The Fire Mages by Pauline M. Ross

coincidence, I suppose,” I said. “Maybe the baby would have got better anyway.”
    Marisa shook her head. “Unlikely, with those symptoms. Don’t agonise over it. Spellpages are always uncertain. The most reliable may fail, the most unpromising may be effective. It’s magic, who knows how it works? Besides – it all enhances our reputation, you know?” And it was true, business was brisker after that and a few customers asked specifically for me.
    Marisa began to hint that perhaps, once I’d qualified as a contract scribe, I might want to join them permanently. Elissana’s drusse had been with them for a while, working half his time with them and half with another, larger, Scribing House. That hadn’t worked out and since then they’d coped with just the two of them, and my occasional help.
    “But I think we could support three Scribes quite comfortably,” Marisa said. “Business is good, just now. And we all get along, don’t we?”
    Looking back on it, that year was perhaps the happiest of my life. I was a proper scribe at last, I was beginning to learn the law, I had money of my own, I had friends I met up with in taprooms and board houses for convivial evenings. I had a real home for the first time since leaving the village, and I was away from Hestanora. She had been taken up by one of the Masters, so I bumped into her in classes from time to time, but there was a pinched look about her. She was pale and had lost something of her snootiness.
    ~~~~~
    Each new year at the scribery brought me access to a wider range of books. The scribery had an extensive collection of spell books, but those for higher ranked scribes were barred to me. I had soon exhausted all those I was allowed to read.
    I turned as always to bookshops. There were several in Ardamurkan, and they all had a number of general purpose spell books, some of them very old. Books of basic spells for general good health or abundant harvests were freely available to anyone, and every house with any pretension to learning kept one or two on hand. A suitable spell could be recited, or written and burned, when there was no money for a true spellpage. Along with a prayer to the Moon Gods and an offering to the forest sprites, it was standard practice for illness or on important occasions like a birth or marriage or the start of a new business.
    I loved whiling away an afternoon with dusty volumes not opened, perhaps, for decades. There was always a chance of turning up interesting variations of a routine spell or new information on long-forgotten practices. Who knew what treasures might lie inside?
    One sun, I went into one of my favourite bookstores for the first time since I became a transaction scribe. The bookseller was a small man, round as an apple, and almost as red.
    “Good afternoon, Lady Scribe Kyra.” He winked, and I smiled at the acknowledgement of my new status.
    “Good afternoon, Master Torlion. Do you have anything new related to harvest spells?”
    “Nothing in the public sections, my dear. Do you want to look in the scribes’ room?”
    “The scribes’ room? I’ve never heard of that.”
    “Ah, well, it’s restricted, of course. But now...” He gestured towards my necklace. “You have a gold chain, so I can let you in. Would you like to see it?”
    A gold chain. My transaction scribe’s chain was gold, marking me as authorised to use magic. And now, authorised to enter the secret scribes’ room.
    Torlion led me through the shop to a nondescript wooden door near the back. I’d always assumed it was just a store room, perhaps filled with mops and buckets and broken chairs waiting to be mended. Instead, it was full of spell books.
    It wasn’t a large room, not much bigger than a broom cupboard, but I gazed round in awe at shelf upon shelf of books, marked with the various symbols of prohibited topics: not just the harmful spells but volume after volume on advanced variances and complex multi-level directives, conditionals