Mae above mae, he recalled, and easily, effortlessly reached and held it. And kept holding it, because moving up and down the vocal scales was, for him, sort of like moving a cow up and down a hill through sheer muscle effort.
A challenge is never boring, but sometimes it is intensely frustrating.
Kamiéra had, by all accounts, a strong, sweet voice -- with, by Schola accounts, the range of a heldris cat. Part of mastering the Will and the Wind lies in the ability to control one's voice across multiple ranges, a talent very few girls had when first at the Academy -- how many natural belava singers are there, after all? -- but that most learned by the end of their first year. The Will shapes the body as much as the body shapes the Will, and most girls unconsciously shaped their voices as they learned.
At this, the end of his second Academic year, Kamiéra found that his voice had not changed at all except to grow a bit richer when speaking. Oh, he could bellow orders on a battlefield. He could maintain a dulcet, high note for longer than most girls could imagine. The sound of his voice when on leave with his sisters would make most young men -- and some of the older ones -- turn with a glint in their eyes.
But he couldn't sing for all his hope of the Garden. Nor, quite honestly, could he see why he should try.
The Academy was designed to bring every girl who passed through its halls to a fullness of training in her Gift and the skills that ran with it, no matter the Path she would choose, precisely because no Witchspear was expected to choose her Path until graduation; not unsurprisingly, most did exactly that. Moreover, most of the training was useful even for those ultimately on different Paths; for a case in point, a Warrior would need vocal control to some of the extent a Chanter would, albeit for sometimes very different uses.
But Kamiéra had known he would take up War from his very first days here. His skills lay there, his interests lay there, his House needed him there, and quite honestly, he was very, very good at it. His vocal control would never allow him to Chant, but it was more than sufficient for mundane or Gifted use in battle.
But for someone who had excelled in everything since he came here, to lag behind everyone else -- in something he couldn't bring himself to care about -- well, frustrating did not cover it.
Although he could not precisely remember it, this had always been a problem for him, back when he had lived a very different life under a very different name: When something was both difficult and not clearly useful, some part of his mind found the intricacies of mechanical pencil erasers, the exact shape of his index fingernail, or the plot of a late-night cartoon infinitely more interesting, and fast.
Although the problem was to some extent neurophysiological, according to a doctor his former mother had taken him to, either some of it was mental/spiritual/intrinsic to his soul or mind, or he had lucked out by ending up in a very different body with a very similar hangup.
His sisters moved up and down as Magistra Belelein instructed. He tried to fake it until he made it, mouthing where he couldn't reach and singing (albeit mutedly) where he could. Any hope he'd had of fooling his instructor died a brutal death when her eyes flicked to him at the descending scale to sub-loa. If he could have died on the spot, he would have. Instead, he tried to force his voice down, now a half-note behind the rest of the group and no longer caring. His novice robes were damp on his skin from the sweat. He could not fail. He would not fail.
He failed.
He managed not to cry. Mostly.
He started to form his Company for the next class when, sweet and sharp as a steel chime, Belelein's voice, shaped into the sound of his name and a command to stay behind, reached his eardrum. Llaha clapped him on the shoulder with a commiserating look as his sisters moved on to second year Tactics.
Tap, tap, came the sound of the clauga as it struck Belelein's palm. Kamiéra waited dutifully for the strike to his rear or back. Almost every teaching Magistra had warmed to Clauga's prop, although most would sooner have eaten theirs than use them liberally on their pupils as Clauga did. A handful kept it as a mock-threatening joke. Until this point, Belelein had used hers as a conducting baton.
He deserved nothing less than to be the first exception.
"This Academy once hosted sisters, daughters of one of the best students ever to attend here," Belelein began, and Kamiéra nearly jumped in surprise at the lack of a strike. The tapping continued. "Born on the same day, mere minutes apart, and as alike and as different as an image in a mirror and the object that creates it." Kamiéra briefly remembered, and then forgot altogether, that the image is created by light bouncing off the object, and not the object itself.
"The elder of the two was always the better student. She treated every challenge as a battle, one in which she would be victorious at any cost. The younger was as intelligent and Gifted, but much calmer -- sure that any problem could be handled in time, and more likely to treat a challenge as an obstacle that required rethinking." Belelein was behind Kamiéra still, so her face was a mystery, but her voice became a bit distant.
"They loved each other fiercely, those two did, and were eternal optimists in their own ways; and so they saw each other as the yielding way and the strong way, as reflections of the Mother and Father. And they surely teased each other for it."
Kamiéra desperately wanted to know what this had to do with his chronic inability to go through all ten levels of his scales, but kept his jaw resolutely shut, because the best way to be a Witchspear is to learn, and the best way to learn is to listen. Even if this was killing him. It beat a switch to the rear, anyway.
"In their final year, during their Trials, they quite improbably fell in love with Blademage brothers, identical as they, and their matches in temperament and skill. Jests were made, but the Mother and Father have Created one for each of us, and here they made two for two of us. Wedding ribbons were tied and their Houses prepared for a great, dual celebration.
"That was the Year of Northern Invasions," she said, and seemed to collect herself. To Kamiéra, this made the tale both immediate and, in the way teenagers always think of the world, impossibly ancient, occurring as it did forty-one years before. Belelein took a breath and continued. "And so the sisters and brothers were assigned to war on the icefields, for they had all chosen the Path of War.
"What their Houses and the Provincials did not know, however, was that the eldest sister and brother were always eager for a challenge, and at the same time, deeply in love. And so they found a Canon and a Canoness, freshly drunk on the anniversary of their own joining, and convinced them to perform the Rite in secret. Because a mere invasion greater than any had seen in generations would not stand in the way of their love; it was a challenge to be attacked, and they conquered it.
"Two months later, on a ridge overlooking the Plain of Tears, the elder sister turned to her beloved younger sister and told her of what had happened; that her moonblood had not flowed in that time; that the Medicae confirmed that she was carrying her first; and that if anything should happen to her, the younger should carry word to her husband at all costs.
"The younger sister immediately urged her to follow the Law and quit the field of battle; a thousand Gifted stood arrayed with five hundred thousand Imperial levies from the Northern Houses and marches. This invasion had been doomed from the beginning, and for the sake of her new husband and unborn child, she should accept that even her great contribution would be a drop in a flood."
Belelein walked in front of Kamiéra, the clauga gripped in both hands, her face serene. "It was a perfect moment: The sister who could not turn down a challenge no matter the risk, being dragged back by the sister who always believed that the Mother's providence would see things to their best end.
"And because she could not be other than who she was, the elder hugged her sister and promised to compare body counts when they finished. And when the fighting began, she flowed with her Company to where the Dance was fastest, for she always did."
Kamiéra was spellbound. He recognized that Magistra Belelein was using her Gift to draw the student into the story, but didn't care. He was also not an idiot. "She died, didn't she? Your sister and with her, her child?"
Belelein shook her head. "She paid a price she couldn't imagine."
Kamiéra had completely forgotten his own struggles of minutes before. All he could think of was the pain of losing one of his own sisters -- by blood or by Company -- and a twin, at that. His eyes were wet. "I will pray for her, and for her child, this night," he said.
The older woman smiled, and, taking her hand off of the clauga, gave Kamiéra's arm a gentle pat. "I am quite well, and my eldest son is a father twice over, child," she said.
"But if--"
"Melelein was the worse student, but the better Witchspear," Belelein said, softly. "Her promised was like her -- kind, strong, cautious, but intensely sure that the Father would always bring about some good in the end. But when he learned what happened to her -- he was never the same. Talaseri took over seventy Icemen with him in a cleansing action just before the surrender pledges were signed."
She saw the look on her student's face. "I saw a chance to lead my Company and an Imperial Guard unit to a weak point in the Icemen's line. Here was my opportunity to bring everything to a fast, glorious, neat end. We charged, and broke through -- and then the line collapsed on us. Melelein had seen what I hadn't: that the weak point was a feint, but one made by savages. A small probing force could have triggered the same trap, and a follow-up attack could have broken through and encircled the main force. She had held back, preparing to send in that probing force, when she saw that I was the fool who'd spring the trap.
"So for the first time in her life, she threw caution to the wind and charged with everything she had. She reached out with her Gift and Imperial units and other Companies flowed to her. Oh, she was a sight: She practically glowed, and she was surrounded by a wall of wind that shattered men as she charged. Her huge force broke through the trap and turned my certain death into a victory.
"And she took an arrow here," she said, calmly, as if discussing a dinner menu, tapping the hollow of her neck. "She had extended her Will to do so much with the Wind that she could not hold it as armor. I tore through a dozen fur-clad heathens to get to her, and barely managed to babble an apology before she died."
There was a silence that should have seemed awkward. Instead, it was solemn. Finally, Kamiéra spoke up. "Then I will pray for her soul, and for your heart. But what does this have to do with-?"
Belelein smiled. "It took losing my beloved sister, my womb-mate, the human being closest to me in the whole world, to teach me that Melelein was right: The Mother taught us that we succeed by accepting, by guiding instead of charging, by opening ourselves and submitting to Her will -- and by thinking and planning and being receptive, rather than being like a stupid man and always trying to wrestle every problem into the ground.
"Stop fighting all the time, Kamiéra," she said, suddenly tapping the clauga again. "Submit to the problem, bring it into yourself, and find a new way around it. You'll win more battles that way, you'll avoid unnecessary ones, and Mother help you, you will find that your body and Will want to sing, as long as you don't make every note into a struggle."
Kamiéra experienced a moment of profound vertigo. It felt like he was being shuffled on the inside as the world spun around him. As he came back to himself, he heard Belelein add, "After all, I couldn't Chant to save myself from the Chasm, and now I teach it. Hurry along, you're late for Tactics."
Kamiéra hurried along, and set his voice to the rhythm of his feet, moving up and down a step as his feet moved steps forward.
