About one person in a thousand ever shows signs, and of those, roughly one in forty gets through an awakening without help. The Houses raise most of the practitioners there are, and they keep them, so a practitioner in the Boundary Lands is a visitor rather than a neighbour. Most people in the Heartlands will never meet one, and nearly everything else in these journals follows from that.

The arithmetic, and why I distrust it

Every figure here comes from the records.

About one in a thousand shows signs. Their sleep goes strange, animals act oddly around them, or a child goes through a spell of near-clumsiness and then comes out of it. Midwives right across the Borderlands gave me numbers close enough to one another that it's the firmest agreement I've found on anything.

Of those, roughly one in forty gets through unaided. That one is folk reckoning, since nobody keeps a firm figure. There's no count of the children who didn't awaken, because there's never a day when that becomes official.

Multiply the two and you get one unaided practitioner for every forty thousand people, which across the whole dominion comes to fewer than a hundred souls.

I think the true number is higher, possibly a great deal higher.

Census-taking in the Boundary Lands is unreliable to the point of fiction. The tithe rolls undercount on purpose and everyone involved knows it, and a parish that has quietly decided to leave someone out will leave them out when I come asking too. I wouldn't be surprised if the real figure were double the recorded one, and if it were more than double I'd have no way of proving otherwise.

So by the records it's fewer than a hundred, and the records are poor. Take every number in this chapter as a floor.

Why the Houses exist

The unaided rate produces next to nobody, too few to staff one House, let alone five.

Five Houses can exist because House placement raises the completion rate enormously. A House watches over a child while the connection is still opening and does something to the process, and far more of their children come through than ever would have alone.

No House has ever put it to me in those words, and several would rather I hadn't noticed. It's what the arithmetic demands, though, and it's what the Houses are really for, whatever else they say about themselves.

The upshot is that practitioners are gathered together in a few places instead of spread thinly through the country. The Houses raise them and keep them, and post them wherever they're wanted.

What that means on the ground

In the Boundary Lands a practitioner is a visitor, more an occasion than a neighbour or somebody's cousin. They turn up, do something that couldn't otherwise have been done, and go, and the parish talks about it for thirty years.

I met a man of about seventy who had met exactly one practitioner in his life, three decades before. She fixed a wellhead and then sat for four hours letting his father talk to her about drainage, and it was the four hours he remembered.

Two things under one word

Ask in a Boundary Lands village whether there are any practitioners about and they'll tell you no. Ask who finds water when a well goes bad and they'll say Tam does, Tam always has, and his mother did before him. Tam, everyone agrees, Tam included, is no practitioner.

In village usage, a practitioner is somebody from a House. They wear good boots, they arrive on business, and their visit is an event. What Tam has is a knack, which belongs to a person the way a good singing voice does.

Some of these people are exactly what their neighbours take them for and will never be anything more. A good number, though, are showing signs that will never go any further, and a good number of others went through a small, quiet, unremarkable awakening years ago without anyone involved ever putting that word to it.

This is a large part of why the recorded figures are wrong. The count depends on people recognising themselves as the thing being counted, a great many of them don't, and the ones who don't are precisely the ones nobody visits.

Every so often somebody is simply hiding, living quietly and doing small useful things, having decided long ago that being on a list wasn't for them. I've met a few, and kept their names out of my notes.

Awe requires distance

What surprised me most in four years is how well informed the Borderlands are about practitioners.

People know the tiers and they know about the Houses. They know a practitioner can't lift a barn single-handed and would want paying either way. Where their beliefs go wrong, they go wrong in sensible, homely directions and seldom in mythic ones, and I've given those a chapter of their own.

What they have is distance. Everyone has the facts and nobody has met one. That produces a very particular sort of regard, something like the way you'd think of a good physician you've heard about and never needed. I'd struggle to call it either superstition or fear.

The child who shows signs

A child with the mark is reported to the Houses, always and everywhere. I found no exceptions.

I went looking for bitterness about it and found none. The reasons people gave me were practical, and the same in every district I asked. The child will be fed and taught at someone else's expense, and spared an awakening without help, which everyone knows is dangerous because everyone has heard a story. It's also the only road out of the Borderlands open to a child with no property, which was said to me in exactly those words twice, in villages four hundred miles apart.

Nobody expects the child to come home. The families wouldn't call it sending them away, and they'd be offended if you called it selling. They don't speak of it as a loss either. The visits get further apart while the child grows up somewhere else among people who talk differently, which everyone understood from the start.

That's the ordinary shape of it. It happens maybe once a generation in any given parish, and when it does, it's the biggest thing to happen there in years.