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.
The other is already stalking through the flooded lands, look of determination on her face. Sorcerers are recognizable, or at least this one is, just from her walk she screams, 'I am magic, get out of my way.'
As expected, the water's obeying. As if it's been cowed by its mother, it curls away from the buildings and people, leaving damp but otherwise dry land. The sorceress is picking up the water and she is putting it back, water is not allowed to go where she doesn't want it.
She's got a subtle grin, on her face. Sorcery's fun.
She doesn't need to be on the ground anymore, the water is good and cowed, now. She leads it to the river it came from, and then wills the river to keep it. What's that river? Yes, that's right, no complaints, you do what you are told. The sorceress deepens the river, just for good measure. And it will stay that way, now won't it? Yes. Yes it will. Good river.
Once that's taken care of, she flies back and starts telling houses that they should start doing what she says, too. They obey.
"No problem," says Kithabel. She flies low over the streets of the town. She fixes sinkholes and knocked-over posts and drowned flowerbeds. Somebody calls her over to fix some stuff in her house. Whatever it is is already fixed before she goes through their door, as though it sensed her approach. "Are you a new flier? I haven't seen you before."
There are a few people with injuries, but those are easy to take care of. The broken bone she finds snaps itself right, and the person with some nasty bruising ceases to be bruised. Between the two of them, they're going to have this little town back to normal in no time.
"Fair. Flying carriage with spectral horses could be fun, or like - if you wanted to rock the waterfall look you could have them be made out of mist? And not actually be alive, just a part of the carriage for looks and effect. You'd be surprised how far you can get with presentation."
"You'd have to get the other party to agree to it, too, I hear people who aren't even dating anyone going 'my married name is going to be Apple!' and wondering what they'll do if they fall in love with someone who hates apples, or whose first name is already Apple, or whatever."
"I find that it helps to read a glossary of words while flying, and then just figuring out the grammar and such by talking to people as you're helping them with things. The interpreter idea's cute, though. Sooometimes sorceress turf wars get annoying? If you're a nomad like me they'll leave you alone, though. Just show up and let them know you're in the area but not interested in poaching or anything and you should be fine. They might be rude and tell you, 'No go away' and if you don't that'll cause a problem, but if you shrug and leave them alone they won't care."
"Yyyyyes. Sort of. Not in those words. Don't start off with that, say that you're a new sorceress that just started nearby, and you're planning to make a castle and start working in the area. Or if you've already done that, tell then that you've made a castle already, but you get more invisible points if you tell them before you make the castle. Be polite, but don't be meek, they're sorcerers and sorceresses, they'll think it means you're weak. Usually they'll take the hint about claiming a turf."
"That being - making a palace and looking after my town and its environs?" Pause. "Is it going to cause problems that I sometimes go visit my father? He's in a sorcerer territory - the guy doesn't have a problem with me, but I mean it does involve leaving here for a couple of days at a time."
"Nnnot if you prepare for it, it's not a problem. I recommend leaving a constructed messenger when you leave, to great any sorcerers that show up at your house and be nice to them and explain that you are away visiting family. It's also probably a good idea to leave an item there with the messenger to let them speak to you directly - not the beads, some sorcerers get snippy with wanting fancy things. Mirror's traditional, but you can go with something else if it is pretty and fancy and magical. Oh, now that I think of it - don't just hand a bunch of communication items to other sorcerers that you don't know. Do it with friends. I got into a bit of trouble a few years back when a sorceress tried to treat me like her lackey."
"You're welcome! There's a surprising amount of politics to it. After the first few years it calms down a bit, at least if you're not a nomad. Everyone knows where you are and what you do, where your turf is, so on." Pause. "... Should I give you a crash course in like, sorcerer politics? I sort of feel like I need to do that."
"Sure, crash course in sorcerer politics. The really important thing to remember is that sorcerers aren't like magic. You can't get anywhere by pushing them around or expecting them to yield or anything, they are powers in their own right. Similarly, you can't let them push you around, either, or they will never stop. So... Imagine that instead of an all powerful sorceress, you're a country. You can do whatever you like in your own territory, but you aren't allowed to dictate what happens in another country's territory without upsetting them and possibly provoking a conflict. And neither will they with yours. Sorcerers are generally more peaceful than countries, and you don't have the bureaucratic tape or anything, and you're only dealing with the one person, but the principle is similar."
Kithabel gets ahold of a map that includes both larger political units and approximate sorcerer territories within. Both her own town and the one where her father lives are in the country of Tanree, which is medium-sized and contains eight sorcerer territories (besides Kithabel's-to-be) which jointly cover about half the land and all of the coastline-adjacent sea, although of course the dispatcher can send them to places that aren't within their immediate territories, and nomads come through often enough. One of them is way up on the island, but Kithabel marks that as to-visit anyway. She's in the south, a hop away from the neighboring land of Beraz, and her dad's in the east, close to Ampar. She marks three nearby Berazin and two Amparsh sorcerous territories to visit, too. There's one to the southeast, too, in the nation of Var, over the mountains, but if Kithabel recalls right people in Var almost never speak Reesh, it's kind of far away, and from the look of this map that's a hermit-sorcerer territory anyway, no towns. (What does she do all day, Kithabel wonders?)
"I think I've figured out where to pay visits," Kithabel tells Dianira.
"Eh. Not super stressful? I find scheduling stifling. I show up to places and do obvious magic and usually people will ask, 'Oh can go do this for us while you're here?' And, of course, the answer is often yes. When of course I'm not near people, I just sort of... Do what I like? I don't know how people don't have things to do with magic. I'll flatten out and neaten up roads, clear trees of parasitic plants, create - not castles, but interesting things for people to find if they happen to wander by. I once carved out a cave and added musical crystals that light up and sing when touched, and that copy any tunes they hear. That sort of thing."
"I usually have enough stuff planned in advance, but sometimes I have an hour and want to do something in it. I did the butterflies thing for my mom, by the way, she loved them, I stuck them to the walls and have them occasionally beating their wings as decoration when she asked."
"It means people can rely on me to show up if they make plans with me - for example, I am currently on my way to the library, where I will be restoring old books at a time when the librarians have arranged to have none of them checked out. And sometimes I have more than one idea at once so I'd need to write it down anyway."