Renaro Tovellin is a foundry-magistrate in Camaran, young enough that the Blight is something he studied rather than survived. He came up the way the republic still trains its clerks: statute first, the Volari quarter walked through once a year with the looms left strung as they were found. He is good at the work. The petition he filed late in 3375 is, by the account of everyone who has read it, the cleanest piece of legal reasoning to reach the consul's office in years.
Its argument is simple and hard to answer. The Camaran Blight was Deoric, and Deoric spends living price; that is the danger the statutes exist to stop. The elemental schools spend nothing but the caster's own effort and reach. Banning them prevents no second Volari, because they could not have caused the first. The statute, Tovellin wrote, confuses the act with the grief that followed it, and a law that cannot tell the two apart is not caution but confusion given the force of the state. He signed it, as a magistrate signs his own filings, and sent it up.
The statute forbids the spending of life by command. The elemental schools spend no life. To enforce the one law as though it were the other is not prudence. It is a category error with the whole weight of the republic behind it. — from the Tovellin petition, filed to the office of the First Consul, 3375 SD
It has sat on Doravin Selmari's desk for eight months. Tovellin reads the silence as deliberation. The consul is old, the question is genuinely hard, and the office has never been quick. He is wrong about which of those things is keeping his petition unanswered. Under the same statutes his argument attacks, saying in any official forum that some magic is safe is itself the career-ending offense, and Tovellin has now said it in writing, over his own signature, in a document filed to the state. He has not submitted a question for the consul to weigh. He has submitted a confession, and he does not know it.
There is precedent he could have read. Fifteen years ago a magistrate named Padrin Olveri argued the same point more softly and is now a notary in a river town upcountry, struck from the rolls, his petition entered into the record as the proof against him. Tovellin knows Olveri's name. He has not yet understood that he is walking the same road, or that the man at the end of it agrees with every word he wrote and intends to ruin him for putting it on paper.