Page 48 of Kingmakers, Year One

There’s no arguing. No appeal. To prevent an endless cycle of retaliations between families, the punishment is applied immediately and swiftly.

If you break someone’s arm, your arm will be broken too. If you put out their eye, they’ll pluck yours right out of the socket. And if you kill someone . . . well, that’s the last thing you’ll do.

That’s why my father was worried about Leo coming here with me. He knows Leo has a temper. And it wouldn’t be the first time Leo has pulled me into trouble right along with him.

“Come on!” Leo grabs my arm and tugs me along, since I’m too slow gathering up my bookbag. “Where do you think the classroom is?” he asks Ares.

“I think most of the classes are in the Keep,” Ares says.

The Keep is the largest building at Kingmakers. It’s five stories high, with staircases built into the thickness of the stone walls. This would be the last stronghold of the castle, if all the other outer walls fell to invaders.

I don’t think anyone has ever actually attacked Kingmakers—it’s too far out in the middle of nowhere. But if someone were to try, before the era of drone strikes and bombers, it would have been almost impossible to scale the cliffs or breach its fortress walls.

We find our classroom just in time, located on the second floor of the Keep. It’s a large, airy room, the walls covered with antique maps and the blackboard already crowded with chalk diagrams of family trees and endless notations in a fine, spidery script.

Leo, Ares, and I slip into three of the remaining desks in the front row. The professor closes the door only a moment after, striding to the front of the class.

She’s a tall, dark-haired woman, about forty, wearing a perfectly-fitted suit and a pair of elegant horn-rimmed glasses. Her husky voice instantly claims the attention of the room.

“If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything,” she says. “You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree. Who said that?”

She looks around at us, her demand echoing in a room that has fallen so silent that you can almost hear our individual heartbeats.

“Was it . . . Churchill?” an Irish boy with untidy brown hair asks, hesitantly.

“No,” Professor Thorn says. Her lips curve up in a small smile. “It was Michael Crichton. Authors tend to note the repetitive cycles of events. They look for patterns in behavior,cause and effect. What about this one:A man who has no sense of history is like a man who has no ears or eyes?”

She waits for us to respond. This time, no one has the temerity to guess.

“That was Hitler,” she says with a wicked smile. “I don’t think he took his own advice.”

She turns and writes on the blackboard in that fine, flowing script.

“La Cosa Nostra,” she says, speaking aloud the words as they unfurl from the tip of her dusty chalk. “Giuseppe Esposito was the first Sicilian Mafia member to emigrate to America. He fled there, along with six of his men, after killing the Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor of his province, along with eleven oligarchs.

“The Italian Mafia spread from New York to New Orleans, and then to Chicago. Several families rose and fell from power—first the Black Hand, then the Five Points Gang, then Al Capone’s Syndicate.

“This semester we will study the history of the Italian Mafia in Italy and America. Then we will move on through the various families represented at Kingmakers, until we have covered each and every one by the end of your fourth year.”

She frowns at us, perceiving the thrill of excitement in the students of Italian descent.

“Don’t be too happy,” she says sternly. “Every semester, the students that fail are the ones who think that they already know everything that I’m about to teach them. Trust me, you don’t. Every year you Freshmen prove yourselves shockingly ignorant of your own history, the history of your country, and the history of your friends and enemies. You’ve probably been told more legends than truths by your relatives. Memory is fallible. And no one is more prone to self-serving reconstructions than those who believe they can write their destiny at will.”

I can feel Leo getting restless next to me. I don’t even have to look at him to know that he’s probably gazing around the room to see what the other students think of this speech or trying to peer out the windows which run down only one side of the classroom.

Whereas I feel electric excitement at Professor Thorn’s words. I’ve always loved history. You live a thousand lives when you learn about the people who came before you, and you can take their lessons as your own.

I spend the next ninety minutes scribbling furiously in my notebook as Professor Thorn recounts the origins of the Cosa Nostra in Sicily.

Leo doesn’t bother taking any notes, safe in the assurance that he can copy mine later.

That doesn’t bother me. I’m more annoyed by the fact that Leo is so clever that he can get away with barely paying attention to the professors’ lectures, scoring almost as high as me on exams without even trying.

Ares writes slowly and steadily in his notebook. His stubby pencil disappears inside of his large hand, bent so far over his notebook that his nose almost touches the page. I can’t tell if he’s as fascinated by the lecture as I am, or simply very focused.

Behind Ares, Hedeon Gray stares at the professor with an irritated expression. I don’t think I’ve seen him make any other face yet—he’s good-looking, but perpetually sulky.

Professor Thorn has a fascinating narrative style. Her history lesson is not at all dry. How could it be, when the history of the mafia is studded with conniving deals, double-crosses, and, of course, murder?

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