by Sophie Lark
My father swallowed hard, a muscle jumping in the corner of his jaw. Even all those years later, I saw what that meant to him—that the Other Anna had been fully avenged. I knew he believed her soul could never be at peace otherwise.
I thought that perhaps her soul wasn’t at peace, though. I thought she might be haunting me. She died before I was born—maybe her soul had even been reincarnated in me.
The thought didn’t frighten me. In a strange way, it seemed comforting. If the Other Anna had become a vengeful spirit, it would only make me stronger.
My father continued. “What I learned in that moment is that the Braterstwo had honor. They had a moral code. They were not simply criminals, as I’d believed. Tymon Zajac looked at me. He didn’t see only a poor, skinny child. He saw that I was like him. Or that I could be like him someday.
“He offered me a position at his side. He taught and trained me. And he told me the history of the Braterstwo, the Bratva, the Italian Mafia, the Penose, the Yakuza. Each has its own genesis and development. But like any ecosystem, we have grown, collaborated, battled, and aligned over time. And like many ancient families, we have ancestors in common.
“Many of the criminal families today can trace their ancestry to the Thieves’ Guilds of the Medieval Era. That guild had its headquarters at Kingmakers.”
I had finally interrupted him then, too interested to listen quietly any longer.
“What does it look like?” I demanded, even though he’d told me before.
My father gave me a description of the island and the castle fortress, which he had described for me many times before, but I always wanted to hear it again. If he left anything out, I reminded him.
“Then there’s the towers—” he said.
“Six towers!” I cried, not wanting any detail omitted.
“A library—”
“In the tallest tower!”
“That’s right,” he smiled.
My father’s smile is not like my mother’s. Her smile is so warm that it lights up the room. Her eyes crinkle up, her cheeks flush pink, and you feel like she’s laughing, and you have to laugh, too.
My father’s smile is thin and subtle. It doesn’t show his teeth. But it runs over you like an electric shock. He is just as mesmerizing as my mother, in his own way. They are Hades and Persephone: the King of the Underworld, and the Queen of Summer.
I always knew I would come to Kingmakers. And now that I’m here, it doesn’t disappoint. Every stone, every doorway seems stuffed with antiquity and intrigue. I want to get to know every inch of this place. I want to imprint my own history on its walls so that a piece of me will remain here long after I’m gone.
As I walk into the dining hall, I see Leo already sitting with Ares, each attacking a massive platter of bacon and eggs. I dish up my own plate from the silver chafing dishes set out for us, and I grab a pot of mint tea as well.
So far I’ve found that the food here is simple but extremely good. Fresh-baked bread, meat and produce from the farmland directly around Kingmakers.
“There you are!” Leo says as I sit down. “You almost missed breakfast.”
“Morning,” Ares says, pushing a stone tureen of cream in my direction for my tea.
Ares is dressed neatly in a crisp white button-up, tucked into nicely ironed pants. His shoes don’t look new, but he’s polished them carefully. I wonder if he likes the uniforms because it makes it less obvious that he’s not as wealthy as the rest of the students.
Leo, by contrast, has not ironed any of his clothes and his shirt is only half tucked in. His dark curls look like he just rolled out of bed, and he’s shoved up his sleeves so he can attack his food more easily, showing his bare brown forearms with veins running up both sides, and his large, long-fingered hands.
As he spears a sausage with his fork, his forearm flexes and I feel strangely warm. Leo is sprawled out in his seat like always, too big to fit comfortably in normal furniture. His long legs are perpetually stretched out under tables and across aisleways, his broad shoulders always taking up more than their fair share of space.
Leo’s loud, too. He talks and laughs with so much animation that every eye in the room is drawn to him. Leo is the sun, and everyone wants the sun shining on their face. Girls flutter around him like moths. Even boys can’t deny his charm. Everyone wants to be friends with him. Everyone wants to be near him.
I have to admit, it’s flattering to be the best friend of a man like that. Everybody wants to spend time with Leo, and he gives that time and attention to me more than anyone.
But lately I can’t enjoy our friendship like I used to. It used to be so pure and simple. Leo was my brother, my confidante, and my partner in crime all rolled into one.
We sailed through every phase of life together without anything coming between us. When we went through puberty, I laughed at Leo’s voice cracking and deepening, and he teased me mercilessly about my awful braces and how quickly I shot up in height so that he was the only boy in our class still taller than me. He started dating girls from our school, and then girls from other schools, and I was never jealous because while they might be his girlfriends, I was his best friend.
I went on a few dates myself, but I never felt that thing you’re supposed to feel, that spark of infatuation. The boys were sometimes nice and sometimes obnoxious, and either way I didn’t appreciate them putting their clumsy hands on me. I never wanted to take things further than an awkward kiss at the end of the night.
I never knew if Leo was taking things further. I assumed he was, because he’s a boy, and wildly popular—he could fuck a different girl every day of the week. But it was the one thing we didn’t talk about. Leo seemed strangely reticent, and since I had no sex stories of my own, it seemed pointless to bring it up.
Our families saw us as cousins, as brother and sister even. I thought I felt the same.
After all this time, I don’t understand what’s changed.
Something has. All of a sudden I feel a tension that was never there before. I’m noticing things about Leo that I don’t want to notice. When he throws his arm around my shoulders, I breathe in his scent and my heart starts to race. I notice how warm his skin is, and how surprisingly soft. I see how he bites the corner of his lip when he grins, and I get this uncomfortable squeezing in my guts that was never there before.
I tell myself it will stop. My emotions have never been as stable as Leo’s—it’s something I admire about him. His confidence and optimism are boundless. Whereas I’m often sad or anxious, sometimes for no reason at all.
I tell myself this is a phase. This bizarre impulse will fade and die, just like how it rose up out of nothing. I have to ignore it, even crush it down whenever it springs up. Because whatever happens, I can’t risk my friendship with Leo. Nothing is more important to me.
“What’s up with you?” Leo says. “You look grumpier than usual.”
“I’m not,” I say, chewing a piece of bacon.
I can’t fool Leo.
“What’s wrong?” he persists. “You have a bad dream or something?”
He knows I have nightmares. He knows everything about me. Well . . . almost everything.
“No,” I say, gulping down the hot mint tea. “I just had a weird thing this morning—”
I don’t want to tell Leo what happened, because I know he’ll laugh his ass off at the image of me running into some dude buck-naked. He’ll never let me hear the end of it. But he’s sure to hear about it anyway, if Kingmakers is anything like high school. A story like that doesn’t stay quiet for long.
Before I can say a word, Leo’s face darkens, and he glares across the dining hall.
“There he is, that fucker,” he says.
“Who?” I turn around to look.
“Dean Yenin.”
Leo is staring across the hall not at a stranger, but at the very boy I ran into this morning. I recognize him at once, even though he’s fully dressed in a green sweater vest and trousers no
w.
I whip my head back around, cheeks flaming.
“That’s Dean?” I say.
I never asked Leo what Dean Yenin looks like. The silver-blond hair, the fair skin, the deep blue eyes—I’m a fucking idiot. It’s Aunt Yelena’s nephew, clear as day.
Had I not been so embarrassed and annoyed, I would have realized. Now that I’m paying attention, I can even see a faint bruise under his eye—a remnant of his fight with Leo on the deck of the ship.
“That’s him,” Leo says grimly. “Wonder if we’re gonna have classes with him today.”
“Probably,” I say. “The Heirs will mostly be together, won’t we?”
“What do you have first?” Ares asks us.
I take my schedule out of my bag. We didn’t select the classes ourselves—it was all determined ahead of time, mailed to us in one of those thick slate gray envelopes I came to recognize as a missive from Kingmakers.
The Kingmakers letters are hand-written every time. I wonder if that’s because nothing is stored on a computer at this place. They must have a dozen employees with perfect penmanship, because my schedule looks like something torn out of an illuminated manuscript. It’s not exactly easy to read—I see Leo squinting at the ornate cursive, trying to figure out what the hell his first class even is.
“I think I’ve got . . . History,” he says at last.
“Me too,” I say.
“Me three.” Ares grins.
“Well you better hurry up, then,” Leo says. “We only have five minutes, and I have no clue where the Keep is.”
I fold up one more slice of bacon and stuff it in my mouth, washing it down with a gulp of tea.
“Do you think we’re supposed to clear the dishes?” Ares asks.
“No,” Leo says, nodding toward a man in a crisp white apron who’s cleaning off the neighboring table. “Looks like that guy’s doing it.”
Ares hesitates, seeming like he’d rather help, but Leo and I are already slinging our bags over our shoulders.
“Come on,” Leo says. “I don’t know what they do if you’re late—string you up on a rack, probably.”
The draconian punishments of the school were spelled out in our rules and regulations list. But so far, it’s all theoretical, so it’s easy for Leo to joke about it. I don’t feel quite as sanguine. I’ve never known anything to be a joke in the mafia world.
Our acceptance letters clearly spelled out the Rule of Recompense.
Students from all over the world come to attend Kingmakers. There’s a heavier concentration of Italian, Irish, and Russian students, because those are the territories closest to the school. But with children from all countries and families, and plenty more grudges than the one between Leo and Dean, they have to be strict about violence.
They know that fights will break out—it’s inevitable with so many young hotheads who are used to solving every problem with their fists.
The one thing we have in the back of our minds at all times, reminding us never to go too far over the line, is the Rule of Recompense. If any student injures, disfigures, or maims another student, the same injury will be applied to them. 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 pulled me into trouble right along with him.
“Come on!” Leo says, grabbing my arm and tugging 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 were to fall 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 last 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. She has a husky voice that 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.
I, on the other hand, feel a frisson of excitement at Professor Thorn’s words. I’ve always loved history. I feel like you live a thousand lives when you learn about the people who came before you. If someday I plan to collaborate or contend with other mafia families, I want to know them as well as my own.
I spend the next ninety minutes writing furiously in my notebook while Professor Thorn recounts the origins of the Cosa Nostra in Sicily. She begins in the 19th century with the loose association of criminal groups that called themselves the cosc
a. She describes the family sovereignty over their various territories—at the time small fiefdoms, usually incorporating only a town or village or neighborhood of a larger city—where they operated their rackets. She tells us how the members were called “men of honor,” a term that later morphed into mafiosi. She describes the mafia’s early activities centering around protection racketeering and illegal trade.
Leo doesn’t bother taking any notes, so I know he’ll want to 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, and only glancing over my notes before exams in which he scores almost as high as me without even trying.
On Leo’s other side, Ares is writing slowly and steadily in his notebook. His stubby pencil disappears inside of his large hand. He’s 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 is staring 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. She talks about Sicily‘s transition from feudalism to capitalism. As the feudal barons were forced to sell off their lands, the entirety of Sicily was reconstructed.
“Ironically,” Professor Thorn says, “the proto-mafia began as law-enforcement. In countryside towns lacking formal law-enforcement, young men formed ‘companies-at-arms’ to hunt down thieves and recover stolen property. However, these ‘company-at-arms’ were often composed of skilled and ruthless former criminals. So they were more inclined to collude with other thieves than to eradicate them.”
I barely look up from my notebook the entire ninety minutes. In fact, I’m surprised when the professor breaks off mid-sentence, saying, “That’s all the time for today. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
With that, she turns and strides out of the room, without bothering to bid us goodbye.
