Kadero Gliogale

Kadero taught Mikhail at the university, and is still the man Mikhail writes to when the mathematics get away from him. What came back the first time he asked was not an answer. It was a well-used book on sacred geometry, with a note saying only that three gold were owed on it. Handing over the grounding and leaving the student to do the rest of it is how he has always taught.

The book did more work than a favor would have. The company had already seen sacred geometry laid out on a relief map at the Twisted Grove, sites set at equal distances around a keep and marked for life, for death, and for a third thing nobody there could put a name to. Kadero’s book gave them the mathematics that map had been drawn on, and it is the two of them together that let the motes be identified at all.

What he does with his money is pick students. He funds a spread of them across the colleges, interviews every one himself, and chooses by reasoning he has never explained to anybody; those who have tried to work out what he is weighing have not managed it. He is held to be generous and kind-hearted, and he is, and the other half of him is worth knowing about: get on his bad side and it is a bad side worth avoiding, and he forgives at his own pace, which is slow. Of everyone who once paid Mikhail’s way, he is the only one still doing it.

He does not hold a post any longer. He consults for Talesong and tutors the pupils he favors, and the work his name carries now is advising on the ethics of enchantment and illusion across northern Peredhel. The chair he once held was at Lux Astralis, his own alma mater, and the school Venessa Hasek was sent south to for years of her own. She recognized the name when Mikhail said it, having known Kadero during those years abroad, and traded him the news of his old teacher. She also knew which trophy-hung Bardh tavern he had done most of his studying in.