This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

The Keeper was gone again.

That was how the hive thought of him—the Keeper. The tall, soft, slow-moving creature who walked among the flowers and never stung. He smelled of paper and patience. He made the sun rise and set in their world; he brought the flowers that sang with life; he lay in the grass and let them crawl across his face and did not so much as flinch. He was the one who had found the path that lifted their kind out of smallness, who had given a humble line of bees a future none of them could have dreamed—and who treated even the least worker among them with a gentleness that no queen had ever forgotten.

To the colony, he was not quite a god and not quite kin, but something warm and necessary that sat squarely between the two.

And today he had stepped through the shimmering door at the edge of the world and vanished, the way he sometimes did.

The hive did not panic. He always came back. But in his absence, a very old and very serious matter resurfaced—one the thirty queens had been feuding over, with mounting intensity, for some time.

Who, precisely, had the right to remain closest to him?

It was no small question, as far as the queens were concerned.

There were thirty of them now, each a sovereign in her own right, each crowned with the same emerald-and-gold majesty, each utterly convinced of her own singular worth. To the queens, the Keeper was not merely a talented beast tamer. He was the one who had discovered their evolution, expanded their species’ future, and shown them kindness when the rest of the world had thought them too common to notice. Every last one of them wished to claim the honor of standing at his side.

And there, of course, was the trouble. Every last one of them wished to claim it.

A Lifebloom Queen was a regal creature by nature, proud and certain and not the least bit inclined to defer to a rival. Thirty such queens, each believing herself best suited to the role, made for precisely the sort of standoff one might expect: thirty crowns and not one of them willing to bow.

So the matter was settled the only way it could be. Not with a brawl—that was beneath them, or so they all loudly insisted—but with a contest.

They would prove their worth. Each queen would demonstrate, through genuine achievement, why she deserved the place: through the prosperity of the hives she tended, the richness of the honey she coaxed forth, the healing she accomplished, the help she gave the Keeper’s endless research, and the leadership she showed over the colony. Whoever proved herself most worthy would earn the right to remain closest to him.

It was a fine and dignified idea.

It became, almost immediately, a political nightmare.

Dozens of proud, ambitious queens all attempting to out-achieve one another at once was, as it turned out, a recipe for magnificent disorder.

They competed at everything. One queen poured her stored life essence into the dullest patch of grass she could find and grew it into a riotous explosion of bloom, then turned, expectant, to see if anyone had noticed—only for a rival three flowers over to grow something bigger, and a third to grow something bigger still, until a corner of the meadow had erupted into a ridiculous arms race of overgrown daisies, one of them grown to the size of a dinner plate by a queen who stood beside it vibrating with pride.

They competed at honey, at wax, at the tending of the worker bees, at who could organize the hive most efficiently—which mostly meant several queens issuing contradictory commands to increasingly confused workers, who did their patient best to obey four sovereigns at once and pleased none of them.

They competed, too, at sheer spectacle, weaving grand aerial patterns trailing ribbons of golden light, each performance more ostentatious than the last—and the displays were genuinely beautiful, right up until two queens claimed the same loop of sky and dissolved into mid-air bickering, or one young hopeful attempted a maneuver so ambitious that she lost track of her own wings and tumbled gracelessly into a flowerbed, emerging dusted in pollen and radiating wounded dignity.

Cooperation was, frankly, not in their nature. Each queen believed herself best suited for the role, and few could bear to work alongside the very rivals she meant to surpass. The contest threatened, more than once, to collapse into exactly the undignified scrum it had been designed to avoid.

And that, perhaps, was the heart of the problem.

There was no one to preside over them. Floria—the first, the eldest of them all—was not here. She belonged to the gentle healer who shared the Keeper’s blood, and she went where he went, far beyond the shimmering door. Had she been present, a single sharp command of her pheromones would have settled the squabbling in an instant. But she was elsewhere, and so the thirty queens were left to govern themselves—which was rather like leaving thirty crowns in a room and asking them to agree on who should wear the throne.

The result was exactly as dignified as one might expect.

Still—somewhere beneath all the chaos and the sulking and the dinner-plate daisies—a quieter truth was waiting to be discovered. And three of the queens were about to stumble into it before any of the others.

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Because while every other queen strove to outshine her rivals, three of them did something none of the others had thought to do.

They stopped competing with one another—and started working together.

It began almost by accident. One queen, meticulous and tireless, had taken to organizing the others’ scattered efforts into something resembling order. Another, gracious and clever-tongued, had a gift for smoothing the endless disputes, coaxing furious rivals back from the brink of open war. And a third, a dreamer forever chasing some new and impossible idea, kept suggesting strange experiments that, against all expectation, kept working. Apart, each was simply one more talented queen among thirty. Together, they were something else entirely—organized, harmonious, and endlessly inventive, accomplishing more as three than any of them could alone.

The disciplined one kept the hives in flawless order. The diplomatic one wove the fractious colony into something like unity. The dreamer turned wild notions into the hive’s greatest innovations. Where the others fought over the prize, the three simply earned it, quietly and together, until there was nothing left to argue.

One by one, the other queens conceded—reluctantly, with no small amount of sulking, but they conceded. There was no defeating a partnership that had stopped trying to win and simply started to excel.

The matter was settled. The three had earned their place.

The Keeper returned the next day. And he was not alone.

The shimmering door opened, and he stepped through with a second creature beside him—an older one, white-furred atop his head, who smelled of dust and ink and many, many years. The hive bristled with wary interest. A stranger. But the Keeper walked easily beside him, unafraid, and so the colony watched rather than warned.

“Here it is,” Elias said, spreading his arms wide as Professor Aldwin stepped into the meadow and stopped dead. “What I’ve been hiding.”

The old man stood frozen at the edge of the field, taking in the impossible glowing meadow, the towering hive, the haze of head-sized queens drifting like jeweled lanterns over a sea of life-attribute flowers. His mouth opened. Nothing came out.

“Elias,” he managed at last, hoarsely. “Those are—what are those? That hive—the size of them—is that a Commander aura I’m feeling? From a bee?”

“Lifebloom Bee Queens,” Elias said, pride warm and unmistakable in his voice. “Evolved from common Amberwings. I’ll explain everything—the path, the steps, the products. It’s a long story.” He gestured into the field. “But first, come and look. They don’t bite. Well. They don’t bite people they like.”

Professor Aldwin walked into that meadow like a man walking into a dream, and Elias led him through it, talking all the while—the evolution, the flowers, the four steps, the willing heart, the long patient months of work. The old man’s stunned silence gave way, bit by bit, to the rapid and hungry curiosity of a lifelong scholar handed something genuinely, impossibly new.

And while the two humans talked, the three queens made their move.

They had waited—with as much patience as their nature allowed, which was not much—and the moment the Keeper settled into the grass to better explain something to the white-furred stranger, they descended together, as they now did everything.

The disciplined one alighted on his shoulder with composed, proprietary dignity, already eyeing the loose papers in his bag as though deciding how best to organize them. The gracious one settled upon his knee, gentle and poised. And the dreamer, smallest and least able to contain herself, claimed the top of his head and stayed there, beaming with delight at the world from her perfect vantage.

Far off, at a careful and respectful distance, the other twenty-seven queens and the whole vast colony watched, holding to the bargain the three had won.

Elias paused mid-sentence.

He looked at the composed queen on his shoulder. At the gracious one on his knee. At the irrepressible little one perched on top of him. And then he glanced, somehow knowingly, toward the distant hive where the rest of the queens hovered in disciplined, watchful rows—as though he understood, without being told, that something had been decided in his absence. That these three, and these three alone, had earned their place beside him.

A slow, delighted smile spread across his face.

“So that’s how it is,” he murmured. “You three settled it among yourselves, did you?”

The three queens preened in perfect, unified smugness.

“Well,” Elias said, “if you’re going to be my closest, you’ll need names.”

Professor Aldwin, watching his finest former student converse with three head-sized bees, wore the expression of a man who had given up on being surprised for the day and said nothing at all.

Elias considered the composed queen on his shoulder—the orderly one, already nudging his scattered papers into a tidier stack with single-minded purpose. “You like everything in its proper place, don’t you? Tidy, sharp, a little bit bossy.” He smiled. “Holly.” Holly gave a crisp, approving buzz, as though the name had been correctly filed.

He turned to the gracious queen on his knee, calm and warm and watchful, the one he’d already seen smoothing a dozen squabbles among her sisters. “And you’re the peacemaker. Sweet as your own honey.” He nodded. “Honey.” Honey dipped her head with gentle, gracious dignity, well pleased.

Finally he went and touched the bee on top,—the restless dreamer, fairly trembling with eagerness, her gaze already drifting toward the half-built experiments at the edge of the meadow. “And you, you little dreamer, little wanderer.” He thought a moment, and his smile softened. “Hope.” The smallest queen did a small, joyful spin in the air before settling right back onto her hard-won perch.

“Holly, Honey, and Hope,” Elias said, trying out the names, and found that he liked them. “My three little ministers.”

From the distant hive, the watching queens stirred—some content, some still faintly sulking, all of them, in their wordless way, acknowledging the new order. The matter, at last, was properly and permanently settled—and somewhere far beyond the shimmering door, had she known of it, the queen who had started their whole lineage would surely have flicked her wings in quiet approval.

“Elias,” Professor Aldwin said faintly, “you named your bees.”

“They named themselves, really,” Elias said, entirely serious, as Hope washed her face on his head. “I only provided the words.”

The old man looked at him, looked at the three queens, looked at the glowing impossible meadow that by every rule he knew should not exist—and began, helplessly, to laugh.

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