"It's easy," Myr says, still quiet, "to distort the plain text of the Chant. To teach it wrong and make magic out to be something other than gift. All the same, it's not so hard to look at the cost and the risk of it--and at the awful power a mage's got at her fingertips--and be afraid. To feel like you're going to collapse under the weight of that responsibility on your shoulders."

But she didn't come out here to hear lectures from him on the subject (the warmth in her tone and the touch on his arm don't go unnoticed) and he breaks into a smile that's rueful and a little abashed at once. "Glad to offer another perspective, though."

And when she gives him one in turn, holding out a vulnerable part of herself--a memory that still sounds so raw-- He's taken momentarily aback, silenced by the idea of a family who would want a mage child so much they'd be disappointed in anything less. (Even stunned wordless by the thought he's not devoid of his native empathy; he reaches to touch her arm in turn, sympathetic.) "I'm glad to know that," he says at length. "But I'm also glad to know you as you are; there's not any 'just' about you. Magic's only one gift the Maker gives His children--and it seems to me you've made much of the ones you did receive." Leading an entire division of the Inquisition's not a small thing, after all.