Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 40: DECLARED

Not the beasts this time.

The people.

The clerk’s pen stopped. The administration man looked up from the report. The older proctor’s tiredness went off his face for one beat and something else came onto it and went off again.

And Percival, in the chair on Aiden’s side, four feet away, turned his head, because declaring it was not a branch the trap had a closed end for.

"Declaration is a registration procedure," the administration man said. "It is not heard at an incident review."

"It’s heard wherever the beast is produced with its tamer and a panel," Aiden said. He had read the public charter three days ago, before the Field Provision corridor. "Charter, registration provisions, the part about atypical classifications presented outside the standard battery. A panel and a tamer and the beast present is a declaration venue. There’s a panel. There’s a tamer. The beast is present. The filing party brought it here."

The administration man looked at the older proctor.

The older proctor looked at the charter the clerk was already turning to in the ledger. Then he looked at Aiden.

He said, to the administration man, not to Aiden, "He’s right. The venue holds. He can declare."

The administration man set the report down.

"Declare it, then."

Aiden put Nyx on the table.

It sat on the wood the size of a kitten, the light of the small chamber sliding off it the way the morning had slid off it on the path.

It looked at the panel the way it looked at corners, fixed, total, past them and on them at once. There was a beast under the panel’s table too, there was always a beast under a table. It came awake without a sound. It put its eyes on Nyx. It did not take them off.

"Affinity," the administration man said. The procedural voice. "State the affinity for the record."

"Void."

The pen did not move. The administration man looked at him.

Void was not a word the procedural voice had a column for.

Aiden watched him reach for the column and not find it. This man’s whole function was the column. The column was not there.

He had a report on the table that had been written to run a procedure. The procedure had just been handed a word the procedure did not have.

"Form," the administration man said.

"Shadow Pup."

The pen did not move on that one either. The clerk wrote it down in the ledger because the ledger took whatever the tamer said in declaration.

The administration man did not look up while it went into the page. Shadow Pup was not a form the Academy had a folder for. He moved past it.

"Lineage," he said.

"D."

That one the column had. The pen moved. D went into the ledger, and the moment it went into the ledger Nyx was a declared beast, D-lineage, Shadow Pup form, on the Academy’s own record, in the venue the filing party had produced it in.

The report on the table, unregistered, present, undeclared, had its third violation struck by the act of the review it had been filed to trigger.

The administration man looked at the report. He looked at the ledger. He added it up.

Aiden watched him do it and watched him reach the place where it came out, which was that the incident review had, by being held, produced the declaration that unmade the incident.

He did not say that. He said, "The undeclared violation does not stand. The beast is declared as of this venue." He looked at Percival. "The filing alleges unregistered and present. Present is conceded. Unregistered—" he tapped the ledger "—is now answered. The remaining matter is the beast’s presence on the lower grounds during a sanctioned walk without prior declaration. That is a notation. Not a revocation. The panel will enter a notation."

A notation.

Percival had filed three violations to take an assessment off a lamplighter. The review had produced a declaration that struck the violation with teeth and left a notation. The procedural weight of a late form.

Aiden did not let the thing onto his face. Behind it the thing went up the way it had gone up at the wall. He held it down. The panel was watching. The performance was the loss. He was not going to perform the win in a room where the man across from him had just lost under his own name.

The older proctor spoke. For the first time since, he’s right, the venue holds.

"The filing party will note," he said, to Percival, the procedural form but not the procedural flat, "that an incident review is a venue of record. What is produced in it stands on the record. The filing party produced the beast." He let that sit one beat. "Future filings should account for the venue they trigger."

It was not a reprimand. It had no procedure behind it that bit. It was a man who had been doing this nineteen years telling a Vane heir, in front of a panel and a clerk and the man he had filed against, that he had walked into the venue he had built and the venue had held the weight the other way, and that everyone in the room had watched him do it.

Percival’s hand was on the Griffin’s harness. The Griffin still had its head to the wall, four feet from Miasma, refusing to look.

A bred Griffin, papers back six generations, taught its first refusal by a Venomspine off Sewer Row. The instructors would have words for it. Stress response. Atypical fixation.

The words would be wrong. The bird had met something its breeding had no entry for, and the bird had updated. Beasts were honest that way. It was the part of them the registries had never once managed to paper over.

Percival got the not-smile assembled. In the chair. In front of the panel. Assembled, not worn.

He did not use it on Aiden. There was nothing to use it on. The procedure had run, and this time it had run the other way because the weight had been put in the column that held it.

Percival stood when the panel rose.

He left the chair the review had put him in. He went to the door. The Griffin went with him.

At the door, the Griffin’s head came around.

The turn Percival had tried to force at the breach wall and could not get. The look the beast had refused for days. It gave it now, on its own, while Percival pulled it toward the door. It put its amber eyes on her for one full beat before the door took it out of the room.

Percival’s hand on the harness had not been the thing that decided it.

Aiden watched the door close on the back of a Vane heir whose own beast had just looked where it wanted in front of the panel. He let the thing stay where it was, all the way up, held, not performed.

You found the pen. You filed the part that runs against me.

You left the wall out so the report would live. That’s what killed it. The part you cut is a D now.

You built the venue. The venue held my weight.

The older proctor stopped him in the corridor outside.

The clerk and the administration man had gone the other way. The corridor was the lower-grounds corridor, stone, the claw-scoring of drilled beasts old on the lower third of the walls. The proctor had his ledger under his arm. He did not open it.

"Nineteen years," he said. "I have watched filings go in front of panels. I have not watched a Field Provision admit walk into one and declare his way out of it through the charter." He looked at Nyx on Aiden’s shoulder. He looked at Miasma. "Where did a lamplighter learn to read the registration provisions."

"I read them before the Field Provision corridor," Aiden said. "I wanted to know what I was walking into."

The proctor looked at him.

"You read them before you needed them."

"I’ve been reading things before I need them for five weeks. It’s been the only thing that’s worked."

The proctor was quiet a beat. Then he said, "Eleven days. The assessment stands. The notation does not bar the yard." He paused, and the next part was not procedure, and he said it like it was not. "Bring both. The thing that has no column. Bring it in the yard and let the yard be the venue. It will hold the weight there too. I have a guess about that. I am usually right when I guess and I have stopped enjoying being right about this kind of thing, so do not make me right the bad way."

He went down the corridor with the ledger under his arm.

Aiden stood in the lower-grounds corridor with both beasts and eleven days and the procedure folded down small where he could carry it.

The procedure, the thing that had been on his neck for twelve years, folded next to the win and the cost and the half-minute clock, all of them on him, none resolved, the way he carried things now.

He went out the way he had come in.

The Stoneback at the gate came back up onto its forefeet only after Miasma was forty feet down the path.

The guard noticed his beast do it again.

Aiden did not look back to watch him notice.