This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

The trouble with introducing five guardians to the secret realm, Elias quickly discovered, was that the realm had opinions of its own about guests.

He had meant to give them a calm, orderly tour. He had even planned a route. That plan survived roughly as long as it took Rowan to step out of the laboratory, look up at three hundred ravens wheeling through the sky, and say, with total sincerity, “I think I’ve died, and this is the good place.”

After that, order was a lost cause.

The ravens noticed Rowan first.

It made a certain sense, Elias supposed—a flock of Fortune-attribute birds and a man whose entire talent was bending luck were always going to find one another interesting. Within minutes a dozen of them had drifted down to investigate, circling Rowan’s head, landing on his shoulders, tugging experimentally at his sleeves with their beaks. One particularly bold raven dropped a shiny pebble into his palm as though presenting a gift, then waited, head tilted, for judgment.

“Is—is it giving me treasure?” Rowan asked, delighted.

“It thinks you’re lucky,” Elias said. “They can sense it. You’re probably the most interesting thing to happen to them since Kyle invented the maze game.”

Rowan looked as though someone had handed him the keys to a kingdom. He spent the next several minutes thoroughly adopted by the birds and made no effort whatsoever to escape.

Iris went to the flowers, of course.

Elias had half expected it. A beast tamer whose strength grew with every element she gathered could hardly walk into an endless field of attribute-blossoms and remain unmoved. She drifted along the edge of the meadow with her rainbow eyes wide, trailing her fingertips over petals of fire and water and frost, and every so often she would stop and simply breathe, as though the air itself were something to be savored.

Briar, riding on Elias’s arm, watched her go with what Elias had learned to recognize as cautious interest. Then—slowly, shyly—a single vine uncoiled from Elias’s sleeve and stretched toward her, offering up one perfect flower.

Iris went very still. “For me?”

The flower trembled. Elias bit back a smile. “He likes you. He doesn’t do that for many people.”

She accepted the blossom with both hands, careful as though it were made of glass, and the look on her face—quiet, astonished, almost overwhelmed—was one Elias found he understood completely. He had worn it himself, the first time something small and living had decided to trust him.

Oliver, predictably, gravitated toward the queens.

Holly, Honey, and Hope had emerged to inspect the newcomers with the regal composure of three monarchs receiving a foreign delegation, and Oliver—who had spent his life among nobles and knew court manners in his bones—greeted them accordingly. He bowed. He addressed each by name. He complimented the evident excellence of their hives with a fluency that left even Honey, the diplomat of the three, visibly pleased.

“You know,” Oliver murmured to Elias, watching Honey preen, “I have negotiated with actual royalty who carried themselves with less authority than your bees.”

“They’d take that as a compliment,” Elias said.

“I meant it as one.”

Holly, meanwhile, had taken one look at the way Oliver organized his thoughts before speaking and apparently decided he was acceptable. High praise, from Holly. She began, almost at once, attempting to recruit him into the realm’s scheduling. Elias decided not to warn him. It was funnier this way.

Seraphina said very little, which was how Elias knew she was comfortable.

She walked a step behind the others, watching everything with those clear violet eyes, and where the rest of them were drawn to the loud and the bright, she found the quiet corners—the still edge of the river, a patch of shade where the butterflies gathered. Valentine, ever suspicious of strangers, flitted over to investigate her and then, surprisingly, stayed. The two of them regarded each other with matching reserve, a butterfly and a young woman who both preferred to observe before they trusted, and seemed to reach some private understanding.

“He’s usually jealous of anyone near me,” Elias said quietly, joining her.

“He still is,” Seraphina said, watching Valentine settle on a flower a careful, deliberate few feet from her. “He just decided I’m not a threat.” A pause. “I like him.”

From the side of Elias’s neck, where he had returned the instant Seraphina was deemed safe, Valentine fluttered his wings smugly, scattering rainbow light, thoroughly pleased to be liked.

And then there was Cassian.

Cassian, who had stood unmoving since they stepped into the realm, taking it in the way Elias imagined he took in a battlefield—cataloguing everything, missing nothing. He did not chase ravens or admire flowers. He simply watched, and somewhere beneath that still expression Elias thought something was quietly coming apart and being put back together.

It was Sebastian who reached him first.

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The head butler approached with a bow of flawless precision, attire immaculate, and addressed the commander with the grave courtesy he reserved for important guests. “Welcome, sir. The Young Master’s home is your home for the day. Should you require anything at all—refreshment, shade, a moment’s quiet—you need only ask.”

Cassian looked down at the elegant, upright pig regarding him with such genuine warmth, and something in his rigid posture eased by a fraction.

“Thank you,” he said. And then, after a moment, as though surprised to find he meant it: “You keep a fine home.”

Sebastian’s entire being radiated quiet pride. “The Young Master makes it easy to keep, sir.”

Elias, overhearing, felt his ears go warm and pretended very hard to be examining a flower.

His family, of course, had simply made themselves at home.

They always did. Selena had already commandeered Kyle into hauling something for her; Damian was crouched at the riverbank with Amia, the two of them in the comfortable silence of decades; Kyle was—inevitably—being pulled in three directions at once by ravens who remembered him as the Gamemaster and wanted very much to know whether new games were forthcoming.

“They like your brother,” Cassian observed. It was nearly the first unprompted thing he had said.

“Everyone likes Kyle,” Elias said. “It’s very annoying.”

Across the field, Kyle attempted to escape his admirers, tripped over a Butler Pig who had materialized with a tray of drinks, recovered with the easy reflexes of a Commander-rank beast tamer, and somehow ended up with a raven on his head and a glass of juice in his hand and no idea how either had happened. Selena’s laughter carried clear across the meadow.

Cassian watched the whole disaster unfold, and the corner of his mouth moved—just slightly, just once.

Elias counted it as a victory.

By the time the sun had climbed to its warmest, Sebastian had decided it was time to eat, and the Butler Pigs went to work.

It was, Elias thought, one of the more remarkable things to witness even after all these months. Two dozen elegant pigs moved across the flower field in perfect coordination, telekinesis humming in the air around them. A long table assembled itself out of nothing, legs unfolding, surface settling level on the uneven ground. Cloth drifted down over it, white and smooth. Plates floated into place in neat ranks. Chairs arranged themselves. And then came the food—dish after dish carried out on shining trays, set down in a procession so seamless it looked less like serving a meal and more like watching a single enormous, gentle machine at work.

Rowan stopped chewing the grass stem he’d been chewing and stared. “Okay,” he said faintly. “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

“You said that about the ravens,” Iris pointed out.

“I contain multitudes.”

They ate in the flowers, under an open sky, with bees drifting lazily overhead and the river murmuring somewhere beyond the meadow’s edge.

It was, by any measure, a strange gathering. A frontier commander, a diplomat, a luck-talent, and two quiet women who had each found their way here by very different roads, seated at a table in a pocket of impossible space, served by a butler pig who refilled their cups before they noticed they were empty. And folded all through them, as though they had always belonged there, the Arkwright family—Selena arguing cheerfully with Oliver about something, Damian asking Iris gentle questions and actually listening to the answers, Kyle attempting to explain the raven games to Rowan, who was nodding along with the fervor of a true convert.

Elias sat back and watched it happen, and felt something loosen in his chest that he hadn’t known was tight.

The meal itself, he’d planned—the table in the flowers, the open sky, Sebastian’s feast. That part had gone exactly as he’d hoped. What he hadn’t planned for was the rest of it. He had asked Maeve for protection and braced himself for professionals—bodyguards who would take the job and do it well out of duty, who would stand at his doors, keep a polite, contractual distance, and go home to lives of their own.

This was nothing like that. These five had bound their entire lives to his. They would not be standing at his doors for a season; they would be standing beside him for the rest of his days. And if they were going to share his life that completely, then Elias did not want to treat them as hired help. He wanted to treat them as family—because that, he was slowly realizing, was exactly what they would become.

It was why he hadn’t hesitated to show them everything. The secret realm was his most guarded possession; before today, only his family had ever set foot in it. He had let them in because they had given him their trust without condition, had sworn their minds and their futures to him on the strength of work he’d never even signed his name to. The least he could do was return that trust in kind. So he had opened every door, shown them every flower, bee, and bird, held nothing back. It seemed only fair.

“You’ve gone quiet,” Cassian said.

He had taken the seat beside Elias—whether by choice or because Oliver had engineered it, Elias couldn’t tell—and was watching him with those golden eyes, not unkindly.

“Sorry,” Elias said. He turned his cup slowly in his hands, searching for the words. “I was just thinking. When I asked for protection, I expected… guards. Professionals. People who’d do the work because it was a job, and keep their distance otherwise.” He looked out over the table—his family and theirs, already tangled together past telling apart. “But you’re not here for a job. You’re here for life. And that’s—different. That changes what I want to give you.”

“Which is?”

“This,” Elias said simply, with a small gesture at all of it. “Everything. I’ve never let anyone but my family into this place. But you trusted me first—all of you, completely, before you’d even met me. I’d like to return that, if I can. I’d rather you weren’t strangers I keep at a distance. I’d rather you were…” He trailed off, suddenly self-conscious. “Well. Family. Eventually. If that’s all right.”

Cassian was quiet for a long moment. Down the table, Rowan said something that made Selena bark out a laugh, and Sebastian pretend not to have heard it.

“My soldiers eat together before every campaign,” Cassian said at last. “Always. It is the first thing we do and the last thing we do. A man will hold a line for a stranger.” He watched the table, and the people at it. “He will die for someone he has broken bread with.”

He turned back to Elias, and there was something in his golden eyes that hadn’t been there before—something that looked almost like gratitude.

“You wanted to give us your trust,” Cassian said. “Most men in your position would have given us a wage and a room and nothing else.” A pause. “We accept. Gladly.”

Elias felt his ears warm, and to cover it, he reached for the nearest dish and asked whether Cassian had tried the honey bread, because Holly would be personally offended if he hadn’t.

And Cassian, the heir of the Sagittarius Legion, the man who had never in his life been good with spirit beasts or comfortable in peace, allowed a Butler Pig to serve him a second slice of honey bread in a field of flowers, and looked—for the first time since he had arrived—as though the borrowed coat had begun, just slightly, to fit.

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