"Can we have a bigger dinner after?"

Beadu said, exiting the corridor. "I always get really hungry when I go all out, dunno why. It’s like my stomach knows something’s up and starts nagging ahead."

Beorn considered whether this was a request or just something she was telling him. "Sure, I don’t see why not."

"Yay," Beadu said, and walked the rest of the way without elaborating.

The courtyard stopped her for a moment when she came through the entrance.

The cracked floor from Hild’s session, the ridge of earth splitting the old chalk grid, the bowed wall with stone fragments at its base.

The garden in the corner with the half-uprooted herb plant, its roots partly pulled from the ground and its leaves still faintly moving.

And in the center of the floor, the compact mound of dust from Mod’s session, sitting within the ghost of a circle that had no mark but was obvious in where the dust had stopped falling.

"You really used this courtyard," she said.

She tilted her head curiously, as if analyzing a crime scene.

"That one on the floor was Mod?"

"The mound of dust, yes." Beorn said. "She has an interesting ability."

"Oh."

Beadu looked at it for another moment. Then she moved toward the garden without being told to.

She stood near the vegetation and looked at the plants with reminiscence and nostalgia.

Aestrith hadn’t moved from the near wall with the crutch braced, watching the garden and the open courtyard behind Beadu.

Beorn opened the ledger.

"If there’s no problem, show me what you can do first, before I start asking for specific things."

Beadu exhaled and tried.

Every plant in the garden snapped at once.

The herbs shot upward, stems extending by inches in seconds, the leaves spreading out wide and pressing against each other because none of them had room.

Roots pushed deeper through the cracked soil and into the broken stone of the courtyard floor, thin tendrils forcing themselves into the fractures Hild had left.

The half-uprooted herb had its roots grabbed by the surge and driven further down in a way that made the root ball writhe against the earth.

The two flowers over snapped open in under a second, not blooming the way flowers bloom in the morning sun but springing open all at once like something under pressure finally released.

A vine along the garden pushed a shoot sideways out across the courtyard toward the timber target at the far wall, its tip moving at a speed that was simply wrong for anything growing.

It continued for five seconds before Beadu made a cry and it stopped.

The garden was significantly taller than it had been. Multiple plants had pressed against each other and bent sideways at their tops, the vine shoot had reached two feet across the courtyard stone and was still pointed at the timber target.

"Uhh... I didn’t mean for all of them to go... wild?," Beadu said.

She looked at the garden with a somewhat embarrassed expression.

"I was trying for that herb. Just that one."

"I could see that," Beorn said.

Since nothing had moved toward Beorn, Aestrith didn’t set the gravity field up, but she had watched very carefully, watching which plant moved in what order and how far.

She commented at last, "That’s not true, you were already reaching toward all of them before you began. Focus on only one."

Beadu looked at the garden. "Was I? Um, maybe?"

She continued. "It’s a bit like having lots of conversations at the same time and being expected to separate only one of them."

She looked at Aestrith.

"Focus on one, all right."

She turned to the half-uprooted herb, the one with roots half-pulled from the ground and the stem still tilted from when the earth ridge had shifted the soil around it.

She looked at it specifically and tried again.

The herb plant’s roots pushed back into the earth.

Steadily, the root ball working itself down through the broken soil, the loose roots seeking out the fractures in the stone and anchoring through them.

The stem straightened as the root found its new position below it.

A small new shoot extended from the main stem toward the afternoon light and then held there, waiting.

The other plants in the garden did not move at all.

Beadu let out a breath.

Beorn was already writing.

After a moment he said, "Can you stop it once it starts, or does it keep going until it runs out?"

"I can stop it."

She tilted her head. "When I let go of it, the plant doesn’t keep growing on its own."

"Can you reach something without being next to it? Without seeing it directly?"

She frowned, thinking about it honestly. "Maybe? When I tried to reach all of them at once just now, it was more like they were all already there and I picked them all up at the same time. I think I need to be able to see it, or at least know it’s right there."

He wrote down her exact words.

The potential was plain to see, especially for agriculture. It was a sort of luck he didn’t expect, right when the city was on the verge of a food crisis.

Beadu was tired in the way the previous two had been tired, the simple exhaustion of pushing for her limits without reservation.

"I’m hungry, and tired. That was faster than I expected."

Aestrith had been watching the garden throughout the entire session.

The two flowers still open. The vine shoot two feet across the courtyard stone. The herbs taller than they had been when they began.

"What you can do has the most obvious use of the three I’ve seen today," she said to Beadu.

She locked Beadu’s gaze for a moment. "Which means it also carries the most responsibility. That’s something to know about yourself going in."

Beadu looked at the garden, the reseated herb plant with its small waiting shoot, the flowers that had snapped open in under a second and never closed, the vine still pointed at the timber target across the stone.

She looked at what she had made of the place in under ten seconds on the first try.

"Mmm," she murmured.

However she felt about it, she didn’t exactly say.

Beorn closed the ledger.

"Thank you, go rest and eat now. When you go back, send Leof."

Beadu turned toward the entrance.

At the edge of it she paused and looked back at Beorn and Aestrith.

"Don’t let the flowers die," she said. "I’ll take it personally."

Then she left.