The courtyard at the end of the day looked like four different people had been let loose in it, which was exactly what had happened.

Mab was standing in the middle of all of it with a more curious expression, looking widely at everything.

"Um, we won’t have to pay for any damage, right? She cautiously asked.

Beorn felt a light chuckle escape his lips. "No, don’t worry about that."

She tilted her head at him, and then at the courtyard again.

Aestrith was already beside her, one crutch braced on the uneven stone, her free hand open at her side and waiting. The other sessions she had kept to the near wall or taken a position at distance.

This time she was where she had been before, close enough to take Mab’s hand, which she did. One hand in both of hers, the crutch supporting the other arm.

Beorn tapped down the ledger. "This will be a bit like the previous time in the room. Aestrith will help you through it and we will see if can have a more accurate demonstration of your powers."

Mab squeeze lightly the hand holding hers. "Will it hurt like before?"

"It shouldn’t, no. Never again."

She accepted this with a small nod. The fear that had defined her earlier was not present.

What was present was something that did not have a name yet. Eleven years old, the pain gone for days now, standing in a courtyard full of evidence of what the others could do, with Aestrith’s hand around hers.

Aestrith continued to instruct from there, "Before, I had to bring out the power inside you. Now, you will do that by yourself, I’ll just guide it when you release. "

She glanced at the wood target, then gestured to Mab. "I want you to try and aim for that. It doesn’t really matter how much or how strong, only in that direction."

Mab nodded once.

"Try it," Aestrith said.

It took a moment for Mab to exhale and prepare, and then the light came from her hands and the air immediately around them, brightening outward in all directions. It was not the flood from before, briefer and less overwhelming, but still spreading outward rather than toward the target. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

Aestrith’s field shifted. The change was not obvious, but the light nearest Mab’s hands began to pull in a direction, the outward spread slowing, the energy finding a path it had not had a moment before.

"Only the target," Aestrith said. "Forget the courtyard. Look at the wood."

Mab started to stare at the target, at the parts made out of timber, at the iron fittings holding them together.

The courtyard went darker.

The target did not, not immediately, but gradually. The iron fittings took on a warmth that was not from reflected light but from the iron itself. The glow built from within the metal, deepening from a faint amber toward orange, and the wood around the fittings began to smoke at timber, thin threads of it rising from the points where the heat was concentrated.

The orange at the iron fittings was bright enough that looking directly at it was difficult, and the heat at Beorn’s distance was a physical fact on his face.

The rest of the courtyard was dim. The garden, the cracked floor, the bowed wall, the earth ridge, all of it in shade.

The only light source was the target at the far wall, burning from inside.

Mab stopped. The glow faded. The iron cooled. The smoke at the wood thinned and dispersed in the still air of the courtyard, the charred lines remaining visible at the fittings.

Beorn was already writing. He had been writing since before the light reached full intensity. What she could do wasn’t simply to create light, it was a much more complex reaction in how energy worked in physics.

The heat supply a properly trained Mab could provide to the foundry’s furnace without fuel, the implications for the boiler, he noted them briefly, one or two words per category, and kept moving. He had not seen enough to draw conclusions, but enough to understand the direction.

He looked at her.

"It doesn’t quite feel you are creating light, right?"

Mab thought about this honestly before answering.

"No," she said. "Um... I don’t know what I’m doing, but the light feels more like a side... thing?"

Beorn nodded and wrote that.

Aestrith let her hands go with a sigh.

Mab looked back at her, slightly confused. She couldn’t tell if behind the mask of an expression Aestrith was feeling exhaustion, approval or if it was just a wide sense of indifference.

Nevertheless, this had been the last session. There was no next name to send.

Beorn continued after a few seconds, "Thank you Mab. Go find the girls, eat and rest. We are done for today."

She looked at the target for one more moment, the thing she had touched in a courtyard full of everyone else’s marks.

Then she turned and walked out in a slightly tired, slightly awkward way of a child unsure how to behave in a new household.

The courtyard became quiet.

Beorn looked at the accumulated evidence around him. Hild’s cracked floor and earth ridge. Mod’s ghost circle still faintly readable in the stone. Beadu’s taller garden and blossomed flowers. The vine and stone Leof had aged at its edges. The wood target still warm at its iron fittings, charred along the timber.

He opened the ledger to a fresh page and began sketching a rough sequence.

Basic exercises, each domain, building from single-object focus to constant usage to simultaneous awareness. He had enough to put the first month on paper.

"I’ll sketch the exercises out," he said to Aestrith. "Teaching and instructing them is yours."

Aestrith deadpanned, staring him down with a sense of helplessness.

"Bodyguard and engineer, he promised."

She snorted to no one in particular. "Then here I am, the head of a department and babysitting children."

A few more seconds passed into a shared silence by them.

Then she said, to the courtyard rather than to him. "Fine. None of them should go through that fear again without someone there who can help them."

Beorn kept sketching with a hum, "They’re lucky to have you".

He paused, then, "Your contract is on the desk whenever you want to read it."

The quill, charcoal, ledger and whatever he was working on spread over the courtyard, affected by an unseen power.

"You are lucky to have me," she said. "Sign the damn thing yourself, I don’t care."

She walked away with a huff.

Beorn looked at the space she had left.

The contract was on the desk. She had not asked what was in it, had not looked at the signature line, had not asked about the title or the salary. She had told him to sign it himself.

He turned that over once.

The contract was a formality, which she understood better than most people who had ever signed one.

He looked at the courtyard. The bowed wall. The ghost circle from Mod’s ability. Beadu’s garden, taller than it had been that morning.

None of them should go through that fear again without someone there who can help them.

She had said it to the courtyard.

He wrote it at the bottom of the fresh page, exactly as she had phrased it, and looked at it for a moment. He had been writing down her observations for a while now, when she said something important enough to belong in the ledger.

This one did not feel like an observation. Beorn wasn’t dense enough to not see the change in her tone, when she talked about the girls, or him.

He was not entirely sure what it felt like. He put a question mark beside it, the notation he used when he had an idea but it had not fully arrived yet.

Then he kept sketching.