This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

The sun overhead wasn't real, but it was warm, and Elias had decided that was good enough reason to do nothing at all.

He was sprawled across a cushioned lounge with a plate of honey-sweets at his elbow, half of them already gone. Briar was wrapped along his shoulders, the vine's little flowers opening and closing in a slow, drowsy rhythm. Valentine had tucked himself against the side of Elias's neck, where he always ended up sooner or later, and every so often the butterfly fanned his wings for no reason at all, throwing a scatter of rainbow light across the cushions.

The pigs kept running the whole afternoon without being asked.

One topped up his tea the moment the cup dipped past halfway. Another nudged the sunshade a little to the left, following the light so it never reached his eyes. A third turned up with a cool cloth folded over one foreleg and stood there, patient and dignified, until Elias took it. He hadn't asked for a cool cloth. He hadn't known he wanted one. He used it anyway.

It was, he thought, a bit embarrassing how much he was enjoying this. He felt like some spoiled young prince who'd never worked a day in his life. He decided not to feel too guilty about it.

Mostly, he just kept getting struck by how far the pigs had come. Weeks ago, they'd flinched at every sudden movement, twenty-eight frightened old creatures who'd been used up and thrown away. Now they moved like they owned the place, their telekinesis steady and exact where it used to wobble and drop things. They looked proud. That still got him, a little, every time he noticed it.

Sebastian was in the middle of all of it, the way he always was now.

The old pig carried himself like a butler who'd been doing it his whole life, upright and unhurried, a cloth folded over one foreleg out of what seemed like pure habit. It was hard to remember he'd been frail, blind, and deaf a couple of months ago. And of everything he'd picked up since, Elias thought the most impressive was how he'd learned to handle Hope.

That was harder than it sounded. Hope was the dreamer of the three senior queens, and she came up with impossible ideas the way a spring came up with water — constantly, happily, with no thought spared for whether any of them could be done.

She couldn't put them into words. None of the bees could. She talked in pheromone and the flicker of her wings, in the way her green light brightened and sped up when an idea grabbed her. Early on, Sebastian had barely been able to follow her, and had once, through plain misunderstanding, agreed to something that turned out to involve three fountains and a slide.

He'd gotten better. His mental sense let him catch the rough shape of what she meant — not words, just the gist of a feeling, like hearing a conversation through a wall — and a few weeks of practice had made him good at it.

Right on cue, Hope came spiraling across the meadow toward the butler, her light flaring bright and fast, trailing a scent Elias could only describe as excited. Sebastian set down his cloth.

He went very still for a moment, the way he did when he was listening. Then his ears flattened slightly.

"You wish to flood the eastern meadow," he said.

Hope spun a happy loop.

"To make a lake," Sebastian went on, with the calm of a pig who had been here before. "For the bees to look at." A pause. "And the fish you would like to put in it."

Another loop, even happier.

"A wonderful notion, my lady," Sebastian said gravely. "Perhaps a smaller version first. A pond. We shall consult the Young Master."

That seemed to satisfy her. She drifted off in a glow of green light, already, Elias suspected, designing the pond. From here it was almost funny — the giant idea, the small dignified pig, the careful little negotiation. He'd seen the maze get talked down to a garden path the same way, and the fountain-slide become a regular fountain.

His household was running well. Everyone in it had found a place.

Which was probably why the worry picked right then to show up.

It turned up the way worries always did, when nothing was wrong.

He'd given the world four discoveries now. The Lifebloom Bees, keeping the sick and the hurt alive all over the federation. The Hundred Fragrance Vine. The Blood Crystal Butterfly. And now the Care Pigs, spreading house by house, handing families back the companions they'd been bracing to lose. Every one of them was released without his name on it, his identity kept quiet by Maeve and the Association.

But four was a lot. People weren't stupid. Talk about the mystery breeder had been building for ages, and Elias wasn't going to pretend it would stay quiet forever. One day, by guesswork, accident, or someone just being persistent, somebody would figure it out.

He'd mostly made peace with that. When it happened, it happened.

What he hadn't made peace with was what might come after.

He wasn't all that worried about someone physically coming after him. The Association was old and powerful, and surely it had ways of protecting a breeder worth this much from anyone reckless enough to try something obvious. Guards, wards, whatever they used. That was the kind of problem big organizations knew how to solve.

The mental attacks were different.

He'd read enough to know how nasty they could get. Techniques that slid past your guard without leaving a mark and planted a thought, or muddied your judgment, or pulled a secret out of you, all without you ever knowing it had happened. There was a reason they were rare. The dangerous ones scared him precisely because you might never even notice. He didn't doubt the Association had countermeasures. He just didn't love the idea of trusting his own head entirely to someone else's care.

He wanted protection; he understood. Something that was his.

Lucky for him, he'd been saving up.

At Commander Rank his talent had turned into Omniscient Questions II — two questions a day now, and he could store the ones he didn't use, up to twenty. Through the slow, easy weeks since the Care Pig party he'd just let them pile up. Now the reserve was full, twenty questions sitting there, and he finally had something to spend them on.

He settled back, waved off a Butler Pig who'd come by to suggest, very politely, that he might nap instead, and got his criteria straight in his head first.

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He needed a beast whose evolution path could eventually reach at least King rank — not on the first step, but by the end of the whole path, after however many evolutions it took, so that whatever he finally made would be strong enough to be with him for a long time. It had to be affordable for him as he was now well-off but not willing to chase some priceless treasure. And most of all, it had to grow some way of protecting the mind from its very first evolution, so the protection showed up early and not at the far end.

Three things, all true at once.

Then the guessing game began.

Like searching a library by guessing the titles, basically.

He started with the common beasts he already knew, naming each one and asking if its path would reach King rank by the end, while staying cheap and giving mind protection after the first step. No. No. No. Then he worked outward, into half-remembered species from his studies, the little creatures stuck in textbook footnotes. No. No. No.

Somewhere around the eighth one, Valentine woke up.

The butterfly lifted off Elias's neck, did a slow, disgruntled circle of his head, and landed on the notebook he was writing in — directly on the page, wings spread, very obviously in the way.

"I'm working," Elias said.

Valentine fanned his wings.

"I know. I've been ignoring you for an hour. I'm sorry." He reached up and ran a finger gently down the edge of one crystal wing, the way Valentine liked. The butterfly leaned into it, smug, then grudgingly relocated to the arm of the lounge where he could keep an eye on things. Briar, not to be outdone, tightened a vine around Elias's wrist and put out a small, pointed flower right next to his hand.

"You too," Elias said. "Both of you. Five more minutes."

Neither of them looked like they believed him. They were probably right.

He went back to it. No. No. No.

On the nineteenth question, he named a small, quiet creature he'd nearly skipped right past.

The answer came back.

Yes.

Elias sat up fast enough that Valentine startled, and Briar's vine pulled tight around his arm.

"There you are," he said, grinning.

The Fool's Turtle.

He knew it already, naturally. Any breeder did due to its special ability.

What the talent had just told him was the part the textbooks left out — that this small, gentle, overlooked thing had an evolution path inside it that nobody had ever bothered to trace.

He ran through what he already knew, looking at it differently now.

The Fool's Turtle was a mental-type beast, modest and unremarkable, starting out somewhere with Elite rank potential with basically no offensive ability. Everything it did leaned toward defense and hiding — a hard shell, a knack for staying out of sight, a quiet instinct to go unnoticed. It bothered nobody and wanted nothing. Elias had always found that sort of endearing.

And tucked inside it, his question had confirmed, was a path that climbed step by step through a few evolutions all the way up to King rank — and would give protection of the mind from the very first evolution, long before it ever got near that final rank.

Nobody had found it. Not because the turtle was beneath noticing, he thought, but because almost no one ever really looked at the small, quiet things. Which was the whole reason his job existed.

Then there was the ability — the one thing the little turtle was actually known for, the thing that had stuck it with such an unkind name. Elias had always thought the name was unfair.

A Fool's Turtle could speed up the thinking of any creature it picked. For five to ten minutes, a mind it touched would run several times faster than normal. Thoughts flew. Problems came apart. Understanding showed up all at once, clear and bright.

Sounded too good to be true. It was — because there was a price, and it was steep.

When the few minutes ran out, whoever it was dropped unconscious for hours, then woke up with a brutal headache that hung around long after. You could make the mind sprint, but it would cost you. A handful of minutes of brilliance cost you the rest of the day and a good deal of misery besides.

For anything serious, it wasn't worth it. Hardly anyone would trade hours of their day and a pounding head for a few minutes of quick thinking.

But where it got its name from is the way they are used.

Its best customers were strict parents and panicking students.

The logic was funny but fair. A kid who couldn't make themselves sit down, who put studying off and of until the exam was tomorrow, and the panic finally hit, could get five to ten guaranteed minutes of study at the absolute top of their ability. It was a last resort, the thing you reached for when nothing else had worked — but the night before an exam, those few minutes of perfect focus could genuinely save you, and the sore head the next day was, by all reports, considered worth it.

Elias snorted, picturing it. Some frantic student at midnight, a patient turtle pulled out of its shell, a few precious minutes of clarity bought with a headache. There was something kind of sweet about a creature whose weirdest gift mostly got used to help kids who'd run out of time.

Sebastian, who had appeared at his elbow at some point with a fresh cup of tea, said with a remark. "I take it you have found something interesting, young master."

"Maybe. We'll see." Elias was already writing again.

Sebastian set the tea down where Elias would forget about it and let it go cold, which they both knew was what would happen.

It was exactly the kind of beast Elias loved most. Gentle. Easy to overlook. Quietly full of something nobody had bothered to look for.

Now he just had to find one.

Fool's Turtles lived a long time — a really long time, up to five hundred years. That was good and bad. Something that lived five centuries didn't get dumped at a shelter the way short-lived beasts did; an old Fool's Turtle was more likely to outlast a few owners than to get left behind. So he couldn't count on turning one up among the rescues.

But he could look.

And if the shelters didn't have any, he could just buy as many as he wanted. Money wasn't a problem anymore. He could buy out a quarter of every Fool's Turtle in the kingdom if it came to that.

Still, after the Care Pigs, his gut pointed him at the shelters first.

He'd seen what his work could do for the forgotten ones. He'd watched twenty-eight thrown-away pigs turn proud and whole again, and then watched that spread out to families and orphanages and lonely houses across the kingdom. If there was a Fool's Turtle sitting in some shelter — old, overlooked, waiting out the end of a long life for somebody to want it — he'd much rather give that one a home than buy a fresh one off a market stall.

So: shelters first. If he found one that needed him, great. If not, he'd buy. Either way, the worry that had wandered into his nice quiet afternoon would have its answer. A guard for his mind, pulled, like always, out of the least likely place.

With a new little friend to study, which, if he was honest, was at least half the appeal.

He grabbed a fresh notebook, gave up entirely on the rest of the honey-sweets, and dropped into the head-down, single-minded state his family had long since learned to spot and quietly sigh about.

From across the meadow, Sebastian watched the Young Master vanish into his notebook, the whole carefully arranged afternoon forgotten in about two seconds, and sighed again, fondly this time.

He'd spent weeks learning to properly spoil the Young Master. Perfected the tea. Worked out the timing of the cool cloths. Lined up every comfort a person could reasonably want. And Elias had enjoyed it — really had, for almost a whole afternoon, which Sebastian was starting to realize was about as good as it got.

Because here was the thing, and Sebastian had figured it out by watching: the Young Master didn't actually relax when you pampered him. He put up with it nicely, the way you put up with a pleasant but slightly boring afternoon. He only really relaxed when he was working — when some new little puzzle had grabbed hold of his curiosity and pulled him all the way in.

And there he was, scribbling away, more at ease with a notebook and an impossible question than he'd been with every honey-sweet in the realm. Briar had settled back against his shoulder. Valentine was dozing on Elias’ neck with one eye cracked open. The household went on around him, warm and ordinary.

Sebastian shook his head, swept up the abandoned tea things, and went to make a fresh cup. If the Young Master was going to spend his rest working, the least his butler could do was see that he did it comfortably.

It was his duty, after all. And Sebastian had never once been sorry to have one.

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