This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

With Cassian and Seraphina gone to the frontier, the realm settled into a quieter rhythm than it had known in months—though never quiet in the way an empty house was quiet.

The Butler Pigs saw to that. They had taken the absence of two residents as a personal challenge, and Sebastian in particular seemed determined to prove that a guardian's home left unattended could be kept in finer order than one lived in. Cassian's house was dusted daily whether it needed it or not. Seraphina's small library was reorganized twice, then a third time when Holly proposed an improvement to the system, after which the two of them held a polite and unusually intense discussion about cataloguing that consumed most of an afternoon. Elias stayed out of it. He had learned, over many months, that there were certain debates between Sebastian and Holly into which no wise person inserted himself.

For his own part, Elias was looked after with the same relentless gentleness as always. Tea appeared at his elbow before he knew he wanted it. Briar wound a vine around his wrist whenever he sat too long, Valentine kept his usual post against the side of his neck, and Angel slept against his collarbone and said nothing, which was her way of saying everything was fine. It was, all in all, a good time to think.

And so Elias thought.

The frontier had given him the question, even if no one there had meant to.

He had watched what the Protector Turtles did, and what the Nightmare Sheep did, and he had begun to see the shape of the gap between them. The turtles guarded a mind from the outside—a shield against attacks, against intrusion, against the slow erosion of hostile intent. The Nightmare Sheep reached inward, into sleep, and devoured the horrors that had already taken root. Between the two of them they covered a great deal of ground.

But not all of it.

Cassian had spoken, once, of the particular cruelty of his frontier. It was not a place of claws and teeth so much as a place of lies. Oceans of Illusion energy gathered there, and the demonic beasts born from it did not simply attack a soldier—they unmade his certainty. A man could no longer always tell whether the comrade beside him was real, whether the ground beneath his feet would hold, whether the order he had just received had ever been given at all. The strongest will in the world could be worn down not by pain but by doubt, drop by drop, until a soldier no longer trusted his own eyes.

A Protector Turtle could blunt that. A Nightmare Sheep could clean up the damage afterward. But neither did the one thing Elias kept circling back to: neither helped a person see through an illusion while standing inside it.

That, he decided, was worth solving.

He approached it the way he had approached the sheep, because the principle had never once failed him.

He did not need a legendary beast, or a rare bloodline, or anything that cost a fortune and lived behind glass in some great family's vault. He needed something common. Something overlooked. Something a frontier could be supplied with by the thousand, the way a blade was, without bankrupting a legion to do it. A miracle only the wealthy could afford was barely a miracle at all.

So the requirements were the same two as before. The species had to be cheap and easy to obtain, and after its first evolution—the very first step, the one within reach of an ordinary tamer—it had to gain some power against illusions.

With his criteria settled, Elias turned to the only tool precise enough for the work.

He had been hoarding questions for exactly this. Twenty sat waiting, the full reserve, and he meant to spend all of them if he had to.

He folded both of his requirements into a single asking, naming a candidate species and binding the whole search to one answer—

Does this race have an affordable evolution path, and does it gain abilities against illusions after its first evolution?

A yes would mean both. A no would close the door on the creature entirely and send him on to the next. From there it was simply trial and error—candidate after candidate, one name a day, each answer a door opened or a door shut.

The noes came, and came, and came.

Each one closed a door, and Elias simply moved to the next. A no told him nothing of what a creature might otherwise become—only that it was not the one he sought—and that was enough. He did not need to know their secrets. He only needed to find his. So he worked through the gentle and the common and the overlooked, the farmyard creatures and the household pets and the little ornamental beasts kept for no reason but pleasure, asking his single patient question of each in turn and waiting, without hurry, for the day a yes would come.

His reserve ran dry, and still the search went on, slowing to the patient pace of the questions each new day brought him. Briar grew used to the long silences and stopped fidgeting through them. Valentine took to napping more deeply at his neck. Days became a week, and a week became more, and still Elias asked, one careful name at a time.

On the thirty-seventh try, a door opened.

He had asked his question, the same as he had asked it three dozen times before, naming a creature he had very nearly skipped over for being too pretty to be useful.

Yes.

Elias sat very still for a moment, the way he always did when a long search ended. Then he laughed, quietly, alone in the lab with a butterfly asleep at his throat and a vine curled around his wrist, and wrote the name at the top of a clean page so he could not somehow lose it.

A Glimmering Horse.

It was a beautiful animal. That was, by every common account, the whole of what it was.

A small horse, pristine and white, with a flowing golden mane and gentle golden eyes, its pale coat catching the light with a soft inner shimmer that gave the creature its name. It was an ornamental pet, beloved nearly everywhere—kept by nobles and farmers and children alike, prized for its grace, its calm, and its sweet and loyal temper. It lacked any real ability worth the word; it could not fight, could not labor, could not do much of anything but be lovely and be gentle and be loved. And by the measure of most of the world, it made up for all of that with its beauty alone.

Which was, of course, exactly the sort of thing Elias had been hoping for.

There was a particular joy, one he had felt with the bees and the vine and the turtles and the sheep, in finding worth in the creature no one else had bothered to weigh. With the Glimmering Horse it felt less like inventing something than like apologizing on the world's behalf to a thing it had only ever admired and never once taken seriously.

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He began adopting them the very next day.

It proved harder than the ravens or the sheep had been, and for a happier reason. Glimmering Horses were rarely thrown away. They stayed beautiful even as they aged, and so people kept them—down the long years, until the very end—rather than abandon them to a shelter. The ones Elias found waiting were the unwanted remainder: the plain ones whose coats had never shimmered as brightly as their kin's, the homely ones, the ones missing a limb or marked by some deformity, the ones carrying old and hideous wounds that had cost them the only thing the world had ever valued them for.

Elias took every one of them gladly. To him a dull coat was no flaw at all, and a scar was only a story he had not yet been told.

With Oliver's help, the two of them combed the whole of the district—Oliver smoothing the paperwork, soothing the shelters, turning what would have been months of dreary errands into a matter of quiet, efficient days—until between them they had gathered close to a thousand horses. The realm's endless meadow, already crowded with bees and butterflies and ravens and sheep, found room for them. It always seemed to.

With the right creature finally found, Elias learned the shape of the road ahead.

The Glimmering Horse needed four steps to complete its evolution. And after the first of them—the first alone—it would gain both the Mental and the Illusion attributes. That was the answer he had been chasing across thirty-seven days: not strength against illusions borrowed from some other source, but the illusion attribute itself, taken into the creature's own nature. A beast that did not merely resist the lie but came to understand it from the inside. He could already feel, dimly, the shape of what that might become.

But that was for later. First there were a thousand horses to come to know.

A month after they arrived, they had decided he belonged to them.

It was his affinity, he supposed—the same strange ease with spirit beasts that had smoothed every contract he had ever made. Whatever the cause, the horses had taken to him completely. They followed him in a loose bright herd whenever he crossed the meadow, circling him, nudging at his shoulders and his hands until he reached out and ran his palm along their necks, and they neighed with soft pleasure at the touch and pressed closer for more. He was forever arriving somewhere later than he meant to, having been waylaid by a creature that wanted only to be scratched behind the ear.

The other beasts adored them, too. The Blood Crystal Butterflies and the Lifebloom Bees were drawn helplessly to the horses' soft inner light, settling on their manes in glittering drifts until each animal wore a living crown. It made for a great deal of beautiful chaos. Honey and Holly had no small trouble keeping the colonies in order around the newcomers, and the difficulty was not helped in the least by Hope, who abandoned all pretense of management and simply joined the fun—drifting through the herd with the butterflies, delighted, while her two sisters exchanged the long-suffering looks of queens who had expected better.

By then the bond had deepened enough for Insight to open to him, and Elias finally saw a Glimmering Horse for what it truly was.

Race: Glimmering Horse

Type: Beast

Attribute: Light

Rank: Elite Rank 3

Potential Rank: Elite Rank 6

Mood: Content

Skills: Glimmer Step Lv7

Soft Light Lv6

Mesmerizing Glow Lv5

Flash Run Lv5

Golden Shimmer Lv7

A modest creature, by the numbers. A low ceiling, a gentle nature, a handful of soft and pretty skills with nothing sharp among them. Anyone else would have closed the page and moved on.

Elias studied it for a long, happy while, and began to plan.

The first step came clear soon enough. Every one of the horse's skills had to reach Level 5—a modest threshold, and one most of the herd had very nearly met already simply by living. A little encouragement, a little time in the realm's rich energy, and skill by skill the slow ones caught up to the rest, until nearly the whole thousand stood ready at the gate of their first evolution.

The second step asked more of him. It required a concoction steeped in the Mental attribute—the third such brew he had made now, after the one for the Care Pigs and the one for the Sleep Sheep, though each had been tuned to its own particular end. There he was fortunate. The mental-attribute materials Cassian had sent him for the sheep evolution had been generous, and a great deal of it still remained; he had more than enough to work with, and he set to it gladly, measuring and steeping and testing through the quiet days.

By the time Cassian and Seraphina returned, the concoction was finished.

He gave it to the horses, and one by one they drank—and one by one they grew drowsy and lay down in the meadow grass, and slept. For a full week the herd dozed beneath the flowers, breathing slow and easy while the concoction did its quiet work. Then, on the seventh day, they woke, and a new line had settled into each of their statuses: Mental Fortitude. The first true gift of a creature the world had only ever called pretty. Elias watched it take hold across the herd and felt the particular satisfaction that never grew old—of a small thing becoming, quietly, a little more than it had been.

And then there were people to greet.

The Butler Pigs reached the new arrivals first, of course, sweeping out in a dignified procession to welcome Cassian and Seraphina home with bows and tea and the immaculate ceremony only Sebastian could orchestrate. The guardians came next, Oliver and Rowan and Iris spilling out to meet the travelers. Elias arrived a half-step behind them all, having been delayed—as he was always delayed now—by a horse that had wanted his attention on the way.

He greeted the two of them, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he had missed them quite a bit. He said as much, plainly, the way he said most things, and Seraphina ducked her head, and Cassian's composure flickered in the way it only ever did in this realm.

There was a feast, naturally. There was always a feast.

Sebastian and the kitchen put on something grand, and they all gathered at the long table among the flowers as the travelers tried to tell of where they had been. It went haltingly. Seraphina did not care for talking, and managed her account in quiet fragments that the others gently helped her finish; Cassian, robbed of the crisp scaffolding of a military report, proved oddly awkward at simply telling a story to friends, and stumbled through his own half with a stiffness that Rowan found openly delightful. Between the two of them, the tale of the frontier emerged in pieces, and was all the warmer for the trouble it took.

They had brought gifts back, which surprised everyone.

There were pieces of the frontier's demonic beasts—rare and beautiful materials, claws and crystals and shimmering scales—shared out among the household with the easy generosity of soldiers who had more than they could carry. But for Elias, Cassian had brought something else.

It was a bundle of letters.

Letters from the soldiers of the frontier, gathered up and carried home—thanks, in a hundred different hands, for the Lifebloom honey that had kept men alive, for the Protector Turtles that had guarded their minds, for the sheep that had given them back their sleep. Elias took them carefully, and read each one, slowly, a soft smile settling over his face that deepened with every page.

He looked up at last and thanked Cassian quietly, and meant it more than the small words could hold. It was, he said, a wonderful gift.

Cassian looked at that smile and said nothing at all. But something turned over quietly behind his golden eyes, and the thought that surfaced there—unbidden, and not entirely welcome for how much he meant it—was a simple one. He wanted to see it again. He frowned slightly at the unexpected thought.

Off to the side, Oliver watched his friend with a slow and dawning amusement.

Something was different about Cassian. It was there in the way he had looked at Elias just then—a small thing, easily missed, the sort of thing only a man raised among diplomats would catch. Oliver caught it. He turned it over, the way he turned over everything, and felt a familiar, delighted certainty settle into place.

Oh, he thought, hiding a smile behind his cup. This was going to be interesting.

Glimmering Horse