This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Cassian Sagittarius had spent his entire life on the frontier, and so he had no frame of reference for a place like Heartwood District.

He arrived in the early afternoon, and the strangeness of it struck him before he had walked a hundred paces. There was no smell of scorched earth. No distant pressure of churning spiritual energy against the back of his skull. No watchtower bells, no muster horns, none of the low constant tension that lived in the spine of every frontier town. Just a wide street under a clean sky, lined with shops and gardens, and people—ordinary people—moving through it without once glancing toward the horizon to see what might be coming over it.

That, more than anything, was what unsettled him.

He had been able to leave at all only because of the turtles.

In the months since the Protector Turtle evolution had reached his legion, the casualties had dropped sharply—soldiers who would once have been broken by the frontier’s endless tides of Illusion and Mental energy now held their minds intact, shielded by a single small pendant resting against the collarbone. Madness had always claimed more of his people than any beast. Now it claimed fewer. For the first time in living memory, the line could be held without bleeding men dry simply to keep them sane.

It had freed him. The heir of the Sagittarius Legion could step away from his post, for once.

His mother and father would hold the Frontier in his absence, as they had held it for far more years than he had been alive. They always had. They always would. The thought carried no anxiety—only the quiet, bone-deep certainty of a man who had grown up watching the two of them turn back nightmares without flinching. The line was in good hands. Better hands than his.

Still, he could not shake the feeling of being somewhere he did not belong.

It was like wearing another man’s coat—well made, perhaps, but cut for shoulders that were not his. He walked through Heartwood’s peaceful streets and felt the wrongness of his own ease there, the way a soldier feels the silence after a battle and does not quite trust it.

And yet.

He watched a pair of children chase a common spirit beast across a square, shrieking with laughter. He watched an old man doze in the sun outside a teahouse, untroubled. He watched a young woman laugh at something her companion said, careless and bright, with no shadow behind her eyes at all—no fear that one day the person beside her would march out past the wall and simply never come home.

This was what the frontier was for.

Every soldier he had ever buried had died so that places like this could exist—so that somewhere, people could live without ever learning the weight of that word, casualty. He had carried so many of those names for so long that he had half forgotten what they were carried in service of. Standing here, in all this undeserved quiet, he remembered. And he was glad. The sacrifices had not been misplaced. Whatever else this strange, soft place made him feel, it made him glad of that.

He had thought a great deal about the nameless breeder over the years.

It was difficult not to. A single anonymous source had reshaped his entire war—the Lifebloom honey that pulled men back from death, the mind-shielding turtles, a dozen smaller miracles besides—and never once asked for a name in return. Cassian had built a hundred pictures of who such a person might be.

An eccentric genius, perhaps, half-mad with brilliance and contemptuous of the world.

A stubborn old master hoarding secrets behind a wall of conditions.

A hidden hermit who despised people and worked only to be left alone.

He had been certain it would be one of these. Powerful, strange, difficult. People who changed the world usually were.

Then the door had opened, and Elias Arkwright had walked through it.

He had put a face to the breeder at last, and the face had undone every picture at once.

Over the years Cassian had seen a great many people, and watched a great many of them perish, and somewhere in all of it he had grown—without ever meaning to—unsettlingly good at reading them. A glance was often enough. He read Elias in the space of a few heartbeats.

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Young. Far younger than the work suggested—young enough that it should not have been possible.

Honest. Plainly, almost helplessly so; there was no second face behind the first, no angle being worked, nothing held back for advantage.

Bad with people—and trying anyway. Cassian recognized the particular care of someone who found other human beings difficult and chose to keep reaching toward them regardless.

It was nothing like what he had expected. And yet he found he was not disappointed.

He was only surprised—deeply, genuinely surprised—that such young hands could give away such miracles and ask for nothing at all. That the source of so much salvation should turn out to be a quiet boy who looked more worried about inconveniencing them than about anything else in the room.

And when the contract was sworn, and Cassian watched the boy’s reaction to it—the startled distress, the protest that they shouldn’t spend their lives on a stranger, the way he had clearly never once considered himself worth that kind of devotion—any last doubt went quiet in him.

He would not regret this. Of that much, Cassian was certain. He had wagered his life on far worse reasons, for far worse men.

This was the first time he had ever wagered it on someone he was glad to follow.

Afterward, Elias guided them to his secret realm, and his family folded easily around him.

On the way, the boy talked—and the most he ever spoke of, by a wide margin, was his spirit beasts and his research on evolution. He spoke of attribute affinities and grafting, of bees and vines and turtles, his quiet reserve falling away entirely the moment the subject turned to the creatures he loved.

Cassian understood perhaps half of it.

This was a thing worth noting: Cassian Sagittarius despised wasting time on matters that did not concern him. A commander’s hours were currency, and he spent them with ruthless economy. He had cut short generals mid-sentence for less than this.

And yet he listened. Calmly, without impatience, with a mind that for once was not racing three steps ahead toward something useful. He did not need to follow every word. It was simply pleasant. There was something good in listening to a person speak about the thing they loved most in the world, with that much open, unguarded joy. He could not remember the last time he had been near such a thing.

He let the boy talk and was sorry when they arrived.

They stepped out of the laboratory, and Cassian stopped where he stood.

Before him stretched a field of flowers without end—every color, every kind, rolling away to a horizon that should not have fit inside any realm. Bees the size of his head drifted above it, brimming so thickly with life energy that the air itself felt richer to breathe. A line of pigs in immaculate butler’s attire approached and introduced themselves one by one, each with an eloquence that would have shamed half the nobles he had met. Butterflies scattered rainbow light as they passed. High overhead, a flock of gold-veined ravens wheeled and dove through what appeared to be some elaborate game of their own devising.

It was magical. It was strange. It was, by every standard Cassian knew, entirely unreal.

And it was peaceful in a way the surface world above it was not—a deeper peace, settled and whole, the way he imagined a place might feel if nothing in it had ever been afraid.

Elias led them through it, naming things as he went.

He introduced the three queens—Holly, Honey, and Hope—who inclined themselves with regal courtesy. He introduced his contracted companions: Briar, the many-flowered vine still coiled shyly about his arm; Valentine, the crystal butterfly that watched Cassian from the side of Elias’s neck with frank, jealous suspicion; Angel, the small turtle pendant that yawned against his collarbone. He introduced Sebastian, the head butler, whose bow was a small masterpiece of dignity and whose every word to the boy carried an affection that needed no explaining.

Cassian watched the way they all moved around him—the bees, the pigs, the vine, the butterfly, the queens. The way they leaned toward him, spoke over one another to reach him, competed gently for his glance. The way the boy answered every one of them by name, by temperament, by old private joke.

It was like watching a family.

No—Cassian corrected himself. It was not like watching a family. It was a family. The understanding sat strangely in his chest.

Of all the things the realm showed him, that was the one that stayed.

Cassian had been born with a devastating flaw—an affinity for spirit beasts so poor that not one creature in the world had ever consented to bond with him. Beasts shied from him. Ignored him. Looked through him as though he were a closed door. He had made his peace with it long ago, or told himself he had.

And here was the exact inverse, standing a few feet away in a researcher’s plain coat.

One look was enough to tell him. Whatever it was that Cassian lacked, Elias possessed in overflowing measure—some quiet gravity that drew every living thing toward him and made it want to stay. Take away the talent for research, take away the discoveries, take away every miracle the boy had ever published, and this alone would have set him among the very finest beast tamers alive. The creatures adored him. Not because he was powerful. Because he was kind, and they had simply recognized it, the way Cassian’s own soldiers recognized something in him and gave him their faith.

Surrounded by spirit beasts that loved him—that pressed close and bloomed and bowed and squabbled for his attention, all of them plainly, helplessly devoted—Elias laughed, and apologized for the chaos, and tried to make introductions over the noise of it.

And Cassian Sagittarius, who always had something to say, who had stood unshaken before beast tides and broken generals and the screaming illusions of the Frontier, found that for once in his life he had no words at all.

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