Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 35: TWO BEASTS

Field Provision Seven admits reported to the Academy’s east annex on the first of the month.

He had not been back since the registration corridor. The notice had come to his door by the sixth bell, a month ago, before the chamber and the egg and the streak. Live Combat Assessment, it still said. The date on it was fourteen days out now. Admits reported first. The assessment came after.

He went in the east gate with Miasma on his shoulder and Nyx in the kit bag at his hip.

The gate guard had a registry board and a Stoneback Hatchling at his foot. He read Aiden’s notice. He looked at Miasma.

The Stoneback looked at Miasma too. The slow way a low-tier beast looked at a thing its body had opinions about before its tamer did. It shifted its weight back off its forefeet a hand’s width and held there.

The guard saw his own beast do it.

He looked at the Stoneback. He looked at Miasma. He marked the notice and waved Aiden through faster than he had waved the two admits ahead of him. The faster was not courtesy. A man moves a thing past his own beast quicker than he moves the harmless things.

That’s one. Not even inside the gate yet.

He went in.

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The annex hall was admits and their beasts.

Forty of them. The year’s Field Provision intake. The atypical, the reassigned, the ones whose classifications fell outside the standard battery. He had expected to be the lowest thing in the room. He had been the lowest thing in every Academy room he had ever stood in. He walked in expecting it the way a man walked into cold expecting cold.

The room did the thing the gate had done.

It moved through the hall the way a draft moved. The beasts first. Then the tamers noticing the beasts.

A Frostmane Lynx two rows in put its ears flat and turned its head to track Miasma across the hall. It did not stop.

Its tamer, a girl with a Provincial collar on her coat, followed the Lynx’s stare and found a streaked-haired man in a lamplighter’s coat with a rat on his shoulder. Her face did the thing the herbalist’s had done. It reached for a category. It came back empty. It went to his coat to make the coat explain the Lynx.

The coat did not explain the Lynx.

A Stonewing Hawk on a perch by the proctors’ table opened its wings half out. The involuntary mantle a raptor did at a thing it had decided to keep both eyes on. It folded them slow. It kept both eyes on.

He walked to the admit line under it.

He did not perform the not-noticing. He had performed it twelve years ago in his mother’s coat and he was done with it.

He walked at the pace of a man who had a place in the line.

The beasts tracked his shoulder. The tamers tracked their beasts to his shoulder. He let them. The thing in his chest moved up half an inch and he let that too.

Twelve years ago this building decided what I was worth before I reached the desk. It’s deciding again. Different number this time.

He kept the face for receiving administrative correspondence. Behind it the half-inch sat where it had moved to. He did not push it down.

The face held. It had held for harder mail than a half-inch.

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Percival was at the proctors’ table.

Not as an admit. The Vane heir did not go Field Provision.

He was on the other side of the table, in the coat that cost months of Aiden’s pay, the juvenile Griffin at his heel. Standing where the proctors processed people, so the people got processed in front of him.

The Griffin saw Miasma before Percival did.

Aiden watched it happen the way it had happened on the cobblestones. The Griffin was a month larger now. It did not flinch and recover this time.

It went still.

The full still. The still a predator went when the thing it was looking at had moved, in a month, from a thing it stepped back from to a thing its mind hadn’t caught up to.

Percival followed the Griffin’s stare.

It took him to Aiden’s shoulder. To Miasma. Longer now, glass-green, the ten fine spines along the tail catching the annex light the way a bare pink Rotfang tail had never caught anything.

His eye did the same work everyone else’s had. It went to the beast, found a thing it could not file, went to the coat to make the coat explain it.

The coat still did not explain it.

His eye went lower. To the kit bag at Aiden’s hip.

The kit bag did the thing.

Aiden felt it through the canvas before it landed on Percival’s face. Nyx, shifting, the small dark weight rolling against the bag wall.

The bag was a different dark than the rest of the hall. The density of it leaning. The way the corner of his room leaned.

A Hearthcat asleep under the proctors’ table came awake without a sound and put its eyes on the bag and did not take them off.

Percival saw the Hearthcat do it.

He saw a proctor’s beast wake from sleep and lock onto a lamplighter’s kit bag. He was a Vane. Vanes were taught to read a room’s beasts the way Aiden had been taught to read tool marks.

He read it.

Two beasts.

The lamplighter from the cobblestones. The Zero. The Field Provision rat-carrier his Griffin had backed away from in front of nine people.

Two beasts now. One the room’s predators tracked. One that woke a sleeping cat through a bag.

His face did the small thing. The not-smile assembling and not committing. The depot one. The one he wore when the audience had not arrived.

Miasma’s weight shifted forward on his shoulder, reading the ground ahead before he did. The bag at his hip went perfectly still, which from the bag’s occupant was the equivalent of sitting up.

The audience had arrived. Forty admits and a table of proctors.

Percival did not speak to Aiden across the hall.

He turned to the proctor beside him and said two sentences, quiet, the way he had said two on the cobblestones.

The proctor looked up across the hall at Aiden. Made a notation.

Aiden watched the notation get made and did not know what was in it and knew exactly what kind of thing it was. He had watched Percival make a proctor write a thing about him before. The thing had been a Live Combat Assessment.

There it is. You can’t read her. You can’t read the bag. This time you have an audience. So you do the only move you have. You make someone write something down. The Griffin used its body. The pen’s all you’ve got.

His face did not change. Behind it the half-inch went to an inch.

The proctor closed the notation.

Percival looked at Aiden across the hall for one beat, the not-smile assembled and worn. The Griffin at his heel did not look at Aiden at all. It was still on Miasma. A month larger and unable to stop.

Percival saw it, because he could not help seeing it. His own beast had not taken its eyes off the lamplighter’s shoulder the whole time he had been arranging his face.

The not-smile thinned.

He turned away first.

Aiden read that the way he read tool marks. On the cobblestones Percival had walked away last, after the Griffin, framing it as dismissal.

Here he turned away first, while his own beast was still locked on Miasma. A man who turns away first from a thing his beast cannot turn away from is not dismissing it.

He is leaving before the room watches him keep losing a staring contest his Griffin already lost for him.

Yeah. Saw that too.

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He reached the admit desk.

The proctor at it was the older one. The Hearthcat one. The nineteen-years one.

A different ledger today, the same tiredness that had nothing to do with the hour. He looked at the notice. He looked at Miasma. He looked the way the room had been looking. Then he did the thing the room had not done. He looked back up at Aiden’s face like the face was the part worth reading.

"Lamplighter Vell." He found the line in the ledger. "Two beasts now. That’s rare."

"Yes."

"Registered?"

"One. The first." Aiden put his hand flat on the desk. "The second hasn’t classified."

The proctor’s pen stopped.

"Hasn’t classified."

"I came to register what I can and report what I can’t."

The proctor looked at him for a beat. He looked at the kit bag.

The Hearthcat under the far table was still locked on it. Nineteen years of procedure, and Aiden watched him reach for the one that covered the hasn’t classified and not find it.

This was the man in the building whose job was to have the answer. He did not have it. He did not pretend to.

He wrote a single line. He closed the ledger. He looked back up.

"Live Combat. Fourteen days. The notice stands." He paused. "Both beasts are yours on the day. Atypical track does not bar a second beast. It does not register one that will not classify, either. Whatever is in that bag goes into the assessment as an unknown, on the record, against you. The examiners are permitted to treat an unknown as a hostile."

"Understood."

The proctor held his gaze a beat longer than the desk required.

"One Griffin in nineteen years," he said. Quiet. The same words from the corridor. They were not for the corridor now. "Stepped back from a Rotfang on a cobblestone. I wrote it in a ledger and the ledger went where ledgers go." He looked at Miasma. He looked at the bag. "Fourteen days, Lamplighter Vell. Bring both."

He closed the ledger.

Aiden took his notice off the desk.

He walked back across the hall the way he had walked in. The Frostmane Lynx tracked him out. The Stonewing Hawk kept both eyes on him to the door. The Hearthcat under the proctors’ table stayed locked on the bag until the bag left the room.

Percival was gone from the table by the time Aiden reached the doors.

He had not been processed yet. He had come to the proctors’ table to be seen processing people, and he had left it before the room’s beasts finished telling the room what they thought of the lamplighter’s shoulder. The table he had been standing at was empty, and the not-smile had not been worn out the door because there had been no good moment to wear it.

You left before I did. You’ll find that bothers you more than the Griffin did.

He went out the east gate. The Stoneback Hatchling at the guard’s foot came back up onto its forefeet only after Miasma was through the gate and forty feet down the path.

The guard noticed his beast do that too.

Aiden did not look back to watch him notice. He could feel the shape of it behind him the way a man felt a room someone had just left.

He went down the path with Miasma on his shoulder and Nyx settled against the side of the bag. He had a fortnight in front of him and he left the room behind him to whatever it did when he wasn’t there.