Chapter 42: Awakening
Aestrith spoke to Tam in a low voice, too quiet for Beorn to catch from across the room. Tam’s attention was wrong. She was looking at her own hands, but her focus wasn’t actually on them. Beorn wondered what she might be sensing instead.
"Don’t reach for it," Aestrith said. "Let it sit. You’ve been doing it for weeks without knowing. Don’t start trying now."
Tam frowned, confused. "That doesn’t make any sense."
"It will make sense when it happens."
"What if nothing happens?"
"It’s already happening," Aestrith said.
Beorn stood against the far wall with his arms at his sides. Twice, his right hand shifted toward where the ledger should have been. Both times it met empty air.
Then the room changed.
It wasn’t in a way he could explain, but he knew it was there. A pressure came down on his chest, felt through the difficult to breathe, then pressed faintly against the backs of his eyes. His gaze shifted toward the window without a conscious decision. It was like his brain captured something he hadn’t seen.
The Scar stretched across the afternoon sky. He had seen it from countless windows in Ashmark, every day, every evening. It was always there, as the sky itself.
For three full seconds, the upper reach of it opened.
The pale jagged line stayed where it belonged. But something deeper split within it.
The unnatural depth the Scar always felt expanded, but this time it tore wider. From behind it, something pulsed outward. It passed through the window glass without resistance, crossed the distance, and struck Beorn directly behind the eyes with force. This wasn’t like staring at the sun and feeling the light hurt the eyes. It was abstract, in a dimension he couldn’t see and barely feel.
Then it stopped. The Scar closed. Exactly as it had always been.
Beorn stopped his gaze on it for another beat, waiting to see if it would happen again. Nothing changed. It was just the Scar again.
Across the room, Aestrith’s hands tightened briefly around Tam’s. She had not stopped speaking.
The candle holder on the shelf above the table lifted.
The motion was slow, and Beorn watched it attentively.
The iron base cleared the shelf edge. The candle tilted forward, then corrected as the object stabilized midair at shoulder height. It floated. The air still had the warm scent of burning wax, unchanged.
The door beside him groaned. Beorn turned. The iron hinges were pulling away from the wood, the mounting plates lifted at their edges, the screws strained, almost breaking. The wood resisted with its groans.
A needle from the sister’s work tin shifted upright, then rose. It stopped two feet above the table, suspended.
Beorn’s belt buckle twisted against his waist. He looked down. The belt was moving toward Tam. The pull was steady and obvious, transmitted through fabric and skin.
He stopped to observe the room in its entirety.
Candle holder. Needle. Hinges. Curtain rings along the rod, all under some sort of effect. The nail heads in the corner beams protruding slightly from the wood. Beorn listed them, and considered the similarities of the objects clear in his mind.
Then there was a pull.
All suspended objects snapped inward toward Tam at once. Candle holder, needle, curtain rings, all accelerating in a single vector.
Then the direction inverted. The repulsion forced everything outward with equal intensity.
The candle holder crossed the room at head height. Beorn’s body reacted before he could process what happened. He dropped under its path, one hand striking the stone floor to stabilize. The iron base hit the top of the door frame above him with a sharp impact, then continued into the corridor. It struck the far wall hard enough to bounce audibly.
The needle embedded itself in the ceiling up to the eye.
The cup from the windowsill, previously unaccounted for, struck the plaster to his left at shoulder height. The mark it left was fresh and pale.
Aestrith did not release Tam’s hands.
"I’ve got you," she said. Her tone had change, more gentle. "Stay with me. Just my hands."
"I can’t find-" Tam’s voice broke, then resumed. "I don’t know where it is."
"My hands. That’s all. Not the room, not any of it. My hands."
Tam’s shoulders shook. Her face had gone white. She maintained her grip.
The hinges stopped straining. The belt buckle relaxed. The curtain rings slid back along the rod one by one, producing small metallic sounds.
The room went quiet.
Beorn pushed himself up from the floor, noting his palm was scrapped from the floor. He looked around the room, the mark in the plaster where the cup had struck, the hole in the ceiling where the needle was embedded.
Tam had not moved with exhaustion obvious in her face. It wasn’t so much as tiredness as the feeling of spending all your energy. She remained seated, still holding Aestrith’s hands.
Aestrith exhaled once. The relief was obvious in her eyes. Her grip loosened, but she did not let go.
"That’s how. Good work," she said.
Tam looked at the table, at the needle, then up at the hole in the plaster. She paused, processing what happened.
"I did that," she said. It wasn’t quite a question, but needed an answer regardless.
"Yes," Aestrith said.
Beorn surveyed the room again. The candle holder was in the corridor. The cup had dented the wall. The door frame carried a fresh mark where the iron had struck. Every iron object had responded to Tam.
He extended that observation outward. The piston rod in the warehouse engine was iron. The rocking beam assembly was iron. Every mold frame in the foundry. The ore that sat on in the northern mines. The rails of every mine cart. Every nail in every floor of this building. The scale of implication expanded rapidly. The scale of what he could do.
His hand moved again toward where the ledger should have been. There was nothing there.
He looked at Tam. Fourteen years old, sitting on the bed, hands locked with Aestrith’s, a hole in her ceiling marking what just happened.
Then he looked at Aestrith. Her exasperated gaze indicated she had already read his reaction and chosen to ignore it.
He became aware, privately, that his current expression was likely not quite right for what the situation required.