This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

The secret realm had settled into a particular kind of rhythm that season.

It was not the rhythm of research, exactly, though Elias still spent long hours bent over the Protector Turtle papers and longer ones puzzling at the mountain of trouble that waited beyond a certain raven's first evolution. It was the rhythm of a place that had quietly filled up with people—with family, who now came so often and stayed so late that the laboratory's guest rooms had simply become their rooms, and the realm had stopped feeling like a workshop and started feeling like a home that happened to grow flowers the size of dinner plates.

And in the middle of all of it, slowly, a scarred delivery raven was learning what that home felt like.

Holly, Honey, and Hope ran the realm the way they ran everything.

Holly had taken one look at the family's new visiting habits and produced a schedule within a day. Who arrived when. Which guest rooms were aired. When the turtles were most settled for mindspace matching and when they preferred to be left to nap. She delivered this information to Sebastian each evening with the brisk satisfaction of a queen who had at last found another soul in the realm who understood that things ought to be done properly.

Honey, by contrast, had appointed herself the realm's hostess. She drifted between family members with effortless grace, smoothing the small frictions that came of so many people sharing one space—steering Selena gently away from arguments she was about to start, charming Damian into resting when he'd hovered too long over an injured beast, and somehow always knowing exactly who needed a word and who needed to be left alone.

Hope simply wanted to know what would happen if. She had latched onto Elias's raven research the moment she heard the word Mystic, and now followed him about with a stream of impossible, delightful suggestions—what if the burns mattered, what if fate could be fed like nectar, what if, what if—most of which were useless and one or two of which, Elias suspected, might not be.

Together they kept the realm turning, and pretended they did it for the realm rather than for him.

Briar, for his part, had no interest whatsoever in any of it.

He had decided, with the single-minded devotion that governed his entire existence, that the arrival of so many people meant only one thing: more competition for Elias's arm. He responded by simply never leaving it. Wherever Elias went, a vine went with him, curled snug around his wrist, occasionally producing a small smug flower whenever someone else tried to sit too close. When Kyle once jokingly reached to pat Elias on the head, a tendril intercepted the hand mid-air and set it gently but firmly back down on the table. Kyle had laughed for a full minute. Briar had not found it funny at all.

Valentine ignored the entire family with magnificent consistency.

This was not coldness, exactly. It was priorities. To Valentine, the visitors were furniture—pleasant enough, occasionally in the way, fundamentally beneath his notice so long as they kept a respectful distance from Elias's neck. He spent the visits dozing in his favored spot, one wing folded over his eyes, rousing only to glare whenever someone's voice rose too near or whenever Briar's vine drifted into territory he considered his. The two of them maintained a silent, ongoing border dispute over Elias's person that everyone else had learned to find hilarious and neither of them acknowledged at all.

Only once did Valentine deign to involve himself with Hero. The raven, new to the realm and unsure of its rules, had perched a little too close to Elias one evening. Valentine cracked open one eye, considered him for a long, cool moment—then, apparently deciding a one-eyed bird posed no threat to his position whatsoever, closed it again and went back to sleep. It was, from Valentine, very nearly a welcome.

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The family's own beasts had long since made themselves at home, and the realm suited them.

Koda had appointed himself general handyman. Boxing Monkey he might be, built for breaking things, but in the realm he spent his time carrying crates for the bees, steadying ladders, hauling whatever was too heavy for everyone else, and quietly fetching food for anyone who'd forgotten to eat—Elias chief among them. He and Sebastian had developed a wordless, mutually respectful partnership built entirely on the shared understanding that the humans in their care could not be trusted to look after themselves.

Rime treated the realm as the greatest playground ever to exist. There were flowers to freeze into glittering sculptures, ponds to skate experimental patterns across, and an endless supply of new things to ask Elias about. The Ice Sprite had also taken an immediate, intense interest in Hero, trailing the raven at a careful distance and, over several evenings, constructing a small ice perch shaped—lopsidedly, earnestly—like the raven himself. Hero had regarded the gift with deep suspicion before, eventually, condescending to sit on it.

Eiren presided over the chaos like a snowy, long-suffering grandmother. She and Floria spent long evenings in dignified conversation near the hives, occasionally pausing to watch some new absurdity unfold and exchange a look that said everything. Amia floated in her sphere of water at Damian's side, blowing the occasional bubble of judgment whenever Kyle proposed something idiotic, which was often. And Floria, queenly and warm, let the younger bees flock around her and made the very air of the realm feel a little more alive simply by being in it.

It was, Elias thought more than once, looking up from his papers at the soft riot of it all, a very full kind of quiet.

And through all of it, Hero changed.

It happened the way real things happen—too slowly to see from one day to the next, and unmistakably when you looked back across a week.

At first the raven had stayed glued to Kyle, watching everyone else with the wary stillness of a creature waiting for the warmth to turn out to be a trick. He flinched from sudden movements. He took food only when it was set down and left, never from a hand. He kept the burned side of himself angled away from the room, as though he could hide the part of him the world had decided to throw away.

But the realm was patient, and so were the people in it, and nobody ever asked him to be anything.

Selena won him over first, which surprised no one who knew her. She didn't coax or coo. She simply talked to him the way she talked to everyone—blunt, unsentimental, treating his scars as a fact rather than a tragedy—and slid him the best pieces off her own plate while pretending she wasn't. Hero, who had spent a year being pitied, found he could bear being respected.

Damian healed what could still be healed—not the old burns, which had set long ago, but the small aches that came with them, the stiffness in the ruined wing—and asked nothing in return, and never once looked at the raven as though he were broken.

Rime made him a perch. Koda quietly made sure he was never crowded. Floria's presence soothed him in a way he didn't understand and didn't question. And Elias, when the raven finally allowed it, would sit nearby and tell him about the research, about the strange and difficult future hidden inside him, talking to him as though he were a person worth explaining things to—because, of course, he was.

The first time Hero took food directly from Damian's hand, the whole table pretended not to notice, because they were good people and they understood that some victories are spoiled by being seen. The first time he stretched his ruined wing out fully in front of everyone, unashamed, Selena's hand tightened around her cup, and she said nothing at all.

And one evening, when Kyle was late arriving, Hero hopped down from his perch, crossed the grass, and settled himself against Honey of all creatures—a queen bee three times too dignified for it—who allowed the indignity with the faint, pleased air of someone who had just been paid a great compliment.

He was not healed. Some things don't heal. But he was coming home day by day.

And the turtles came through in the end.

It happened the way it always did in the realm—quietly, without ceremony, on an ordinary night that no one had marked as special. One after another, over those long patient evenings of slipping into dreaming mindspaces and waking in beds they didn't remember reaching, each of them found the one that fit.

Damian found his. Then Selena found hers. And at last, grinning like he'd known all along that it would work out, Kyle found his too.

In the end, all three of them found their turtle.

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