The world of this story was inhabited by humans, but certain ones used magic. Not that they were born with it - apparently in this book magic was just something ordinary humans could learn if they studied enough. And knowing magic created a huge divide between them and the other humans. Magic users lived in a city far away from this little village, all by themselves. Kind of like the divide between the races in Hearth’s Warming Eve. That story had been just as fictional as this novel, though.