Milan smiles.

"Sure, why not."

And then they are in his office. "How well have you learned our language so far?"

"Astonishingly well!"

"In that case, I shall proceed in this language, and if you have any questions then of course you should ask, and if you find you are failing to understand enough of what I'm saying to seriously impede comprehension then of course you should let me know and I shall work something else out."

"Sounds good!"

He drums his fingers on the table. "The first thing you should probably know is that the reason no Great Mage who was alive five hundred years ago will speak a word of what happened to the others is that they killed them. This was probably not difficult for you to figure out. Since then they've been weeding potential Great Mage prospects very, very carefully so that no one who seemed likely to actively oppose them would live long enough to become a threat. I survived using a variety of tactics, the most salient of which would be 'escaping their massacre, changing my name, and actually being much older and more powerful than they had any knowledge of.'"

"Good strategy," approves Milan.

"Yes," he says dryly. "Of course if I wished to rely on this tactic it would tip my hand far sooner than I wished and find the rest of them collectively attempting to tear my throat out again, which would have been disadvantageous. I de-aged myself, paid a middle-aged couple who lived in sufficient isolation that no one would find it implausible that they had a teenaged son no one had met to pretend to be my parents, and found myself an apprenticeship with a mage of mediocre talent. By the time it came out that I had the capacity to perform near-arbitrary magic at my supposed power level, I had managed to establish myself with the personality I needed my past and future peers to believe I had; one of extreme studiousness and a strong disinclination to meddle. They were suspicious, for a while, when I raised my city, but when I promptly established a university there they considered it sufficiently in line with what they thought they knew of me that they were disinclined to act against me. I believe at least one of them opined that they ought to have killed me while I was still young and weak, but none thought me worth going after now that I had any capacity to defend myself. I've kept out of their games by sheer disinterest in politics, and I've expanded my city and encouraged immigrants both because I can better help those in my immediate circle, and in the hopes that one day a new Great Mage would be born here, or at least not reveal themselves until coming to study here." He looks straight at Odette.

"You wanted me to help you fight them."

"You or someone like you," he agrees. "I'll understand if you feel that you've been treated as a pawn, but you can understand why I felt the need to keep my secrets to myself until I was quite certain of you."

"Can I help too?" says Milan, grinning.

"No," he says dryly. "I have waited a hundred and seventy years to find another Great Mage who had the spirit to overthrow a centuries-old conspiracy and the nearness that I could shield them, and now that a second has fallen in my lap I'm going to throw them away."

He snickers.

"In any case--" he stops, and frowns. "Ah. You probably wouldn't know, Odette."

"Know what?"

"You've lived all your life in Genosha. You probably wouldn't know how the magic sense is acquired," he elaborates.

"Go on."

"It's quite simple, really," he shrugs. "You have a lot of magic done near you. Telepathy, on the few occasions it's been used for the purpose, also works, but since a form has yet to be invented that doesn't inflict the pain on the recipient as well as the caster it's practically useful only for communication between mages of sufficient pain tolerance. Odette has had it all her life because she grew up in a city that's kept flying by magic."

Milan laughs.

"How long does it take without telepathy?"

"It depends on the strength of the magic. Only from being in Genosha, it might take a year. Hang around the university and it should be shortened to six months. Allow me to speed up the process by casting a significant amount of magic on you right now, it might take as much as a few hours."

"A lot of magic like what? And would telepathy be faster?"

"Well, yes," he says, "but I really don't recommend it for someone who's never used magic before."

"Why not?"

"It is a particularly advanced exercise, and incredibly painful."