Kithabel wants to be a sorceress.

She's very precocious with dabs of householdy magic, like what her mother does when there's the right amount of work for this to be faster or easier or the only way - rescue an overcooked roast or dust a whole room without missing spots or make sure flies find other places to be than their apartment. These things are only a matter of a few minutes' want. Want the roast to be perfect and rare in the middle and tender - want the room freshly clean and unsneezeworthy - want those pesky bugs gone gone gone. Anyone can do it. Kithabel's fast, maybe, and starts early - most four-year-olds don't have that much concentration - but this is not exceptional, and it is not, really, sorcery.

There are ordinary people, who do only that, and only now and then; these people have no particular name. And then there are people who do magic fairly often, who put up buildings or perform for audiences or heal the sick. Those are specialists, who work the same power, want and concentrate on and need the same thing so much that it makes a home in their bones and learns the way they breathe and doesn't take too long to rekindle in the morning.

Kithabel doesn't want to be a specialist. She wants to be a sorceress.

Sorceresses do not get days off. Sorceresses do not take hourlong lunchbreaks or roll over to sleep in or have hobbies.

Sorceresses might start like specialists, but someone who only needs one sort of power can put it down and pick it back up again without the furrows they've left in their ambient power wearing shallow. Specialists specialize.

Sorceresses (or sorcerers, as the case might be) specialize only in doing magic. Familiarizing the energies that collect around them not with construction or color or curing but with the sorceress herself. Accustoming the magic to obedience.

Where a specialist thinks I've done this before, a sorceress thinks I can do anything if I want it hard enough.

Kithabel is very good at wanting.

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She doesn't do very well in school past the time she's about twelve. Too distracted. She's always, always trying to do magic. The reason sorceresses do not get days off is because the magic will forget about them if it isn't in constant use. She drops out of school and carries books from the library with her instead. She switches to a biphasic sleep schedule so she doesn't lose so much progress overnight - five hours at night, nap in the afternoon. She makes sure she has work. A variety of work. Some specialists aspired to proper sorcery only to fall into doing the same thing over and over, then figuring they might as well go on vacation... Kithabel doesn't do that. She finds lost sheep. She fixes plumbing. She encourages her mother's garden. She wears wooden beads on a string around her wrist and concentrates and concentrates over weeks, and then gives one each to her parents and someone who runs an emergency response service, and they can talk to her from far away.

When she is eighteen, she has finally built up enough momentum that she can fly.

This means that she can put her name in the national book of sorceresses, and that makes finding things to do magic to a lot easier.

For instance, the national dispatcher speaks to her bead to summon her to a flooded area in the lowlands.

She's in the air and on her way presently.