Joking Maiden

plus the color version

And yet, as the events of Silver Eve play out, Qifrey proves that he has committed to prioritizing the children's feelings and safety over his own vendetta. When they're ambushed by Engendale, he makes sure Coco is protected and stays by her side instead of blindly going on the attack as he did to Sasaran. When he gets the chance to find and confront Custas on his own, he steps back instead and allows Coco to be the one to talk him down. He then gets bodied by his own Silverwood migraine, but once he recovers, he goes to his students and helps with their plan to stop the leech rather than keep searching the city for the Brimmed Caps alone. And even though he hoped to get information from Custas, when he realizes the boy is in mortal danger from the Silverwood, Qifrey prioritizes saving his life over any potentially useful memories - and then chooses honesty despite the risk to himself when Coco confronts him about it.

Having seen that play out, we can thus understand that despite wiping his relevant memories, Qifrey still took Olruggio's concerns very seriously and is doing his best to correct his own behavior. He is pointedly not using the fact that Olly can't remember his own suspicions as an way to avoid accountability and continue doing whatever he wants. Once we see that for ourselves, the conversation they have in chapter 40 feels a lot less like Qifrey deflecting or distracting Olly before removing the problem, and more like him going through a process of trying to figure out how to best abide by Olruggio's wishes this time.

After all, Qifrey could have just run the memory-wipe the minute they were alone, if all that mattered was keeping the tree back and keeping Olly compliant. Or he could have done it right after Olly made it clear that he planned to support Qifrey in whatever he was trying to accomplish, if he was just looking to soothe his own conscience with surface-level forgiveness. Instead, he looks for anger and is surprised to see its already passed, pushes back on Olly blaming himself, and tries to understand where he's coming from. He's doing his best to hear Olly out through the entire conversation.

What Olly tells him is that despite his own hurt and frustration, he still believes that Qifrey wouldn't act this way without a good reason. That he still considers him a friend and wants to be a better source of support going forward. All he asks in exchange is that Qifrey not lose sight of his duty to his apprentices or abuse their trust in the process, and to be told what's going on.

And Qifrey does his best to give Olly what he's asking for. Everything he says in response really is exactly what he's been thinking and feeling. He admits that he loves being a teacher, that he loves his life in the downs, and his motivation is to preserve that life rather than risk it. With the value of hindsight, he genuinely sounds like he's building up to the silverwood reveal with his insistence that he can't just let himself be happy. He even starts to reveal what he discovered about the experiments performed on him as a child, and what he knows about the new kind of forbidden magic the Brimmed Caps are cultivating. It's only when the relief of being honest allows the roots to start growing that he stops and pulls out the memory wipe spell.

There is a good question as to why he stops there instead of finishing his explanation and getting Olly's explicit permission to use it. It could be that Qifrey's declining condition has made him more cautious about allowing it to grow too far before forcing it back. It could be that he's gotten used to this process and is actively trying to make it more painful for himself by denying them catharsis so it remains effective. It could even be that a previous Olly told him to start cutting these confrontations shorter to make them less risky (which I would buy, but want more evidence of).

Personally, though, I think that it was a result of Qifrey trying to balance his newest promise to Olruggio against his long-standing one. Olly has been clear repeatedly over their last few talks that he thinks the students should be Qifrey's top priority, to the point of making it a condition for his continued support. All four of them are nearby, with the atelier still in clear view of where Olly and Qifrey are talking - in fact, almost immediately after the memory wipe happens they all pop up to ask when they're having dinner. If any of them witnessed the silverwood's growth, Qifrey would have to choose between wiping their memories as well, or letting himself die with the secret irreparably out to everyone he loves.

Either option would mean breaking a promise to Olruggio. And, of course, we've seen from his interactions with Tartah that Qifrey is willing to do plenty of other morally dubious things if it means not having to take memories from children. So from his vantage point of fully knowing what's at stake, he makes the choice that seems to best fit both his and Olly's sense of priorities and morals - use the memory wipe without permission, before anyone else can be put at risk.