This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

It took the last of Elias's patience and a good deal of careful questioning, but at last he had it: the specific Mystic attribute the Carrier Raven gained on its first evolution.

Fortune.

That alone was a relief. Mystic was a category, not a single thing—fortune and misfortune, blessing and curse, sun and moon, fate, and a dozen stranger concepts besides—and knowing only that a beast turned Mystic was a little like being told it would gain “a color.” Useless until you knew which. Now he knew. Fortune. The attribute of luck itself, of favorable chance and small mercies, of coincidences that fell the right way. It narrowed the headache from an impossible one to merely a very large one, and Elias had built an entire career on very large headaches.

With that settled, he could begin in earnest. Which meant, first, gathering the ravens.

It was the Care Pigs all over again—the same rounds of shelters, the same mountains of paperwork, the same slow careful business of convincing tired clerks that yes, someone really did want to adopt the old and the broken in bulk, and no, there was nothing strange about it.

Except this time something had changed, and Elias had to be careful about it.

His kindness toward the Care Pigs had spread. Quietly, the way these things did, the story had gotten around that the breeder behind the Butler Pig evolution had taken in shelter pigs and given every last one of them a new life. It was the kind of tale people liked to repeat. And it made the shelters far more willing to hand him their hopeless cases—but it also pointed, if anyone looked too closely, in a direction Elias very much needed no one to look.

Maeve helped. She made certain the timeline read the safe way round—that he had adopted the pigs after the Butler Pig method went public, a generous admirer following a known discovery, rather than the anonymous source who had made it. It was a small fiction, easily believed, and it kept the thread from unraveling.

Even so, the real lesson from last time had nothing to do with shelters or paperwork. It had to do with the monitoring period.

When you adopted a spirit beast from a shelter, the responsibility did not end the moment you carried it home. It was a good rule, born of people who had once adopted beasts and neglected them, and Elias had no quarrel with it. The trouble was that with the Care Pigs, evolution had occurred squarely in the middle of that window. One week he was submitting photographs of ordinary elderly pigs; the next, those pigs had become something the world had never seen, and a very awkward question hung in the air about how an admirer merely following a public method had produced the discovery itself in his own back garden.

He had been forced to call Maeve to smooth it over, and she had—quietly adjusting records, vouching where vouching was needed—but it had been a near thing, and Elias had no intention of relying on her to bail him out twice.

So this time he made a decision: simply to be patient. He would not touch the evolution until the three months were done. He would take his daily photographs of three hundred perfectly ordinary, perfectly un-evolved ravens, attend every weekly check-up, and let the entire monitoring period pass without incident—and only then, once the ravens were fully and unremarkably his, would he begin turning them into something extraordinary. It would cost him time. But time, he had learned, was far cheaper than exposure.

Three hundred. That was the number he reached, in the end.

They came in every shape that misfortune took.

Some were simply old—feathers gone ragged, eyes filmed, long past the speed a delivery route demanded. Some were blind. Some had wings that had broken and healed wrong, hanging at angles that would never fly true. Some had bodies worn thin and weak by years of carrying loads heavier than they should have. Carrier Ravens were used everywhere, in every city, by every company that needed something small moved quickly—which meant that, sadly, a supply of discarded ones was never hard to find. The world produced broken delivery birds the way it produced worn-out boots.

It should have been a grim collection. Three hundred ruined creatures, gathered from the forgotten corners of a dozen shelters.

It did not stay grim for long.

The secret realm had a way of healing things simply by being what it was.

Within days, the ravens had discovered Briar's fruit—the lush, spirit-rich fruit the great vine produced in endless supply—and fell upon it with delight. Whatever else was wrong with their bodies, their appetites were perfectly intact, and a steady diet of the best food they had ever tasted did wonders for creatures who had spent their last years on shelter rations.

And then, as they recovered, their true nature surfaced—because Carrier Ravens were clever, famously clever, and a clever bird with a full belly and nothing to deliver will inevitably find its own entertainment.

The mischief began almost at once. It was never cruel—that was the charm of it—only the playful, testing trouble of intelligent creatures discovering they were finally allowed to play.

A pair of them took to stealing Holly's carefully sorted papers, one sheet at a time, purely to watch the queen bee's dignified outrage as she chased them down. Holly was not amused. The ravens found her lack of amusement the funniest thing in the world.

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Others competed with the Blood Crystal Butterflies for the prettiest perches in the brightest sunlight, a rivalry that ended in an uneasy truce after the butterflies demonstrated that their wings had edges. The ravens, no fools, conceded the best perches and contented themselves with stealing shiny pebbles instead, which they hoarded in absurd little piles and guarded with enormous seriousness.

Honey adopted several of them as personal projects, drifting among the flock and somehow soothing the most anxious birds the way she soothed anxious people; before long a knot of ravens followed her about like courtiers. Hope, meanwhile, kept trying to involve them in her experiments, which the ravens interpreted as games, so her experiments now frequently ended with a raven flying off, carrying some crucial component. She did not seem to mind. She had simply learned to bring spares.

And Sebastian—dignified, long-suffering Sebastian—presided over the new chaos with the air of a head butler who had seen everything and would not be ruffled by mere birds. The ravens adored him. They followed him on his rounds, perched on his shoulders, and accepted his gentle correction with the grudging respect clever creatures reserve for someone cleverer. More than once Elias caught the old pig telekinetically returning a stolen object to its owner while three ravens watched, entirely unrepentant, plotting their next theft.

It was good to see them open up. It was good to see them play. After everything, that was perhaps the part that warmed Elias most—not their recovery, but their joy.

There was one thing he had wondered about, and Sebastian, with his telepathy, could answer it.

Elias had assumed, looking at the broken flock, that there would be bitterness in them. Most of these birds had been put into shelters by the very companies they had served—worked until they could work no more, then set aside. To a human, that looked like betrayal, and Elias had braced himself to find wounded, distrustful spirits behind those clever eyes.

He found nothing of the kind.

Through Sebastian, he came to understand that the ravens simply did not see it the way a person would. To them it was not betrayal but the plain order of things, as natural as weather. They had done a job; they had been fed and housed in return; and when they could no longer do the job, the food stopped. There was no malice in it, and they expected none. It was the law of nature as a raven understood it, and a raven did not waste grief on the way the world worked.

And in truth, Sebastian conveyed, the shelters had treated them well. The companies had not thrown them to the street—they had given them somewhere to live out their days. The birds' circumstances may not have been the best, but their spirits had never been broken, because nothing had been done to break them. They had simply been waiting, contented enough, for whatever came next.

It made Elias unexpectedly grateful—to the shelters, to the people who had kept these clever creatures fed and sheltered when there was no profit in it. He had spent so long thinking about what the world threw away that it was easy to forget how many quiet hands caught the falling things and held them, asking nothing. He resolved to remember those hands too.

As if summoned by the thought, one of the ravens came swooping toward him.

Elias caught it on instinct, and the bird settled into his arms with the easy confidence of a creature that had already decided he was safe. It was missing a leg—the stump long healed—and it regarded him with a bright, mischievous eye, entirely untroubled by the lack.

Out of habit, Elias let his gaze soften into the status only he could read.

Race: Carrier Raven

Type: Avian

Attribute: Wind

Current Rank: Elite Rank 1

Potential Rank: Elite Rank 3

Mood: Playful

Skills:

Directional Sense — Lv6

Enhanced Memory — Lv7

Carry Strength — Lv7

Swift Flight — Lv7

Silent Flight — Lv6

Wind Barrier — Lv6

Wind Cut — Lv7

Nothing remarkable, by the world's reckoning. An ordinary Carrier Raven, common as rain—about the size of an eagle, its black feathers glossy and glistening even now despite its years, the single leg tucked neatly beneath it as it made itself comfortable against his chest.

Common as rain, and carrying somewhere inside it a hidden path that climbed all the way to King rank.

Elias smiled and scratched the raven gently beneath its beak. “You have no idea what you're capable of, do you?” he murmured.

The bird gave a pleased croak and stole his pen.

If only the work itself had gone half so smoothly.

The first evolution step had no business being as difficult as it was, and yet here Elias sat, a month into the monitoring period, still no closer to cracking it.

Working it out on paper broke no rules, at least. He could study the requirement, deduce its shape, plan every move—all without laying a finger on the evolution itself until the three months were safely done. The waiting, for once, cost him nothing, because he had nothing yet to wait with.

He had hoped, when he began, for one of the ordinary requirements. A skill to be raised. A material to be fed. A battle to be fought, an environment to be provided—any of the familiar categories he had solved a dozen times before. Those were work, but they were honest work, the kind that yielded to patience and method.

Instead, the first step belonged to the dreaded final category.

Other.

Not skill. Not material. Not combat, not environment. Something else—some condition that fit none of the clean boxes—and from everything Elias had been able to deduce, it had something to do with luck.

Luck.

He turned the word over for what felt like the hundredth time, and it remained as slippery as ever. How did one engineer luck? It was the one thing in the world that, by its very nature, refused to be made to order. He could raise a skill through training and feed an attribute through the right flowers, but luck answered to no method he knew. And of course it would be luck—the raven was destined to awaken Fortune itself, so it made a grim sort of sense that the door to that future should be guarded by the very thing it would one day command. The requirement was Mystic in spirit long before the bird ever touched the Mystic attribute, a thing of meaning and chance rather than cause and effect.

A month gone, three hundred ravens thriving in his realm, and Elias Arkwright sat among them with no idea at all how to give a bird good fortune.

He looked down at the one-legged raven dozing contentedly in his arms, utterly unbothered by the impossibility of its own evolution.

“Well,” he sighed. “At least one of us isn't worried.”

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