"Can anyone tell me what sound this letter makes?" Amethyst said in the little schoolroom, pointing to a board with a single large letter painted on it, and smaller text below.
Three hands came up, two of which shot up immediately and one of which was shakily raised.
She selected the least confident. "Lura?"
"'Ruh'?" said the small child.
"Yes!" Amethyst leaned forward with a honed experienced excitement. "It makes the 'ruh' sound! Can you tell me a word that starts with a 'ruh'?"
As a child, Amethyst had presented with Perseverance at six years old - and found her way into a school for Traited children on a scholarship that her Traitless family could not possibly had afforded.
Every morning she hitched a ride in a wagon that passed by her home before dawn, perched atop a nearby farmer's melons and potatoes on the way to market. Every afternoon she walked all the way back home with homework and books, thinking about math problems. After her written homework she would practice her magic exercises with tree stumps and straw-stuffed flour sacks, until the glow of her magic was the only thing left to see by.
The other children made fun of her because she wasn't like them. She spoke in the wrong accent. She didn't know what a demitasse was. Her clothes needed to be bought secondhand and too large, so that the hems wouldn't creep above her knees too soon. She once begged the school's garbage-picker to find her a pair of shoes that didn't pinch her toes from being too small.
It was a difficult life, but Amethyst was bright and determined, her scholarship came with a filling breakfast and lunch better than she'd ever get at home, and her parents encouraged her as much as she could. Maybe she could rise above her circumstances?
Once she graduated, she spent a few years working in the city as a bookkeeper. She never did bother marrying, as she wasn't interested enough to cut down on the amount of money she would send home.
But she thought: sometimes Traits presented in children much older than six years old. Sometimes they were as old as twelve. And at that age, they would never catch up at any city school.
She didn't act on that, though, until her parents died, one in a mining accident, the other only a few months later. Now with a sudden empty space in her budget where she'd used to send money home, and loss sharpening her thoughts of what she needed to accomplish before she died, she contemplated her life.
She worked for another few years, saved everything, and began to think about what she could do with that money.
What she ended up with was more or less a large shack, one that she couldn't use in the dead of winter because it wasn't well enough insulated. The children she taught only ever stayed on until they were eight or nine, because most of them ended up having to work in the mines to make their family's ends meet after that.
She had to be ingenious about outfitting it. They didn't have the money for slate and chalk like in the city schools. They used lumps of charcoal on sheets of birchbark, when they could, and river clay pressed into wooden frames and written upon with a large stick, when they couldn't. And most of their "books" were large smooth boards with the words painted onto them.
But she was teaching them enough reading and math to understand at least a little bit of the contracts they were signing, and sometimes she'd beg for a parent to give her another year or two with a particularly bright child, and once or twice a child did end up presenting and she'd refer them to a city school, and sometimes -
"Miss Amethyst?"
Amethyst, surprised, looked up from the piecework she did after school for a bit of extra money. (Unshelling nuts; she could feel for the seam and then manifest a tiny Perseverance blade just large enough to cut the shells apart.) She'd sent all the children home already, but here one was. "Yes, Dania?"
Dania shakily walked closer and pulled up their pants leg to reveal the marks of a belt.
She knelt to Dania's level. "...Thank you for trusting me. Can you tell me what happened?"
Dania looked at the floor. "My - my pa... he..."
"What did he do?"
"Sometimes... when he gets drunk and... if I make too much noise..."
"Mm-hm?"
"...Please don't tell him..."
Amethyst swallowed. "You deserve to feel safe, Dania. I'm not going to talk to him, but I will try to talk to a magistrate and see what we can do for you."
Dania shuffled back two steps. "But... but if they don't listen, or they think he's..."
"I'm Traited, and they know I keep kids out of trouble. In the meantime - you can stay here and help me copy books for an hour or two after class. I'll tell your parents that I need you for that. Okay?"
"...okay."
"I'm glad you told me. Tell me again if anything else happens, all right?"
Dania made the tiniest of nods.
