"They're healthy and have healthy children."

"I guess I've heard of lower standards."

He looks slightly stung. "This life is hard. Gets easier after that."

"Sorry."

"He was ten when he ended up responsible for 'em."

"Can't all spring from the void fully formed."

"Sorry."

"I think the years when the kids are little are hardest, and then it gets easier."

"Can you hire them help?"

"Gave them my ring of sustenance, a while back. Helps a lot with babies, they share it between them depending who's got a new one."

"Aw."

"I told them it cost a hundred gold and they were terrified they'd lose it."

"Twenty five hundred. Right?"

"- yeah."

"Tsk, tsk, not very lawful."

"It did cost a hundred gold! Also some more gold after that."

"Would've sounded like a pretty wild amount to me too. My mom was actually a sorcerer too but didn't level far and didn't have the business sense to do much with it, plus her family took most of what she did earn."

"And men can't work?"

"Oh, my dad worked too but he died when I was pretty young so it wasn't a major factor in household finances that I can actually remember. Also he wasn't a caster so he didn't earn his wife a caster's income."

He nods. "We were unusually poor, a lot of boys stay in school until they're twelve and do an apprenticeship after that."

"Mahdi stayed in school until he was twenty but that's because learning to read was very hard for him."

"Yes, that's why." He makes sparks fly menacingly between his fingers.

"Well, congratulations on your persistence."

"Hagan can't read at all."

"In my homeland reading is scorned as an evil art. It's believed that when you read words they vanish from your internal monologue and then you can never think them again."