"Hmm." He thinks about this. "I - guess that makes sense. That makes it seem like it's really important to have as few laws as you can, though? Because - the government isn't aware of the considerations that'd lead a general to think it was better than losing five hundred of his soldiers trying to stupidly mob mages. Do you think that? Or am I still missing some other thing here." 

"You want to give your generals discretion whenever it'll make them make better decisions and not worse ones. Especially if you don't have good instantaneous communications -- and those are pretty recent -- that generally meant giving them lots of discretion, because - yeah, it's hard to run a war from somewhere other than the front lines of it. But something like blood magic -- in Golarion it might affect whether paladin orders ally with you, stuff like that, it's the kind of thing where you need the bigger strategic picture and not just the immediate tactical one. Five hundred soldiers dying isn't very much of a big deal in a war if it means you preserve an alliance you need to win it, or deter the next one..."

"Oh. That'd make sense. Especially in Golarion where you can just see people's alignment, and Good gods will only ally with people who aren't Evil... I wonder what alignment I'd be." 

"Leareth was Lawful Evil when he first arrived and Lawful Neutral after the conquest of Cheliax."

"Mmm. Aroden was Lawful Neutral too, right? And Abadar. And Asmodeus is Lawful Evil, but - it doesn't sound like Leareth was actually very much like him at all." 

"You end up Lawful Evil if you're Lawful and you kill people, not counting self-defense or fighting a justified war or whatever, and he'd done a lot of that. There are lots of entities in Hell that don't have Asmodeus's specific philosophy. ...and really I don't know that Asmodeus has that philosophy, as opposed to thinking it was useful to promulgate. Though it must've gotten people close enough he could pick them as clerics, gods can't lie about that..."

"Mmm." He fiddles with the page of his textbook for a minute before looking up. "What does Urtho intending to do better actually mean." 

"He said it was unfair, to treat you worse precisely because the world had treated you worse, and he wanted to figure out a better way to think about it, and he said he missed your perspective in class, and maybe in a little while once you've learned a little more he'll try to encourage you to speak up again."

"Oh. That's..." He looks unsure for a moment, and then smiles. "I'm glad." 

"Yeah. I am, too."

It's not often, that Ma'ar actually feels inside as though everything will be all right. But sometimes he does, for brief flashes, and this is one of those times. He puts his head down on Carissa's shoulder and closes his eyes, still smiling. 

Carissa mostly expects things to go all right, in the sense that there won't be a horrifying war and they'll figure out immortality, and expects things to not go all right, in the sense that everything she knew and was invested in has been erased from the continuity of history and can't be gotten back. Cheliax will be founded as an outlying province of Taldor, in four or five centuries.

She hugs Ma'ar and then reminds him that if he finishes his homework early they can practice arcane magic a little.

Ma'ar grins and bounces a bit and dives back into his homework. 

Things seem to go fine, for the next while. Ma'ar comes home with stories of things he learned, and occasionally even interactions with other students. He doesn't think they seem scared of him. Maybe they've forgotten; maybe it's hard to remember when he's so little, which would be convenient really. 

Urtho meets with Carissa every fortnight or so. He's picking up more arcane magic and will delightedly tell her his theories about how it's put together, which Aroden would probably make better sense of than she can. He doesn't bring up anything about Ma'ar for a while. 

About five months after they reached the Tower, the hertasi officially pronounce that Ma'ar has grown out of his school robes and ought be fitted for new ones. They measure him and he's nearly a whole two inches taller. 

Carissa has also grown out of her dress, though in a different direction; she knows there's a trick to magic clothes that resize to the wearer, but hasn't cracked it yet. She can go with him to get fitted.

The hertasi congratulate her and coo over her belly. They tactfully don't ask about the baby's father; maybe they somehow know via gossip about her circumstances. 

She accidentally kind of murdered him and everybody else in the future, probably. Maybe not. Maybe they're just very far away. Maybe he didn't like her as much as she thought and tried for a week and then asked Iomedae for the next candidate. (This does not actually feel at all likely.)

The gradualness of the change made it less something he noticed, but having Carissa being fitted alongside him and watching the hertasi respond is making her pregnancy salient all over again. 

"- Are you scared?" he asks her, once they're back at the apartment afterward. "About having the baby. I'm. A bit scared still. I know they have Healers here, though..." 

"Little bit. I have a tiny bit of magic healing, I can probably use it if anything goes horribly wrong."

"Mmm." He hugs her tightly, though, and holds on for longer than usual. 

Her baby is Leareth's child. Which is sort of a really weird thing to be true - especially if she's right that her Leareth, the grownup one, doesn't even exist anymore. 

It is. Having Ma'ar does feel - better than having nothing, in a weird way, on that front, though it would obviously be stupid to let him get distracted from his education here. 

She meant to have lots of servants who could do most of the baby care so she didn't have to, but she's not entirely sure if that's an acceptable thing to ask for, here, or if it'll make everyone judge her for being a bad mother. She doesn't say anything.

Ma'ar is used to women wearing their babies strapped to them and doing all the same work anyway - or leaving them with older siblings, if they have to go carry water or something, and he's an older sibling here - so this hasn't even occurred to him as a problem. (He hasn't particularly thought through whether schoolwork or magic item creation are harder to multitask with childcare than watching cows and mending clothes.) 

The months pass. Ma'ar seems happy enough. He works very hard; he still doesn't have any real friends among the other students, because most of them want to talk about things that aren't their studies and he feels like those conversations are wasting time. His classwork is interesting, though, and the other students think he's very smart and they come to him for help sometimes.

Another few months later, Urtho calls on him a few times in their debate class, even encouraging him to say more when he gives terse one-sentence answers. Ma'ar comes home both confused and jubilant about it. 

Hug. "I guess he meant it when he said he was going to try, once you'd had some time to get used to being here, to get you to say more! What were you debating?"

"We were talking about the laws for Healers. Um, less what the rules are and more how strict to be about it and how badly to punish people. A lot of Healers have Mindspeech or Empathy too so they're subject to those rules as well." 

"What are the rules for Mindspeech?"

"You're not supposed to ever read anyone's mind without asking. They don't usually punish kids who aren't done training, though, and you'd usually just get a warning for the first few offences assuming you didn't use the information to slander people or plan crimes. Some people think the rules should be a lot stricter for Healers because they treat vulnerable people - that you should be punished if you're a Healer and, I don't know, you read your neighbour's mind once to see if they took your missing chickens and confessed to it, even though normally you'd just get a warning for that."