This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Elias had sat through a great many meals in his life. This was, without question, the most uncomfortable.

The food was extraordinary—the restaurant deserved every coin of its reputation—and he could barely taste a bite of it. Across the table, Kyle was shoveling food in with every appearance of a young man enjoying himself, but Elias knew his brother too well to be fooled. Kyle wasn’t enjoying a thing. He was performing enjoyment, loudly, because the alternative was sitting still in a silence that made his skin crawl, and eating was something to do with his hands.

What made it worse—what made it almost unbearable—was the way his grandparents behaved.

To Damian, and to Elias himself, they were warmth itself. Gracious, attentive, gentle. They asked Elias thoughtful questions and listened to his answers; they suggested this dish and that one, pressed the good wine on Damian, smiled at both of them with real and evident fondness. If that had been the whole of it, it might almost have been pleasant.

But it wasn’t the whole of it. Because when it came to Selena, or to Kyle, the warmth simply… stopped. It was never rude. Nothing so crude as an insult, nothing you could point to and name. It was subtler and colder than that: a question never directed their way, a dish never offered, an eye that slid past them as though the chairs they sat in were empty. As though ignoring Damian’s wife and Damian’s elder son were simply the natural order of things, too obvious to require any unkindness at all.

That, Elias thought, was so much worse than rudeness. Rudeness at least acknowledged you existed.

He’d spent his life around people who were kind—truly kind, all the way through, the kind of kindness that didn’t stop at the edge of who was worth being kind to. His mother, fierce and warm. Oliver, generous under all his scheming. Cassian, gentle in the careful way of a man who’d had to learn it. This was something else wearing kindness’s clothes: a warmth that turned out to be conditional, a courtesy that was really a verdict about who counted. It made his skin crawl worse than open cruelty would have.

He watched his mother absorb it without a flicker—Selena had swallowed worse than these two in her life and would not give them the satisfaction—and he watched his father not absorb it at all.

Damian’s composure was legendary in the family. Elias had seen him stay gentle and calm through disasters that would have broken other men. But he would not, could not, sit quietly and let these people erase his wife across a dinner table, and Elias watched the calm crack, watched one thing lead to another, watched it build toward the shout and the standing and the leaving.

And when his father rose and said they were going, Elias almost let it happen. It would have been easy. Walk out, leave these cold gracious people behind, never look back.

But he didn’t want it to end like that. Loose ends had a way of following you home.

And there was something else, too, underneath. Elias had watched these people spend an entire meal deciding that his mother and his brother did not matter—and he found that he was not willing to simply walk away and leave that verdict standing unanswered. Not out of anger, exactly. Out of something colder and clearer than anger. He wanted the account closed, properly, on his terms, so that it could never be reopened.

“Wait,” Elias said. “Before we go. There’s something I’d like to say.”

He glanced at his family and, very slightly, smiled—at his father, his mother, his scowling brother—and mouthed, don’t worry. Then he waited until they had settled back into their chairs, and turned to the two people across the table. His grandparents. By blood, at least.

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“I can’t claim to know my dad the way the two of you must have,” he began, evenly. “You raised him. I’ve only had him my whole life, which is a different thing. So I won’t pretend to speak for him. I’ll just tell you what I know.”

“What I know is this. As much as it frustrates him—as much as he’s given up hoping for it—he still wants you to understand him. After everything, after all these years, some part of him still wants his parents to see that he’s happy. Not resigned. Not settling. Happy.” Elias let that sit a moment. “And if his happiness isn’t enough for you—if you can’t look at the life he built and the family he chose and simply be glad he’s happy in it—then there’s nothing here for any of us. We’ll never see each other eye to eye, and there’s no use pretending otherwise.”

He said it without heat. That was the thing his grandparents seemed least prepared for—not anger, which they could have dismissed as a child’s tantrum, but a calm, level certainty that sounded uncomfortably like their son. He watched the resemblance register on their faces and did nothing to soften it.

His grandparents said nothing. He hadn’t expected them to.

Then Elias reached into the bag he’d carried all this way and set three small things on the white tablecloth.

Three baby Sparkling Jade Guppies, each in its own delicate sphere of water, shimmering pure white, trailing motes of green light. Even here, even now, they drew the eye—small living jewels on the fine linen.

His grandmother’s composure slipped at the sight of them, just for an instant. She knew exactly what she was looking at. Anyone from Silverstream would. Three Sparkling Jade Guppies, healthy and young, set down on a tablecloth as casually as a man might leave a tip—it was a small fortune, and more than a fortune, a thing that money alone could not reliably buy. She looked from the guppies to the plain-dressed grandson who had produced them from a bag, and something in her calculation visibly failed to add up.

He’d thought about this carefully. From his father’s story he knew what a Sparkling Jade Guppy was worth, how much the family had once paid to contract Amia, how precious these were as a strategic resource of Silverstream. Whatever debt of upbringing might be said to hang over his father—every coin the Ostends had ever spent raising him—Elias meant to settle it, here, now, and be done.

“Please, take them,” he said. “Consider it repayment. For everything you spent on my father, everything you gave him growing up—all of it, paid back, in full. These are worth a great deal. More than enough.”

He met their eyes.

“Thank you for what you did for him, truly. He wouldn’t be the man he is without some of it. But that’s the end of the account.” He gathered the bag and stood. “Goodbye. It was—interesting, meeting you. And I hope we never do again.” A small, perfectly polite smile. "If we do, I expect it'll be in court."

Then Elias stood, and his family stood with him.

They rose together, all of them, and turned their backs on the fine table and the two stunned faces behind it. Kyle, being Kyle, twisted around at the last moment to stick his tongue out at the old couple—and got two hands to the back of the head for it at once, one from Selena and one from Elias, delivered in perfect unison.

“What!” Kyle protested, rubbing his skull. “They deserved it!”

“They did,” Selena agreed. “You still don’t stick your tongue out. You’re a grown man.”

And just like that, walking out the door, they were themselves again—warm and easy and loud and whole. The cold gracious room fell away behind them, and the family closed back around its own warmth the way water closes over a stone.

Damian was the last through the door, and at the threshold he glanced back.

His parents sat where they’d left them, and their faces had gone from gracious to something rawer—confused, indignant, unable to comprehend how the evening had slipped so entirely out of their hands. There had been a time, long ago, when those two faces had been his whole world. When he would have done anything, been anything, twisted himself into any shape they asked, only to earn their approval and make them proud. He had spent his youth chasing exactly the look they were failing to give him now.

It astonished him, a little, to find that it no longer moved him at all.

Somewhere across sixty years he had stopped needing them, without ever quite noticing the moment it happened. He had found his own happiness. He had built his own family, out of nothing the Ostends would have chosen, and it was better than anything they had ever planned for him.

So Damian did not spare his parents a second glance. He turned from the door, and went back to where he belonged—to the warm loud tangle of his wife and his sons, walking out into the Silverstream evening—and did not look back again.

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