“You should set up your own school of magic,” she said, blunt as ever. “It would be good for the town.”
Adrissu laughed, shaking his head, but Kira frowned at him.
“I’m serious,” she continued, folding her arms across her chest. “We already have the mercenary’s guild to train up fighters. Why not a school for mages and scholars as well? Polimnos could become a place of learning for everyone.”
“Youareserious,” Adrissu repeated, still smirking. “Well... I’ll give it some thought, I suppose. I don’t think I’m cut out for teaching, frankly.”
“Then don’t teach,” she said. “Be the headmaster. Design a curriculum. You’re good at dealing with people, Adrissu. I think running a school of magic would play right to your strengths.”
“A headmaster,” he mused, leaning back. “I think I do like the sound of it.”
He considered it for a few days, then returned to Kira and agreed to at least give it a test run. With her endorsement, it was relatively simple to gather the funds for a new building, where the school would be housed. Adrissu shifted much of his time from working on his own studies to creating lessons and designing a curriculum that started with the very basics of arcane knowledge, which eventually grew to a three-branched path that focused on mastery of the elements, alchemy, and enchantment.
To his surprise, his contacts at the College in Gennemont were happy to help him design and refine his curriculum; and two students, who were set to graduate the following year, took a contract to be the first instructors in Polimnos. Everything fell into place far more easily than he’d expected.
But when signups began, interest was meager, and the only students to enroll were the children of merchants in Polimnos who were well-off enough to afford the risk that the school might not survive long enough to confer a degree. While a small student body was not necessarily a bad thing, Adrissu hated the idea of such a weak start.
After some discussions with Ederick, still the head of the mercenary’s guild, a collaboration was formed. Three guild recruits who showed some aptitude and interest in the arcane would receive a scholarship to attend the academy, entirely at Adrissu’s expense. At first he thought of naming the scholarship in memory of Ruan, but it left a bitter taste in his mouth. After all, Ruan was not dead. Adrissu was only waiting for him to return. He called it the Headmaster’s Scholarship, instead, and selected the three recruits.
It took nearly a year for all the moving parts to come together; but in the end, the Polimnos Academy of Magic opened its doors to ten students with two instructors to guide them. Spending his mornings in the brand-new, four-room building was far more pleasant than Adrissu first anticipated; and many of his afternoons he ended up either studying in his office, or occasionally stepping in to teach a lesson or two in the classroom.
“Aren’t you glad you listened to me?” Kira laughed, a week after the school’s grand opening, as they shared a bottle of wine in his new office.
“Very,” he admitted. Hewasglad Kira had convinced him. It was not something that he would have thought to do on his own; but now that the Academy was open and running, he wondered why he had not considered such a venture sooner. If nothing else, it would make the procurement of magical texts and tomes much easier. Their library was tiny now, but he already had plans on how to expand.
The first year required his near-constant attention, so his studies largely went to the wayside, and anything that he could not accomplish from Polimnos was abandoned entirely. The second year, they lost three students, but gained a new one, for a total of eight. With the curriculum already in place, and the teachers less wet behind the ears, Adrissu allowed himself to step back a small amount. He took one trip to the college in Gennemont in the autumn, partly to gather texts for the academy, and partly to resume his own studies. He had not forgotten his idea about mortal souls becoming immortal.
During his two-week stay at the college, the most he could find was a study that proposed the idea of soul containment as a means of stasis; but the tome made no mention of putting a contained soul into anything other than its original body. He made a note of the author—an elf called Caemar Illuren, studying in service of the royal library of Aefraya—and considered perhaps taking a trip to Aefraya sometime in the future.
Adrissu wrote a letter to Caemar, introducing himself as a fellow scholar, expressing his interest in the study and Caemar’s findings, and requesting permission to visit him at a later date. He passed it to a courier, paid the exorbitant fee to have such a letter delivered halfway across the known world, and tried not to think of it thereafter. Long-lived as they were, elves were notoriously slow to act on anything, and he doubted that he would hear back from the scholar within a year, if not a decade. Luckily, the one thing that he had in abundance was time.
He put his head down and focused on the Academy. If he dwelled too long on Ruan, the thought of waiting for him to return became unbearable, so he tried to keep busy as much as he could.
Polimnos grew significantly around him. What had once made up the whole of the town was now only a central inner city, which was surrounded by new buildings: homes and businesses alike. His tower was still far enough out of town that he was largely isolated; but for the first time, he could see his nearest neighbors from his door. Luckily, Kira knew how much he valued his privacy, and when any building proposals that edged too close to Saltspire Tower came before the council, she kindly suggested an alternate location closer to the city center. So far, no construction had intruded too close, and he intended to keep it that way.
He used to know every resident of Polimnos by name. Now he recognized most on sight, but knew the names of fewer and fewer as the city’s population grew every year.
It had been twenty years since Ruan’s death, and the population had grown so much that he began to wonder exactly how close “nearby” was for the purposes of the ritual. So once a week, Adrissu started going for long walks around the city. Sometimes he would be accompanied by instructors, or other city officials, or occasionally students who wanted to discuss some topic or another, but most often he would walk the streets alone. His eyes would flicker across the face of every man that he saw who looked to be about twenty years old, whether they were workers performing manual labor, artisans crafting their wares, or merchants calling out for his attention.
While some seemed to recognize him, more and more as his walks continued, none gave him that sense of the world stopping around them—he could still remember it so clearly, the first time that he’d seen Ruan over thirty years ago.
Whenever he would return to his tower, Vesper would eagerly come to peek down at him from where she typically lay on the upper floor, radiating a bit of disappointment when she saw he was alone. She had continued to grow and was now too heavy to go out with him—plus, loose, flowy robes with large sleeves had fallen out of fashion, and the tighter robes that he wore now had no room for her to nestle in the sleeve.
“Maybe next time,” he would sigh, patting her head and trying not to think about it until his next walk.
This too became a part of his life’s routine. He oversaw lessons at the Academy, met with Kira and other officials, and went for long walks around the city. Time passed quickly and easily when every week had the same structure as the last.
Adrissu had started to fear that maybe the man he was looking for was not in Polimnos after all, when one day his feet carried him through the back streets of the town center, and the world came to a halt around him.
Chapter Fifteen
Asmuchashehad tried to keep an open mind about who Ruan would be when they found each other again, Adrissu still could not stop the hot prickle of shock in his chest when he found him standing just outside the doorway of a brothel.
He had been walking as usual, eyes scanning the crowd, when that feeling ofknowingcaught him by surprise, so much so that he didn’t notice the brothel until he was already standing at the front. The human man was unlike Ruan in appearance in almost every way—petite where Ruan had been tall, slender where Ruan had been bulky with muscle, and fair where Ruan had been tan.
He was standing idly in front of the brothel’s entryway, watching people walk by. It was clear that he worked there and was enticing customers with sultry looks and winks; his tight pants and lack of shirt only reinforced the message. A delicate golden chain looped around his neck, draping down to wrap around his waist and encircle his narrow wrists. It seemed to be ornamentation, but Adrissu had the unsettling thought that it was perhaps some mark of ownership.
He did not have long to dwell on it, though; the man turned his head, as his gaze followed the path of a passerby walking in the opposite direction, until Adrissu entered his line of sight. His eyes were a vivid blue in the sunlight. He blinked, noticing Adrissu’s attention for the first time, and a slow smile spread across his lips. There was some slight recognition in his expression, but in a way that was familiar. Adrissu was known, being one of now only a handful of elves in Polimnos, so it was a look that he had seen a hundred times over. The man knew who he was, but not in the way Adrissu had hoped.
