There was a tax on spells.
Seren had known this all her life — the Arcane Levy was posted in the Thornfield Hall's public notice board, updated quarterly, the rates for common enchantments listed with the matter-of-fact clarity of any public utility tariff. She had collected it thousands of times, pressing the levy seal onto parcels and letters and recording the charge in the permanent ledger. She had never thought about it as anything other than bureaucracy.
The sphere had shown her a farmer. Just farming.
On her walk back from Gate Seven — she had returned the same way she'd come, the copper arch resealing behind her with a soft finality that felt temporary, like a door closed but not locked — she had passed through the lower market district, which was still open in the late evening, lit with the ambient glow of the common-cast lights that ran on the city ley lines. The lights were provided free to all city residents. This was considered a basic civic right in Caldenmere, so basic that no one discussed it as a provision anymore — it was simply a fact of evening, the way stars were a fact of night in other contexts.
She bought bread. She paid for it with copper marks from the small coin purse she kept in her apron. The baker, a broad woman with runic calluses on her right hand from the bread-warming enchantment she used to keep the loaves fresh, wrapped it in paper and slid it across the counter and asked after her mother in the way of a woman who asked after everyone's mother as a matter of social cohesion.
"Fine," Seren said, which was approximately true. "Still in Thornfield. Still teaching basic rune comprehension to the primary school."
"Good work, teaching," the baker said. "My daughter wants to test for the Academy. The Level Four entrance examination."
"She should," Seren said. "The Academy's worth it if she has the aptitude."
"The aptitude she has. The fee is another matter."
This was the thing. The thing that Seren had known and not fully examined, had walked past every day the way you walked past things that did not require immediate action. The Academy tested for Level Four competency — the threshold at which you could legally and commercially practice complex enchantment. Access to the test was free. Preparation for the test was not. The private tuition required to prepare a student of average ability cost roughly eight months of a teacher's salary. The commercial materials — the practice rune sets, the guided meditation resources, the foundational texts — cost four months more, minimum.
If you passed, you could earn significantly more. If you came from a family that could front twelve months of a teacher's salary, you had a significant advantage in being the kind of person who could one day earn significantly more.
Seren had passed her certification at eighteen through a combination of genuine aptitude, extreme dedication, and the fact that her mother was a teacher who had spent three years systematically preparing her daughter for exactly this examination. She had not thought of this as privilege at the time. She had thought of it as effort.
The sphere's question sat in her chest: WHAT DOES A LIFE COST?
She walked home through the lit streets of Caldenmere, where the ley-line lamps burned free and equal over everyone, and thought about what was free and what was not, and the distance between the two, and how that distance determined, more than almost anything else, the shape of a life.
Her flat was on the fourth floor of a building on Corders Lane — the kind of building that housed postal workers and teachers and the lower ranks of the civil service, maintained but not elegant, with enchantments that worked most of the time. The hot-water enchantment had been failing since the winter. She'd put in a maintenance request in November. It was March.
She ate her bread. She sat by the window that looked out at the glow of Caldenmere, the city that ran on magic the way her world had once run on rivers and muscle.
She thought about the baker's daughter. She thought about Level Four certifications and private tuition and the specific shape of barriers that did not announce themselves as barriers.
She thought: the sphere asked what a life costs, but that assumes a life has a single price. What if the cost is different depending on where you start?
She picked up a pen. She found, in her desk drawer, a sheet of blank paper that she had been keeping for no particular reason for an unspecified period of time. She wrote at the top, in her neat clerk's hand: SURVEY — WORLD OF AETHERMOOR — PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS.
Then she wrote for two hours, and filled four pages, and when she was done she felt something she had not felt in a very long time: the specific satisfaction of a person who has sent something of her own.