Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 36: THE WALL

The orientation walk was on the third day.

The Field Provision admits were walked through the Academy’s lower training grounds in a group of forty, two proctors leading, so the atypical intake would know where the assessment yards were before the assessment put them in one.

Aiden walked it with Miasma on his shoulder and Nyx in the kit bag. The proctors named the yards as they passed them.

Sand yard. Stone yard. The pit. The kind of names a place earned by having the same thing done in it for decades.

Percival was on the walk.

Not as an admit. He had a reason to be on the lower grounds that morning the way a Vane always had a reason to be where the lamplighter was being processed.

A training slot, his name on a yard board, the Griffin at his heel grown another half-week. He fell in along the edge of the group. Close enough to watch. Far enough to call it coincidence.

He stayed four people back from Aiden.

Aiden clocked the distance the way he clocked tool marks.

Four people back was close enough to watch and far enough to not have chosen to.

Percival had been making proctors write things in ledgers about Aiden for a month. Percival was not done. A man four people back with a thin reason to be there was waiting for the walk to give him something.

The bag moved against Aiden’s hip.

Not the roll. The press. The aimed one, the one Nyx had used at lamp fourteen. The one that meant a thing with intent behind it had picked a direction.

Aiden put his hand on the bag through his coat. The press did not ease the way it had eased for Miasma. It held. It was the first time Nyx had pressed since the morning it had put its head on his hand.

He looked at Miasma on his shoulder.

She had gone to the rhythm. Not the working one. The careful low one, the one she had held for four days over the shell.

She was facing the bag, and her body had the bar-quality in it, the readiness to put herself across a line. She was not putting herself across the line because she was on his shoulder. The line was somewhere out in front of them in the group of forty walking admits.

Both of you. At once. What is it. What are you both telling me.

The group came around the end of the stone yard.

There was a wall.

A training wall. The kind the Academy built to teach beasts to go over, around, through the gap at the base.

A slab of fitted ashlar, head height and a half, freestanding, with the scuffs and the claw-scoring of a thousand drilled beasts down its face.

The path went along the near side of it. The proctors named it. Breach wall. They kept walking. The group followed the path along the near face.

Percival was four back from Aiden on the near side of the wall.

The press in the bag went hard.

This was past the lamp-fourteen press.

The bag against Aiden’s hip stopped being a bag with a weight in it. The canvas pulled against his belt. Through his coat, he felt it the way he felt a cold coin through cloth.

The dark inside it leaned. Through the wall. Past the slab. Toward something on the far side Aiden could not see and Nyx could.

Miasma came off his shoulder.

She did not go down. She went to the bag.

She put herself across the bag flap. The bar. The actual bar this time. And she was a beat too late.

She had been on his shoulder and the bag was at his hip. The line she needed to be across had already been crossed by the time she reached the flap.

The bag was empty.

One instant the strain at his belt. The next instant no strain, no weight, the canvas slack, Miasma’s body across the flap of a bag with nothing in it.

Nyx was through the wall.

He understood it the way he had understood the box rim and the back of his hand. Late, the eye catching up to a thing that had already finished.

The group kept walking. Forty admits and two proctors on the near side of the breach wall, none of them looking at a lamplighter’s slack kit bag.

From the far side of the wall there was a sound.

It was not loud. A man’s voice, one syllable, the syllable a man made when a thing arrived in a place the man had been certain nothing could arrive in. The involuntary sound that came up out of a body before the body chose a sound.

It came over the top of the head-and-a-half wall, where the path did not go. Where a Vane heir had stepped four people back and around the end of the slab to wait, out of the group’s sight, for the walk to give him something.

The sound had come from beyond the wall.

It was Percival’s.

The group stopped because the proctors stopped, and the proctors stopped because the sound had carried.

Aiden had the whole group of forty between him and the end of the slab.

He did not run. He had four years of not running toward things that carried. He went fast along the near face toward the end of the wall, Miasma off the flap and back to his shoulder in the same motion. The forty admits parted for him. A man who moved like he had a reason got the path.

He came around the end of the breach wall.

Percival was on the far side.

He had his back to the wall. He had the Griffin out in front of him, the juvenile Griffin three and a half weeks larger than the cobblestones.

The Griffin was not at his heel. The Griffin was between Percival and the open ground, wings half-mantled, head low. A beast putting itself between its tamer and a threat.

And there was nothing in front of the Griffin. The open ground was open. The threat the Griffin was mantling at was not on the open ground.

It was behind Percival.

Between Percival and the wall. In the strip of shadow the slab threw at that hour. A small dark shape the morning light would not land on, sitting on the worn ground, looking up at the back of a Vane heir who had stepped around a wall to wait for the walk to give him something.

Nyx was not doing anything.