This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

In the few days before they set off, Oliver worked a small miracle.

Elias's plan, such as it was, had been to arrive in Silverstream, find a hotel, and then go looking for a breeding house to rent once they were there—sort it all out on the ground, the way he sorted out most things. Oliver had listened to this plan with the pained patience of a man who arranged things for a living, and then quietly gone and arranged a better one. By the time they were ready to leave, he had secured an entire vacant breeding house in Silverstream, empty and theirs, for a full six months.

Elias had been faintly embarrassed and enormously grateful, which was the usual result of letting Oliver handle anything.

The reason he needed a breeding house at all came down to the core.

On the morning they left, Elias stood on the platform at the heart of the secret realm and watched Cassian work. The commander's spiritual energy moved with a control that was almost frightening to observe—careful, exact, coaxing rather than forcing—and Elias wove his own energy into it, the two of them threading together around the anchor at the platform's center until, at last, the core of the secret realm lifted free.

This was the whole reason he'd wanted a portable realm in the first place.

An ordinary secret realm was a fixed thing, rooted to its place. But Elias's could be taken up and carried—core and all—and set down anywhere he liked, which was worth a very great deal to a man whose work kept sending him across the continent. The only catch was that lifting the core required a King-rank beast tamer's hand on the spiritual energy, delicate and strong at once. That was a rare thing to have on call. With Cassian here, it was no trouble at all.

And everything inside would be perfectly safe. The realm was its own small world, complete—Briar's endless vines, the bees, the Butler Pigs' quarters, all of it. The horses were gone now—every last one of the thousand evolved into a Guiding Horse and sent on to the Sagittarius frontier, all save one: the single small Glimmering Horse Damian had chosen, waiting still for his father to contract it and raise it, the long way, into a Guiding Horse of his own. Every beast within had everything it needed to live, and none of them would feel so much as a ripple of the journey, unless something happened to the core itself. Which was precisely why Cassian would be guarding it.

So, with the core secured and Cassian set to watch over it, they left for Silverstream—aboard the first-class cabins of a King-rank mechanical-type airship.

There was no other sensible way to cross between districts. The wild lands between the calm central regions were dangerous, thick with beast tides and worse, and only something powerful and armored enough to shrug them off could make the crossing routinely. A King-rank airship did exactly that, hauling passengers and cargo over the danger in comfort while the wilds raged harmlessly below.

Cassian, characteristically, had tried to arrange something safer still. Teleportation existed—it was real, and he'd wanted Elias and the family to travel that way, instant and untouchable. The trouble was that a secret realm's core could not be teleported; it had to go by ship. Which meant Cassian would have had to send them ahead and follow days later with the core himself, alone. Elias had thought about being handed off to a teleportation array while Cassian rode the dangerous route by himself, and decided, simply, that they would all just go together. Cassian had not looked entirely pleased about it. He had also not argued.

The first-class room was larger than Elias's house.

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He stood in the doorway of it with his family crowded in behind him and simply stared. It had bedrooms—several. Bathrooms. A full kitchen, a playroom, a room with nothing in it but screens and couches, a proper little theater, and, absurdly, a swimming pool. An actual swimming pool, inside an airship, inside a spirit beast.

Because that was the part that kept catching at Elias, the part he couldn't stop turning over: they were inside a spirit beast. All of this—the pool, the theater, the impossible space—was the interior of a living creature.

Mechanical-types were, he thought, almost certainly the one kind of spirit beast he would never make.

It wasn't that he had anything against them. He simply couldn't work with them, not the way his mind worked. Every other type of beast grew—it started small and became more, step by step, along a path you could find and coax and follow. That was the whole shape of what Elias did. But mechanical-types didn't evolve. They were built. Assembled from nothing, manufactured piece by piece, part fitted to part, until a thing that had never been alive in the ordinary sense stood up and lived anyway.

If his work made him something close to a biologist, then a mechanical-type breeder was an engineer—and that simply did not sit right in Elias's head. He could admire the airship. He could not imagine ever building one.

The journey itself passed without much event, which was exactly what a King-rank airship was for.

The biggest thing to happen along the way was a tide of flying demonic beasts that came at them somewhere over the wilds—a churning swarm that would have been the end of any lesser vessel. The airship dealt with it in minutes. To a creature of its rank, it was less a battle than a nuisance, an everyday occurrence swatted aside between meals, and the passengers barely felt it. Elias lay on the absurdly comfortable bed and watched the flashes through the window and then went back to his notes.

The rest of it was, by every account, wonderful.

The food was extraordinary. The views out over the racing world below were the kind a person remembered. Rowan and Kyle were beside themselves—a whole ship of games and films and luxury laid out for them, and the two of them tore through all of it with matching delight. Damian and Selena took the chance to go on something very like a date, wandering the ship together. Oliver and Cassian, of course, were still working, because they were always still working. Iris drifted about with open curiosity, poking into every room. Seraphina found a quiet corner and her books and was entirely content.

And Elias worked. He turned his questions over the guppy's evolution, one careful query at a time, and slowly the shape of the thing came clear.

He had spent enough time around Amia to know what a Sparkling Jade Guppy could do. They were healers, first and last. The water a guppy controlled could be given healing and disinfecting properties, made clean and mending at a touch; and beyond that they could gather life energy into small, concentrated draughts, water so rich with vitality it could be given to the badly hurt. But the strangest and loveliest of their gifts was quieter than either. Any water a guppy simply lived in long enough would fill, little by little, with life energy—until it took on a soft, shimmering jade glow, water turned slowly into something like liquid gemstone. Amia's tank at home had always held that glow. It was drawn off and used whenever a patient needed it, once it reached the mark; but even so, every time Elias had looked at it as a boy, he had thought it was the most magical thing in the house.

The two affordable paths, then. He worked at them with his questions until he could confirm the important things one by one. Both, evolved, reached King-rank potential—that alone made them worth everything. One path gained the Mental attribute. The other gained the Blood attribute. Pressing further, he pinned down the difference that mattered: the Mental path leaned deeper into healing, refining what the guppy already was, while the Blood path turned outward toward combat, trading some of that gentleness for teeth.

So he asked his father the simple question underneath all of it—did he want Amia to lean further into healing, or to keep her healing but gain real fighting power alongside it? Damian answered as Elias had known he would, without much hesitation at all. Healing. Of course healing. That was who the man was, and who Amia had always been. So Elias set the choice down: the Mental-attribute evolution it would be.

He had just begun turning over the next question—the how of it, the requirements, the steps—when the airship began its descent, and Silverstream District rose up to meet them.

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