Page 27 of Kingmakers, Year One

The plan is to stay the night here, then take a boat to Visine Dvorca the following morning.

Dvorca is a tiny rocky island in the Adriatic Sea. There’s one small town on the island, with a few hundred locals scratching a living on the hillsides, raising sheep and goats, cultivating little farms and vineyards. Most of their produce is sold to the school.

My father told me that. He didn’t attend Kingmakers himself—he’s not from a legacy family. But his adoptive father Tymon Zajac was.

My father visited Kingmakers twice with Zajac, to meet with the Chancellor. He said he’d never been to a place with such a sense of history. The school has stood on the same spot for seven hundred years. The most brilliant and ruthless criminal minds of centuries have passed through those halls.

In fact, Kingmakers influenced my father to buy our house in Chicago. Both buildings are ancient, remote, and castle-like. And both are stuffed with secrets.

Because of the high rocky cliffs and the currents that dash against the island, there’s only one place where a boat can make harbor. And that’s what makes Kingmakers so defensible. You can’t sneak up on the island unannounced. You can’t approach the school without warning. You have to take the single wide-open road up to the front gates, just as we’ll do tomorrow.

For now, Leo and I will be spending the night in a hotel in the Old Town part of Dubrovnik. The Grand Villa Argentina is perched on the cliffs above the blue ocean. The red roofs of theOld Town are spread out below, leading down to the medieval-looking Ploce Gate with its squat stone towers.

“I wonder if they’ll let us come into Dubrovnik often?” I ask Leo. “There’s not much on the island. What if we need new clothes or something . . .”

We were only permitted to bring one suitcase each.

“You won’t need clothes,” Leo says grimly. “We’re supposed to wear those stupid uniforms.”

“It’s to prevent us wearing gang colors or whatever the fuck, I guess…” I shrug.

“That wouldn’t matter for you,” Leo says, “since all you wear is black. How are you gonna adjust to having to wear green sometimes? And gray and silver?”

The school uniforms are mostly black, with a few pieces in shades of charcoal, silver, sage, and olive. It’s all fairly muted, but of course Leo can’t resist an opportunity to give me shit.

“I don’t only wear black,” I inform him.

“Midnight and onyx are also shades of black . . .” he teases.

“Did you look those up ahead of time for that joke? Admit it, you didn’t know the word ‘onyx’ . . .”

Leo snorts. He loves trying to wind me up, but what he really wants is for me to hit him back. He wouldn’t respect me if I didn’t. Everything is a competition to him.

“There’s probably some other kids from the school here by now, don’t you think?” he says.

I wish we could have flown out with Miles. He would have been our guide the whole way. He could tell us where to eat dinner right now—he always knows the best place to get anything.

Of course Leo and I grilled him about what Kingmakers is like, but it’s hard to get a straight answer out of Miles. He’s sarcastic as fuck and not one to show emotion. He wouldn’tadmit if something were seriously scary or difficult. He acts like nothing affects him.

I say, “We can’t be the only ones who got in today.”

After stowing our bags in our adjoining rooms, we head down to Old Town to look for someplace to eat.

Old Town sits within high stone walls, preserving the city in its original medieval state—or as close to it as you’re likely to find. It’s stuffed with Baroque churches and monasteries, and stone palaces with two-foot-thick walls. The streets are roughly cobbled, and the squares are paved with flat slabs of marble. The air smells of salt, thyme, wild orange trees, and the spray of dozens of fountains that keep the greenery lush.

We find a little restaurant with outdoor dining and sit down at the wobbly table shaded by a bay leaf tree. The waiter brings us hot tea and a warm basket of flatbread without us even asking.

Leo tears into the bread like he hasn’t eaten in weeks.

“What should I get?” I ask the waiter.

Enough tourists come here that he speaks English quite well.

“We’re famous for our seafood,” he says, proudly. “We have fresh-caught oysters, mussels, squid, and cuttlefish risotto. Fish stew—we call itbrudet.Also beef stew—that’spašticada.”

“I’ll have oysters, please.”

“Anything that isn’t fish?” Leo asks. He doesn’t like seafood.

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