Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

The word landed.

Nyx did not move off the stillness for a long beat. The yard waited like a crowd at a sound in no language it knows.

Then the body at the rail collapsed.

Not the fold the bottom row had done. The other kind. The kind a body made when whatever was inside it left. The woman in the plain coat went down into the seats she had emptied.

The six rows around her finally moved to her, the ordinary way, hands and voices and a man calling for water. Nobody in the row knew what had been in her a moment ago.

Nobody asked.

Aiden watched her go down and filed that the dog in the cut had left the same way.

Nyx came back across the stone without a sound.

It did not look at the woman it had held. It took his shoulder. The pale eyes back on him for the first time since the gate. The cold not coming.

Miasma came off the open ground and took the other shoulder. She did not bring the second pulse back up off her. The thing she had used was used. She rode the shoulder as she had on Sewer Row.

The centre proctor put the slate down.

He had a half-written forfeit on it and a yard that had just watched a borrowed body speak a word at a beast nobody had filed. He looked at the nineteen-year man at the burned line. The nineteen-year man did not move his hand. Palm down. The hold gesture still toward Aiden.

The centre proctor crossed out the forfeit line. He marked the slate differently.

"Field Provision admit, Vell." His voice carried to the line at the gate. "Demonstration set aside. Engagement reassigned. Combat against the next admit on the list."

Combat against the next admit.

That’s Percival.

The proctor at the gate said the name.

"Vane. P. Step forward."

Percival came through the gate.

He did not look at the collapsed row or the woman being helped up or the proctor’s flat palm.

He looked at Aiden on the stone.

The not-smile his coat had assembled in the review chamber was on his face.

The Griffin walked at his shoulder where the harness held it.

The Griffin came at him fast. No hesitation. A bred thing doing the one thing it had been bred to do.

Fast. Sure. No question in it.

It crossed the burned line off Percival’s command, wings cocked for the drop. A head taller than Miasma. Bred for exactly this.

The panel sat back down. This was the part the slate had a column for.

Aiden read the line of the drop.

She needs the Griffin to commit to the drop and miss. That’s her opening. I give her the opening.

Miasma had not come off his shoulder yet.

The yard registered her not coming off.

The Griffin registered nothing. The Griffin had been told what was beneath it.

The talons opened.

He blinked.

Three meters to his left. The mark was empty. The Griffin was already on the drop. Wings out. Vector locked. The half-ton of it committed to a body that was not there.

The talons hit stone.

The wings caught air they had not planned to catch. The bird drove past the mark with its own momentum. It had to come around on the open yard with its wings still wide.

It came around. Slow. The way a thing that size came around when it had been built for the line and not the turn.

That was the half-beat.

Miasma was off his shoulder while the Griffin was still committing. She did not go at it. She went past it. Low. Fast.

Open stone. A tree at the yard’s edge in its stone collar. The one living thing the wall had not put there.

She went for it.

The Griffin caught her motion mid-turn. The turn became the mistake.

She hit the tree and went up it. The green into the bark, as into a grate seam. The trunk took her weight.

She was in the high reach of it before the Griffin’s wings finished opening on the second beat.

Then the green came off her in a way she had never shown him.

Not the pulse that emptied rooms. Not the green she raised to fight.

Thread.

It came off her in lines. Off the limb. Down through the air the Griffin was climbing into. The Griffin flew into it. The lines were invisible until they held. By then the bird was already in the web.

The lines took a wing.

Then the other.

Then the long bird neck. The legs. The cocked talons. Each line going taut and holding. The green hardening on the air as it hardened iron.

The Griffin’s drop became a thing hanging.

It screamed. The lines did not care.

It beat the one wing it had loose. The beat wound the line tighter. The way a thing in a snare spent itself making the snare worse. Then the wing stopped. There was nothing left to do that did not make the web worse.

The yard ran the same arc. Forward lean. The held beat.

Then the small collective settle of bodies understanding that the fight had ended some seconds ago and only the bird had not been told.

The panel’s pens did not move. There was no column for the gap between over and finished. The yard sat in the gap and learned it.

The proctors’ table found its pens again one pen at a time.

Miasma did not come down.

There was nothing to finish. She had not hurt it. She had hung it.

The yard went quiet.

Not the quiet of a held breath. The other one. The quiet a thousand people made when the thing they had come to watch had already happened and they were still catching up to it.

It sat over the stone and did not lift.

Forty feet up the tree the wall had not put there, a Vane Griffin turned slow on its own weight. Wings pinned. The only sound in the walled place was the creak of the limb taking the turn.

It turned. It turned again. The limb creaked.

Percival was still giving it commands.

He’s calling a beast that can’t turn its head to look at him.

He hasn’t read what the floor just did.

Aiden walked.

He did not run. He did not look at the Griffin.

He came off the place he had landed three meters from the mark. Crossed the burned line. Walked the open stone like a route at the sixth bell. The breath short. The chest doing what it did.

One foot and the next.

Past the tree where a thing bred better than him turned in a web it could not feel its way out of.

He did not look up at it. A man only looked up at a thing while it still mattered. It did not matter. It was hung. He did not look. That was the whole of what he had to say about it.

The yard saw two things and did not have a word for either.

That was the thing the slate had no column for. The yard had every eye for it.

A lamplighter in a blackened coat had stepped through a Vane Griffin’s drop without moving his feet. Then he had walked under the same Griffin in a tree and not lifted his head. A thousand people watched him do both.

The sound went out of the tiers all at once.

A man only walked past something like that without looking when it was already finished. The yard understood, in one breath, that it was.

He walked to the panel’s table and stopped at it. The breath was short. He did not perform that it was not.

The centre proctor did not write anything.

He looked at Aiden. The breath. The old coat. The beasts where the beasts were. The three meters of stone between where Aiden stood and where Aiden had stood when the Griffin came off the line.

He looked up at the tree. At the thing turning in it. The limb creak carrying in the quiet.

He looked at Percival in the middle of the stone. The only moving thing in a yard that had stopped.

He looked back down at the slate. At the column his quill was already over. He did not put the quill to it.

The yard waited on the quill. So did Aiden. The breath went in short and came back short. That was the only clock the table had.

Then the proctor moved the quill off the forfeit column.

"The Griffin is engaged and held," the proctor said. To the slate. To the four. His voice did not lean now. "The candidate moved a measure the slate does not have a column for. And the candidate crossed the engagement and did not break stride."

He set the quill down. He did not pick the forfeit column. He picked the other one.

"Field Provision. Pass."

He said it flat and the flat carried. The yard was quiet enough that flat was all it took.

There it is. Not discretion. He wrote it.

Pass. One word. It’s on the slate where the other one would have gone.

Percival heard it from the middle of the stone.

He did not turn at once. He had been calling the Griffin and the word reached him mid-command. The command finished before the word landed. His mouth was still shaping the next order when it stopped having anywhere to go.

He stopped. The hand he had been giving the beast came down slow.

He turned. Not fast. A man turned that slow when his body had understood a thing a step before he let himself.

He found the panel. He found the word still sitting in the quiet over the table. He found the lamplighter at the table not looking at him. The slate. The quill set down beside it on the column it had not taken.

He looked at the slate for a moment longer than a man looked at a thing he already understood.

Then Percival’s shoulders dropped. The crest on the coat settled with them.

The yard he had built his paper war to control had just been won by a man who did not fight with paper.

Nobody in the tiers said anything.

That was the part that landed last and hardest.

A yard that size made noise at a pass. It made more at a forfeit.

It made the most at a Vane.

It made none at this.

A thousand people sat over a stone where a lamplighter had just been written through and a Vane Griffin hanged in a tree. Not one of them had a sound that fit it.

They made none.

The none went on long enough that Aiden heard the limb creak again through it.

The nineteen-year proctor was at the burned line. The Hearthcat at his heel. Hackles flat. He was not looking at Percival. He was not looking at the Griffin.

He looked at Aiden like Marsh reading the true part. He let the look sit a moment.

Then he did what he had not done in the corridor the day Aiden came to register, twelve years ago. He inclined his head. Once. A man to a man who had crossed a thing and not broken stride.

Up in the tree, the Griffin’s screaming had gone out of it. It hung. It turned.

Above it, on the high limb where the web ran out, the small dark shape the light still would not land on sat where it had sat the whole time.

It had not been needed. It watched the thing in the web as it watched everything.

Then it came down the trunk. Without a sound. Crossed the open stone. Took Aiden’s shoulder.

It had not been called.

He put his hand up to it anyway. It put its head against the hand. Brought nothing back. Left nothing behind.

The yard watched a lamplighter who had just passed stand at the panel’s table. A Venomspine in the tree. A Shadow Pup on his shoulder leaning into his hand.

Percival Vane left the stone before they cut his Griffin down.

He did not wait to watch them do it. A Vane did not stand in a yard while men on ladders cut his beast out of a web in front of a thousand people.

He went out the gate he had come in. Fast. Not running. The silence in the yard went with him to it and did not break until he was through it.

Aiden stood at the table with his breath short and his beasts where his beasts were. For the first time, the word on the slate matched what the yard had seen.

He stood in that.

He let it be the same word, for as long as it took them to bring the ladders.

The centre proctor slid a thing across the table to him. Small. Flat. Stamped.

"Territory Token," he said. "Entry. You’ll be reviewed. They always review the ones who pass like that."

He looked at the tree. The Griffin coming down it now in a tangle of cut web. The men working fast and not looking up at the limb where the small dark thing had sat.

"Review’s a week out. Walk it like a lamplighter until then. After that they all start looking." A beat. "You earned the looking. That’s not nothing. Most men get the looking without earning it."

Aiden took the token like a thing that was his.

It weighed what a token weighed. It did not fix the breath. It did not need to. It was the first thing the system of men had handed him instead of taken.

His hand closed on it. Held it. Did not log it like a complaint nobody would read.

He had passed.

The word was on the slate. The Griffin still hung where she had put it. A Vane had walked out of a yard ahead of his own screaming beast.

Aiden Vell stood on the assessment stone with the breath coming back into him one short pull at a time.

The thing he had carried out of every room that ever mattered. The not-performing. The standing there while it was true. It had, this once, in front of a thousand people, been enough.

Then the nineteen-year proctor crossed the stone to him, the Hearthcat at his heel, and he was not wearing the face of a man bringing a man his win.

"There’s something you need to hear before you leave this yard," he said. "And it is not about Percival Vane."