This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

With Cassian and Oliver gone to the frontier, the realm grew quiet again, and Elias filled the quiet the way he always did—with work.

There were papers to write. The evolution from Glimmering Horse to Guiding Horse had to be documented properly, set down in careful detail and prepared for submission—though not, this time, in the way Elias usually did things.

He had thought hard about that. Nearly everything he found, he gave away freely, into everyone’s hands at once; that was the whole point of his work. But the Guiding Horse was different, and the difference sat in the third and fourth steps. Those required casting illusions directly onto a living mind—deep ones, painful ones, the kind that had to be broken from the inside—and a mishandled mind-illusion was not a thing that failed gently. In careless or untrained hands it could leave a beast, or a person, badly and permanently harmed. To scatter that method to every amateur tamer in the federation would not be generosity. It would be a slow disaster, written in minds that never woke up right.

So he chose, for the first time, to keep the path semi-public. He documented it fully and honestly—but the method would be released under license, sold only to the established professional breeder houses with the expertise, the controlled conditions, and the trained hands to walk those mind-steps safely. The early steps, the harmless ones, anyone could learn. The dangerous heart of it would stay with those equipped to handle it. It chafed a little against his instinct to simply give, but Elias had decided some gifts had to come with a careful hand attached, or they stopped being gifts at all.

And alongside the writing there was the slower, gentler work of the thousand Glimmering Horses still in the realm—coaxing them through their evolutions one wave at a time, so that batch after batch of Guiding Horses might be sent on to the frontier that waited for them.

It was good work, and it kept his hands and mind full, and he was content.

It had begun, in truth, before the horses ever left for the frontier. His family had come to visit while the herd still filled the realm, and this time it was Damian who was caught.

He had taken one look at the Guiding Horses—the great glowing creatures with their golden manes and the diamonds set in their brows—and gone still in the particular way that meant something had reached him. He had several contracted beasts already, and he had not come looking to add another. But standing among the gentle giants, watching one lower its luminous head to breathe against his palm, he had made up his mind on the spot: he wanted one of these. Not a finished Guiding Horse, though. He wanted to raise it himself—to find a small, unevolved Glimmering Horse and grow it into one, the long way, the way Elias did everything.

Finding the right one, though, was another matter, and Damian was in no hurry at all. There were still a great many small Glimmering Horses in the realm—the unevolved waves Elias was working through batch by batch—and Damian took to walking slowly among them on each visit, studying the little creatures one after another, in no rush to settle. It was not a decision a man made quickly. Selena watched him with fond exasperation, and Kyle declared he would help, which mostly meant scooping up whichever horse was nearest and pronouncing it the best one. Damian thanked him gravely each time and went on looking. He had not contracted any of them yet. He was content to wait until the right little horse looked back.

Three months passed, and in that time the Guiding Horse made its way out into the world—carefully, through the licensed breeder houses, but out all the same.

It did not break over the world the way the Lucky Ravens had, or the sheep. There was no frenzy, no scramble, no avalanche for Oliver to wrestle into order from afar. What it brought instead was something quieter and, in its way, deeper.

For ordinary families, it was a mercy of the same gentle kind the sheep had been—arriving, now, by a slightly longer road. A family could not safely walk the mind-steps themselves, but they could bring an aging Glimmering Horse to a licensed house and have the evolution done properly, under careful hands. All across the federation, people did. Beautiful old companions near the end of their small lives were given a future: years back, strength gained, a little more time. And beyond that, the Guiding Horses proved extraordinary at something no one had quite expected—the soft, patient work of helping those who suffered illnesses of the mind, reaching a troubled soul and steadying it and guiding it gently back toward itself. The professional houses found themselves with a calling none of them had foreseen, and letters of gratitude found their way to Elias once again, a fresh wave of them, and once again he read every one with great relish.

But on the Sagittarius frontier, it was not a mercy. It was a revolution.

There, illusion was not a rare affliction but the very air the soldiers breathed. And into that, the Guiding Horses changed everything. The maddening, slippery illusion-attacks that a soldier could never quite see through—gone, broken or revealed before they could take hold. The horrors built to shatter a mind from within—answered. And most of all, there were the lost ones: the soldiers who had fallen into illusions years before and never woken, sleeping their lives away because the cost of saving them had always been too high to pay.

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The Guiding Horses walked into those long dreams and led the sleepers home.

Cassian watched men wake who had been gone for years. He watched comrades and families crowd around cots they had long since stopped hoping over, watched them weep as eyes opened that everyone had given up on, watched soldiers thought lost forever sit up and ask, hoarsely, how long they had been asleep. It happened again and again, in ward after ward, up and down the frontier. A thing that had been simply accepted as the price of the border—lives swallowed and not returned—was being undone, quietly, one waking at a time.

And as Cassian watched it, he felt the frontier's heart turn toward him.

It was the nature of his talent; devotion became strength in him, and there was a great deal of devotion now. Gratitude, admiration, respect—from soldiers given back their lost brothers, from families given back their sons, from a whole frontier that had learned to associate its commander's return with salvation. It poured into him, and his power rose on the tide of it, climbing past every height he had known until at last it crossed the final threshold.

Cassian Sagittarius reached the Emperor realm.

It was a height almost no one of his years had ever touched, and he touched it quietly, sealed away in seclusion for the breakthrough, emerging at last steadier and stronger than he had ever been—and outwardly unchanged, which was very like him.

Oliver was waiting when he came out, of course.

He greeted his friend with a warm smile and a sincere word of congratulations—Emperor was no small thing, and Oliver meant it. And then, the obligation of sincerity discharged, he moved without pause to the matter he had been saving up for weeks.

"So," Oliver said pleasantly. "Are you going to tell me why you've been avoiding a certain breeder? Or shall I keep guessing aloud until I get warm?"

Cassian ignored him.

This was, Oliver had long ago learned, Cassian's entire defensive repertoire: ignore the thing, attend to a report, ignore it again. He was extraordinarily good at it. Unfortunately for him, Oliver was relentless, and the days on the frontier were long, and there was only so much paperwork even a commander could hide behind. Oliver raised the subject at meals. He raised it on inspections. He raised it, once, in the middle of a strategy briefing, purely to watch Cassian's jaw tighten. Cassian endured all of it with stone-faced discipline and gave him nothing.

But Oliver was a diplomat, and diplomats noticed things. And what he noticed, over those weeks, was that for all his stubbornness, Cassian seemed unusually eager to finish the frontier's work and go back. Not impatient with the frontier—Cassian was never impatient with duty—but quietly, restlessly ready to return to the realm. It was a small thing. Oliver doubted anyone else would have caught it. He caught it.

So one evening, mildly, he laid it out.

"You don't want to face him," Oliver said. "But you want to be near him. That's the whole trouble, isn't it."

Cassian froze.

It was only for a second—the smallest hitch, a man stopped mid-motion—but it was answer enough, because Cassian had plainly not put the two halves of it together until Oliver set them side by side. He had been so busy not facing the thing that he had not noticed how much he wanted to be in the same room as it.

Oliver's smile gentled. He did not press the advantage, which was its own kind of mercy.

"Whatever it is," he said, rising to go, "don't run from it. And don't do nothing, either, and end up regretting it later. That isn't like you, Cassian. You've never once in your life let fear pick your battles for you." He paused at the door. "Don't start now."

And then he left, off to his own endless work, the way he always was.

Cassian sat alone for a long while after, turning it over. He was not a man given to indecision; he had spent his life making impossible calls in seconds and living with them. But this was a different country, and the maps he knew did not cover it, and it took him longer than any battlefield ever had. Still, in the end, he was who he was. He made up his mind.

Three months after he had left, Cassian returned to the realm—resolved, at last, to speak.

He did not get the chance, at least not at first. He and Oliver arrived to find the place in cheerful uproar: Butler Pigs bustling everywhere with packs and parcels, a small efficient storm of preparation, and Elias planted in the middle of it on a chair he had very clearly been made to sit in. He had the slightly sheepish look of a man who had tried to help and been gently informed that his help made everything take longer, and had been overruled by his own household. He was not allowed to lift a thing. Sebastian had seen to that.

Elias spotted them across the commotion and lit up, waving them over with both hands.

"You're back! Oh—I'm sorry, I should have sent word sooner." He gestured helplessly at the packing going on around him. "Something came up for the new research. We're heading out on a trip—I didn't mean to leave you walking into all this."

"No trouble at all," Oliver said smoothly, and slid his gaze sideways to Cassian with an expression of perfect, expectant innocence.

And Cassian—who had faced down demonic beasts of Monarch rank without his pulse so much as stirring, who had crossed into the Emperor realm and not blinked—felt, for the first time in his life, genuinely nervous about speaking to another person.

He looked at Elias. At that bright, open, welcoming face that had no idea what was coming.

And he opened his mouth.