You might suppose that the City was a small, sea-soaked version of paradise. On the whole this impression was not inaccurate, although I admit I find it difficult to be objective.
The City of Nin was certainly a peaceful place, and neither the grandest nor poorest island City that circled the edges of the Amarico Sea. It had a reputation for fine word-working and fair traders and had gained a small degree of fame as a center of prestigious scholarship. The scholarship was rooted in Nin’s vast tunneling archives, which were some of the oldest and most extensive collections on the Amarico. Should you ever find yourself on the island I urge you to visit them and wander through the endless vaults packed full of scrolls and books and pages written in every language that has ever been documented in that world.
Of course, the City of Nin suffered all the usual maladies of human cities. Poverty and strife, crimes and their punishments, disease and drought—I have not yet seen any world free entirely of such things. But none of these sins touched the childhood of Yule Ian, a dreamy-eyed boy who grew up on the eastern edge of the City in a crumbling stone apartment above his mother’s tattoo shop.
He had devoted parents who were prevented from spoiling him only by the sheer number of their offspring. He had six brothers and sisters, who were, like siblings in every world, alternately his dearest friends and direst enemies. He had a narrow bunk decorated with tin stars dangling from the ceiling, which filled his dreams with gleaming planets and fanciful places. He also possessed a bound set of Var Storyteller’s Tales of the Amarico Sea given to him by his favorite aunt, and a temperamental cat that liked to sleep on the sunbaked windowsill while he read.9 It was a life well suited to daydreaming and reverie, which were the things Yule loved best.
Yule and his siblings spent their afternoons working with their father on his small fishing boat or helping their mother in her tattoo shop: copying out blessings and prayers in different scripts, mixing inks, and scrubbing her tools. Yule preferred the shop to the ship, and especially loved the long afternoons when his mother permitted him to watch her pricking tiny, blood-dotted words into a customer’s skin. His mother’s word-working wasn’t especially strong, but it was enough that her customers were willing to pay more to have their blessings written by Tilsa Ink, because her blessings sometimes came true.
His mother originally intended to apprentice him to her art, but it soon became clear that he lacked even the faintest spark of word-working talent. She might have trained him anyway, but he had no patience for the actual labor of tattooing. It was simply the words he loved, the sound and shape and marvelous fluidity of them, and so he drifted instead toward the scholars in their long white robes.
Every child in the City of Nin was subjected to several years of schooling, which amounted to weekly gatherings in the university courtyards to listen to a young scholar lecture them on their letters and numbers and the locations of all one hundred eighteen inhabited islands on the Amarico. Most children fled these lessons as soon as their parents permitted it. Yule did not. He often lingered to ask questions, and even wheedled a few extra books out of his teachers. One of them, a patient young man named Rilling Scholar, provided books in different languages, and these became Yule’s most prized possessions. He loved the rolling way new syllables felt in his mind and the strangeness of the stories they brought with them, like treasures from sunken ships the waves left behind.
By age nine Yule had achieved proficiency in three languages, one of which existed only in the university archives, and by the time he turned eleven—the traditional age for such decisions—not even his mother could object to his clear destiny as a scholar. She purchased the long lengths of undyed cloth at the harbor market and only sighed a little as she wrapped her son’s dark limbs in a scholar’s fashion. He was out the door with an armful of books in a white-blurred instant.
His first years at the university were passed in a state of dreamy near-genius, which provoked both frustration and admiration from his instructors. He continued to learn new languages with the ease of a boy scooping water from a well but seemed unwilling to dedicate himself sufficiently to master any single one of them. He spent untold hours in the archives, turning manuscript pages with a thin wooden paddle, but frequently missed assigned lectures because he’d found an interesting passage on merfolk in a sailor’s logbook, or a crumbling map marked in an unknown language. He consumed books as if they were as necessary to his health as bread and water, but they were rarely the books he had been assigned.
His most generous instructors insisted that it was purely an issue of time and maturity—eventually young Yule Ian would find a steady subject of study and dedicate himself to it. Then he might select a mentor and begin contributing to the grand body of research that made the University of Nin so prestigious. Other scholars, watching Yule prop a book of fables against the water pitcher at breakfast and turn the pages with a faraway expression, were less sanguine.
Indeed, as Yule’s fifteenth birthday approached, even the most optimistic scholars were growing concerned. He showed no signs of narrowing his field of study or proposing a course of research, and did not seem in the least concerned by his approaching examinations. Should he pass them, he could be formally announced as Yule Ian Scholar and begin his ascent through the ranks of the university; should he fail, he would be politely asked to consider some other, less demanding apprenticeship.
In retrospect, it is easy to suspect that Yule’s aimlessness was actually a quest, a search for some shapeless, unnamed thing that lurked just out of sight, and perhaps it was true. Perhaps he and Adelaide spent their childhoods in much the same manner, searching the limits of their worlds in search of another.
But restless quests are not the business of serious scholars. Yule was therefore summoned one day to the master’s study to have “a serious discussion of his future.” He arrived an hour late with his finger marking his place in A Study of Myths and Legends in the North Sea Isles and a bemused, distant expression. “You summoned me, sir?”
The master possessed a lined, somber face, as scholars do in most places, and venerable tattoos that wound up both arms indicating his marriage to Kenna Merchant, his dedication to scholarship, and his twenty years of admirable service to the City. His hair clung to his skull in a white scimitar, as if the heat of his working mind had burned it away from the top of his head. His eyes on Yule were troubled.
“Sit, young Yule, sit. I’d like to talk to you about your future here at the university.” The master’s eyes fell on the book still clutched in Yule’s hands. “I will be blunt with you: we find your lack of focus and discipline of gravest concern. If you can’t settle yourself to a course of study, we will have to consider other avenues for you.”
Yule’s head tipped curiously to one side, like a cat offered an unfamiliar bit of food. “Other avenues, sir?”
“Activities better suited to your mind and temperament,” the master said.
Yule was silent for a moment but could think of nothing better suited to his temperament than spending sun-soaked afternoons curled beneath the olive trees reading books in long-forgotten languages. “What do you mean?”
The master, who had perhaps expected this conversation to involve more distressed pleading and less polite puzzlement, pressed his lips into a thin maroon line. “I mean you might apprentice elsewhere. Your mother, I am sure, would still train you as a tattooist, or you could act as a scribe for one of the word-workers on the east side, or even a merchant’s bookkeeper. I could speak to my wife, if you’d like.”