He screams. He sells it.

Nice. He turns to go.

"Oh, one more thing," he adds. "I'd appreciate if you didn't let on that I told you this, but Savaross? Doesn't really approve of how friendly you're getting with that girl. He put us up to this."

"Thanks," he says. "I won't let on."

"Call it a bonus for listening to reason," he shrugs. "What was supposed to happen was we were supposed to play innocent so you wouldn't believe her and it'd damage your relationship. He was not best pleased that the other two squeaked."

Snort. "Guess I shouldn't expect dessert for this one, then. See you around."

And he leaves and closes the door behind him and goes cheerfully to breakfast.

(He'll have to do a lot of studying before he can come after Savaross for messing with his stuff. And he'd better not leave him alive afterward when he does. So for now, he's a good little apprentice.)

He does get dessert for this one, actually; Savaross has no idea that Tassairen knows he was behind it and no desire that he should come to, and it is the sort of thing that would be rewarded normally.

He is a normal amount of smug about his dessert!

Then things shall proceed with outward normalcy. Stealth magic is next on the curriculum.

Ooh, fun.

Good. Stealth magic is a form of metamagic and therefore way more complicated than most normal magic. It's harder than healing.

Will it yield to effort and dedication? Most kinds of magic do that eventually.

Eventually, yes. It takes the better part of a year before he's learned all the stealth magic Savaross wants to teach him.

His tenth birthday comes and goes near the end of that time. He is pleased with how readily his peers have absorbed the lesson of not messing with him.

It helps that he mostly isn't very interesting when he isn't being a vengeful little ball of not worth it.

Yep! Study hard and destroy anyone who fucks with you, that's him.

A reasonable policy, if less proactive on the destroying than would be optimal. Have some more metamagic. It turns out that the kind of magic they're studying is one of three; they are "warlocks," and there are also "witches" and "wizards." Here is a brief, vague description of how those work with basically no hints as to how to actually do witchcraft or wizardry; and here are a few examples of objects enchanted thereby that he can use to learn how to absolutely ruin a witch or wizard's day.

It's nice to know how to ruin people's days!

It is! The simplest way is to just overload their spells, which are much more passive and finicky than a warlock's--more the former for witches and the latter for wizards--but that's generally not the efficient way to do it, here are some better ones; and here are some tweaks to the stealth spells that will specialize against a wizard's scrutiny than a warlock's...

Excellent! Learning is fun!

That's probably because he's good at it.

Anaseverina continues to not be very good at it; she continues to be picked on (although almost always in passive ways that don't require Tassairen to intervene); and she continues to explore and bring back small treasures. She gets better at picking ones he'll like. She grows out of some of the clumsiness.

She does sometimes have injuries that would merit chastizing another apprentice for messing with his stuff, but they come from official punishments, and Tassairen is not yet strong enough to deal with Savaross.

Yeah. He doesn't make a fuss about his Anaseverina being punished.

Probably for the best; it happens more and more often as she gets older and doesn't outgrow the lack of talent like she did the clumsy.

Yeah this probably isn't going to end well for her, is it.

Probably. But it doesn't look like it's going to fail to end well anytime soon; she is making progress, slow as it might be, and she never comes back with anything worse than bruises.