This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

With the Sparkling Jade Guppies bred true and the lake full of them, Elias’s first instinct was, as always, to give them away.

They were healing beasts, and there were always places that needed healing—wards and clinics and poor districts, all of them chronically short of exactly this. He was already turning over how to distribute them when Oliver, gently, talked him out of it.

It was a familiar dance between them by now. Elias found something wonderful; Elias wanted to hand it to everyone at once; Oliver, whose whole job was managing the consequences of Elias’s generosity, applied the brakes. Elias had learned to trust the brakes, even when he chafed against them.

“The frontier is one thing,” Oliver said. “Those donations we can bury—Cassian’s name covers a great deal, and military supply lines don’t invite questions. But this?” He gestured at the shimmering lake. “If Elias Arkwright suddenly floods the kingdom with precious life-attribute healing beasts, in bulk, out of nowhere—that’s not a quiet gift. That’s an earthquake. Every noble house, every breeder guild, every district that guards its healers jealously is going to want to know where they came from and how, and they will not stop asking.”

Elias sighed, because Oliver was right, and being right was one of Oliver’s more annoying habits.

So the guppies would stay, for now. The lake would be their home.

Perhaps, Elias thought, there would be a way later—once the evolution method was public and the guppies more common in general, once a flood of healing fish from his hands wouldn’t point straight back to a single lake in a rented breeding house. A problem for another day. He filed it away with the other someday-projects and let it go.

They did not seem to mind in the least.

It was, after all, very nearly a paradise built for them. The water ran thick with life attribute, clean and sweet; the Hundred Fragrance Vines carpeting the lakebed offered an endless banquet of life- and water-attribute leaves, flowers, and fruit; there was room to swim forever and nothing at all to fear. The guppies thrived and darted through their glowing world in shoals of drifting light.

And the lake itself was changing under them. Just as Amia’s tank had, only vastly larger and stranger, the water was slowly taking on a jade luster—but not one color. Blues and whites and greens, yellows, a soft lavender, shades of jade Elias didn’t have names for, all of them shifting and blending through the depths. It had begun to look like a liquid aurora, a slow silent light show playing out across the whole enormous lake, and Elias found he did not mind keeping the guppies here at all. He could have watched it for hours. Some evenings, he did.

Oliver, standing beside him at the water’s edge, saw something different.

Where Elias saw a mesmerizing thing of beauty, Oliver saw the storm it represented—the sheer commotion that would break loose the day the world learned there was now a method to turn ten thousand common, worthless river-guppies into formidable life-and-healing spirit beasts of Lord-rank potential. It would upend markets. It would rewrite what healing cost, and who could afford it. It was, in its quiet way, one of the most disruptive things Elias had ever made.

He glanced sidelong at the young man beside him, watching the lights with such simple delight, and could not help but marvel. Again and again Elias did this—reached into some corner everyone else had written off and pulled out a miracle, without ever quite seeming to notice he’d done it. It made Oliver’s endless work worth the effort. It always had.

He would say none of this to Elias, of course. The man got embarrassed by the praise, went pink, waved it off, and changed the subject. So Oliver simply stood beside him and watched the lights, and kept his admiration to himself, and privately began drafting the six different plans he would need for the day the world found out.

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With the guppies settled and their numbers holding steady, it was finally time for the thing they had come all this way to do: Amia’s evolution.

As he searched for his parents to tell the good knews sebations came to inform him his parents had slipped off into the district somewhere, in his unhurried way.

Elias didn’t think much of it. His head was full of guppy-jade and evolution paths, and he’d been indoors too long besides; a little fresh air and some ordinary tourism sounded like exactly the thing to clear it. So he set the work down, left the secret realm, and headed out into Silverstream to cool his mind—with Cassian, as ever, falling into step at his side.

It had become a comfortable thing, the two of them walking together. Cassian said little and needed to be told nothing; he simply matched his pace to Elias’s and let the breeder wander wherever his eye led. After the strange charged air of the day Cassian returned—the apology, the slap, all of it—something had eased between them, settled into a quiet that was more companionable than awkward. Elias had stopped questioning why the commander was always there. He had started, without quite noticing, to expect it.

He was still half-lost in his own thoughts when he heard it.

“Enough!”

Elias stopped dead in the street.

It was his father’s voice. He was certain of it—and that was the impossible part, because in all his years, through every scrape and setback and disaster, Elias had never once heard his dad raise his voice. Not once. His father was the calm one, the steady one, the man who met every storm with quiet. And he had just shouted.

Whatever was happening, it was serious enough to crack the steadiest man Elias had ever known. And some cold part of him connected it, all at once, to the shadow he’d seen fall over his parents these past days—the quiet that had come and gone, the fine that hadn’t quite been fine. He should have asked more. He hadn’t. And now here it was.

Elias followed the sound, Cassian a half-step behind him now and alert, and came around the corner to the front of the breeding shop.

Damian and Selena stood there, and they were not calm at all. They were squared off—confronting another man and woman, an older pair, dignified in bearing and richly dressed, the kind of people who wore authority like a coat. The four of them stood locked in something tense and old and clearly not new.

Elias had never seen his mother stand like that—not sparring, not laughing, but rigid, her whole body a warning. And Damian, who never raised his voice, had it up now, his jaw tight, one arm half-across Selena as though to keep something between her and the strangers. Whatever this was, its roots ran for years before Elias was born.

But it was the woman who caught Elias and would not let go.

Because she looked like him. Like him, and like Damian—the same lines in the face, the same set of the features, softened by years but unmistakable. Elias knew, the instant he saw her, with a certainty that went past thought: they shared blood. This was family. Family he had never seen before in his life.

He had no name for her. His parents almost never spoke of Silverstream, and never of anyone they’d left behind in it. In eighteen years the subject had simply not existed—a closed door his family kept shut so quietly he’d never even noticed it was a door. And here, apparently, was what lay behind it, standing in the street in expensive clothes, wearing his father’s face on an older woman’s frame.

His footsteps, or Cassian’s, gave them away. The four of them turned.

For a moment they all simply looked at Elias, and at the tall crimson-haired commander at his shoulder—and then the older man and woman went still with surprise, staring at Elias’s face.

It was a thing Elias was used to, in a smaller way. He looked so much like Damian that strangers routinely took them for brothers rather than father and son. On these two faces, though, the recognition landed like a blow. They looked at him the way people look at a ghost—at a face they knew, worn by someone they didn’t, appearing where it had no business being. Whatever they had come to Silverstream expecting, it had not been this.

The woman found her voice first. She looked from Elias to Damian and back again, and what she said came out cracked and disbelieving.

“You had a child?”

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