Ranara and her little daughter Azabel move to Urtho's Tower when the latter can say six words ("up", "mama", "milk", "no", "now", and "please") and hasn't started to walk yet. Ranara sets up to teach little children to read, ones who don't have evident Gifts yet - Ranara herself has Mindspeech, is all, with about a classroom's worth of range. Azabel sits in on classes, worn on her mother's back or later plopped in a corner with toys or, when she's only four, plopped in a corner with a book, younger than the other kids in the class. When Azabel has in fact sat through her mother's curriculum she is turned somewhat loose, to walk very carefully up and down and around the Tower, exploring.
Well, if it's money or glory maybe they could arrange to distribute more of those? Higher salaries, more, uh, parades?
"I think funding a war is hard already, right?" Ma'ar points out. "The King would have to raise taxes even more. But - it does seem like you should pay people a lot of money if you want them to risk getting killed. And I would sort of expect that people who signed up on purpose would be more motivated about it than if they got drafted against their will?" He's not sure. It seems complicated. A lot of things do, lately.
"Fighting for a country that doesn't practice slavery?" she mutters, not very quietly.
When that line of debate fades out, Ma'ar tentatively raises his hand. "Would - women get treated all right?" he asks. "I think it doesn't matter if it's a draft or volunteer, probably it'd still mostly be men, since - that's what everyone expects. And...in Predain if you were one of the only women in the army, it'd be - not great." He is not going to say out loud that someone would probably try to rape them. "I know mages can defend themselves but it could still be really miserable. Probably Tantara isn't as bad that way, just..." Shrug.
And eventually Ma'ar dares to raise his hand. "This is - not really about the draft again," he says tentatively, "but mage-gift runs in the blood, right? So it's bad if a lot of mages die in a war when they're young and haven't had children, but - it could be even worse if men and woman die. Since, uh," he's just realized this is the sort of thing that people probably make faces about, "since a man can get a lot of women with child if he's, um. Trying."
"In practice is that very likely to actually happen, though? I think if a huge fraction of the population around me had just died, and I couldn't actually find anyone I wanted to marry, I probably wouldn't want to have any kids right then regardless - is that me being weird, would a lot of women rather go ahead even then?"
There is disagreement on this point! A couple of girls in the class seem to be very much looking forward to having babies, and express that they'd be upset if they couldn't get married until they were thirty and maybe they'd move into a house together and be pretend-married to have their babies instead, at which point they might as well find some mage father to, well, do the deed. A different girl is firmly on Azabel's side. The boys mostly seem nonplussed.
Coparenting with another girl does seem better than nothing if she were baby-crazy, and she might get that way in a couple years. If she had a close enough friend by then. Anyway, if some girls would do it that might be enough for it to be an important policy consideration.
Some other boy in the class, NOT Ma'ar, brings up the point that if a lot of mages die, having more mages is pretty important to Tantara and maybe after the war the Crown would want to pay women with mage-gift who wanted to raise babies with each other. This gets a lot of slightly uncomfortable laughter and an amused look from the teacher.
"They could pay us anyway, when we're not also spending on a war," Aza points out.
"Back on the topic though I wonder if drafted soldiers have a high rate of desertion? I'd expect them to."
"I wonder if anyone's ever kept figures on how many soldiers desert," Ma'ar suggests, but this thread is not taken up by anyone else. Oh well. Maybe he can see if the library has any books on it.
"There're non-combat positions in the military, logistics and Gates and stuff, which is less awful to force people into maybe, but if you didn't put the draftees in combat that might actually get you fewer volunteers."
"I know! It's so much less frustrating than the other class before. I like the teacher too."