Patience was a child, old enough to say her name (no small feat when it’s Patience Skarlefaxus), when she realized that fire could be tied to emotion and bent to will. She was old enough to realize that her parents were having some kind of emotion, even if they said “no” when she asked them whether they were sad. And unbeknownst to her parents, she was old enough to practice sorcery.
The components were all there. When her Mother would experience a strong emotion, the hearth would flare or die down. Certainly, she lacked the intellectual comprehension of Wholist Scripture of an adult, but she believed in the One God, and He was a good God, who wanted good things for His children. And she had successfully divorced her sense of self and will from whatever Mama and Mother wanted for her. So it was that when she willed to know why the fire flared, sorcery answered.
Her Mother was conflicted. There was a fear of death, something that Patience might not have figured out on her own for a bit longer. There was sadness. There was resignation. Unaware that their daughter had felt, as though her own, the emotions they were experiencing, they tried to tell her they’d explain when she was older.
That was just an open invitation to go ask her grandparents. They’d grown up with her Mother, raised her, and had more permissive notions of what a child could know. Not that Patience thought of it in those terms, she just knew that Gramma and Grampa answered more honestly than her Mother and Mama. When she was close to the hearth, she could feel the lie behind their words. It took her some time to figure out the connection between fire and her talents, simply finding the emotions of others curiously muted when she was far from a flame.
But her grandparents. Grampa groaned as he lifted her onto his knee. “What’s on your mind, poppet?”
“Mama and Mother are not telling me something.” The direct approach had worked before, but she hadn’t had the inside scoop of what kind of thing they weren’t telling her before. Predictably, her Grampa started by invoking the right of her parents to decide what to tell her. Experimentally, she dangled a tidbit of information. “But they’re unhappy about it!”
Her Grampa sat back in his chair, and pursed his lips thoughtfully. It was a promising sign. He was deciding how much to take her into his confidence. Though Patience thought of it as deciding how much truth she would be given.
Finally, he looked at her seriously. “You know that we’re not from here. We come from a far-away land known as Dragold.” Patience nodded. She was darker than most of her playmates. Nobody much cared, but she had been asked about it. “We had a King—no, that’s not the place to start. The land we live in now, Fief,” Patience rolled her eyes. Grampa would explain, but he would overexplain. “Well, Fief invaded Dragold. Because it doesn’t have a strong leader, and Fief wants to rule over it. And while we don’t live there anymore, it was our home, and…” He was trying to decide something. Grampa spent a lot of time sitting in front of the fire, it was easy to read him. “And while it will be good for Dragold to have a leader, it’s…” he rubbed his beard, “It’s not the easiest thing to… the feelings are complicated.” Patience could feel her Grampa’s emotions, and they were indeed a mystifying blend of feelings. She nodded, and thanked him, hopping down and seeking out the sweets her Gramma kept on her person.
She was in school, taking her first steps out of girlhood, when the news of the White Queen reached the ears of the student body. It was simply a fact one day at lunch that all the students were discussing. The White Queen, ruler secular of Fief, had fallen under the sway of a dragon and had been leading the nation to the advantage of dragonkind for who-knew-how-long. Generations, at least. Dragons lived a long time, something that had briefly inspired Patience to proclaim she would be a dragon when she grew up. Mortality sat badly with her.
The general response was one of indifference. They were affluent, they had done well for themselves under the current, evidently draconic, regime. Disdain for the law prevailed, her Mother being a forger and her Mom… doing something that even Grandpa hadn’t explained. Corruption was money to her classmates, whose parents were in similar trades. Dragons had a lot of money, and had to spend it somewhere.
Patience was the natural leader—she was the unnatural, sorcery-powered leader—of those she designated part of her social group. Loyalty and affection towards her prevailed. So it came to her ears through one of her friends that the journalist who had spilled the news about the White Queen was a man named Genuine Gnosis. She knew of him from her parents’ stories about their wilder days, which they had just begun to share, and his betrayal of her Moms made him an immediate enemy. Then, too, they lived west of the Crown Range, and Western Fief had largely identified itself as Loyalist Fief, cleaving to the White Queen over the Black Queen.
It was a footnote to Patience’s school days. She was much more invested in understanding the feelings she was having about boys and girls in her class. She’d been popular ever since she had realized that fire sorcery could influence the moods of others. It had taken a few years, and she hadn’t tried it on her parents yet, because she was aware that her Mother was also a fire sorcerer, but she had figured out how to influence the emotions of others in time. Her Mother, being less than conforming with feminine norms, had given Patience a lack of clear gender roles. This was further blurred by the deference of boys who would have dismissed her as “ewww a girl” but for her sorcery. So she had sorted through her friend group for other fire signs, putting more consideration into the birth month of her interests than their features or gender. Preliminarily, kissing was weird.
Shortly after the division of Fief into Loyalist and Reformation Fief, the White Queen declared the foundation of the Church of Fief. They were given instruction in the mores of the Church, and it was much the same as the Wholism that Patience had practiced all her life. The only real difference was that the White Queen, as the draconically-favored ruler of Fief, had been made First Bishop of the Church. This struck Patience as eminently reasonable, given that Gnosis was anti-dragon, and in Scripture the great dragon Gotorjod had sacrificed her wings to protect the first humans from the One God’s wrath.
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Of much greater interest was expanding her sphere of influence and refining her technique when it came to her classmates and teachers. In the moment, it was well within her abilities to inspire affection (useful), trust (also useful), and fear (stopped being useful when affection stopped inspiring bullying). But making these emotions last was more difficult, and while she had improved, there was clearly work to be done towards the end of making loyalties to her persist. This was most important with teachers, because she needed their deep-seated trust and affection to get them to believe while grading that her own paper had been misplaced by themselves and their fear of what to do having lost her work yet again. The same endurance of emotion was necessary to get classmates to do her work for her unless she wanted to actually learn some of the material.
Adults were also harder to manipulate in general. Patience, unacknowledged as a sorceress in her own home, had not received formal training, so she put this down to normal adult unwillingness to take direction from anyone they perceived as a child. She didn’t realize that the humors of adults were better balanced, and possessed greater resilience. Still, she persisted, because any glance at the handwriting would give away the essays written by classmates, unless she were to choose someone competent and allow them to fail in her stead. Which she had done, in the past, but a gradual shortage of competent essayists had taught her to value her classmates’ academic success. In desperation, she resorted to doing her class work with the aid of her fellows, unable to influence her teachers adequately to succeed by any other means.
It was only with a hearth nearby that she could adequately manage to instill emotion in her teachers, and this proved to be her undoing. Her general studies teacher observed the effect and responded with sorcery of his own. He found her classmates filled with great affection towards her, a not-implausible reality, but also that she was drawing on the flames to inspire his own trust to overlook her wholesale copying of test answers from the girl at the desk next to hers. Even knowing she was doing so, his first impulse was to assume there was a good reason for her actions, because after all she was a trustworthy student, agreeable and hard-working.
He took her out of class, into the hall, and as they distanced themselves from the hearth his feelings of trust and fondness faded. Taking the time to examine his memories intentionally, he realized that her voice in essays varied from paper to paper, and she cheated, or appeared to cheat, on nearly every exam. He turned to Patience, who was staring at him wide-eyed. His expression was severe, and he informed her that they would be talking to the principal of the primary school—after he had made sure they extinguished the hearth in her office. Her eyes only grew wider, not in innocence but in fear.
In the principal’s office, her teacher related that she cheated in her studies and was manipulating, at the very least, himself into trusting her. He would not be surprised to learn that the class presidency had been won by application of fire sorcery as well. She denied this, denied more than a passing knowledge of sorcery in general. Reading her emotions, she was recalcitrant and unrepentant. If anything, she was frustrated to have been interrupted. She looked at him as he read her emotions, his less-than deft hand at sorcery palpable to her carefully-tuned senses. He was shocked by a wave of indignance, and a defiant wall of sorcery applied to herself, filling her with self-righteous anger.
The principal, not a magically-inclined sort, was unaware of the battle of wills going on in her office until the frisson of magic re-ignited the fire in the office hearth. Patience’s teacher pointed at the fire and proclaimed, “Quickly, extinguish that! She’ll bend the entire matter to her will unless you do!” Unfortunately, the bucket of water drawn up to extinguish it the first time was nearly empty, and so it was some minutes before it could be put out once more. In the meantime, Patience explained carefully to the principal that she was innocent of all these accusations, and her teacher watched the fire draw towards the principal rather than up the flue as Patience used it to bolster her sorcery. The bucket of water fetched, Patience protested that she was cold, that she was missing her exam, and so on. Her teacher insisted the principal hear him out, and that the child would not expire of the cold in the time it took him to make his point.
Patience was ultimately judged by the principal to have conducted herself appallingly, and suspended her from her classes until such time as she could be trusted to control herself and apply her efforts to her studies.
Her Moms were not impressed. Patience reached out tentatively with her sorcerous senses to see that Mother was impressed, while Mom was disturbed. Patience loved her parents, and wouldn’t dream of manipulating them. Besides, she knew that her Mother was a fire sorceress, and trying to influence a fire sorcerer had been the root of all her problems. She tried her Mother first, knowing her true feelings might make her less harsh a judge.
“So Mother, I… am evidently a sorceress, like you! Who knew?”
Her Mother crossed her arms over her chest and raised an eyebrow. “You knew.”
Well sarx. This wouldn’t be an easy conversation. Her Mother’s emotions shifted from being impressed to irritation at the attempt to play her the fool. Mom, meanwhile, observed them while saying nothing, which was a bad sign. That was Mom’s standard bargaining tactic; wait until she knew what cards everyone was holding and then place her bet. That she was treating this as a confrontation wounded Patience’s ego, as well as her conscience, but ego won out between the two. “So what are you going to do about it?”
“The better question is what are you going to do about it? It’s not too late to course-correct. You’re a smart girl, you can succeed in your classes without cheating.”
“They’ve got me suspended. I can’t succeed in my classes at all.”
Mother shook her head. “We can take care of that. But there’s no point if you’re not going to be willing to apply yourself.”
Patience assured her parents that she would apply herself, even as she puzzled over her Mom’s disturbance at her conduct. She didn’t think what she’d been caught doing was that disturbing, which meant… she asked her Mother, “Did you use sorcery like I did, on Mom?” Both parents startled, and exchanged a significant look. Patience congratulated herself on a successful deflection. Her Mother was evidently willing to take care of matters, and once she was back in class her cadre of friends would do everything in their power to explain the material to her. At least until all of this blew over. She knew, from veiled conversations overheard between her parents, that her records were likely to have an unfortunate accident involving fire. She wanted a box of sulfurs for herself, to conjure flame at any time, but that was not a request to make at that particular moment. She shook herself, realizing that conniving was not the emotion to be putting forth, in case her Mother was… completely distracted.
That was the day that Patience’s certainty in her parents died and her determination to shake the yoke of authority became total and complete. Her Mother was a fire sorceress, yes, but she was not the equal of Patience despite her years. Even the teacher who had caught her had greater finesse than her Mother. It was a disappointing realization. After she was reinstated in her classes, the only change she made to her behavior was to avoid trying to influence her teachers, and to avoid drawing upon flames, what her Mother would have called “making an investiture” in the element, in the process of manipulating her classmates.
