These are some facts about Jean Dulac:

(A) At fourteen, he's a hair over five feet tall, putting him in the eighth percentile of boys his age. He is enormously proud of this. He takes six pills a night for it, and it makes his hair very soft and his face a little girlish, and when he goes to the Scholomance he will stop taking them and then he might grow to be even as tall as his Papa is. His sister Alice took different medicines, and she never did grow taller than five feet, and in the Scholomance all her classmates outran a mal and she didn't and now she's dead.

(B) He's wearing shoes today. His brother Baptiste learned to run barefoot, and it saved him over half a kilogram on three pairs of excellent running shoes, and it meant that he couldn't possibly find himself crippled by losing all the shoes he brought in, and it also meant that he stepped on a mal and died.

(C) Besides English and (of course) French, he speaks Navajo and (his choice) Biblical Hebrew. Chloé was brilliant -- the smartest of his children, Papa says -- and had twelve languages, and one of them not quite well enough, and she got herself spell-blocked and died.

(D) He's much too well-brought-up to dream of turning out a maleficer, unless he really really really has to. It didn't turn out well for Damien.

(E) Eliot, who was the prettiest of Papa's children, hung himself, and so Jean is allowed a half a kilogram of personal discretion. He's spent it on strings which are not made of catgut, and pegs which are not made of ivory, and an ocarina to tide him over until he can make something he can do magic with. He won't be utterly starved for art.

(F) It wasn't Flavie's fault that an Indian boy in the year above hers lost it entirely and went down the hall, draining dry one student after another, each fueled by the last, so that even her carefully-placed wards couldn't possibly have stopped him by the time he got to her. But she reported in her note home the year before that her hair, growing out from a shaved head, flopped in her eyes at the wrong moment and nearly lost her a hand, and so Jean's hair is tied back in the tiniest possible ponytail.

(G) Jean practices hard, every day, weekends and holidays and sick days and all, and most nights too. But each time he's had surgery, taking out his wisdom teeth and his gallbladder and correcting a slight defect in his eyesight and the other thing, he's had a whole three days where there weren't any live-fire tests at all, no real mals to practice against, because Gabrielle never made it to the Scholomance.

(H) He's always suspected that Heloise was never meant to make it at all. The rule in the Paris enclave is that anyone who hasn't had a child come out alive gets a slot, if there's enough to go around at all, and everyone else comes after; so it didn't cost Papa anything to send her, even though it was obvious that three epi-pens wouldn't really last her four years, not with how the Scholomance is. But she brought in her full load of gear, and so there will be some things waiting for Jean when he goes in.

(I) Ilan got a girl pregnant, and then he forgot everything Papa ever taught him, and he died trying to do her a stupid favor. So Jean can't.

This is how Jean's induction goes: his Papa checks his gear for the hundredth time, and gives him a kiss on the forehead, and Jean smiles, and the Scholomance takes him.