Mab’s hands were cold. Aestrith held them in both of hers and did not react to the temperature.

She had been talking for several minutes in a voice too low for the rest of the room to follow, and now she had stopped. The room stopped into a kind of anticipation.

Mab was looking at her, the way an eleven-year-old looks when they have been told that something is going to be better after and they believe it but not all the way, and they cannot make the not-all-the-way part go away by wanting to.

Her breathing had shortened, and when the room focused fully on her, it shortened further.

"Look at my eyes," Aestrith said, still low. "Keep looking."

Mab locked her flickering gaze with hers.

"Good."

Aestrith said, which was as close to reassurance as she was going to offer. "Now follow my lead. You can do this."

Hild had come away from the doorframe. She stood near the foot of the bed with her arms folded and her eyes on Mab. Mod was a pace to her left, watching with flat continuous attention.

Beadu had pulled Leof close beside her near the wall, one hand resting on the girl’s shoulder, and for once she was not talking.

Tam had moved away from the wall, watching with the expression of someone who knows every stage of a process and is seeing it from the outside for the first time.

Beorn stood in the doorway in silence.

The first sign was warmth. It arrived without a source, pressing out of the air immediately around Mab rather than into it.

It was an abstract form of warmth, one that didn’t come from heat or flame. It felt alive and building up, seeping outward from the girl on the bed, and Mab’s hands in Aestrith’s grip, which had been cold, were cold no longer.

Then the light came.

It poured from the smaller girl all at once, a flood of luminescence that had no source and overtook everything and everyone into a bright wall of whiteness. It came from her skin, from the air around her and from the space between her fingers where Aestrith held them.

It pushed over the ceiling first, then found the walls, then poured across the worn stone floor and turned everything it touched into something that had never been ordinary.

The light was almost transparent at its center, pure and sourceless, and at its borders it had everything that white could ever become, be it gold, the pale blue of very early morning, and the full spectrum of dawn arriving at the exact moment the dark finally concedes.

It turned the worn stone floor luminous. It turned the walls into something that seemed to reflect every color.

Mab made a small sound, something escaping before she could stop it, and the light grew.

"Uhh," Beadu gasped.

Leof pressed into her side without a word.

The light kept coming and faster. The weeks of suppressed onset had not made it smaller, they had compressed it, and the release was all of it at once, and nothing in Mab knew how to give it a shape or a direction.

It was just pouring out of her and filling everything, and the brightest point in the room was where Aestrith held her hands, so bright that looking directly at it made the eyes burn as if you were looking at the sun.

Mab was frightened of it, in a way apart from the pain of months before, a new fear with its own specific tone.

She was frightened of the power that was hers.

Aestrith did not look away.

Her gravity field came up around that brightness and pressed inward, the way a hand cups water, holding it without closing around it. The light at the contact between powers changed, at Aestrith’s hands, the wildness went out of it.

The brightness directly between their palms became steady while the rest of the room still drowned with the overflow at distance, and the difference between the two was simple and absolute. Close to Aestrith’s hands, the light was being controlled. Farther away, it poured.

Blood appeared at the corner of her right eye. She did not address it.

Hild looked at Beorn.

"Is she hurting herself?" she asked with concealed concern.

"Not past what she knows," Beorn said.

Hild looked at him for a moment.

"How long has she been like that?"

"Nearly a week," Beorn said.

Hild looked back at Aestrith and said nothing else.

Aestrith spoke to Mab again, a whisper only for the girl. Her hands tightened slightly around Mab’s and the gravity field shifted, its pressure changing from constant to rhythmic.

Inward and releasing. Inward and releasing.

A pulse, and the light between their hands responded to it. The light began to pulse with the same rhythm. Gently and clean, building and releasing, building and releasing, each discharge a thing with a beginning and an end rather than the endless pour of before.

Mab’s expression widened.

The fear did not leave them. Eleven years old and weeks of carrying something alone, and the fear wouldn’t disappear in a few minutes. But something underneath it was surfacing, the expression of a child who has found that there was a beautiful and pure side to what she had.

The light was hers to send. The room was full of it because she had sent it there. And now, in the steady pulse between Aestrith’s hands and hers, she could send it and take it back and send it again, and each time it went it carried some of what had been sitting in her body since the onset began.

The pain was going somewhere. Her body was learning what release meant.

The flood in the room dimmed. The pour became a flow.

The flow became a rhythm of small bright discharges that kept their glow and faded clean, and the room’s light came back toward the grey afternoon through stone walls, the corners returned back into stone, and Mab sat on the bed with her own light between her open palms, a steady brightness the size of a cupped flame.

Aestrith released her hands.

Mab opened her eyes. She looked at the light in her palms, the last trace of it fading between her fingers as she watched, embers flickering away. Her face brightened.

"T-That’s mine?" she said.

"Yes. Yours only." Aestrith said.

The room came back to itself around them. The walls were walls again. The afternoon through the window was the afternoon through the window.

Mab sat with her hands open in her lap and watched the last of the brightness disappear, and the look on her face stayed for a long moment before she took a deep breath.

Tam skipped to the bed, more excitedly than she herself expected, the idea that she had someone to relate to overflowing from the girl’s smile.

"Told you," she giggled. "It doesn’t hurt anymore right?."

Mab looked up at her. A smile slowly blossomed on her face.

"Nope."