After a couple of seconds of silence, he starts talking again in an upbeat way. “You’re probably wondering where the Academy is located, right?” He adjusts his position again so that he’s looking directly at me. “Everyone who comes here wonders that. It doesn’t matter how much we were trained to never mention this place. Curiosity is human instinct, especially for Strategia. The Council of Families knew this, and after a few failed attempts in other buildings where the school’s secrecy was breached, they settled on this location. Additionally, they came up with an elaborate camouflage system that has kept the Academy hidden for more than a thousand years. Can you even imagine?” Ash shakes his head. “Now, the most common guess is England, based on the seasons and the foliage alone. But if you start paying closer attention, the seasons and the foliage match so many places it’s not funny. There is every likelihood that the school was built to look like it’s in England because that is exactly where it isn’t. Everyone here speaks English now, but that wasn’t always the case. You’ll find that students here stop asking these questions after their first year because it’s a futile pursuit. If some of the greatest minds over the past thousand years haven’t figured out our location, you won’t, either. And besides, there is nothing to gain by knowing where we are. You only put yourself and all of us in danger.”

He pauses to make sure he has my attention, which he most certainly does.

“The analytical minds and ambition that drive us to figure out the school location also make us look at history differently. In history class we’re not just learning dates and events. We’re taught about our Families’ greatest victories and most catastrophic failures. And not the way we learn about Family origins as children. The lessons are broken down to illustrate specific strategy and maneuvering details, and the deeper you look, the more you see patterns. At first you don’t think much of it, but then, all of a sudden”—Ash snaps his fingers—“it clicks. You start seeing the cyclical nature of historical events—the cause and effect—in a way you’ve never analyzed it before because you never stopped to consider that a member of your own Family was not only responsible for those events, but was strategically maneuvering them.”

Ash gestures with his hands, and his expression is more animated than I’ve ever seen it. “Take Pope Gregory the Ninth, for instance. After he decided that cats were associated with devil worship, he had them killed in droves throughout Europe, right?”

I nod, vaguely recalling this from world history class.

“But because he took away the rat’s natural predator, medieval Europe found itself with an overpopulation of rats, resulting in nothing less than the bubonic plague, which killed twenty million people.” Ash shakes his head, as if in disbelief. “We see that misstep as obvious now, looking back. But what is unique about studying history here is that you realize our Families saw it as obvious back then and tried to stop it. When you’re paying attention, history isn’t linear; it’s a web of interrelated events, each domino toppling the next. You learn to predict instead of react. It’s the backbone of everything we do at this school. If you can figure out what someone is going to do, not just in a single moment, but five steps down the line, you can be effective.”