. Um. I think King Leodhan doesn't have any children and so probably if something happened to him it'd be his cousin or something who got made King. I have no idea what he would do if he didn't like what Urtho was teaching, people think he likes Urtho though and thinks he's right about things." 

"That makes it seem not very likely that Urtho has political opinions he is scared to say, or feels constrained in what he can let his students say. So probably his policy reflects what he wants his school to be like. Not - definitely, though, it's always worth having an eye out for."

"Mmm." Ma'ar squirms. "I - don't want him to think I'm bad. But I also don't want to...not be allowed to say things or think things? I don't know." 

"Yeah." Hug. "You can say things to me, I'm not going to think you're bad. And - maybe once we've talked about things I'll have a better guess about whether you can say the things you think to Urtho. You might be sounding like your thoughts are less nuanced than they are, and if you successfully said the thing you thought it might be fine."

"I'm glad I can say things to you." He snuggles up against her, and is quiet for a bit, making various faces. 

"The thing I was trying to say," he murmurs eventually, "is that - I don't think killing an enemy you're fighting and then getting blood-magic from it is more evil than just killing them period? ...Or, it's a little bit more complicated, because blood-magic is also bad for the weather, but Gates are like that too, it's not - uniquely terrible, or anything, it just means you'd need to take that into account and teach people to do it properly and have more weather-mages."

Shrug. "Maybe people felt like admitting it's not worse than just murder would be like saying they don't think either one is bad. But obviously killing people is bad because then they're dead. And I can imagine a place where people actually act like it's never okay to kill anyone, but Tantara isn't that place, they do execute criminals and the king's soldiers are allowed to kill enemies if it's - considered legitimate, I don't exactly understand their rules. And, I don't know, just - if you're going to hang people anyway, I don't get how it's bad to also have a mage there and then they can use the power to do something useful. It's like the other students don't get that sometimes you can't do all the important mage-work you'd want to because there's not enough node-power! And - and so they don't notice that it's giving something up, not to use blood-magic ever." 

"That makes sense. Is it giving something up? I don't know very much about - limits on node-power, things like that."

"So it depends how many mages you have, if you only have one mage in the whole city they can't possibly use all the node-power themselves. And obviously mages have to be Adepts to use nodes at all. But Tantara has so many mages, especially in the cities, and cities actually have less total magic a lot of the time because there are fewer plants and wild animals that give off ambient mage-energies. Urtho's done a lot of workings that he couldn't power with nodes, though. He gets around it by doing really big concert casting melds, hundreds or even thousands of mages, but - that's also expensive, you need all those mages to be there instead of doing other things somewhere else, and then they're exhausted, and also sometimes people die in concert melds if the spell goes badly! And there are other ways of getting energy that we're supposed to learn about later, to do with other planes, but they're also complicated and dangerous and take a lot of training to use at all." 

She nods. "So then the next thing I would think about is - who gets the power, from executing people? Probably the King, or whatever local authorities he has delegated law to. So legalizing blood magic gives those authorities power, compared to when it's illegal. That's a good thing, if they'll use it for, I don't know, aqueducts, but there are some other uses that'd be bad, especially if some of them are bad people."

...Ma'ar nods. "That - makes sense. I was thinking, this'd matter more in Predain? Because we don't have enough mages to do concert melds with a hundred of them, and we don't have a school like Urtho's that can teach people the harder ways to get power– oh, the other thing that's different about blood-magic is that someone doesn't have to be an Adept, to get power that way. So you could have Master-potential mages working with enough power to - pave roads, or lift building blocks, or whatever. It's sort of fine in Tantara to be inefficient, I guess? There are just enough Adepts to pave all the roads. But -" he grimaces, "but I wouldn't trust the king's guard in Predain to use it for good things instead of bad things. And that...seems related, I guess, to Predain being the sort of place that doesn't have enough mages in the first place?" 

"I think it is, yes. Predain needs Law very badly but precisely since it hasn't got it, the kinds of people who seize power in Predain are not people you'd want to have more of it. States can - swing between tyranny and anarchy, they're closer to each other than they are to peace and law. And...Predain is also the kind of place where people who got power from executions would have more executions, isn't it."

"That's a good point. And - then it's not just the same badness as having executions anyway. Because you get something useful out of it but also more people die. And maybe the useful thing doesn't even end up being used for good things." He scowls. "That makes it seem really hard to fix the problem." 

"I think most of the big problems are really hard to fix, that's why no one's done it yet."

"Mmmhmm." Ma'ar fidgets. "I - still think there's something really bad about - not being allowed to talk about or think about whether using blood-magic is worth doing? Even if it's a complicated question because of things like not wanting there to be a reason to do more executions, or not wanting the people it'd give power to to have that power. ...Especially because it's a complicated question, so - it takes more cleverness to find the right answer...? And it felt like other people didn't think I should be allowed to talk about it in a debate in class." 

"Yes, it sounds like they were being very stupid, and if they'd actually talked with you maybe some of the other important considerations would've gotten talked about. I think they could learn, if there aren't big political reasons for it to be unsafe to learn, but - they're not going to pick it up themselves, someone would have to teach them."

"Why? I don't feel like someone had to teach me." 

"Well, you're unusually clever, for one thing, and also, you've had to learn - two contexts? You've had to learn how to accomplish your goals in cow-herder tribes in Predain, and in Urtho's Tower, and those are really different, and people have to think more about what they believe when they've had to figure out different places with different general worldviews."

"Huh. I guess that makes sense. I...can try to figure out how to teach them. - Do you reckon Urtho knows how to do that thing? He's very very clever." 

"He is very clever. But - I think he mostly works in the one context, and he seems - disinterested in making it clear to people precisely how he wields power - so it's possible he doesn't, or not as well as a powerful mage ideally would."

"Mmm." Ma'ar sighs heavily. "I guess I'm not mad about it anymore. It makes more sense the way you explain it."