Élie is, at that moment, trying to teach Ines that her toes don't go in her mouth when she's just been in the mud. 

Oh, we're probably supposed to get him some musty old tutors who make him memorize things until he can't fit anything else in his head, but I wouldn't like that, would you? I was just thinking we'd give him as many books as he likes and see what he's interested in. 

Well I don't know, I never had any musty old tutors who made me memorize anything. Except for the woman who taught me remedies, arguably. I also didn't learn to read until after you met me, although that seems to have worked out pretty well, too.

Rahim likes it when I read aloud to him, and he can already recognize almost all of his letters. I think he'll have it down soon. 

Oh, I'm sure! - well actually I'm not, I have no idea what to expect there, but I do expect that you know what you're doing much better than I do. I'm awful at teaching, apparently, the apprentices complain about it.

I guess I was just idly wondering whether we had any particular ideas about what he ought to learn, before he grows up. I always figured I'd let my children wander around until they were any use at farming or chores, and then see that they understood both how to grow crops and how to be decent at their father's trade. But you're a wizard, and I'm a - whatever exactly I am, professionally - and neither of us grows any crops, so I'm not entirely sure that this plan has any remaining connection with reality.

Why not let him learn whatever he likes? It's only languages we'd want to be sure to start early. I do try to speak with them both in Azlanti, but we should probably find a real dragon for Draconic since we just can't make some of the sounds and it's probably easier when you're not just learning it out of a book. I don't think there's any need to worry about mathematics until he's a few years older unless he's very advanced with his cantrips, I've always believed the practice and theory should go together. Oh – do you think we should teach him to write, or just let him pick it up on his own once he's a stronger reader?

I genuinely have no idea which of these things people do pick up at their own pace, without being taught. I learned to read and write when Wishbone taught me, when we were living in Alexandria. 

...I suppose I did, in practice, pick up almost everything that I learned as a child fairly independently, and before it would have occurred to my parents to make a fuss about me making myself useful. But - I did it by copying what my parents did, and he can't copy most of what we do. I'm not sure what it does to a child, when all the labor their parents engage in is this - impenetrable.

Well, my parents are accountants, and I think I turned out alright. But – what did you learn as a child? 

Everything that anyone around was doing, more or less. Spinning, weaving, sewing, embroidery, dyeing fabric, cooking, laundry, caring for animals, piloting riverboats - not far, I'd just tag along when people went to the next couple towns sometimes. What Saira knew of the gods, I used to fight my siblings to carry the water because I wanted to ask her questions. Planting and harvesting, I'm no good with a plow but I do know what you're supposed to do with one. How to find useful debris that the river washed up. Taldane, but not until I was a teenager, we had no use for it before the first Galtan refugees showed up. Just enough math to buy and sell things, when I was old enough to make anything worth selling. And eventually I learned to make paper, but not until after I married Tariq, and I didn't have time to get very good at it. I guess there are a couple other crafts I tried a few times and knew I could get better at with practice, and half a dozen I never tried, but where I spied on the people who did them, and thought I could probably figure the rest out if I had to. But I ended up going for spending all of my time making clothes, since it paid best.

It felt like everything that ever came up in the world, back then, but very little of it ever comes up now.

It might be good for him to know how to do something ordinary, at that. Carpentry or blacksmithing or – probably not paper-making, since if I get Fabricate down to fifth circle there might not be very much of it – or dyeing or the like. I suppose I've been assuming he'll be a wizard, but a child ought to know he has options. Of course we can't send him for an apprenticeship, but I'm sure a tutor might be found. 

Can we not let him apprentice anywhere? I suppose he's an obvious way of targeting us, but we can't just keep him under guard his whole life about it.

And send him to live with some master who expects him to jump when he calls, and beats him if his work is bad and takes the credit for it if it's good, and give him half a day off every fortnight and probably make him sleep in some damp unhealthy workshop? I know we can't protect him from everything, but I'd hope we can protect him from that. 

Oh, if that's all you mean. Obviously you'd exercise some judgement in who you leave him with, and there's nothing to stop you from checking in on him while he's there.

I mean – I don't want him to learn he should have any kind of master at all. 

Well, I suppose we can leave it up to him. But - do you really think that working under someone is always awful, something people shouldn't tolerate? Quite a lot of people work for me, you know.

Well, one can be an employer without dictating where your workers go and with whom they speak and when they eat and sleep and practically when they breathe – and then make them pay for the privilege! Apprentices aren't like ordinary workers. They can't leave when they like. In fact in Absalom I think they can't leave their apprenticeship at all without paying some abominable fine – which we could, it's just the principle of thing. They're not free. Besides, at the end of it, what have they learned? How to carve a perfectly exquisite cabinet just exactly the way their master did it, and not a plane or a joint different. I think – 

– I won't be too awfully disappointed if Rahim never learns a trade, or can't speak any language except his own, or even if he never picks up magic. But I'd feel I'd failed him as a father if he ever starts to believe he's not his own master.

And I'll feel that I've failed him, if -

Hm.

I can't think how to say this without sounding like I'm taking issue with your entire philosophy of parenting, or in any kind of organized way at all, but it isn't meant that way. My thought is that - the world is not made of people who are perfectly free. We, perhaps, are as close now as any mortal comes, but ordinary people don't live like us, and we accomplished it by being capable of providing for ourselves. I value being someone who can provide for myself very, very much. And I value knowing how ordinary people live, even if I don't want to live the way they do. I think that one of the worst things I could do to Rahim - at least of the things that are likely to happen, if I don't pay attention - would be to raise him in such a way that he is not capable of providing for himself, and does not know how ordinary people live, and does not feel that he could bear to leave us or our protection, if ever he had a reason to. I do not want to raise a prince who thinks himself too good to earn his bread, or who one who thinks he can't, and is afraid to try. The thing that I most want him to learn is how to take care of himself, no matter what happens to either of us, and no matter what we one day think of him. 

I don't know exactly what the law is in Absalom. I guess I probably ought to. But not everyone does apprenticeships the same way - not that I'm going to claim that you can leave them whenever you want in Mut, since, you know, the whole point of an apprenticeship is that you're not yet capable of earning your bread. But - I don't want to tell him - I am not at all convinced that tutors are an adequate substitute for seeking out a master craftsman who is actually practicing their trade. The best people in any field aren't going to work as private tutors, they're going to work at what produces the most value for society! I certainly don't privately tutor anyone, I'm busy! And anyone who wants to learn what I do is going to have to learn it by working alongside me, because I'm not going to stop working.

...also I do in fact have apprentices, and I'm kind of confused about how that fact fits into your opinions, but - firstly if you think I'm doing something wrong I want to know, and secondly if you don't think I'm doing something wrong then there must be a version of the system you approve of, but thirdly this is all sort of a tangential point from - I actually do feel quite strongly that I want Rahim to be able to take care of himself and not rely on me forever, and that requires being capable of earning money somehow. And I don't want to tell him that he shouldn't pursue mastery of some skill in the way that he judges best, and I think it's quite likely that for many skills, the best path to mastery is some kind of apprenticeship.

If they really want Rahim to learn how ordinary children live, they could kill him and send him to the boneyard for a few days.

He's not going to say that, obviously. It is a cruel, ungenerous though. He'll spend an uncomfortably long moment trying and not quite succeeding reformulate it into something he isn't ashamed of. 

I know perfectly well that most people in the world aren't free, and if I didn't think I couldn't do better than that for my children then I'd never have had any. Maybe the only way to earn an honest living is to submit to years of – of spiritual subjugation. Certainly my own life has given me no evidence to the contrary. But I do hope that in between all the other impossible things we do every day, we can devote some time and effort to determining if our son might become a productive member of society – if that's what he wants, of course – without crushing his spirit just the same as everyone else's.  

I don't object to Rahim knowing how to support himself, though I can't say it's as important to me as it is to you. I did just say I'd like him to learn some useful trade – and if he happens to develop a passion for cabinetry then I'm sure the most talented cabinet-maker in the world earns less in ten years than either of us does in an hour and we can just pay him to move to Diobel and take up education full-time. It can't possibly matter in any practical sense, because I'd be shocked if any of our children aren't capable of earning his living as a laundry wizard by the time they're twelve. None of them will ever be without money, or the means to earn it. The thing a master can never give them – the thing I think we both want them to have is – 

– let's not say freedom, we clearly mean different things by it. Independence of mind, perhaps. We both want to raise a son who doesn't need us. I think it matters infinitely less by what means he might hypothetically one day make a living if by some wild fluke he ever had to, then that he grows into the sort of person who might look at his parents, who are arguably the two most powerful living people in the world, and even if he's weak and unskilled and helpless – because compared to us, he will be – and decide to break from us if his conscience tells him that he must. 

Sure. But - those are very much related things, aren't they? A person who is materially dependent on their parents can't safely leave them. It takes much more courage to leave a situation when the alternative is - not just starvation, but a vast unknown space, a world where he would have no idea how to take care of himself or whether he could - than when you know precisely what your alternative is, and know that you could handle it if you had to.

I don't understand why the only means of teaching him to earn a living is to send him off to some stranger to raise when he's barely old enough to form his own opinions. If you like, we can set him up copying books and cleaning clothes for his board as soon as he hangs his first cantrips. It's not glamorous work, but you might remember that it was enough for me when we first met. 

I don't think it's the only means. I didn't apprentice anywhere, and you didn't apprentice anywhere, and we're both doing just fine. I just don't want to discourage him from it if he decides that he wants to learn from someone who's the best at something we don't know anything about. If he wants to learn medicine or wizardry, fine. But if he wants to learn - I don't know, painting, or weapon smithing, or cooking, or alchemy, or law, or architecture, or anything else he wants, then I don't see that we ought to forbid him from learning from the best, and in many professions the best are working alongside apprentices.

It's fine if he doesn't want to do that, too, as long as he's aiming himself towards something. But I don't see why we have to tell him he can't.

I don't think we have to tell him he can't either! You seemed very concerned he'd never be able to fend for himself if he didn't. If he's thirteen and has his heart absolutely set on it, I wouldn't want to absolutely forbid him – but it's so young to sign the next six or seven years of your life away. 

I was arguing against you saying we couldn't! I'm not going to make him apprentice somewhere, as long as he's learning some useful skills. - I'm not going to make him apprentice anywhere even if he isn't learning any useful skills, I'm just going to separately be concerned about that and want to place him some circumstance where he'll see why he would want to. 

Thirteen's a little young to live with a stranger anyway, I think, and also pretty young to enter into any kind of formal agreement that someone is going to enforce on you for six years. It's fine if it's someone we know, I think, although really I wouldn't want to leave him with someone we didn't know at all anyway, I don't see why we can't get to know someone before we leave a child with them.

Is there anyone we do know you'd want to raise our children? 

If they were old enough and really wanted to, I think there are lots of people I'd let them live with. I don't know why we'd send them to live with Ishani or Saira or Shawil on professional development grounds, but I wouldn't worry terribly about them as long as we could check in with them once a week and see how they were doing. There are lots of people who work for the hospital who I'd probably let them live with, except that that's medicine, and not very relevant to learning things that I don't know.

I was actually thinking of leaving them with Fatima for some length of time when they were older - not years, of course, just a summer or something - if I didn't have any better ideas of how to expose them to something closer to ordinary existence by then. I'd check up on them while they were there, of course, and I wouldn't do it if you weren't all right with it. But - it's not good for children to only spend time with one household, or to only ever have a couple of adults to look up to. And I don't think it's good for them to only see the world from one vantage point, especially if the vantage point is as odd as the one that we have.

I'm not - incredibly attached to it, if you don't think it's a good idea. It was just something I'd thought about. 

Oh. 

I don't have any strong objections to letting them live with Fatima for a few months, when they're older. You're right that it's probably good for them to see how most people live. 

It's only that I think most people are quite thoughtlessly cruel to children. Not that I think poorly of your sister. It's very hard to improve upon the manner in which we ourselves were raised – if I've been able to, it's only because the standard was exceptionally low – and I've yet to encounter the society whose method of raising children is satisfactory to me. I don't want them to grow up being always punished, threatened, put to work when they're useful, kept out of sight when they're not, told that the highest virtue is obedience – treated as the raw material for their future selves.

– So, yes, I do want our children to grow up differently from everyone else. I've seen what happens when parents bring children into the world just because other people are, and raise them the way other people do. When I was a little boy I promised I'd be better than that.