This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

The first sign that something had changed in the Secret Realm was the smell.

For weeks, Elias's laboratory had carried the faint, perpetual odor of overworked research. Spilled nutrient solution that nobody had quite finished wiping away. The papery dust of a hundred half-read reports. The sweetish tang of dried honey crusted onto the rims of forgotten jars. Elias had stopped noticing it long ago, the way a person stops hearing a clock they live beside. It was simply the scent of work being done.

That morning, he opened the laboratory door and breathed in clean linen, polished wood, and the faint cool freshness of lemon.

He stopped on the threshold and blinked.

The long worktables, which he distinctly remembered burying beneath stacked notebooks and a small mountain of butterfly observation logs, were mostly clear now, wiped down and arranged with obvious care. His instruments stood in rows — not quite even, a few of them grouped by a logic that wasn't his own, one beaker set hopefully upside down — but clean, and clearly meant well. The floor, which had developed a permanent gritty crunch underfoot, had been swept, though a faint trail of dust near the far corner suggested the broom had given up partway. Even the tall windows that looked out over Briar's endless flowering hills had been wiped, leaving a single streaky smear at the very top where a shorter reach had not quite managed.

It was not perfect. But it was the work of someone trying very, very hard, and that made it better than perfect.

In the center of it all stood Sebastian.

The Butler Pig was a sight Elias still had not entirely grown used to. Where there had once been a frail, half-blind old Care Pig curled in the corner of a shelter pen, there now stood a dignified figure in dark attire he had stitched himself — a little crooked at one seam, the cuffs not quite matching, but worn with enormous pride. He stood upright with careful, deliberate poise, the poise of someone who had decided exactly how a butler ought to carry himself and was concentrating hard on doing it. A folded cloth rested over one forearm. He was, at that precise moment, attempting to guide a feather duster along the top of a high shelf with a thread of telekinetic force, his brow furrowed in concentration.

The duster wobbled, overshot, and knocked a small empty jar off the shelf.

Sebastian caught it — barely, with a second hasty thread of force that sent the jar wobbling through the air in a drunken arc before it settled, rattling, back onto the wood. He froze. For just a moment the dignified composure cracked, and an old pig who was still learning what his new mind could do let out a small, mortified grunt.

Then he straightened, smoothed the cloth over his arm, and pretended very firmly that nothing had happened.

"Good morning, Young Master," Sebastian said, recovering his composure and inclining his head. "Breakfast will be ready in ten minutes. Or perhaps fifteen. I am still learning the stove. I took the liberty of organizing your research notes by date and project — the Blood Crystal Butterfly logs are in the blue folders, the Care Pig studies in green." He paused, and added with scrupulous honesty, "Though I confess I could not read several of them, so a few may be in the wrong folder. Your handwriting, Young Master, is a considerable challenge."

Elias stared at the gleaming room. "Sebastian, you didn't have to—"

"I did, actually," Sebastian said, with the gentle firmness of a butler who had clearly rehearsed this exact reply. "A breeder cannot think clearly in a cluttered space. And you, Young Master, have been thinking very hard for a very long time in a space that would have made a goat despair."

Behind him, from somewhere near the floor, came a soft, satisfied chorus of grunts.

Elias looked down and felt his chest go warm.

The other twenty-seven Care Pigs had filed into the laboratory in a line that was almost orderly, each one carrying something. A few balanced small baskets of folded cloths on their backs, though one basket sat at a precarious tilt and shed a cloth with every other step, leaving a small trail behind its owner who hadn't noticed. Two older sows nudged a wheeled cart of cleaning supplies between them, bickering silently over which direction it ought to go, so that the cart drifted in a slow zigzag across the floor. A pig with one cloudy eye and a notch in his ear was meant to be pushing a dustpan along with his snout — but he had misjudged the angle, and was instead very diligently sweeping the same small pile of dust back and forth across the same patch of floor, utterly content with his progress.

They were slower than Sebastian, clumsier, and one of them kept getting distracted by a particularly interesting patch of sunlight and lying down in it. Their new, stronger bodies clearly still felt unfamiliar to them; more than one moved with the careful, testing slowness of a creature surprised to find its legs no longer ached. But they worked, and they worked happily, their stubby tails wagging in unhurried contentment, and not one of them seemed troubled in the slightest by doing the job imperfectly.

These were the same pigs that, only weeks ago, had flinched at every sudden movement. The same pigs who had spent decades being used and then discarded. Watching them now, busy and unafraid, fussing over a room as though it were the most important task in the world, Elias had to clear his throat twice before he trusted his voice.

"Thank you," he said quietly. "All of you."

The pigs grunted again, pleased, and went back to their work.

The breeder shop, it turned out, had received the same earnest, imperfect treatment.

Elias discovered this when he stepped through the connecting passage and found the front room of his old shop in the middle of being transformed. The shelves that he had let slide into chaos — half-labeled seed stock here, a tangle of empty contract scrolls there, three months of unsorted correspondence shoved into a drawer that no longer closed — had been emptied and were being rebuilt, slowly, into something more sensible. The seeds were sorted by attribute. The correspondence had been alphabetized with great determination, though by the smell of things at least one letter had been alphabetized directly into a puddle of spilled polish. The troublesome drawer had been removed entirely, carried off by two pigs who had decided the simplest solution to a drawer that would not close was to no longer have it, and now leaned against the far wall awaiting a verdict.

Sebastian, naturally, had appointed himself the head of all of it.

It was not a position anyone had given him. He had simply assumed it, the way water assumes the shape of whatever holds it, and the others had let him, because someone clearly needed to be in charge and Sebastian was the one who most looked the part. He was still learning how to do it. He gave instructions that proved impossible and had to be revised. He assigned a delicate sorting task to a pig whose eyesight could not manage it, realized his mistake, and quietly reassigned her to folding instead, mortified at the oversight. He overestimated, often, what his telekinesis could lift, and had twice now had to summon every pig in the room to help him recover a stack of crates he had been certain he could float across the floor unassisted.

But he learned. Each mistake taught him something — which of the pigs saw best, which grew anxious in tight corners, which of them needed gentle work and which wanted to feel useful with something heavier. He was not yet the butler he so clearly wished to be. He was an old pig who had been given a sharp new mind and a body that still surprised him, doing his honest best with both, and getting a little better every day.

Holly approved of this immensely. Effort, in Holly's view, counted for a great deal.

The Lifebloom queens had opinions about the new arrangement, as the Lifebloom queens had opinions about everything.

Holly, the most disciplined of the three, took to Sebastian at once. Within a day, the two of them had developed a working rapport that bordered on conspiratorial. Holly managed Elias's schedule and the flow of the hives; Sebastian managed the household and everyone's comfort; and somewhere between the two of them, an unspoken alliance formed whose sole purpose was to ensure that Elias ate three meals a day, whether he wanted to or not. They held what could only be described as meetings — Holly hovering at eye level, Sebastian standing with his cloth over his arm — during which they compared notes on exactly how long Elias had gone without sleep and what to do about it.

Elias found this development deeply alarming.

Honey, the diplomat, simply enjoyed having someone new to be charming toward. She drifted gracefully around Sebastian whenever he worked, complimenting the shine of a freshly polished floor or the elegance of his folded cloths, and Sebastian — who had spent decades being told he was no longer useful — accepted each compliment with a humble little bow that suggested the praise embarrassed him terribly even as it warmed him to his core.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Hope, the dreamer, immediately tried to recruit him.

She could not explain her ideas in words, of course. Like all her kind, Hope spoke in the language of her species — in drifting clouds of pheromone, in the eager flicker of her wings, in the way the motes of green light around her brightened and quickened when an idea seized her. To most people it was simply a queen being a queen. But Sebastian's newly awakened mind perceived more than most. His telepathy let him catch faint impressions of the intention behind the scent and movement — not words, never words, just the rough shape of a feeling, like trying to make out a conversation through a wall. He was not at all good at it yet. But he was, by some distance, the best the household had.

So when Hope drifted around him one afternoon in a bright, insistent spiral, trailing the warm green scent of growing things and casting her gaze again and again toward the open eastern meadow, Sebastian set down his cloth and frowned with the effort of listening.

"You wish to expand the meadow, Lady Hope," he ventured. Her light dimmed, unimpressed; that was not it. He tried again. "You wish to… plant something in it." A flicker, closer, but not quite. He concentrated harder, and a faint impression reached him — winding green corridors, butterflies drifting through them. "Channels. Patterns. A maze, perhaps. Of flowers." Her light flared brilliantly, and a fresh wave of fragrance rolled off her in unmistakable delight. "For the butterflies to wander through. Ah — yes. I see it now. Forgive me, my lady, I am still learning your tongue."

He inclined his head. "I would be honored to assist, provided the Young Master approves, and provided the project does not interfere with anyone's mealtimes."

Hope spun a joyful loop around the room, scattering green light, and took this as a yes. It was, generally, easier to let Hope take things as a yes.

Of course, peace in a household full of proud, clever creatures was never absolute.

The first real squabble broke out over territory, as these things often did. Briar, who liked to drape himself along the warm windowsills of the laboratory where the artificial sun fell strongest, discovered one morning that his favorite sill had been claimed by three Care Pigs who had decided it was the ideal spot for an afternoon nap. Briar did not approve. He expressed this disapproval by sending an exploratory vine down to gently — but pointedly — nudge the nearest pig.

The pig, who had survived far worse than a polite vine, simply grunted and rolled over.

Briar, scandalized, bloomed an entire spray of indignant orange flowers and tried again, more firmly.

What followed was less a fight than a very slow, very dignified disagreement. Briar tugged. The pigs shuffled. Briar wound a vine around a chair leg and tried to lever himself into a better position. One of the pigs sat down on the vine. For several minutes the windowsill became the site of a quiet, grumbling standoff between an eight-attribute plant of enormous potential and three elderly pigs who simply wanted to nap in the sun, and neither side was willing to concede.

It was Honey who eventually negotiated a truce, drifting between them and somehow convincing Briar that the slightly smaller western sill received better afternoon light anyway. Briar, soothed and flattered, relocated. The pigs went back to sleep. Honey looked enormously pleased with herself.

Sebastian watched the entire affair from across the room with the patient expression of a butler who had long ago accepted that his household contained a great many strong personalities and that the trick was simply to let most disagreements resolve themselves.

It was the sort of squabble that siblings have. Loud, brief, forgotten by dinner. Elias found himself laughing more often than not, and he could not remember the last time the realm had felt so full of life.

Valentine did not laugh.

Valentine, curled in his favorite place at the side of Elias's neck, had been watching the Butler Pig with narrowing multifaceted eyes for several days now, and his patience was wearing thin.

The problem, as far as Valentine was concerned, was simple. The pig was always there. When Elias sat down to eat, the pig appeared with the meal. When Elias rubbed his eyes after a long day, the pig appeared with tea. When Elias so much as shifted his weight in a way that suggested fatigue, the pig appeared with a cushion, a blanket, and a gently insistent suggestion that the Young Master might consider resting. The pig anticipated Elias's needs. The pig cared for Elias. The pig stood close to Elias, far too close, far too often, and to a possessive Blood Crystal Butterfly there could be no greater provocation.

So Valentine did what Valentine always did. He inserted himself.

When Sebastian set a cup of tea beside Elias's hand, Valentine fluttered down and landed on the rim of the cup, wings spread wide in a brilliant fan of rainbow light, glaring up at the butler as if to say This is mine; he is mine; you may go now. When Sebastian arranged a blanket over Elias's shoulders during a late evening of reading, Valentine wedged himself beneath the blanket first and refused to move, forcing the entire arrangement to accommodate him. He took to landing on the side of Elias's neck and fanning his wings whenever Sebastian came near, scattering crystalline light across the room in what could only be described as a territorial display of dazzling, petty beauty.

Sebastian bore it all with unflappable grace.

"Of course, Master Valentine," he would murmur, adjusting the blanket around the sulking butterfly without the slightest sign of offense. "The warmest corner is yours, naturally."

This, somehow, only annoyed Valentine more. It was very difficult to win a territorial dispute against an opponent who simply refused to compete.

The standoff reached its peak one evening when Sebastian, having noticed that Elias's hands were cold, attempted to offer him a pair of warmed cloths. Valentine, sensing an intrusion upon his Source, swooped down and landed directly on the back of Elias's hand, wings raised, glittering, immovable.

Elias looked down at the indignant little butterfly perched on his hand, then up at the patient butler holding two warm cloths, and finally understood what was happening.

"Valentine," he said gently, lifting the butterfly to eye level. "He's not trying to take my attention away from you. He's just trying to help take care of me. The same way you do."

Valentine's wings drooped slightly. He fixed Elias with a long, wounded look, the look of a creature who had been overcome with hunger a thousand times and refused to feed without permission, who would endure any discomfort before he let anything threaten the warmth he had finally found.

Elias understood that look better than anyone.

"There's room for both of you," he said quietly. "I promise. You're not going anywhere. You're mine, and I'm yours, and that doesn't change because someone else brings me tea."

For a moment Valentine simply sat there. Then, slowly, he fluttered up and resettled at the side of Elias's neck, against the steady beat of the pulse he loved best — but this time, instead of glaring, he watched as Sebastian gently wrapped the warm cloths around Elias's hands.

When the butler finished and stepped back with a respectful bow, Valentine fanned his wings once.

It was not quite friendship. But it was, Sebastian recognized with quiet satisfaction, a truce. And the butler had a great deal of experience with the value of a truce.

The nagging, however, did not stop.

If anything, having a butler had made the campaign for Elias's well-being alarmingly well-organized. Where Holly had once fought a lonely battle to make him eat, she now had an ally with telekinesis, infinite patience, and a genuinely concerning ability to appear precisely when Elias was about to skip a meal in favor of one more hour of research.

"Young Master," Sebastian said that very night, appearing at Elias's elbow with a cup of tea that he set down a touch too hard, so that it slopped over the rim and he had to dab at it with his ever-present cloth, flustered. "It is past midnight."

"I'm almost done," Elias said, which was a lie, and everyone in the room knew it.

"You said that three hours ago," Sebastian replied, not unkindly. "You have eaten one meal today. You have slept perhaps four hours in the last two days. With the greatest respect, Young Master, you are studying how to make an old, tired body strong again, and you are doing it by running your own young body into the ground. I find this somewhat ironic."

Holly, hovering nearby, hummed in pointed agreement.

Elias opened his mouth to argue, glanced at the row of expectant faces — one butler, one queen, and a Care Pig who had wandered over with a blanket draped hopefully over his back — and slowly closed it again.

"That's not fair," he muttered. "You're ganging up on me."

"We are caring for you," Sebastian corrected gently. "It only feels like ganging up because there are so many of us who wish to. I should think that is rather a fine problem to have."

And the worst part, Elias thought as Sebastian guided him away from the desk with the warm cloths and the tea and the blanket-bearing pig trailing dutifully behind, was that the butler was entirely right.

He had spent so much of his old life alone. He had spent so much of this life, too, quietly bracing for the day the warmth would run out — certain, somewhere deep down, that affection always came with conditions, that one day he would disappoint everyone and be left with nothing but his notes. He had never quite stopped expecting it.

But here, in a realm he had built with his own hands and filled with creatures who had chosen him, the warmth simply kept coming. A queen who remembered his meals. A vine who wrapped around his wrist so he would never feel alone. A butterfly who guarded his pulse while he slept. And now an old, dignified pig who had spent decades believing he was useless, who had found purpose again in the simple act of making sure a tired young man rested.

Elias let himself be led to bed. Briar uncurled from the lamp and wound a single contented vine around his finger. Valentine settled against his neck. Somewhere beyond the door, the soft grunts of contented pigs and the low hum of fifty queens filled the realm with the sound of a home that never truly went quiet.

"Goodnight, Young Master," Sebastian said softly, dimming the light.

"Goodnight, Sebastian," Elias murmured. And then, half-asleep already: "Thank you. For all of it."

The butler paused in the doorway, and for just a moment the perfect composure slipped, revealing the quiet, overwhelming gratitude of a creature who had once been certain his story was already over.

"It is my honor," he said. "Truly."

Then he closed the door and went to make sure the others had eaten too.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!