Endorsed Mentor

The Endorsed Mentor

In the Black Market, a licensed tradesman may formally take on an unrelated apprentice and register them as such through the Illicit Yield ledger, the same office that licenses every business in the Market. Do it, and you're recognized as an Endorsed Mentor, a status that carries no pay and no title beyond the word itself, but does carry weight.
  An Endorsed Mentor's testimony about their apprentice's skill is treated as fact by the Triad in licensing disputes. Their name gets recorded permanently alongside whoever they trained, whether that apprentice goes on to greatness or, as happened once, to considerably worse.
  Most tradesmen never bother registering. It costs nothing and changes nothing about the actual teaching. Dorin never registered either, as it happens, which meant that when the worst came for him, there was no formal record anywhere saying what he'd actually been to the young man who killed him.
  The Endorsed Mentor status was never meant to matter this much. It was designed, originally, for mundane disputes... a customer questioning whether an apprentice's work was truly supervised, a rival tradesman claiming poaching. Nobody who wrote the original ledger rule imagined it might someday be the only thing standing between a man's actual legacy and complete silence.

Why Anyone Takes the Title Anyway

I asked an Endorsed Mentor in Togs once why she'd bothered registering, given it changes nothing about the teaching itself.
  "Because someone should be able to look it up," she told me, "and know I meant it."
  That's the whole profession, in the end. It exists for exactly one reason: so that when a master and an apprentice are gone, or estranged, or one has quietly betrayed the other, there's still a record somewhere saying the teaching happened, and that it was real while it lasted.
  I think about Dorin every time I write that sentence. Nobody registered what he was to Reeve. I've made certain, at least, that somebody wrote it down.
  I've since started recommending the registration to every tradesman I interview for other reasons entirely, whether they think they need it or not. Most of them laugh it off, the same way Dorin likely would have. I keep recommending it anyway. It costs nothing, and I've now seen exactly what it costs to have skipped it.