This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Elias was lying in the grass thinking about turtles.

He'd stopped pretending he was going to get up anytime soon. The pigs had seen to that — one had tucked a cushion under his head before he'd even finished settling, another had angled a sunshade over him, and a third kept drifting past to check he had everything he could possibly need, which by now he did. So he lay there in the warm not-quite-real sunlight, hands behind his head, and watched the herd.

Step two was still beating him. The turtle had to use Mind Acceleration on him; he knew that much — and then he had to do something, and he had no idea what. He'd been chewing on it for days. Lying in a field staring at turtles wasn't the worst way to keep chewing.

The turtles ambled about doing turtle things. And the longer he watched, the more he noticed that they weren't quite as identical as he'd first assumed.

They were all gentle, all slow, all mostly interested in sleeping and eating. But underneath that, each one had its own little quirks.

Some loved the sun more than anything, and would plant themselves in the brightest patch of meadow and bake there for hours. Others kept making for the water, paddling around the shallows of the realm's little stream with surprising contentment for creatures built like rocks. A few went straight for the flowers every time, not to eat — well, not only to eat — but to push their faces in and just smell them. One had a favorite slope. One always slept upside-down against Briar's roots and had to be righted by a long-suffering pig every morning. One simply liked being near the others and would shuffle across half the meadow to sit beside a sleeping companion.

Little things. The kind of thing you'd only catch if you spent days flat on your back watching turtles. But Elias had built his whole life on little things, and something about this one tugged at him.

They were all the same species. Same skills, same temperament. And yet not one of them was actually the same.

The thought sat there for a moment, and then quietly turned into a question.

He still had his second question of the day.

He turned the idea over until it was simple enough to ask cleanly, then asked it. For the second step — did he have to find the one that suited him? The right turtle, the one that fit?

The answer came back.

Yes.

Elias was on his feet before he'd decided to stand, which sent Briar — wrapped around his arm as always — into a startled shiver of rustling leaves and shaking flowers. Valentine, dozing at his neck, didn't so much as twitch. The butterfly had been through a great many sudden breakthroughs by now and had clearly decided none of them were worth waking up for.

Across the meadow, the pigs watched their Young Master scramble up and bolt toward the nearest turtle, and several of them shook their heads in unison. Then, with the calm resignation of staff who had seen this exact thing more times than they could count, they began tidying up the abandoned cushions.

The nearest turtle was sunning itself near the stream, and it blinked its pure white eyes up at Elias with mild interest as he scooped it up and held it level with his face, eye to eye.

The turtle knew this part. Years of being rented to desperate students had trained it well — a few seconds held up like this was the signal, and, right on cue, it used Mind Acceleration.

The world changed.

Elias had read every account of what this felt like. None of them had come close. Everything was suddenly, impossibly clear. Every thought slid forward smooth and bright and effortless. A memory surfaced — some ordinary afternoon from years ago — and it wasn't a memory at all; it was happening, every detail of it laid out perfect and complete. His mind ran like water down a hill, and part of him wanted nothing more than to just sit in it and follow where it went.

But he didn't have time for that. He had a few minutes, maybe less, before the crash took him, and then hours of nothing. So he dragged his racing attention back to the turtle in his hands and made it work.

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He tried the obvious things first.

He pressed his forehead to the turtle's. Nothing. He concentrated as hard as his accelerated mind could manage, reaching for some connection, some thread. Nothing. The minutes were burning, and he could feel them going.

What finally worked was spiritual energy.

Almost out of ideas, he let his own spiritual energy flow out through his hands where they cupped the turtle's head — gently, the way he would with any beast he was trying to reach. For a moment there was still nothing. Then, second by second, something began to come through.

It was hard to describe even with his thoughts moving as fast as they were. Something that wasn't there and was there at the same time. An expanse of it, opening up under his attention — green, a deep delicious green, full of sunlight and a low spreading warmth, the feeling of a meadow at the height of a perfect afternoon. Elias felt it the way you feel a room you've walked into with your eyes closed, and somehow he knew, without being told, exactly what he was touching.

The turtle's mindspace.

The inside of it. The shape of how this one creature felt the world.

He had just enough time to marvel at it before the price came due. The accelerated minutes ran out all at once, the green folded away, and Elias pitched forward as the crash took him.

Briar caught them both. His vines shot out and spread wide, cradling the falling turtle in one and Elias in the other, lowering them down to the grass far more gently than gravity would have.

He woke four hours later in his own bed with a headache like a spike through his skull.

He groaned. It was, he thought dimly, exactly as advertised. Every account of the Fool's Turtle ended with the same warning, and now he understood why people only ever used the thing as a last resort. His head pounded with every heartbeat.

The door opened, and Sebastian came in carrying a tray, timed so perfectly that Elias suspected the butler had been listening for the first groan. Tea, something warm and faintly bitter that smelled of herbs, and a cool cloth.

"Slowly, Young Master," Sebastian said, easing him up against the pillows. "You did warn us this might happen. You did not mention you intended to do it to yourself on purpose."

"Research," Elias managed.

"Indeed."

For the next several hours, as much as Elias wanted to get straight back out to the turtles, the headache made it flatly impossible. He couldn't read. He couldn't think in a straight line. He could really only lie there and let the pigs fuss over him — a fresh cloth when the old one warmed, the tea topped up, the curtains drawn against the light — until the worst of it finally ebbed. There were, he admitted, far worse ways to be forced to rest.

The next day, with his head clear and two new questions to spend, he confirmed the whole shape of the second step.

A turtle had to use Mind Acceleration on him. Then, in those racing minutes, he had to reach the turtle's mindspace and feel it. And then — this was the part the asking made certain — he had to find the turtle whose mindspace fit him. The right one. A match.

Because the turtle from yesterday hadn't been it. He'd felt its mindspace clear as anything, that green sunlit warmth, and it had been lovely, but it hadn't been his. There'd been no click, no sense of rightness, nothing that said this one. Just a beautiful place that belonged to someone else.

So the search began, and it was a slow one by necessity.

He could only manage one turtle a day. The acceleration, the reaching, the few stolen minutes inside a mindspace, and then four hours unconscious and the rest of the day lost to the headache — there was no rushing it, no doubling up. One turtle. One mindspace. One crash. Every single day.

The pigs developed a whole routine around it. Sebastian had the bed turned down, and the herbal tea steeping before Elias ever picked up that day's turtle. Briar took up a permanent position nearby, vines ready to catch, having appointed himself official breaker-of-falls. Valentine watched the daily ritual with lordly indifference and went back to sleep.

And the mindspaces came, one a day, each one different.

Some were warm. Some were cool and still, like the bottom of a quiet pool. One was all wind and open space. One was so densely, sleepily peaceful that Elias nearly forgot to come out of it in time. He got to know five hundred turtles not by their shells but by the insides of their minds, the private green-and-gold worlds each one carried around without ever knowing it had it. It was, headaches and all, one of the strangest and most beautiful things he'd ever done.

But none of them fit. Day after day, mindspace after mindspace, lovely and wrong.

Until the thirty-seventh.

He'd lifted the turtle up the same as all the others, eye to eye, felt the world stretch and brighten the same as always, poured his spiritual energy out the same gentle way. And the moment the mindspace opened under him, he knew. There was no mistaking it. Where every other turtle's mind had been a beautiful place he was only visiting, this one felt like walking through his own front door. It fit. It simply, completely fit.

Elias barely had time to laugh before the crash took him, and even as he fell, pitching forward into Briar's waiting vines with a headache already gathering behind his eyes, he was grinning like a fool.

He'd found his turtle.

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