This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Damian Arkwright had spent the years not telling this story. It had never seemed worth the telling—a thing of the past, sealed and left behind. He should have known that, in his experience, the past did not stay where it was put.

They walked to the restaurant together, all six of them, and the wrongness of that number sat strangely in Damian’s chest.

It was one of the finest establishments in Silverstream, the kind of place his parents had always favored—gleaming and expensive and quietly certain of its own worth. His mother had named it without hesitation. Of course she had. Sixty years, and some things did not change at all.

Behind them trailed the rest of it: Elias, thoughtful and quiet, Kyle, ambling and unbothered. And beside Damian walked Selena, her spine straight, her jaw set, the girl he had run away with grown into the woman who would not now give these people the satisfaction of seeing her flinch. Damian took her hand. She let him.

His sons deserved the truth. He had put it off long enough.

“You know your mother and I are from Silverstream,” he began, as they walked. “And that we eloped. You’ve never known much more than that, because we never told you more. We considered it finished business.” He drew a breath. “It seems it isn’t.”

He told it plainly, the way he told everything.

His name had not always been Arkwright. He had been born Damian Ostend, into the Ostend family—rich, old, influential. And he had wanted for nothing. Ever. Comfort, tutors, opportunity, praise—every advantage a talented young man could be handed, he was handed, before he ever thought to ask for it. Elegant, gifted, admired. The perfect gentleman.

He did not say the rest of it, the part he had never found words for even inside his own head—how a life laid out that completely stops feeling like a life at all, and starts to feel like a road someone else is walking in your body.

Then Selena took up her half, because it was hers to tell.

She said it flatly, without softening any of it. She had been an orphan, raised by no one, scraping through the poorer quarters of Silverstream on wits and grit and whatever the day allowed. She had learned early that no one was coming to help, and had stopped waiting for it.

And then one day she had found an injured Snowfall Owl—a broken-winged thing that should by every rule of her life have been left where it lay, one more mouth she could not feed. She had taken it in anyway. She had gone looking for a healer who might mend it.

That was where she met Damian.

Damian remembered that day better than he remembered most of his childhood.

He had been doing charity work—offering his healer’s gift to the poor of the district, which was a fine and noble thing to be seen doing, and which the Ostend name made sure was seen. That was the shape of his generosity then: real enough, and never quite his own. And into his tidy line of the grateful poor had come a sharp-eyed, furious girl with a dying owl in her arms who plainly expected him to be useless and was prepared to hate him for it.

He had healed the owl. Eiren, she would be called, in time.

And then, somehow, one thing had led to another, and to another after that, across weeks and then months, and the two of them—who could not have come from more opposite ends of one district—had fallen in love.

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He had been so certain, at first, that he was the one teaching her things. He was wrong.

Selena had thought him a soft, sheltered noble, and had said so, often. But over those months she had learned his kindness was real, and that his calm was a thing you could rest against, a steadiness that did not break. And he had learned her—her fierce, unbending will, her refusal to be pitied, the ferocious determination that had kept a parentless child alive in a place built to swallow her. She had shown him what a life chosen rather than assigned could look like. He had never gone back.

The Ostends, of course, had not taken it well.

They already had a suitor arranged for him—suitable, advantageous, a good match for the house. An orphan girl from the gutter quarters was not part of any plan. There had been no reasoning with them. So Damian had done the one wholly unplanned thing of his entire planned life: he had walked away from all of it, the name and the wealth and the road laid out before him, and run off with Selena, and never once regretted it.

For sixty years, he had believed they were content to let him go.

That had suited him. He had built a new name and a new life in Heartwood, raised two sons, grown quietly proud of the man he’d become when no one was arranging it for him. The Ostends had felt as distant as a story about someone else.

He should have known better. The moment word of his arrival in Silverstream reached the wrong ears, they had come—as though sixty years were nothing, as though he were still a possession briefly mislaid. He did not know yet what they wanted. He was fairly sure he would not like it.

He glanced back at his sons, to see how the story had landed.

Kyle was pulling a face. The love-story portion had clearly been more than he’d bargained for, and he wore the expression of a young man who would much rather be fighting something than hearing his parents describe falling in love. Damian felt a flicker of fondness. That, at least, was uncomplicated.

Elias was harder to read, as ever. His younger son had gone thoughtful and a little distant, turning something over behind his eyes—and at some point he had slipped away briefly and come back carrying something in a bag, held carefully. Neither Damian nor Selena asked what it was. They had long since learned that Elias’s quiet purposes were usually worth trusting, and that he would show them when he was ready.

Then they reached the restaurant, and were seated, and for a little while it was almost civil.

His parents were gracious in the practiced way of people to whom grace was a tool. They asked after his health, his work, his years. Damian answered evenly and gave them nothing to pry at. It might, he let himself hope, pass as a cold and formal meal and nothing worse.

It did not.

It began, as these things did with them, in the shape of concern.

Were you happy? they asked. And when he said yes—plainly, truthfully, yes—they did not believe it. They could not believe it. It was written all over their gentle, doubting faces: that a man could not truly be happy with someone like Selena, that whatever he’d built out here was a sad small consolation, that the only real happiness they could imagine for him was the one they had once planned. They said it in soft words and softer implications, and every one of them landed on his wife.

Damian felt the old trap closing again—the smiling, reasonable, immovable certainty of people who had never once doubted they knew what was best for him.

And then they began, at the table, in front of Selena, to talk of marriage candidates.

As though the last sixty years had been a phase. As though his wife were not sitting three feet away. As though he were twenty again and merely needed steering back onto the proper road.

That was when Damian shouted.

He was not a man who shouted. He heard his own voice crack across the fine quiet restaurant—enough—and saw his parents flinch, and did not care. He had no hope for this, he realized. There was nothing here to salvage. These people would never see Selena as anything but a mistake, and he would not sit and let them say it.

He stood. He said they were leaving.

And then Elias, who had been silent through all of it, spoke.

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

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