Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 34: THE NAME IT ANSWERS TO

On the fourth day it touched him.

He had stopped trying to feed it. Miasma had been doing whatever Miasma did.

It took water from the tin lid now, but only after Miasma had gone to the lid first and come away. The hatchling drank after she approved it and not before.

It was not a method he understood. It worked. The hatchling drank after she cleared it and not before.

Aiden had stopped trying to be the one who approved things, because three days had taught him he was not the one it cleared things with.

He was at the bench in the grey before the route, packing the kit, when it came up the table leg on its own.

It had not done that. It came up the leg the no-sound way, the dark moving with it even in the grey. It crossed the bench to where his hand was resting flat by the kit bag, and it stopped at his hand, and it looked at his hand the way it looked at the corner. Fixed, total, on the hand and past it.

He held still.

He did not move his hand. He had reached into a grate for Miasma without thinking about teeth. He thought about everything now, with this one.

He held the hand flat and open on the bench and let it look.

It put a forelimb on the back of his hand.

The limb went through.

He felt it. That was the part that closed the border his eye had been working at for four days.

Touch did what sight had not. The limb came down on the back of his hand. There was a moment of contact, a cool weight, the small real pressure of a small real foot. Then the contact did not stop where contact stopped. It continued.

The cool went down through the back of his hand and the meat of it, out the palm, a line of cold drawn clean through the middle of a part of his body that was supposed to be the kind of thing a line could not be drawn through.

His hand did not hurt and did not give and was, for the length of one breath, a thing the hatchling’s foot was simply also occupying.

The hand stayed his hand. The bones were where the bones were. He flexed the fingers after. They worked. Nothing had moved through to make room. The room had been made and not taken back and both of them had been in it.

Miasma watched the flexing from the bench rail with the stillness she saved for new facts. She had seen the hatchling go through him. She was filing what came back out.

So was he. It went beside water and corners.

He did not pull the hand away.

He had decided, somewhere in four days of a thing that would not eat and watched corners, that the worst thing he could do was be the one who flinched.

He held the hand on the bench with the cold line through it and looked at the hatchling.

The hatchling looked at him. At him, this time, the pale deep-water eyes off the past-him and on his face. And the cold eased out of his hand the way the press had eased in the bag.

The foot lifted, the border going back to being the back of his hand, whole, cool only where a small foot had rested on it like any foot.

It kept looking at him.

It had not looked at him before. Four days. It had looked at the corner and at Miasma and at the middle distance behind whatever it faced. It looked at him now, the whole of its small attention, the way it had given the whole of its attention to Miasma in the dark.

Aiden sat with his hand on the bench and the eased cold in it and held the look and did not look away, because looking away was a flinch and he was not going to be the one who flinched.

Miasma made the sound.

From the floor. The low note. The one the runes had answered in the chamber, the one she had aimed at the box the morning it hatched. She made it once, and the hatchling’s attention did not leave Aiden. That was new too.

Every other time she had made the sound the thing had gone to her. It stayed on him. It held his face and Miasma made the sound and it did not turn, and Miasma did not make the sound again.

She let it stay on him.

He understood the shape of that the way he understood tool marks. She had been clearing the water and barring the corner and letting it sleep on her leg for days because it would not come to him.

It had just come to him, on its own, up the leg, and put a foot through his hand. It looked at his face, and she had made the sound that called it. It had chosen to keep looking at him instead, and she had let it.

She was not keeping it from him.

She had been keeping it until it would.

That’s what the three days were. Not her taking it. Her holding it steady until it could stand to be looked at by the one who paid for it. And it just did. It came on its own and she’s not calling it back.

He looked at the small dark thing the light still slid off, that the dark still agreed with, that had just drawn a cold clean line through his hand and was now watching his face with the whole of itself, and the name came.

It did not come the way Miasma’s name had come. Miasma’s name had arrived on a breath he was already taking, in a gutter, fast, without his permission, a thing his mouth did before his head agreed.

This was not that.

This came slow, up from somewhere under the place names came from, while he held the look and did not flinch and the thing held the look back. A word arrived the way the cold had arrived in his hand, not announced, just there, and true once it was there, and his.

He did not say it on a borrowed breath.

He waited until he had a breath that was only for this.

"Nyx," he said.

The hatchling’s attention did not break.

But the dark around it moved. Not toward the corner. Toward him.

The density of the room leaned his way the way it had leaned at the corner for four days, the thing’s whole orientation turning onto him.

For the length of one breath the part of the room that was a different dark was the part of the room he was sitting in.

Then it eased. Level. The room a room.

Nyx put its head down.

Not against Miasma’s leg. Against the back of the hand it had drawn the line through, the same hand, flat on the bench.

It set its head there the deliberate way it had set its head on Miasma’s foreleg in the dark. It went still, the sides slowing. The cold did not come this time. It was just a small head, a small real weight, on the back of his hand.

He did not move the hand.

Miasma, on the floor, stopped facing the bench.

It was the first time in four days. She came off the careful rhythm she had held since the counter. She turned, slow, away from the box and the bench and the thing on his hand.

She went to her spot on the floor, and she sat in it the ordinary way. She watched the two of them the way she watched him. The gutter patience, the one that was not a guard and was not a bar, the one that meant the thing she had been waiting for him to catch up to had been caught up to.

He sat at the bench in the grey before the route with a half-year in his vision and a streak in his hair and Nyx asleep on the back of his hand.

He did not pack the kit. He did not go to work yet. He let the route take the long time, because the thing he had paid sixteen months for had finally chosen him. A man did not pick up a kit bag into that.

The window went to the grey before light.

He stayed where he was until Nyx woke, and lifted its head off his hand, and looked at him, at him, again, still. The look did not have the corner in it anymore.

Then he packed the kit, slow, one-handed, the other hand staying flat on the bench until the last thing was in the bag.

He went to work, with Nyx in the kit bag because Nyx fit in the kit bag, Miasma on his shoulder, and a beast the system would not classify riding a bag at his hip.