“You’re banned from The Gift.”

Archie and Nori looked at each other, then back to Rowan. “Banned?” they asked in unison.

“I told you that I opened The Gift to cook for people that deserved cooking for. You two need to ask yourselves…do you deserve to be cooked with?”

Archie waited for Rowan to laugh. To reveal that it was all a joke. To clap like he always did and then explain why their sponsor had called them out to the fields by the lake.

But Rowan didn’t laugh. The starkness of his face made his wrinkles seem harsher. His smokey voice no longer felt like a hug. Deep in those hickory notes, Archie heard only disappointment.

Nori looked just as confused as Archie. “What’d we do?” she asked.

That got Rowan to laugh, but it wasn’t a laugh that Archie liked. “What did you learn working for me last week?”

Nori’s mouth hung open as she tried to find an answer. Archie also came up empty.

“Well, I mean…” Archie knew he was just getting himself in more trouble, but he couldn’t stop himself. “We’ve just been making stew and bread. There’s not much to learn…”

Rowan nodded and looked at Nori. “Is that how you feel?”

“Uh…a little?”

“Tell me the name of one person that we’ve served.” Rowan crossed his arms.

Archie closed his eyes as he realized his failure. Nori looked at the ground.

“That’s what I thought,” Rowan scolded. “You two spent all day arguing with each other over nothing. You didn’t connect with anyone. You didn’t make a new friend. You haven’t even made friends with each other.”

Archie’s dad could hardly make him feel so ashamed. “Actually, we’ve been getting along recently—”

“Good,” Rowan said in a tone that was anything but. He pointed out into the wild forest and hills that stretched across the horizon. “Because you two are going to be spending all your time together out there.”

Archie and Nori looked into the thicket of trees. “Doing…what?” Nori asked.

“Picking blueberries.”

Again, Archie waited for a punchline that never came. When a Black Jacket first offered to sponsor him, he thought he would be curating gourmet experiences with a dozen courses. Not stew and bread. And he certainly didn’t think he’d be picking berries in the wilderness.

“There are four kinds of blueberry bushes,” Rowan continued, paying no mind to the shocked faces of the students. “Rabbiteye. Lowbush. Highbush. Half-high.” He fished a blueberry out of his pocket and tossed it to Archie. “What kind of bush did that come from?”

Archie studied it as if he had known there were four bush types more than five seconds ago. He had nothing. He showed it to Nori, who shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“I want you to be able to tell me the difference,” Rowan said. “Not by physical characteristics. By essence.”

Archie already felt like a disappointment. “We just started learning…I mean, we’re just learning how to put essence in soil.”

“And?”

“Well…Distinguishing the differences in essence between blueberry bushes seems…like a big leap.”

“And?”

Archie looked to Nori for help. She shrugged.

“How do we do that?” Archie asked.

“Same way you learn anything. Through hard work. You need to develop an affinity for blueberries. That means you need to pick them. You need to cook with them. You need to eat them. Only then will you understand them. So to get you started…different bushes need different temperatures. You might be able to find them mixed together, but in general…”

He pointed to the south. “Rabbiteye does the best in the warmth. It gets a little warmer south as the elevation lowers. If you hit the ocean, you’ve gone too far.”

He pointed to the north. “Highbushes are going to be the most trouble. They need the coldest winter, so you might only be able to find them in the highlands. Lowbushes will be all over the forest. Half-highs will be…halfway between.”

Archie still couldn’t wrap his head around the mundanity of his new assignment. “The highlands? That’s gotta be, what, four hours of walking? One way!”

Rowan shrugged. “Do it toward the end, then. Once you’ve already figured out some of the lowbush varieties and gotten a feel for the essence.”

Nori cleared her throat. “How long will we be picking blueberries?”

Rowan clicked his tongue and leaned his head back in thought. “Well…blueberries were at their best last month. Once we start getting close to winter, you’re not going to find any fruit. So I guess you have a little over a month.”

“You want us picking blueberries for a month?!”

“And cooking with them. And eating them.”

Archie felt like the conversation had just begun, but Rowan was already walking away.

“I’ll come check on you in a couple weeks,” Rowan said. “Oh, and if you’re curious if you got the right blueberry, you should try asking it. They’re quite unlike people in that…they always know who they are.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“This is not what I was expecting,” Archie complained as he probed at a bush with his walking stick. Two hours of searching had yielded nothing.

Nori sighed. “Well, it sucks, but we shouldn’t complain. He is paying for us.”

No, he’s paying for me. I’M paying for you.

They walked parallel to each other, taking high steps through the brush and skirting around the trees in their search for blueberries.

“Besides,” Nori continued. “He wants us to learn to cook with blueberries, too. That’s exciting. We don’t really cook much with blueberries in Uroko.”

Archie looked up at her. She continued to scan the foliage as she waded through it. Archie had never heard her mention home without her seeming frustrated. He saw the opportunity to press.

“So, Nori…We’re gonna be out here every week for who knows how long…”

“And what? We should get to know each other?” She flashed a coy look at him.

“Well, yeah.” Archie averted her gaze, kicking at a bush to check for any flashes of blue.

“What do you want to know?”

“Uhhh…” Archie struggled to think of a meaningful question, so he stuck with the classics. “Do you have any siblings?”

“Three. Two brothers, one sister. All older.”

“Oh wow. Are they Chefs?”

“Two of them. One of my brothers never manifested, so he made up for his ‘great shame’ by becoming one of the youngest generals in Urokan history.”

“Wait, like. A general general? Like…leader of armies general?”

“Yep. If you’re a Harper and you’re not a Chef, you better be the best at something else. What about you? Any siblings?”

“Only child.”

Nori narrowed her eyes at him, a question brewing in her head. She cast the thought away, deciding to keep the conversation superficial for now. “What about extended family?”

“Uh…a couple of cousins. My dad was an only child. My mom has a sister that lives in Labrusca, so I never really got to see them. You?”

Nori let out a little laugh. “Well. I have like…fifteen cousins. Of course, I’m the youngest of them, too. And that’s just the main branch. There are offshoots—oh! Oh!” Nori threw her walking stick down and submerged herself in a large bush, coming away with something in her hand. “I found some!”

Archie ran through the tall grass and bushes to reach Nori and examined the berries. “Hm…kinda purple and red….” He took one and tasted it. “These are huckleberries.”

“What?!” Nori stared down at the berries as if she could change the truth with a look. “Are you sure?”

“They’re too tart.”

Nori tasted one, groaned, and threw the rest on the ground.

Archie laughed and continued his search. “What’s that like? Being the youngest of everyone?”

Nori took a deep breath. “I wish I was a middle child. When you’re the youngest and there’s that big gap before someone else gets born, you get a lot of attention. You can’t do anything good without someone noticing. It’s nice at first, getting recognized, but then it becomes a burden. Every achievement becomes an expectation.”

“Is that why you…” Archie was afraid to say the words.

“Ran away from home?” Nori finished.

“Yeah.”

“That’s part of it, yeah…It’s like…I stopped being a real person. I was just this vessel for other people’s expectations. My dad…I can’t tell you how many times he told me, ‘everything you do reflects on me.’ I never got to be Nori. I always had to be Nori Harper.”

The thought stirred something in Archie. They walked in silence for a moment, letting the birds fill the air with their songs.

“You’re the opposite, aren’t you?” Nori asked.

“In some ways.” Archie kept his eyes to the ground as they walked. “I want everything I do to be as a Kent.”

“Why?”

Archie laughed at the simplicity of the question and the complexity of the answer. He had thought of it so often but spoken of it so rarely. “Because…For so many generations, the Kents were revered. My dad never got to experience that.”

“So you’re doing it for him?”

“Yeah.”

“But not for yourself?”

Deep down, Archie knew there was a difference, but he couldn’t make the distinction. “I mean it’s me. I want him to experience it, so I’m doing it for me. It’s what I want.”

“Is it what he wants?”

Was it? Before Archie could find an answer, he found a blueberry. “Oh, Nori! Look!”

As the afternoon went on, their conversation steered away from the profound. They took turns telling stories about their upbringing. Archie told her about his mud pie restaurant. Nori told him about how she used to go to the bathroom during private tutor sessions and sneak out the window.

After their first blueberry, they found many more, and while they had originally been excited to use them to make dinner, by the time they made it back to the kitchens, they were both too tired to cook. Luckily, leftover meals were easy to come by in a Culinary Academy.

Reinvigorated by a budding friendship and a desire to make Rowan proud, they committed themselves to waking up early and spending all day in the kitchen. They dubbed it “blueberry day.”

“So can you tell the difference?” Nori asked as Archie held a blueberry in each hand.

In fleeting moments, he thought he could. But he no longer felt the competitive urge to exaggerate his own abilities to Nori. “Not really.”

“Damn.” She zested lemon into a bowl of sugar. “I was hoping it’d be like you with the soil. Or the noodle. Do I do the vanilla now?”

“Yeah.” Archie tossed the blueberries into a heating pot along with some syrup. “I think I could tell the difference with those because that was like…the difference between it being there and it not being there. Here, it’s all there. It’s a more subtle difference. Have you never made pancakes?”

“I have.” Nori grabbed a couple of eggs. “I just figured I’d try to make them your way.”

Archie smiled. With each hour they spent together, their times arguing seemed to move weeks into the past. “We’ll do the next meal your way.”

They combined ricotta cheese, eggs, dairy, and flour, and a few minutes later, they had their first fluffy lemon ricotta pancake with blueberry syrup. Nori burst into giggles and glee as she shifted the plate back and forth, making the spongy pancake jiggle. Archie laughed with her and remembered the days of being a kid in Sain playing make-believe Chef.

Their jubilation caught Oliver’s attention.

“It smells good! Got one for me?”

Nori looked at the blackened underside of the pancake, a typical casualty suffered by the first pancake of the batch. “I’ve got just the one.”

Despite eating the worst pancake of the batch, Oliver still left with rave reviews. Word spread through the dormitories and out into the fields, and soon, Archie and Nori found themselves serving breakfast to nearly thirty students.

Nori showed Archie how to make a blueberry zucchini bread with a little lime tang. They barely got a bite to themselves as their vulturous classmates picked the bread apart. They blew through lunch, satiated by the little taste tests they did throughout the morning.

Despite standing all day, Archie’s throat hurt long before his feet, the neverending conversation between him and Nori making his voice hoarse by the time they finished making a blueberry balsamic chicken salad for a late lunch.

While they laughed and shared stories of their past, they planned for the future, baking blueberries and bananas into crispy oatmeal cups so that they wouldn’t go hungry on their next foraging adventure. They put the leftover cups into the fridge in a bag labeled “Archie + Nori” in an ambitious—yet naive—attempt to thwart would-be thieves. When Archie added the vanilla extract into the mix, he thought of home and wondered how his parents were doing.

They took a breather out on the balcony of the lounge, looking down on a couple of older students that practiced combat in the field below. One student threw exploding tomatoes at the other, who struck them down with a spatula that shrank and grew on command.

For dinner, Archie begged to make something without blueberries, but Nori insisted they use the last of their harvest. They raided the fridge to find something that would relegate blueberries to an accent flavor, finding a salmon filet.

Throughout the day, Archie felt like he and Nori cooked as equals, but when they turned to seafood, Nori showed a new level of skill. She overwhelmed Archie with culinary tips as she displayed the expertise of the prodigy daughter of the world’s greatest seafood restaurant. To stay on theme, they served the grilled salmon with blueberry sauce and blueberry lemonade—very heavy on the lemon to appease Archie’s tiring taste buds.

As Archie prepared for bed, he was afraid that he would never stop thinking about blueberries. But when his head hit his pillow, he couldn’t think of anything other than Nori.