The way Will became suspicious of a CHILD??? Just BC she was smart for her age and status?...

i think it’s more because she’s a commoner and a child since it seems they don’t have proper education

Yeah I mean I get that, but with his knowledge and connection with the prince, I figured he would've known that the owners are connected to the merchant guild therefore having the capabilities to teach a child simple arithmetic, also given that they run an inn so the kid could've learned it just by that. It was unnecessary suspicion of a kid. Her intelligence contrary to her status could be also interpreted as being smarter than others, and that doesn't have to give them a need to have a watchful eye from a literal royalty. Sorry for the rant, but this is solely my opinion lmao. I just feel that even if you're a commoner, you could also be smart, as established from a number of mangas/novels that have commoners as smart protagonists.

Yeah, I thought so too. The royals seem to have too much free time to bother with a commoner child just because she can do arithmetic and is ingenious

You forget history, where women working with herbal cures and being able to swim was enough to get them called witches. Lack of information makes everything a boogeyman.

That was also among the unedicated folk. The people who blamed the supernatural whenever something happened tended to be villagers. Yes, we had churches, or other powers claiming one thing or the other but it was always politically driven.

Take vampires for example: They never originated from the nobility, but from the villagers that would blame the dead for things like unknown sickness or depression. Or rather, they would blame the dead when there was nothing to blame among the living. Your hair was red, when it wasn't a common colour in the area? Your tooth was ingrown and weird? You knew a suspicious amount of information about herbs? And if no one was suspicious, then they would dig up the deceased. Some corpses don't decompose in normal ways, heck, sometimes even the process takes much longer than normal thus after digging up a body that should have been already in a bad state only to find it still quite good looking? Yeah, we're dealing with a vampire, boys! There were also 'gas vampires', aka villagers believe vampires could come to them in a form of smoke/invisible gas, so they would leave small holes in their windows with bottles on the inside covering it. It was all in order to catch the vampires in a bottle! Watermelons have a round shape and a bloody colour inside of them, so ofc that's how the legend of vampiric watermelons started! They're blood red because they drink blood! Fun stuff, all propelled by lack of knowledge.

Nobility was not a fan of vampires however, because having your father or grandfather come back from the dead would create inheritance issues, so they always went out of their way to deny any vampiric claims. They didn't even bother fancing the idea. What did they actually like, then? Wolves! That's right, nobility didn't have to live in fear of wolves eating them at night like the villagers did, so they idolised predatory animals a lot. Some of them would even wear skinned wolves and pretend to be such 'werewolves' to look more cool. That's right, they were furries.

But here's the thing, our history is practically nonexistent to this story. The common attitude towards a skillful child, girl or boy, in this story is to think of them as a smart child, maybe even a prodigy, and they are not described as someone suspicious (evident in the attitude by customers and Will's companion). The possibility of a child being smart is higher than them being a spy. Btw my outburst was entirely about the unnecessary report Will made, as someone who is a close aide of a prince in this world setting. In my opinion it was a weak way to establish some sort of connection towards another character in a story. This disregarded the world building that was, maybe unconsciously, established from the way of writing the story. Hell, even saying that there was an amazing dish, almost revolutionary, never seen before- could make that prince come down there, if they want to establish a prince who has a playful personality, and one who can make time to go out of the palace. Lmao sorry for this response, I haven't read this for a while.

I don't think you were wrong at all. The author clearly did no research for their very generic story, or even thought much about worldbuilding. As a writer myself it could not be any more clear to me. Therofere the only reason they created such a dumb plot point is because the author wanted to connect the two characters somehow and who knows, probably thought that witnessing her genius in person was too cliche.