Anyway I am pretty sure adoption is probably not a thing in witch society given how their child-rearing structure is made and how people spend most of their developmental life with someone else (meaning for younger babies and toddlers they are more likely to foster until they can choose a master), but I am pretty confident if they had adoption paperwork Beldaruit would have signed them within one year of having Qifrey.
Like look at him. That's his son there. He probably joked around to Vinanna about giving single handedly birth to him at some point. They are family and Qifrey does not have another family aside from Olly and the girls. Olly treats Beldaruit like a mildly irritating FiL.
You just know if adoption of an older child was a possibility Qifrey's ass would have been 100% without any shadow of a doubt adopted by that old man. His child now.
And honestly given the other apprentice-master dynamics we have seen, I think that is also why Qifrey is as good at teaching and raising his girls as he is. Given how Richeh and Euini got treated by their previous masters, and given how even Agott got treated by her mother, I am going to assume until showed otherwise that most apprentice-master relationships are more akin to a formal and professional student-teacher dynamic.
But Qifrey is not just teaching, he is very attentive about every part of their lives: sleep, nutrition, emotional turmoil, past negative experiences, ambitions, etc. He is an excellent teacher, because he is taking every aspect of his students into account. And he is taking care of them. That is not something many people intuitively land onto, and not something we have seen so far outside of his atelier.
Which makes me think that he might be copying Beldaruit a bit. Beldaruit had a bit pf a particular case: a child who was likely an outsider before being a Brimhat victim, essentially trafficked and tortured (unless he was born from Brimhat parents, or the "he was a corpse" theory is true, we do not know), without memory, with a lot of trauma, without parents or (until Olly and Alaira) friends, without anyone else to lean onto. And he adopted him in all but nominal senses of the world: of course he would make sure his child is getting enough food and sleep, of course he likely kept offering emotional support to him. Look how gentle soft he is on him even when Qifrey breaks the rules: he is panicked, anxious, but he is not lashing out or taking that anxiety onto Qifrey. He is first and foremost there to be a good adult Qifrey can keep relying on.
And I personally think that kind of dynamic really influenced how Qifrey approaches his own students and why he had all the tools to take in the "problem children" of other ateliers (using quotation marks cause NONE of them deserved that title, but unfortunately they got it).
He knows how to deal with Agott's stubbornness and desire to do more, and with Richeh's need for space and to do her own thing, because he WAS that apprentice himself and he saw what worked with him (and Olly helped too, a lot, what he di not get from Beldaruit he definitely got from Olly).
He knows that staying emotionally friendly helps, and that being firm is all you need when you put a boundary, likely because that is how Beldaruit handled him. Being a safe person is much more important having your authority never being challenged.
All of it because his unofficial dad put his entire heart and soul in that one single first apprentice he got (and he is raising another one, look at that unofficial family line having a tradition of taking in traumatized kids).
Idk where I am going with this, I just have a lot of loge about Beldi-dad. He is a good egg and his good care rippled through Qifrey well into adulthood. I think if Qifrey did not have his botanical issues he would have likely developed to be much less gruffy with him. Unfortunately for Beldaruit being that safe and caring is like mercury poisoning for Qifrey. And I think he probably knows (from that panel), and that is likely why he is not pushing past the initial jokes.
