Verys leads them up some stairs and into a very nice sitting-room - it's still a little cramped, but there's a window that looks out onto the street, and a big comfy sofa and three well-upholstered armchairs, all covered in green velvet, around a low table. There's also a shelf of various bottles of alcohol and a couple of pitchers of water and juice next to the shelf of various glasses.
"Scrying sounds incredibly useful to generals and those who prepare military matters, who unfortunately you won't find any of in Seren at present - the armies are fighting down in Kahraman, and everyone else who has a taste for adventure has gone to the Broc or overseas to - some kind of anti-slavery operation.
The militia and magistrates might also buy that - if you can use, say, a loose hair some suspect has left at the scene, and find them?
There's an impressive budget from the Senate for military magic, it's harder to get money out of the magistrates but a high profile case might do it - in both cases you'd be looking at Anvil for the best prices, though, and some people might try to pressure you into doing it for 'the good of the Empire' - which even the Loyalty Assembly has told them to stop, but it hasn't really done much to prevent it.
You might also get some interest from private investigators - probably not in Seren, although - hmm, I suppose it might find the fate of someone lost to the Vallorn, especially if someone's treasured a lock of their hair? But I imagine the League would pay much better - I'd probably recommend Sarvos, you'd get more people there looking to see if their spouse is cheating on them, or finding where an errant family member has got to, and fewer people who are trying to make you an accessory to murder.
I'm not sure you could put an adequate price to the service for anything other than military scrying, though - you'd get some takers in the League at a Throne a pop, and I imagine cleverer souls than I would come up with more interesting uses they might pay you up to five for - that's as much as it takes to commission historical research from the Civil Service, so it's a good benchmark of what people will throw at a novel investigative tool, although those are also limited by politics.
Healing is usually pretty cheap, yes, it can be hard to get anyone to pay for it - there's always someone eager to use their skills for free and feel good about themselves, you know.
Plant growth... now we have some spells for that, so I can give you some better estimates. Ruthless Vigilance is four mana and you have to find a caster, so call that about six crowns if you're good at negotiation; that almost doubles the output of a single herb garden. Farms, there's a whole ritual cycle, that's ten mana over the year; that more than doubles the harvest if you get them all done. So I suspect you'd be looking at niche projects for that, someone growing Realmsroot or similar that our standard rituals don't affect, or a lot of herb gardens close together - especially if it turns out to stack with Ruthless Vigilance, I can probably find you some herbalists who tend closely packed gardens here that might go in together on a casting.
Sending sounds, again, most valuable for military coordination - but I expect you could find a large number of people who would like to spend a few crowns on it, to exchange words with a relative or friend who's far away, if that's the kind of price range you'd accept.
I'm not sure what 'Restoration' does, that sounds interesting? Generally our magic and herb lore is quite sufficient for most poisons and diseases; some curses are stubborn, but again, you'd find your best market in Anvil, being cursed is a fairly rare occurrence outside that kind of circle.
I've added diamond prices in Temeschwar and Sarvos to our standard market runner's list, if they make good time then we should have them back at some time tomorrow.
Problems we don't have solutions to; well, death, of course. The Vallorn - it's essentially living terrain that hates you, it produces clouds of poison and is full of creatures animated by plant tendrils, gigantic insectoid horrors, and so on - we have a very slow solution that we're working on to gradually drain the power out of it, but that will take many years to finish and also we'll probably have to do a lot of fighting to cut it back even once it's weakened. Druj miasma - it's a region-wide aura of despair, we now have ways of taking it down once we've found the pillars they use to anchor it, but they're difficult to find and the Druj always leave the landscape full of traps which makes it even harder.
Smaller scale, we don't really have any good ways to relieve physical pain, other than getting people extremely drunk? Or a way to safely and reliably hold people unconscious. Healers generally just try to work quickly, but it feels like there should be something there. Cloth is always in short supply, the Marches and the Brass Coast produce it, but an awful lot of time gets spent carding and spinning and weaving and all that. Some way to find more deposits of the bourse resources - white granite, mithril, ilium, weirwood - without just having to stumble across them; they're resistant to our kind of magic, but yours might be different.
Moving supplies, I suppose - ox wagons and barges are all very well, but are really quite slow, and it's easy for outlying settlements to get cut off - if you could move fresh fruit fast enough, you'd have a really considerable market in places that just can't get it at the moment, especially the exotic fruit they grow down in the Brass Coast, into Temeschwar and the Varushkan vales - or into Dawn, they're not as wealthy but that is exactly the kind of thing they pay lavishly for.
It's kind of difficult to understand what we don't have and might be available, am I entirely on the wrong track?"
