This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Over the next few days, Elias spent his questions confirming the third step, and for once the answer was almost disappointingly simple.

The horses had to be placed inside an illusion and break free of it on their own—nothing more, nothing less—and they had to do it again and again until the act itself became a skill. There was no rare material to hunt down, no concoction to brew, no surgical procedure to perfect. Just a creature, a lie, and the will to see through it. After the tangle of everything that had come before, Elias almost laughed at how clean it was.

Almost. Because clean did not mean easy, and it certainly did not mean painless.

The first problem was the illusion itself. Elias had no good way to make one.

Cassian solved it before Elias had even finished explaining the difficulty. There existed, he said, a particular device used on the Sagittarius frontier—a training tool, built to cast controlled illusions into a subject's mind so that soldiers could learn to recognize the false from the true and claw their own way back out. It was precisely the thing. Cassian arranged for one to be brought to the realm, and Elias thanked him so many times that the commander eventually told him, with the faint stiffness that meant he was uncomfortable being thanked, that it was nothing.

It was not nothing. But Elias let him have it, and set to work.

To begin, he was careful.

He set the device to its very lowest setting, and chose the gentlest illusion it could offer—something happy, something kind. He fitted it to a single horse first, one of the calm older mares who trusted him completely, and started it.

The mare's eyes went blank almost at once, staring through Elias at something only she could see. It was a deeply unsettling thing to watch. Every instinct he had told him to reach in, to shake her free, to end it—and his questions had already told him, plainly, that he could not. The horse had to break the illusion on its own. Any help from outside would defeat the entire purpose. So Elias did the only thing left to him, which was to stand at the edge of it and cheer, murmuring encouragement to a creature that could not hear a word of it, feeling utterly useless.

Five minutes later, the mare blinked. Her eyes cleared, found him, and she gave a low confused whicker and pressed her nose into his chest as if to make sure he was real. Elias caught her head in both hands and praised her until she was practically glowing, relief and pride tangled together in his voice.

She had done it. She had walked into a dream and walked back out, by herself.

One down.

After that, it grew harder—and worse.

A happy illusion was the easiest thing in the world to leave, and so it taught the least. To truly build the skill, the horses had to break free of illusions they would not want to leave at all, or could not bear to stay in. So Elias, hating every moment of it, began to vary them. Sad ones. Painful ones. Dreams steeped in fear, in grief, in a loneliness so complete it made his own chest ache just to set the dial.

He did not like doing it. He did not like it at all. There was something deeply wrong, to him, about deliberately leading a gentle creature into its own sorrow, and more than once he nearly stopped.

But the horses would not let him stop.

That was the thing that undid him, a little. The horses understood. Not the mechanics of it, perhaps, but the shape of it—that the hurt was for their sake, that the dark dream was a door they were meant to learn to open. And knowing that, they stood for it. They pressed their foreheads against him, breathed slow, and let him fit the device again, resolute in a way that no one had asked them to be. They walked into their own nightmares on purpose, for him, and trusted that he would be there when they came out.

He always was. Every single time, no matter how long it took, Elias was waiting at the edge with both hands open and a flood of praise the moment their eyes cleared.

He climbed the device by degrees—level one, then two, then five, then ten, the illusions deepening at every step.

Not every horse climbed at the same pace. One in particular—a smallish gelding with a dull, unshimmering coat, one of the shelter castoffs no one had ever wanted—caught somewhere in the middle of a grief-dream and simply could not find his way out. Five minutes passed, the time the others took, and his eyes stayed glassy and far away. Then ten. Then half an hour, and Elias's heart was somewhere up in his throat, every instinct screaming at him to end it, his questions reminding him over and over that he could not. He could only kneel in the grass beside the lost little horse and talk to him, low and steady, saying his nonsense encouragements to a creature that could not hear them, refusing to leave.

It took the better part of an hour.

When the gelding finally surfaced—eyes clearing, legs trembling, a thin exhausted sound in his throat—Elias caught his head and pressed their foreheads together and praised him until his voice nearly cracked, prouder of that one slow, stubborn horse than of any creature who had managed it in five clean minutes. The little gelding leaned his whole weight into Elias and stood there shaking, and Elias let him, for as long as he needed.

After that, Elias paid special attention to him. And after that, strangely, the gelding was one of the steadiest of them all.

Then he scaled it outward. One horse became ten, ten became a hundred, until the whole herd was working through the illusions in turn. That took help, and the realm gave it gladly. The Butler Pigs, Briar, Holly, Honey, and Hope all took stations among the dreaming horses—steadying them, cushioning them, making certain that a creature lost in a vivid nightmare did not thrash and hurt itself, or stumble into another. Briar's vines made soft walls and softer beds; the pigs moved between the rows with watchful precision; the three queens hovered above it all, coordinating the whole careful operation with the ease of long practice.

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For two weeks it went on, and the illusions grew harder and harder.

Even Cassian was surprised. He had watched seasoned soldiers fail to break illusions far weaker than the ones these small ornamental horses were shrugging off by the end of the second week. He said as much, in his clipped way, and Elias glowed with secondhand pride on the herd's behalf. The horses only grew stronger for it, every breaking quicker and surer than the last, fed the entire time on Elias's endless patience—his praises, his pats, his unwavering presence at the edge of every dream.

Until, at last, the skill took. One by one, across the whole hundred, a new line settled into their statuses.

Illusion Break.

Step three was done.

Which left the fourth, and the fourth, Elias had already puzzled out somewhere in the long middle of those two weeks.

If the third step was learning to break an illusion for oneself, the fourth was learning to break one for someone else. The horses had to reach into another mind caught in a lie and lead it out. That was the whole shape of the creature he had been chasing from the start—not merely a beast that resisted illusion, but one that could rescue others from it. The thing the frontier had been missing.

To test it, he needed a subject. And so, a little sheepishly, Elias volunteered himself.

At Cassian's quiet insistence that someone keep watch over him, Elias let himself be put under.

The device, set gently, slid a happy illusion over his mind, and for a moment it was seamless. He was home—the real home of his second life, the warm one, his family all gathered around a table loud with talk. Selena was arguing about something. Kyle was laughing. It was perfect, and it felt entirely real.

For about three seconds.

Then the inconsistencies began to show, the way a poorly stitched seam shows once you know to look. A face that should have aged and hadn't. A room arranged slightly wrong. The low, low setting simply could not hold against Elias's habit of noticing things, and almost without trying he saw the whole soft lie for what it was and stepped out of it on his own.

He raised the setting. Then raised it again. It made no difference. The trouble, he realized with a kind of rueful amusement, was that a joyful illusion had nothing to offer him. It could only show him happiness—and he already had his. There was no ache for it to exploit, no hollow place for it to fill, because the warm table and the loud family and the home full of impossible creatures were not a dream he longed for. They were simply his life. The illusion had nothing to tempt him with that he did not already possess.

Which meant he made a useless test subject, at least for the gentle dreams. And the cruel ones, he was not eager to volunteer for.

Cassian, watching this, made an offer instead.

He was an expert, he pointed out, with the flat practicality of a man stating his qualifications. He had survived more illusions than anyone in the realm by an enormous margin. More to the point, he had the discipline to hold himself inside one deliberately—to keep from breaking it by reflex, so that the horse would have a real lie to lead him out of. He could control it. Elias could not.

Elias did not love the idea. But the logic was sound, and Cassian had already settled himself with the calm of someone who had decided. So Elias relented, and started the device, and Cassian fell into the illusion.

It was not a happy one.

It was a battlefield. The device, reading the mind it had been given, built the thing that mind knew best—and what Cassian Sagittarius knew best was the frontier at its worst. Blood on churned ground. Screaming that did not stop. Soldiers with their minds torn open or seized outright, turning on the comrades beside them, striking down the people they had sworn to guard. Men who no longer knew their own names. Men lost so deep inside their own hallucinations that they simply lay down in the carnage and did not get up again.

And there, among the faceless many, was one the illusion knew to show him. A young soldier—too young, they were always too young—on his knees in the mud with the light going out of his eyes, reaching up toward Cassian with a hand that shook. He had a voice. That was the cruelty of it; the illusion gave him a voice, and it was asking, the way the real one had asked, why the commander had not come sooner. Cassian remembered the face. He had not been able to reach him in time. He had carried that face a long way home and never once set it down, and the illusion had reached into him and pulled it back up into the light because it knew, the way these things always knew, exactly where a man kept the wounds he did not show.

If mental attacks were the insidious kind of horror—blunt, direct, shattering a mind by force—then illusions were something worse, in their way. They were the work of master schemers. They did not break a mind so much as trick it, leading a person gently by the hand to his own darkest moment, pressing on the tender places, the old wounds, the fears a man kept hidden even from himself. They made the lie out of your own heart.

Cassian looked upon all of it with a blank expression.

He knew it was an illusion. Of course he did; he had been inside a thousand of them, and his eyes found the flaws by old habit—the impossible geometry, the detail that did not cohere, the wrongness underneath the horror. Some illusions were dangerous not because they looked real but because they reached for something you tried to bury, something you might not even know was there. This one reached. It put that young face in front of him and made it ask its question, and it reached.

But Cassian had been through too much to be moved by his own grief anymore. He sat within the slaughter of everything he most feared, and held himself there with terrible discipline, careful not to break it—waiting, as he had promised, to let the horse do its work.

And then, through the screaming, he heard a neigh.

A single bright sound, clean and out of place, cutting across the battlefield like a thread of daylight under a door. A warm light bloomed at the edge of his vision, soft and golden and utterly unlike anything that belonged to this place. Without thinking—on an instinct deeper than discipline—Cassian turned toward it and followed.

And the battlefield let go of him all at once.

He came back to the realm with a breath, to flowers and sunlight and the soft press of a glimmering horse beneath his hand, its golden eyes fixed steadily on his. It had come into that nightmare after him. It had found him in the worst place he carried, and it had led him out.

Elias was already there, of course.

Worried eyes hovered over him, circling, checking him over from every angle to be certain he had come back whole. Cassian felt the corner of his mouth lift—a small, real smile, there before he could stop it—and then it faded as quickly as it had come, folded away behind the calm he wore like a uniform. He told Elias he was fine. He was fine.

Then he looked at the horse that had guided him home—the small, gentle, beautiful creature the whole world had only ever called useless—and back at Elias, the quiet man who saw worth where no one else bothered to look.

And a single thought turned over, slow and unbidden, behind his golden eyes.

Did you... ?