The school that Chiron directed him to was called Hillview Academy and was, on the surface, an ordinary private school with a slightly unusual concentration of students who were good in crisis, tended toward the impulsive, and had a rate of ADHD diagnosis substantially above the national average.
Kael settled into Hillview with the practiced ease of someone who had spent years learning to calibrate his performance for a school environment. The academic work was not difficult. The social work was more interesting — a small school with a high proportion of demigods in various states of awareness of their own nature, most of them not knowing what they were, operating on the divine instinct that made them simultaneously exceptional and difficult.
He made two friends. Maya, daughter of Iris though she did not know it, who painted constantly and had the specific quality of someone who saw more color in the world than the people around her because she literally did. And Dominic, son of Hephaestus probably, who fixed things that were not supposed to be fixable with the focused satisfaction of someone whose gift expressed itself as compulsive utility.
He did not tell them what they were. It was not his information to give. But he was a good friend to them in the way that mattered: he took them seriously, he paid attention, he did not treat the things that were strange about them as problems to manage.
The school year also gave him something he had not gotten enough of at camp: time to read. He read widely, using the university library through his mother's access and the camp library through the generous remoteness of Chiron's lending policy. He read mythology he had not covered as thoroughly — Etruscan, Mesopotamian, Zoroastrian. He read philosophy and medical history and, on impulse one November afternoon, the complete works of Marcus Aurelius, which he had read once before in his previous life and which hit differently when you were a twelve-year-old demigod who had been planning a war for most of your conscious existence.
You have power over your mind, not outside events, Aurelius had written. Realize this, and you will find strength. He wrote it in his coded notebook and looked at it for a while.
The school year also meant letters. Long ones, to Cece, full of the real version of things — what camp had been, who he had met, how Luke seemed, what Annabeth was like, what it felt like to sleep in the Apollo cabin with the solar warmth of that bloodline dense in the air. Cece wrote back with equal length: the city, the Moreau family's Vodou practice, a new development in her mother's relationship with Baron Samedi's attention that Cece described with the pragmatic specificity of someone who had grown up treating divine affairs as family business.
He missed New Orleans. Not as homesickness — he was past the age where separation from home produced distress rather than longing. He missed it as a specific quality: the weight of the air, the sound of the city, the crossroads at the corner of his street that would always be his first crossroads, the one where the shimmer was most familiar.
He went home at Christmas and stood in the herb garden in the December cool and felt the four generations of magic in the soil and thought: still here. Still mine. Still the foundation everything else is built on.