Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

The slip came up under his door at midnight.

He had not been sleeping. He was at the workbench, writing up the day’s lamp count.

The slip slid across the floor and stopped against his boot.

He picked it up.

Academy seal. White-blue wax. The Field Provision admit’s clause printed at the top in a darker ink than the rest of the form.

Field Operations Rotation. Departure: morning sixth bell. Muster: West Gate. Duration: four days. Region: Lower Ashwood marches.

A supervised field exercise. The Academy sent admits outside the wall to log beast dens and practice field reading. Every admit did one before qualifying.

Four days outside the wall.

He set the slip on the bench and ran the cost.

The relic was under the floorboard. Loose board, third from the wall. Marsh knew he had moved it, not where. If anyone came up the stairs in these four days, the relic was two lifts of a board away from being found.

Marsh killed papers. He would keep killing them. But Marsh needed to know Aiden was leaving, because Marsh read the lane like the corner of a page, and a lane without him in it was a different page with different things to read on.

Renn would keep hearing what was moving through the lane and who was telling whom. He would not hear any of it for four days.

Coade had given him the sentence. The sentence had been used. There was nothing more Coade could do.

Harken had said seven days. The rotation took four. He would be back with three days before the eighth, when a master signature could legally land on his slip.

He ran it.

Four days out of the city. Four days away from Marsh, Renn, the lane.

Refusing puts a mark on the page Marsh told me to keep clean. The day they file a thing about me being where I should not be is the day they win.

Take it.

He took the herbalist’s jar from the bench. He drank what was in it. He pulled the floorboard up.

The relic was where he had left it.

He did not pick it up. He looked at it and set the board back. There was no better place.

He came down at fourth bell.

The herb lane was empty. He did not stop at the lamp on his own corner. The pane held square in the housing. The collar still soft at four pits.

He walked it the way he had walked it the morning of the panel. Like a man whose name was on a slate that could not be erased.

West Gate.

Eight admits gathered at the West Gate. Seven in proper field coats. Leather over wool, the Academy’s lower-livery green at the cuff.

Aiden in the clean shirt and the lamplighter’s grey. The eighth was the proctor’s boy from the yard, in runner’s livery instead of field, with the small Hearthcat at heel.

The boy nodded at Aiden once. The cat looked at Miasma.

The senior at the gate had a Stonewing Hawk on a leather glove and a face that read the eight of them in the time it took to read a slip.

"Vell."

"Sir."

"You take the south flank. Apprentice goes with you. You will not lead. You will not give an instruction to the apprentice that contradicts mine. You will keep your beasts in your line of sight at all times unless I say otherwise. Clear."

"Clear, sir."

"The rest of you, north flank, on me. Move."

They moved.

Lower Ashwood was a half-day east of West Gate.

The road came out of the canal plain, and into open country he had not seen since he was a boy.

The country had not changed. He had. He read the bend of every hedge the road went past because that was what four years of reading bodies had done to him. The bends had not moved in twenty years. His eyes had been somewhere else.

Past the first hill, the burned forest started.

Burned country was easier to read. No leaves, no green to hide anything. The black gave up its facts plain, which was the one kindness fire left behind it.

The burn was old in some places and new in others. The new burn was Vane charter ground.

Harken’s foragers were on the line of the new burn at every crossing. They turned their faces away as the rotation passed.

The senior did not turn his. He looked at every one of them.

By midday they were at the edge of the old burn.

The senior stopped them at the line. He pointed his hawk up. It went up.

He came back to the eight of them.

"South flank. The marches here. You walk it. You log what you see. You do not engage. If a thing comes at you that you can’t disengage from, you call the hawk. The hawk reaches you in a count of forty. Make the forty."

He pointed at Aiden.

"You. Apprentice with you. Walk the lower line, the one with the second-growth stand on the east side. Log every den you see. Do not enter one. Back at the line by fourth bell."

"Sir."

He went.

The small Hearthcat walked six paces behind him. The boy in livery walked at his shoulder.

The lower trail ran east through young trees that had grown back after a fire eleven years ago. Thin, crowded, the floor under them open.

Aiden walked it.

He read it the way he had read the run. Tool marks on the trees where a forager’s blade had taken bark. A break in a low branch at chest height. A body had moved through here that was wider than a man. Hair on the bark of the break. Coarse, red-brown.

He gave the break the lamplighter’s read. Height off the ground, age of the snap, which way the splinters pointed. The splinters pointed east. Whatever had shouldered through here had been going somewhere, not coming back from it.

He noted red-brown.

A hedge bend a quarter league back, Miasma’s spines had come up for the first time. The single rise. He had looked where she was looking and seen nothing in the hedge. She had read something he could not.

The boy at his shoulder said, "That’s Embercore range."

"What lives in it."

"Things that can eat what grows in it. The lower line is patrolled by foragers in pairs. The upper line is where the den-makers are. We don’t take admits past the lower line on a four-day rotation."

"You’ve been out here."

"Twice. With the proctor, before he took the gate post."

"What were you logging."

The boy did not answer for three breaths. The cat at his heel sat down. The boy looked at the cat.

"The proctor thought something lived out here that shouldn’t," the boy said. "He didn’t tell me what. He had me log dens so he could read the evidence without saying the guess out loud."

He went on.

They walked an hour. Aiden logged six dens. Three old. Two abandoned for the season. One worked but vacant, the bedding fresh, the entrance set against a slope of root mat that would hold a body bigger than a man at full crouch.

The hair on the bark at the entrance was red-brown.

They stopped six paces from the entrance. The small Hearthcat stopped at eight.

Miasma’s spines came up off her shoulder rest. Not the wave. The single rise. Something Vesperian was nearby.

Second time today. She reads what I miss.

Aiden turned slow on his heel.

He looked back along the line they had walked.

Forty paces back, between two thin trees, there was a body.

He could not see what species. He could see it had been a body. He could see what had been done to it. Red-brown hair on the bark of both trees flanking it. Whatever had killed it had not finished. It had stopped halfway and walked off.

Had walked off.

The small Hearthcat’s ears were forward.

Nyx appeared between Aiden and the body. It held there. Not advancing.

The boy said, very quietly, "The hawk takes forty seconds to reach us. Whatever is out here is closer than forty seconds."

Aiden looked up.

The hawk was not where the senior had sent it. The hawk was a quarter mile north, working a different line.

"Call it."

"It won’t reach us at forty. The senior set it on the wrong line."

"Then we walk back. Slow. You and me side by side. Cat between us. My beasts at the rear."

They walked back. Past the den. Past the break. Past the dead animal on the ground.

Thirty paces upslope, a stand of young trees had no sound in it. No bird. No insect. The leaves on the new growth were not moving when the wind reached them.

Something was standing in those trees. He could not see it. The silence had its shape. The wind went around it the way wind went around a thing that was there.

Nyx’s pale eyes had not moved off the spot.

Aiden’s skin between the shoulder blades pulled tight. He was being watched.

I could blink past the silent trees. Three meters closer to the trail. But the senior would see me cross ground I did not walk, and the boy would see, and the senior writes those things down. Using the blink here puts it on a page that reaches Harken before the rotation comes home.

Not here. Not with witnesses.

The clock the system gave me is a clock for things that stand still long enough to be caught, and to be caught by people who are not the ones reading me.

This is neither.

He did not turn his head.

The boy at his shoulder was counting under his breath. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three. The hawk was not coming. He counted anyway.

They walked the forty.

At the camp, the senior was waiting with the hawk back on his glove.

"South flank reports."

"Six dens, sir. One vacant working. One body forty paces from the working den, partial. Red-brown hair at the den and the body and the bark between. Tool marks on the inbound trees not consistent with the den species."

The senior wrote it down.

He looked at the apprentice boy. The boy did not say anything. The senior wrote south flank disengaged at fourth bell, no contact recorded.

The senior had not seen the silent trees. He had not been on the south flank. He wrote what Aiden reported and nothing Aiden did not.

The senior closed the book.

"Camp here tonight. North flank had three dens and a cold pug print Halvic’s lineage. We move east at first bell tomorrow. Vell. You and the apprentice walk the same line at first bell. The same line. Log what’s changed."

"Sir."

He went to set his field kit for the night.

The boy came up beside him. He looked at his hands. He was rubbing the hem of his coat between his thumb and finger. The thread was bare where he had rubbed it.

"The silence in the trees," he said. "That wasn’t a den-maker. It wasn’t anything in our books."

"No."

"You’ve felt something like it before."

"Once. In the city."

The boy nodded. He did not ask where.

The small Hearthcat stayed at Aiden’s boot.

Aiden sat with his back against a tree at the camp.

Three days left of the rotation. Six days before the second press. Forty paces back along the trail he would walk again tomorrow, something had watched him pass.

It had not closed the count of forty.