This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Another month passed, and Elias still could not figure it out.

The first evolution step sat on his desk like a locked door without a keyhole. He knew it belonged to the dreaded Other category. He knew it had something to do with luck, with Fortune, with the slippery business of chance. And he knew, after two months of staring, that knowing those things had gotten him precisely nowhere. You could not train luck. You could not feed it through a flower or grind it out through repetition. It simply was, or it wasn't, and a bird either had a good day, or it didn't.

If there was good news to set against the frustration, it came from the turtles.

His mother's and father's Fool's Turtles had both completed their evolutions, becoming Protector Turtles at last—and to Elias's quiet delight, neither had taken the same form as his own. Angel rested against his collarbone as a small turtle-shaped pendant. Selena's turtle had become a turtle-shaped earring, the tiny shell catching the light whenever she turned her head. And Damian's had settled into a turtle-shaped bracelet, the sort of thing he would wear without ever drawing attention to it. Whatever the shape, the unmistakable turtle remained, shell and all, sleepy and content in each new home.

It made him wonder what shape Kyle's would take, once his brother finally reached Commander Rank and could complete the contract.

Which inevitably led to a rather embarrassing thought. At the rate things were going—two months on the raven's first step with no end in sight—it was entirely possible that Kyle would simply cultivate his way to Commander Rank and bond his turtle before Elias cracked a single evolution. His reckless, impatient older brother, outpacing him through sheer stubborn training while the careful researcher sat stuck on a bird.

Elias decided he needed to get out of the laboratory for a while.

The city was the kind of distraction he needed—noise, movement, and other people's lives, none of which required him to solve anything.

It did not take long, walking those streets, to feel the change his own work had set loose on the world.

The Protector Turtle was everywhere in conversation. He caught it in fragments as he passed—a vendor telling a customer that soldiers who had come home wrong, who had not slept right in years, were sleeping again. A woman at a stall, saying her brother, who had served on the Frontier and never quite returned, even after he came back, had contracted one of the little turtles, started to laugh once more. The afflictions that had no name in polite conversation, the wounds of the mind that healers could not touch—the turtles were reaching them. And it was not only soldiers. Families with disabled members, people who struggled with their own minds in a hundred quiet ways, were finding help in the small sleepy guardians too.

The demand, naturally, had gone through the roof. He heard a merchant complaining cheerfully that Fool's Turtles—once worthless, once the sort of beast you couldn't give away—had tenfolded in price and were still climbing. Everyone wanted one.

“The world's changing too fast,” he heard an old man grumble to a friend on a corner. “One miracle after another, every other season. Bees, the pigs, now turtles. A man can't keep up. Who's even making all these?”

Elias smiled, a little awkwardly, and kept walking before his face could give anything away.

It was the children who gave it to him.

He almost walked past them—a knot of kids in a little square, shrieking with laughter over some game. They had hidden things, it seemed, small treasures tucked into corners and under loose stones, and were tearing about hunting for them, crowing with triumph each time one was found. Elias slowed to watch. There was something about children at play that always settled him, the pure, uncomplicated joy of it.

A treasure hunt.

The thought arrived sideways, the way the best ones always did, and before he had quite decided to, Elias spent one of his questions on it.

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For the first evolution step, do the ravens have to hunt for treasure?

The certainty settled into the back of his mind, absolute and unmistakable.

Yes.

Elias stood frozen for half a second longer—and then he was running, sprinting back toward the realm with an undignified speed that turned heads the whole way; the locked door suddenly, gloriously, swung open.

He burst into the laboratory like a storm, which startled Briar into curling every vine inward at once, set Valentine to ignoring him with even greater determination than usual, and earned, from the pendant at his collarbone, nothing more than a sleepy, contented hum as Angel dozed through the entire commotion.

He still had a few stored questions, and he spent them carefully now, pinning the requirement down to something he could actually build a method around.

The shape of it came together piece by piece. A raven had to find a treasure one hundred times. The treasure itself did not need to be anything specific—no particular object, no rare material. What mattered was the finding, and the finding had to involve luck. It had to be fortune that put the prize in the bird's path, chance favoring it, the world quietly tilting its way. Skill alone would not satisfy the requirement. The raven had to get lucky, again and again, one hundred times over.

Which made perfect, maddening sense for a creature destined to awaken the Fortune attribute. The bird had to prove itself favored by luck before luck would consent to become part of it.

A hundred lucky finds. Elias could work with that. It was strange, and it was going to be a great deal of trouble, but it was no longer a locked door—it was a game with rules. And games, he could design.

He started that very day.

Out in the open grass of the realm, Elias gathered the ravens. They came in a great black tide—those who could fly swooping down in lazy spirals, those who couldn't carried gently over by the Butler Pigs, who set each broken-winged bird down with the same dignified care they gave fine china. Soon three hundred clever eyes were fixed on him, heads tilted, waiting to see what the strange kind human had planned.

Elias produced his first attempt: a hundred and fifty small clay balls, each marked with a number.

The rules were simple. Half the ravens would take the balls and hide them throughout the realm—in flowerbeds, under stones, in the high branches of Briar's canopy, wherever a clever bird could think to stash a prize. The other half would hunt for them. And here was the trick, the part meant to invite luck rather than mere skill: Elias secretly chose ten numbers and held them in his mind, telling no one. Whichever ravens returned carrying those particular numbered balls were the winners—and winners, he had made very clear, received shiny things. Pretty pebbles, polished beads, bright bits of treasure of the sort ravens prized above all reason.

It was, he reasoned, a near-perfect design. A bird could not know which numbers he had chosen. Finding the right ones was pure chance—pure fortune. Exactly the kind of luck the evolution demanded.

The ravens loved it. They flung themselves into the hunt with delighted, raucous abandon, the realm filling with the rush of wings and the triumphant croaks of birds unearthing prizes. When the first lucky winners came swooping back with the right numbers and were rewarded with their glittering treasures, the effect on the rest of the flock was electric. Everyone wanted to win. Everyone wanted the shiny things.

For a while, it was perfect.

Then the problems began.

The first was simple arithmetic, and Elias should have seen it coming. Each raven needed to win one hundred times. One hundred. A single game produced only a handful of winners, which meant that, at this rate, satisfying the requirement for all three hundred birds would take an absurdly, impossibly long time. He ran the numbers that evening and felt slightly ill. At this pace the ravens would be playing the same game well into old age—and these were birds who were already old.

The second problem was worse, and it was one no amount of arithmetic could have warned him about.

The ravens got bored.

Clever creatures, it turned out, did not enjoy doing the same thing over and over, even for shiny rewards. By the third day of identical clay balls, the flock's enthusiasm had visibly cooled. They went through the motions. They hid and hunted with the resigned air of employees, and a few of the boldest simply refused, perching pointedly in Briar's branches and declining to participate. A bored raven, Elias was learning, was an immovable raven.

He needed new games. Many of them. A whole rotation of treasure hunts, varied enough to keep three hundred brilliant, easily bored minds engaged through what might be hundreds of rounds each.

Elias sat down that night with a fresh sheet of paper, wrote “Treasure Hunt Ideas” across the top, listed four, and then sat staring at the page as his imagination ran abruptly dry.

He lasted two more days on his own before he admitted defeat.

Then he sent out an SOS to the only people he trusted to be more creatively chaotic than three hundred ravens: his family. If anyone alive could invent an endless supply of ridiculous games, it was the Arkwrights—and besides, he thought, with the first real grin in weeks, they were going to find this absolutely hilarious.

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