Gélina woke with a start. She hated sleeping on that little cot, but she'd drawn duty at the Archives for the Mark, and she had only volunteered because even two decades later, she still woke reaching out for Marlas and then couldn't sleep with the ache of his absence.
Her mother, bless her in the Garden, had told her such things would pass as she entered old age, but her mother was not the Mother and was clearly capable of error. So given the chance to take an unpleasant Mark of sleeping on a novice's cot, with everything it did to her joints and general mood, over waking and weeping earlier, she played watch-guard to scrolls and tomes and memory-crystals ancient even before her birth slightly more than a century ago.
She looked at the beeswax candles near her bed and immediately realized she had woken earlier than usual; reaching out with her Gift, she realized why when she heard a page turn and the whisper of a young woman's breath carried back to her on the Wind.
She groaned. There were few novices who would be at the stacks in the middle of the night, and only one who would be in the Martial section instead of the nominally forbidden Amorate.
Grabbing her walking stick with more ease than she let on around the young women in her charge, she made it a point to take on her characteristic hobble before she turned the corner and her target could see her.
"Kamiéra dal'Falein," she thundered, causing the poor girl to jump. Good. The child had become incredibly respectful over the last three years, but had also grown far too confident. Best to keep her on edge. "Why are you not in your Company quarters at this hour?"
The girl had the good grace to look embarrassed even as she worked to regain her poise. "We have a Cumulative on strategic disposition after morning prayers," she began, demonstrating that Performance was not one of her strengths.
Gélina waved that off. "The Mother did not make you to lie, so stop." The girl's teeth practically clacked together, her mouth closed so quickly. "There is no student who needs extra studying in strategic anything less than you, and the tome before you is on the Ontim, as," she squinted and made Light, "are the three closed next to it. Now answer me with your hope to see the Mother and Father in the face."
A deep breath that Gélina was old enough to note explicitly. She assumed she'd been like this at that age, because every girl this age took that deep breath in basically the same way when put on the spot; but if she was old enough to see it, she was also too old to remember doing it.
"Something is wrong," the girl began, all of her lack of composure gone or more likely better-hidden. "There are too many Ontim, and they aren't acting as they have for centuries. We have been battling the beasts for training since the Massacre of the Pilgrims, and even if we have been careful not to wipe them out, and though they breed obscenely quickly, their numbers seem too great.
"Here," she said, pointing to On the Heathen Ontim, "Jaleira dil'Rala estimated that at the Scouring, there were only a few over one thousand Ontim females left, a quarter of which were sterile from the Gifted Plague. Kalaso dil'Guyerein estimated that the population stabilized at around 5,000 after the Ontim Hunts became a regular part of the curriculum at the Academy. Here," she gestured at the top book on the stack, which appeared to be The Heathenes of the Rockes, "Malarius da'Herre noted that in time of conflict, Ontim reproductive rates fall, and they've been in little but conflict since dil'Rala's time.
"Jaira was the first to notice this after our last engagement. We fought a hand more than 300 of the brutes in a single engagement. Just one!"
Gélina nodded and prepared to explain that this was all very interesting and would remain just as interesting during punishment laps in the morning, but before she could even open her mouth, Chasm take old age, the girl started again. "And where were the females and young? In all of my battles with Ontim, there have been no females or young cheering on the males, but all of the histories, even the recent ones," another sweep of her hands, presumably to point at times since shelved, "say that the females always accompany the males with young in tow, to encourage the males and seek vengeance at their deaths. But no Company has seen a single female in years." She took a breath.
Gélina was old, but not that old. She leaped into the verbal breach, leading with a quickly-slowly raised palm. "Is there anything else, child?" Her tone made clear that there should not be.
The flush of the girl's ruddy face made clear she'd gotten the message, but Kamiéra was clearly a Falein and so plowed on. "Only two more things, Magistra," she said evenly if significantly more quietly. "They are using stone weapons, and they've never done that before; and I thought," a pause and for a moment, a girl of appreciably fewer than eighty seasons looked back at her. "In the last battle, I thought I heard one yell, 'Father,' in Low Rallan."
The older woman nodded, and then her hand whipped out, cloaked in Wind, and touched the girl's head. Kamiéra's eyes went blank as the Wind coursed through her mind.
No sign of madness or softness. No sign of a brain-bruise. Some lingering anxiety over something somehow distant that Gélina took the opportunity to wipe away as she softened the girl's memories of that battle and the stress around it.
"Kamiéra," she said, taking advantage of the lingering effects of that use of Wind. "It is good that you dedicate yourself to your studies and your craft, but you need to rest. Once you have reported everything you have learned about the Ontim from your studies to Magistra Wairin, your duty will be discharged, and you will cease worrying over this and missing curfew to study on it. You are not intended for a Battle Cloister; you have a long life of marrying, bearing and raising children, and heading a House ahead of you. To be a Witchspear is to live in balance, and you must seek that.
"Go," she finished, taking her hand and Will from the girl's head. "Return to your quarters. Sleep. In the morning, report for punishment laps." Kamiéra's eyes took a moment longer to focus than the old woman expected, but as soon as they did, she nodded and all but raced off.
Gélina didn't miss that the novice's hand shot out and grabbed something from the Amorate section in passing. She smiled and nodded to herself. Punishment laps for that infraction could be overlooked if the girl was finally realizing life was about more than slicing and stabbing people and things to death.
Returning to her cot, she didn't notice that Kamiéra began studying the book of mildly risqué poems as her first foot hit the stairs.
Now, for the long hours of missing her husband and waiting for the dawn to distract her.
