Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 37: NO LEDGER FOR IT

That was the part Aiden saw, the part the group saw, because the group was coming around the end of the wall now too.

The proctors and the forty, spilled around the slab into a loose arc with the open ground in front of them and the Vane heir backed against the wall in the middle of it.

Nyx was not lunging. Nyx was not making the bag-press into a thing. Nyx was sitting in the wall’s shadow behind Percival, small, the size of a kitten, the light sliding off it.

It looked up at him with the pale deep-water eyes, and it had arrived there through a slab of fitted ashlar that Percival had put at his own back so nothing could arrive behind him

Percival had made the sound because he had turned and it was there.

He was not making a sound now. He had the face going, the not-smile, reaching for assembly.

The assembly was not coming. The assembly was for an audience he controlled. The audience was forty Field Provision admits and two proctors who had heard a Vane make the involuntary sound and come around a wall to find him backed against it by a thing the size of a kitten that the Academy’s own light would not land on.

The Griffin would not turn around.

Aiden saw that and the proctors saw it. The Griffin was mantled at the empty open ground, away from Nyx, away from the actual thing, and it would not bring itself around to face the small dark shape in the wall’s shadow.

Percival reached down and got a hand on the Griffin’s harness and pulled, to turn it, to make it face the wall, to make his own beast do the thing that would let him narrate this.

And the Griffin did not turn.

It set its weight. A Vane heir hauled on his own beast’s harness in front of forty admits and two proctors and the beast set its weight against him and would not come around to face a kitten-sized shadow.

That was the thing the group watched, in the loose arc around the open ground: not the wall, not the kitten-shape, but the Vane pulling at a beast that would not obey him with the whole intake watching him pull.

There it is. There’s the move you don’t have. You can’t make a proctor write this one down. Forty people just watched your beast refuse you.

Aiden did not let it onto his face. It went up past his throat, all the way, and he held it there the way he had held the grin at the gates, because the performance was the loss and the room was watching to see who performed.

Percival stopped pulling the harness.

He got the not-smile assembled. Finally, late, in front of everyone, the assembly visibly a thing he was building rather than a thing he had.

He turned it on the proctors, not on Aiden, and he said, in the voice that was supposed to make rooms arrange themselves, "Whose beast is this. This is unregistered. This is an unregistered beast loose on a training ground during an orientation walk."

He pointed at Nyx.

Nyx did not react to the point. It was still looking at the back of him, except he had turned, so now it was looking at the front of him, the pale eyes on his face the way they had been on the corner of Aiden’s room. Total, fixed, past him and on him at once.

The older proctor came forward out of the arc.

He looked at Nyx in the wall’s shadow. He looked at the Griffin still set against its own tamer’s hand. He looked at the slab of fitted ashlar, head and a half, unbroken, no gap at that point. Claw-scoring of a thousand drilled beasts down its near face.

Not one mark where a thing had gone through it because nothing went through it. That was what a breach wall was for. It was the thing beasts learned they could not go through.

He looked at the near side of the wall, where Aiden stood at the end of the arc with an empty kit bag and a Venomspine Stalker on his shoulder.

He did not ask Aiden whose beast it was.

He had been a proctor for nineteen years. He had written one Griffin in a ledger. He looked at the wall, and the kitten-sized dark in its shadow, and the Vane heir whose beast would not turn around, and the lamplighter at the end of the arc.

He reached the end the whole group was reaching before any of them said it, which was that a thing had been on one side of an unbreachable wall and was now on the other. There was no gap, no mark, and no way.

The only thing the Academy had for no way was the silence they were all standing in, which had no rule yet, which someone was going to have to write.

He looked at Aiden.

"Lamplighter Vell," he said. Not loud. The arc was silent enough that not loud carried. "Is that your second beast."

Aiden held his gaze.

"Yes."

"The one that will not classify."

"Yes."

The proctor looked at the wall one more time. Forty admits looked where he looked. Percival stood against the unbreached ashlar with the not-smile assembled and worn. Nobody in the arc looked at his face. They looked at the wall.

"Eleven days," the proctor said. To Aiden. In front of all of them. "Bring it."

He did not write anything down.

There was no ledger for it. He turned and put the group back on the path with two words and the forty went, slower than they had come, every one of them looking back at the wall as they passed the end of it.

Percival went with them because there was nothing else for him to do, four people back from where Aiden would have been if Aiden had been walking.

Aiden was not walking yet.

Aiden stood at the end of the breach wall until the group was gone.

Nyx came out of the wall’s shadow.

It crossed the open ground the no-sound way and came to him and went up his coat the way it had not done before. On its own, all the way, to the shoulder opposite Miasma.

It set itself there, small and dark and light-shedding, and put its head against the side of his neck the way it had put its head against Miasma’s leg in the dark.

Miasma, on the other shoulder, came off the careful rhythm.

She faced forward, the working rhythm back under her skin, and she did not watch Nyx anymore.

Aiden understood. Miasma had been holding the line for a thing that could not hold its own yet. She had been the barrier until it could stand alone.

And now Nyx had walked through an unbreachable wall, put a Vane heir against it in front of forty witnesses, and done it without needing her there.

It had its own line now.

He stood at the end of the wall with a beast on each shoulder and an empty bag at his hip. The grin was still up his throat. He let it stay up. He did not perform anything because there was no one left to perform to.

Eleven days he’ll spend explaining a wall he can’t explain. The pen was all he had. There’s no pen for this.

He went up the path after the group, slow.

Somewhere ahead of him a Vane heir was walking four people back from a space where the lamplighter should have been and was not, and would feel the space the whole way up.