This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Damian and Selena had heard the whole story, and now they had a decision to make. It didn't take long.

They knew their son. Kyle was reckless—there was no use pretending otherwise—but the recklessness had always come bundled with something rarer, a goodness so plain and so genuine that the two of them sometimes wondered what they'd done to deserve to be handed a child like him. He was not a careful boy. He never had been. He was simply, miraculously, a good one.

They respected that goodness. They admired it. And as his parents, they worried themselves sick over it, because a heart that flew into burning houses would keep finding burning houses for the rest of its life.

But the contract was already made. Hero was already family. And so, across the table, Damian and Selena traded a single glance—the kind that needed no words after this many years—and understood each other completely.

Support him. That was the answer. It had always been the answer. Perhaps it was this very kind of support that kept leading Kyle into this kind of trouble, and they had long since made their peace with that trade. Given the choice, they would take a good son over an outstanding one every single time.

So they moved closer.

Selena got there first, the way she always did, settling in beside Kyle with the rough warmth she'd never quite learned to soften. Damian followed, gentler, resting a hand on his son's shoulder. And then, one by one, each of them turned their attention to the raven himself.

“Hello, Hero,” Damian said, in the voice he used for frightened things. “I'm Damian. Kyle's father. You're very welcome here.”

Selena was blunter. “You did good, bird. Whatever anyone told you after—you did good.”

Their own contracted beasts took the cue and came forward to introduce themselves as well. Eiren dipped her great white head in a slow, dignified greeting, one elder to another. Amia drifted to the edge of her floating sphere of water and regarded the raven with something that, for her, passed as approval. Floria's wings caught the light as she settled near, radiating that faint, unconscious warmth of life that made the air around her feel kinder. Rime, predictably, immediately wanted to know how the burns had happened, whether they hurt, whether Hero would like an ice sculpture, and had to be gently shushed.

Hero, who had braced himself for the worst the moment the room went quiet, did not know what to do with any of it.

He pressed deeper into Kyle's chest, startled by the warmth, his good eye flicking from face to face as though waiting for the catch. There had to be a catch. There was always a catch.

But the catch never came. And slowly—though he did not relax, not all the way, perhaps not for a long while yet—the raven decided that he did not hate this. The hands were gentle. The voices were kind. No one was asking him to be useful. He simply stayed where he was, tucked against the only person who had ever come back for him, and let the strange warmth settle over him without quite trusting it.

Elias joined them last.

He came around the table and pulled his brother into a hug, and Kyle—surprised, then pleased—let him. Into his ear, low enough that no one else could hear, Elias murmured, “You truly are reckless, you know that.”

Then he sighed, the long-suffering sigh of a younger brother who had given up on changing anything, and added more softly, “Don't worry. Hero will be okay.”

He pulled back and slapped Kyle hard on the back—and immediately regretted it, because Kyle was built like a wall and Elias was built like a researcher, and the slap hurt his own hand considerably more than it could possibly have hurt his brother. Kyle, generous as ever, clutched his shoulder and gasped as though mortally wounded.

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Elias ignored him entirely.

Instead he turned to the raven, met the one good eye, and said, with complete sincerity, “Welcome to the family.”

Hero studied him for a moment. Then he gave a single short caw.

It would do.

There was still the matter Elias had raised before the story had taken over the evening.

Kyle couldn't contract a Protector Turtle yet—both his contract slots were full now, Koda and Hero—but that didn't mean they had to give up on the idea. It only meant waiting. The turtles weren't going anywhere, and a Protector Turtle's whole purpose was to guard the mind of the one it chose, which made it precisely the kind of safeguard Elias wanted standing between his family and anyone who might one day come looking for the anonymous breeder behind it all.

So he made a suggestion. Find the right turtle now, while there are still 499 of them napping in the realm. Let it match. Let the bond begin to form. And then, once Kyle pushed through to Commander Rank and his Beast Space could hold a third contract, the turtle would already be waiting for him.

Kyle, who would have agreed to almost anything that let him spend more time in his brother's strange and wonderful realm, agreed at once.

And so the family went turtle-hunting.

It was a stranger sentence than it sounded. One by one, they sat with the placid little Fool's Turtles and entered and fell into those slow, dreaming mindspaces—and one by one, exactly as had happened to Elias dozens of times over, they slipped under. Mind Acceleration did not leave its passengers awake. Selena lasted the longest, stubborn even in unconsciousness; Kyle went down mid-sentence and looked faintly betrayed about it on the way.

The Butler Pigs were ready for this. They had, in fact, been ready before anyone asked, which was simply what Butler Pigs were. As each family member drifted off, a pig was already there—catching them, steadying them, gathering them up with that effortless, dignified care—and carrying them off to the guest rooms that had been prepared beforehand, fully made up, in the laboratory. Sebastian oversaw the whole operation like a conductor who had rehearsed it for years.

Over the days that followed, it became a routine of sorts. Whenever they could manage it, the Arkwrights came to the secret realm at night. They sat with the turtles. They searched the mindspaces for the one that fit. And one by one, they fell unconscious in the grass, only to wake the next morning tucked neatly into a bed they did not remember reaching, a warm drink already waiting on the table beside them.

No one had found their match yet. But there was no hurry. That was rather the point of the whole realm.

In between all of it, Elias worked.

The Protector Turtle evolution was ready to go public—or nearly—and the readying was the tedious part. He spent the quiet hours sorting his notes and writing the papers, translating months of strange, patient research into something another breeder could follow: the mindspace matching, the contract, the slow deepening of the mind-bond, the final step that completed the evolution. It would help people. It would help a great many people, eventually, the way all his discoveries did. It simply had to be written down first, carefully, and Elias had never minded the writing.

And he did not forget the raven.

He had spent the last of his stored questions on Hero's race over the preceding days, one careful query at a time, and between them he had already mapped the shape of the first evolution. It came in five steps—involved, but nothing he hadn't handled before.

The trouble waited on the far side of it.

Because once the first evolution was complete, the Carrier Raven gained the Mystic attribute.

Elias set down his pen and exhaled.

Mystic. Of all the attributes in the world, Mystic was the one breeders spoke of in the same tone other people reserved for bad weather and worse luck. It wasn't an element with rules you could chart—fire that burned, water that flowed, ice that froze. Mystic was symbolic. Fortune and misfortune, blessing and curse, sun and moon, and fate and emotion, concepts wearing the shape of power. It bent to meaning rather than mechanism, and meaning was a far harder thing to corner in a laboratory than heat or cold.

Which meant the research ahead of him would be one long, glorious headache.

Elias looked across the realm to where Hero perched in the grass—scarred, half-blind, dozing in a patch of evening light with the unbothered calm of a bird who had finally, after everything, found somewhere safe to close his eyes.

He picked his pen back up and smiled.

He couldn't wait to begin.

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