"You already know what I would do," Taran replies quietly. "Even where I have failed before. I will not hand a mage over to be marked, nor will I pressure one to take it. I will not have the weight of their *sanity* on my hands, not for the sake of any law, not for the sake of easing a paranoid mind. To do anything else is to guarantee a cataclysm when the mages break trying to change an empire, and turn that breaking outward. It is their choice, only theirs and never mine." Saying nothing, Milora tails Norran with a rather satisfied expression on her face.