Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 125: PACK LEADER

Aiden had asked Cinder to bank her flames before going.

Not all the way. Enough to begin the performance he knew couldn’t fool experienced proctors.

By the time they reached the east annex, the sun was high.

Of course, they were waiting.

Proctors and teachers had been lining the walls. They straightened the moment he approached, their discussion giving way to complete silence.

Behind him, students betting on his beast’s species. Ahead, Percival’s trap.

Aiden ignored them all.

He walked Cinder through the doors, Miasma perched on his shoulders, Nyx hidden in his shadow.

Proctors and teachers followed him in, blocking the exit without a word.

Aiden stepped into the long stone hall.

A high table waited at the far end, a row of older proctors behind it in grey, a clerk with his book and his wax.

Everything Nyx had shown him in the shadows was exactly where it had put it.

The cold-iron cradle stood along the side wall on its frame. Four handlers waited beside it in House colors, very still.

Dozens of beasts of all kinds of shapes and sizes stood throughout the hall.

They glanced at Cinder as she approached, not yet pouncing, but studying her with the calm, knowing eyes of old creatures who had been born at Tier Two decades ago.

Good. Keep your flames down. You’re a dog right now.

A man in a coat cut too fine for a registration office stood against the back wall.

His age. Relaxed. A smile an inch too broad to be natural.

Percival.

You’re still the same spoon-fed brat you’ve been for the last twenty-five years.

You think I’d let them hand you what even your brother and the Fire Country couldn’t take from me?

Aiden walked Cinder to the mark on the floor.

"Bank it," he said. "Low as you can."

Cinder banked the rest of her flames. Her mane sank along her spine as the fire folded into her sides, leaving them glowing like embers.

She lowered her head and made herself look like a very large dog at the end of a long road.

They’ve had four days to hear the stories about you.

The city gate reported what you really look like. But that’s better than nothing.

The senior proctor sat at the centre of the high table. She was an old woman with iron-grey hair pulled tight behind her head.

She tapped the end of her quill against the paper in front of her as she studied Cinder.

Aiden watched her not be fooled.

"You’ve banked it," she said. Mild. "Well done. I’ve seen handlers twice your age do it worse."

She set down her quill.

"But you can’t bank what a thing weighs, boy. I’ve assessed beasts for forty years. That’s a third-tier fire-form, undeclared, standing in my hall."

Down the table, a younger proctor had already started writing.

Aiden could see the first letters of the word forming on the paper.

Hazard. That’s the word Percival’s waiting for.

"She’s bonded," Aiden said. "She’s never hurt anyone—"

"I’m sure." The old woman wasn’t unkind about it. "It changes nothing. A third-tier hazard is seized and held until the Academy decides what to do with it. That’s the statute. It isn’t mine to bend."

Her eyes went to the cold-iron on the wall. To the House colours beside it. Then back to her table.

"Unless you can show us a C-rank Master Tamer certification, signed by the Tamer Association and counter-signed by a royal proctor."

You know exactly what you’re doing. You don’t like it. You’re going to do it anyway.

And the only way out you give me is a document I can’t get without an Academy recommendation, from a corrupt clerk who’ll either ask ten years of my lamplighter’s pay or bury the document.

I have two bonded beasts. I even have three. Two of them are Tier Two or higher.

I meet the requirements. I just don’t have the connections or the achievements to get the damn certification.

"I’m sorry," she said. "Bring the cradle."

The handlers moved.

Miasma hit the floor before the first one finished his step.

She put herself between the cradle and Cinder. Spines up, venom beading at the tips.

Then she coiled.

As she had in the Row. Ready to pounce. Ready to show the Vane handlers that her mercy would not extend twice.

She won’t let them take Cinder away. We’re family.

All of us.

Under the floor, in the dark below the hall, Nyx had found the cradle’s mechanism.

Aiden didn’t need to see it. Nyx had shown him the parts, and they had already worked out what to break if they tried to take Cinder.

They had mapped the room’s lamps too: their positions, the gaps between them, how a shadow could turn a seizure into a black scrambling mess.

It was waiting. Waiting for the word to start.

I could. We’re ready. They’re not even imagining that someone would be foolish enough to try.

They’d tell that story for a hundred years.

And every version of that story ends the same way. The army, the city, the church, every House, all agreeing on one thing: put the man and his beasts down.

Percival isn’t in that corner hoping I behave. He’s hoping I don’t.

And then he’ll step up, offering more gold than the bounty provides for my silent capture.

Dead on paper. A slave to evolve House Vane’s beasts until I die.

The beasts around him growled and cawed at Miasma, as coiled as she was.

"Hold," Aiden said.

Miasma did not want to hold. She held.

Nyx under the floor did not want to hold. It held.

Then Cinder did something Aiden hadn’t planned for.

She stepped off the mark.

The handlers stopped where they were.

Cinder turned to face Aiden.

She folded her forelegs and put her head down on the stone at his feet.

Not the crouch of a beast beaten into submission.

She lowered herself on purpose, slowly, so that everyone in the hall could watch her do it.

The room went quiet.

The old proctor shot to her feet.

"Show me that again." Her eyes were wide, her voice no longer mild. "Make her do it again."

"I didn’t make her do anything." Aiden knelt beside Cinder, his hands on her shoulders. "She did it herself."

He felt the heat start to gather under his palm.

Cinder’s fire pulled inward from her shoulders, then began to rise, gathering toward the shape of her avatar.

No!

He tightened his grip and shook her.

Not here. Not in front of them.

I heard you at the tree line. They’re not taking either of us away.

Please—

The fire stopped gathering.

He felt her stop it. Not fail at it. Stop it.

The fire that had started to rise came back down into the kneeling wolf, deliberately, under her own control.

She remained on her knees.

But it had started. For half a heartbeat, she had begun to rise into the shape of a person.

At the back of the hall, Percival went very still.

His smile was gone. His eyes were wide.

He saw it.

Nobody else in this room was looking at the right thing. He was.

The old proctor hadn’t seen it. She’d watched Cinder kneel, and had yet to recover from it.

"That’s a conferral," she whispered to the table, to the other stunned proctors and the clerk. "I’ve seen a conferral twice in my life. Neither was from a beast to a man. A beast doesn’t bow to a Tamer. A beast bows to a Pack Leader."

She looked down the table at the younger proctor.

"A beast that chooses its Pack Leader by itself follows them until its death. I do not recognize this bond as unlicensed property. It’s a sovereign bond we will not seize. We register them."

Then she looked at Aiden. At the white in his hair, at the soot still in the seams of his coat, at the wreck of a young man a Tier Three had just knelt to.

"I don’t know what you did to earn that," she said. "But she’s not the one being assessed here. She’s already made her assessment. Of you."

She sat down, picked up her quill, and drew a line through the word the younger proctor had written.

Then she wrote on her own paper and read her ruling aloud.

[ PACK LEADER DESIGNATION — CONFERRED AND RECOGNIZED ]

Bond: Sovereign, beast-conferred

Seizure: barred by statute

TERRITORY TOKEN RESTORED

Standing: Recognized. The name is back in the book.

The old proctor looked at Aiden.

"The hazard is no longer hers. It’s yours." Her voice hardened. "From this moment on, anything she does is your responsibility. We will watch you. If she harms someone, we will come for you first."

She tapped the ruling with her quill. "And if you knew what she was capable of and failed to control her, there will be no mercy in the sentence."

The handlers stood in the middle of the hall with a cold-iron cradle and nothing to put in it.

Percival was already turning for the door.

He didn’t argue with the proctor. He didn’t argue with the statute. A House lives and dies by its statutes, and this one had shut in his face.

Arguing would only have told the room he’d lost.

He stopped at the door and looked back.

Not at Aiden. Not at Cinder.

At the air between them. The place where a fire had started, for half a heartbeat, to become a woman.

Then he was gone, and the cradle went out after him, empty.

The proctors, teachers, and their beasts left the hall.

Aiden stayed. He helped Cinder up.

Then he sat down himself. His legs had been shaking since the kneel. He’d only just noticed.

The cat climbed into his lap. It looked at the city’s most senior assessors, and began to wash a paw.

"Don’t," Aiden said, on reflex. "That’s the Academy."

The cat had never in its life been told a thing it cared about less.

He laughed. Short and cracked.

The pack came around him. Miasma up his sleeve. Nyx out of the floor and onto his shoulder. Cinder’s head against his chest, banked warm.

I guess we’re a pack now. A very family-like pack.

His name was back in a book. His standing was on paper no House could scratch out with a quiet word. And every one of them would walk out of that room with him.

He put his shaking hand on Cinder’s head.

"You won this," he said, quiet enough that only she heard it.

Then he thought about Percival stopping at the door.

He knows. Not everything, but enough.

He won’t stop at a failed assessment. He’ll try to understand what she is.

The mountain was easier. Up there, I only had to keep us alive.

Here, I have to make sure nobody ever sees what she really is.

He sat on the floor of the east annex with his pack around him.

Somewhere behind, Percival was already thinking about what he’d write in his next document.

And a long way east, on a mountain that hadn’t forgotten, something enormous had put Cinder on a list of its own.

The Witness was still somewhere in the city. Perhaps even inside someone who had just left the hall.

Now two people knew Cinder was more than a Tier Three. Neither one was going to stop watching.

He pulled his pack in closer on the cold stone and waited to find out which came first.