This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

A week into the fourth step, after horse upon horse had reached into Cassian's nightmare and led him out of it, something changed.

It was a mare who did it first. She came into the battlefield as all the others had, found Cassian where the illusion held him, and guided him back toward the light—and as she stepped free into the real world, she did not simply settle to graze. She glowed. A soft radiance gathered along her pale coat, gentle as dawn, and she folded her legs beneath her and lay down in the flowers, and the light did not fade.

Elias knew it at once. He had seen enough evolutions to recognize the beginning of one.

It was working.

Over the next three weeks, one by one, the whole herd followed her down into that glowing sleep.

Through all of it, Elias kept apologizing to Cassian. Every horse that earned its evolution had earned it by dragging the commander back out of the worst thing he carried, again and again, and Elias felt the weight of that keenly. He said so, often, until Cassian finally told him—in the flat way that meant he wished to hear no more about it—that he had endured far worse for far less reason, and that this, at least, was for something good. Elias apologized one more time anyway, and then, with effort, let it rest.

Then the first horse woke.

She had slept the better part of those three weeks, and she woke transformed. Where there had been a miniature horse no larger than a big dog, there now stood a creature grand enough to carry two grown men with room to spare. The beauty was the same—the pristine white coat, the golden mane shining and shimmering as it always had—but everything else had deepened. Her eyes no longer merely held a touch of gold; they shone with it now, a soft inner light spilling out as she looked at him. And set into the center of her forehead, where there had been nothing before, was a single golden diamond, gleaming like a small fixed star.

Elias went to her gently, the way he always did, brushing his hand along the great arch of her neck and stroking the soft place beneath her jaw. She leaned into it and breathed against his hair, and he had to tilt his head back now to meet her eyes, where once he had crouched to do the same. She had been a creature he could lift in his arms. She was something else entirely now.

He checked her status, hardly daring to.

Race: Guiding Horse

Type: Beast

Attribute: Light, Mental, Illusion

Rank: Commander Rank 1

Potential Rank: Lord Rank 10

Skills: Guiding Light Lv2

Illusion Breaking Light Lv2

Revealing Glow Lv3

Mental Guidance Lv1

Radiant Gallop Lv1

Mental Healing Lv1

Sense Illusion Lv3

Lord Rank potential. The little ornamental pet the world had only ever called pretty, lifted to the same heights as his ravens. Elias pressed his forehead to the mare's broad cheek and laughed, quiet and delighted, and she huffed warm breath into his collar as if she understood the joke and approved of it.

And like always, the wheel of fortune appeared, landing on green, giving him 1 month of meditation experience.

As more of the Guiding Horses woke, Elias studied what they had become, and the more he learned the more certain he grew that he had found exactly the thing the frontier needed.

Guiding Light was the heart of it—the skill for reaching a mind trapped in illusion and drawing it back out. That alone would matter enormously. On the Sagittarius frontier there were soldiers lost inside illusions even now, sunk so deep they had not woken—not truly comatose, for there were ways to pull a person free, but ways so costly and so laborious that they could never be spared for everyone who needed them. Men were simply left to sleep, because saving them cost more than the legion could pay a hundred times over. A creature that could walk into a dream and lead a man home, gently and at no great price, would give those soldiers back.

The rest only deepened it. Illusion Breaking Light shattered a false world outright. Revealing Glow stripped an illusion down and showed its true shape beneath. And—to Elias's quiet astonishment—the horses had gained skills that reached past illusion entirely: Mental Healing, to mend the wounds left in a mind, and Mental Guidance, to lead a frayed and wandering soul back toward the right path. They did not merely break the lie. They healed what the lie had broken, and helped a person find himself again afterward.

It was, Elias thought, almost exactly the shape of the gap he had set out to fill, all those months ago in a flower field.

So he gathered his guardians, as he had before, and told them what the Guiding Horses could do—and said, as he had before, that he would like to donate them to the Sagittarius frontier.

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No one was surprised, and no one objected. The realm simply moved. Rowan and Iris went off together to look the newly woken horses over, exclaiming at the great glowing creatures the small ones had become. Oliver excused himself almost immediately to begin getting ahead of the storm this discovery would raise; he had learned, by now, exactly how loud the world became each time Elias gave it something new. Seraphina drifted back toward her house and her books, content as ever to leave the noise to others.

Which left Elias and Cassian, and Elias turning to go.

He had barely taken a step when Cassian stopped him.

The commander hesitated—an unusual thing, in itself—before he spoke. "Did you do this for us?"

Elias blinked at him, not following.

"The Protector Turtles," Cassian said. "The sheep. And now the horses. They help the Sagittarius frontier more than anywhere else. More than anyone." His golden eyes searched Elias's face. "Did you plan that?"

"Yes," Elias said. Easily, without weight, the way he might confirm the weather. "Not the turtles—those came first, before any of this. But the sheep, and the horses." He met Cassian's eyes plainly. "Those two I made for the frontier. For the two of you."

Something moved behind Cassian's eyes, and for a moment he could not speak at all.

The sheep he had thought a fortunate coincidence—a fine and useful thing that happened to help his home. But the horses, gaining abilities that fit the frontier's deepest wound so exactly, as though measured against it—that was no coincidence. And Cassian understood, all at once, what the easy way Elias had said it truly meant.

Elias had decided. Not merely chosen which overlooked creature to raise, but somehow known—or shaped—what it would become on the far side of its evolution. No breeder could be certain of that. It was held as simple fact among them that the abilities a beast gained were discovered, never dictated; one searched for a path and took what it gave. Yet Elias spoke of it as a thing he had aimed, the way an archer speaks of a target. He had looked at the frontier's suffering, and reached into the unknown, and pulled out the precise answer to it.

And he had done it for them.

Cassian knew what he ought to say. That a gift like this was too great to spend on a single frontier. That a talent of this order belonged to all of humanity, not to one stretch of border and the two soldiers Elias happened to care for. It was the correct thing, the dutiful thing, the thing a commander should say.

The words would not come. Because beneath the duty, Cassian knew exactly how grateful he was, and the gratitude had no interest in being correct.

Elias, watching him struggle, saw all of it—and only smiled.

"Cassian," he said, gently. "You have no idea what it meant to me, that you came. I love all the others—of course I do. Oliver, Rowan, Iris, Seraphina, every one of them is family now." He paused, choosing the rest with care. "But you were a commander. The heir. The pillar of an entire frontier, the man a legion of soldiers looked up to. You had every reason in the world to stay where you were needed." His voice softened. "And you came to protect me anyway. I only wanted to repay you for that. In the one way I knew how."

"It was my decision," Cassian said. Low. Almost a defense.

"I know." Elias's smile did not waver. "And it was mine, to choose how to answer it. So don't look like that—like I've made some mistake, like I did something wrong. I didn't. I never once went out of my way to make you sad."

Cassian's reply lodged somewhere in his throat and stayed there. In the end only two words came loose.

"Thank you."

And Elias gave him that warm, unguarded smile in return, the one that asked for nothing back.

It was then, looking at that smile, that Cassian finally understood the thing that had unsettled him months ago.

He remembered it precisely: the strange, sour turn in his chest the first time he had learned how quickly Elias's rank was climbing. He had not had a name for it at the time. He had one now.

It had been jealousy.

He—Cassian Sagittarius, the commander everyone looked up to, the prodigy who had exceeded every expectation laid on him—had been jealous. Because Elias had grown strong too, as strong nearly as he was, and Elias had not paid for it the way Cassian had. Cassian's strength was built on blood, and death, and grief, on a frontier of nightmares and a tally of faces he could not save. Elias's was built on none of that. Elias had grown powerful through love. Through kindness. Through the simple, stubborn warmth of caring for small forgotten things until they flourished. He had reached the same heights by the opposite road, and walked it smiling, and some buried part of Cassian had looked at that and ached with wanting it.

To realize it, here, with that smile still turned on him, was more than Cassian had any idea how to hold.

So—for the first time in his disciplined life—Cassian Sagittarius fled. He turned, and found something urgent to attend to elsewhere, and removed himself with as much dignity as a rout allowed.

Elias watched him go, mildly puzzled, and decided he must simply be shy. He did not think any more of it than that.

For the next several days, Cassian avoided him.

It was not subtle, but it was not obvious either, and Elias—who tended to take people at their gentlest interpretation—assumed nothing worse than bashfulness and let him be. There were a thousand horses to see off, after all, and the work was a mercy to them both.

When the day came, Elias said his goodbyes, and they were sad ones. The Guiding Horses crowded around him exactly as they had when they were small, nudging and nosing and pressing close for one last touch—except now they towered over him, and he had to reach up to cup their great glowing faces, and more than one of them lowered its head to rest the golden diamond of its brow against his and would not be hurried.

And this time Cassian did not hesitate to return to the frontier. He needed these horses there, badly, and arranging their arrival was real and necessary work, and if it also happened to put a good distance between himself and a certain smile—well. That was merely convenient.

Oliver, who had seen straight through his friend's distress from the very start and found the whole thing more entertaining than he could possibly say, volunteered at once to go along. He produced some perfectly reasonable excuse about needing to speak with the Sagittarius Legion in person, which fooled no one and was not especially meant to, and attached himself to the expedition with a bright and knowing smile that made Cassian's jaw tighten.

So the two of them set off—Oliver, Cassian, a thousand Guiding Horses, and a travel-pack of food the Butler Pigs had prepared with enough care to feed a small army. And Elias, never one to waste an opportunity, sent along a thousand more ordinary Glimmering Horses besides, so that he might evolve them in the months to come and send wave after wave of guidance to a frontier that had waited generations for it.

The horses went out into the world. And the world, as it always did around Elias Arkwright, quietly prepared to change again.

Guiding Horse