Archie spent his final day before classes started by lounging around the lake as the soreness of a day of dishwashing set in. The next day, the first-years were instructed to take flower pots down to the fields for their first official class.

Archie tried to use the elevator-noodle, imagining it expanding the same way he had imagined the noodle strengthening during the feast. But after a few fruitless plucks at the noodle, Archie and his roommates resigned to taking turns cranking the wheel to lower the elevator, an exercise that left them all out of breath by the time they reached Head Chef Quince out in the fields.

“Y’all really should work on y’all’s fitness,” Quince said with his heavy southern Kuutsan accent. He wore a straw hat that blocked the sun but still squinted out of habit. Archie noted the double contraction of y’all’s. “I should talk to Headmaster Aubergine about adding some runnin’ to y’all’s coursework. Y’all know he jogs every morning around the lake?”

Archie wanted to complain about having heard enough about Aubergine’s jogs, but he didn’t he couldn’t catch his breath enough to start.

Quince took the entire class out into an old unused farmfield. Grass and weeds and thorny briars grew over the dirt, making it look less like a plot for farming and more like a patchy green blanket with brown holes.

“How would you describe this field?” he asked no one in particular.

Silence. The pressure of answering the first question posed to them as official students kept their lips vacuum-sealed.

“You,” Quince said with a smile, relishing his ability to torture the nervous students.

His finger picked out Barley, whose eyes widened. Archie could see Barley’s neck muscles tense to keep his jaw shut. Quince raised his eyebrows in anticipation. They waited like that for a while.

Finally, Barley answered. “Flat. Big. Wild?” Each answer came out at a higher pitch like a deflating balloon.

Quince shook his head. “You.” This time he pointed at Oliver.

“I mean it’s kind of a dump,” Oliver answered with no hesitation.

Quince shook his head a little harder. “You.” Nori.

She thought for a moment. “Uncared for?”

Quince smiled. “Uncared for,” he repeated thoughtfully. “What’s your name?”

“Nori.” She fixed her posture and spoke with force, her proper upbringing showing in the way she carried herself.

“Nori. That was a very good answer, Nori.”

Nori smiled from ear to ear.

Archie frowned. Somehow, her victory was his loss.

“Uncared for. Unloved. Forgotten,” Quince said. “How would that make y’all feel?”

The students exchanged looks.

“Are we supposed to answer that?” Oliver whispered.

“The soil wants to grow things. It’s in its nature. If you could ask the soil what it wanted to do, it would answer, ‘nourish.’”

Quince let them think in silence for a moment. “A farmer knows how to use things like compost and mulch and manure and crop rotations to get the most out of their soil. You’ll be learning these things too starting today.

“But a Chef. A Chef knows how to use essence. With the right skills, a Chef can grow in a day what a farmer grows in weeks A Chef can grow summer crops in the snow. A Chef can grow a lemon with enough juice to fill a bucket.

“But a Chef can only do these things by caring. So walk the field. Fill your flower pot with soil. But do so deliberately. And then, every morning this week, we will bring that flower pot outside into the sun, and we will care for it.”

“Are we supposed to plant anything in it?” Oliver asked.

“No. That will be next week. For now, the only thing I want you to plant is your essence.”

“So, how do we…do that?” Cress asked.

“I’ve told you already. You care for it. The first few times you use your essence are the hardest. You really just gotta feel it out. Right now, your bodies don’t know what essence feels like. Don't know what to look for. Once you find that feeling, you can start to use it.”

Archie waited for further explanation. It never came.

“It’ll take a week for most of you. We’ll spend mornings out here,” Quince said. “And then in the afternoons we’ll get out of this heat and I’ll teach you the more standard farming principles. We’ll have to grab textbooks out of one of the closets.”

The class groaned and dragged their feet as they walked off into the field to fill their pots.

Archie looked for an advantage over Nori. He hurried over to Benedict. Blue Orchards had sponsored Benedict, so maybe he knew a little extra something about farming.

“Hey Benny. So, do you think there’s like, a secret to this?”

“To…what?” Benedict asked.

“You know. Putting soil in the pot.”

“Well I’d say the secret is to make sure the pot is right-side up so the soil doesn’t fall out.”

“Funny.”

Benedict grinned, then sighed. “No, I don’t know. I swear Blue Orchards just sponsored me because I’m tall.”

“Why does that matter?”

Benedict mimed reaching up and plucking a fruit.

“Oh.”

They sighed and looked around. Perhaps someone else had figured something else out.

They spotted Julienne. Star student, amazing potential, Julienne. He scooped up soil with one hand and plopped it into the pot. Nothing special.

Cress sat in the dirt and used both hands to scoop dirt into her pot. Nothing special.

Oliver hacked at the dirt with the edge of his pot in order to fill it. Especially nothing special.

Blanche bent over, placed her hand flat to the ground, and then moved on without grabbing any dirt.

Special!

They dashed over to Blanche, who seemed oblivious to anything but the dirt beneath her.

“Hey Blanche,” Archie said.

“Oh, hi Archie. Hi Benedict.”

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“Hi—” Archie started.

“Hi Blanche!” Benedict interrupted, looking at her like a lovesick puppy. She conceded an awkward smile and nodded at him.

“So uhh,” Archie started. “So uhh—what are—I noticed that you—you know.”

Blanche’s eyebrows raised in anticipation of something coherent.

Benedict tried to jump in, but did no better. “Why—uh—well, we were just over there, and—”

Blanche giggled. Archie cleared his throat and continued with a resolve to not seem as helpless as Benedict.

“Why did you not use that soil over there?”

“Oh. I…” Blanche’s voice trailed off. She looked back thoughtfully at the previous spot. “I don’t know, actually. I just feel like…this spot…is better.” She laughed. “It…” She seemed embarrassed to say it. “It speaks to me?”

Archie and Benedict looked at each other and nodded. Bingo. They bent simultaneously, scooping dirt into their pots.

Once they cleared out, Nori, who had kept a watchful eye, took some of the same soil.

After a nice morning lecture spent in the sun, the students returned their pots to their rooms, ate, and then rejoined Quince for an unpleasant afternoon lecture spent hovering over books.

And that became their week. The students would kick around during the mornings, staring at their pots, putting their pots near the lake, raising their pots to the wind, looking for anything that might unlock the secret. On the third morning, Quince went from student to student, commenting on their plain pots of soil.

“Hm, not quite.”

“There’s something there.”

“Keep at it.”

And finally, to Blanche, “yes! You’ve got it exactly. Very impressive, Blanche, very impressive.”

As Blanche walked away, Archie rushed over to her, arriving at the same time as Nori.

“Hi Blanche,” Archie said while giving Nori the side eye. “So I was wondering…Um. Well. Yeah—yeah, basically—”

Nori stared him down. “I think he’s trying to ask for help but is too embarrassed.”

Blanche laughed. “It’s okay. What is it?”

“So, I got my soil from the same place as you—” Archie said.

“Me too,” Nori interrupted.

Archie gave her a dirty look and continued. “But…well, you got a ‘very impressive’ and I got a ‘you’re getting close’ and Nori got even worse.”

“Did not,” she protested. “He said ‘keep trying.’ As in, keep doing what I’m doing and I’ll achieve great results. Obviously.”

“Anyways,” Archie continued, “I was wondering what you were doing differently.”

“Uhm, I don’t know,” Blanche said. “I mean, what are you doing?”

“Same thing as everyone else, right?” Archie looked at the rest of the class.

Half of them sat cross-legged in the dirt, both hands holding their pot in their lap. Cress sang softly to her pot. Akando seemed to meditate with his. Oliver laid flat on his back, holding the pot to the sky with outstretched arms.

“Guessing,” Nori clarified.

Blanche laughed. “I guess I just…I thought about what Head Chef Quince said. About what the soil wants. Its nature.”

“And…then what?”

“I don’t know. I just…felt something.” Blanche shrugged. “Then Head Chef Quince came by and said I was doing it right.”

Archie and Nori looked at each other and sighed. They were no closer to figuring things out. “Thanks, Blanche,” they said in unison as they got up to leave.

“But…” Blanche said. “I knew I was right before he told me. I could…tell that I was doing something. Like, the soil told me before Head Chef Quince did.”

Archie’s brain worked overtime all afternoon. He repeated Quince’s and Blanche’s statements back to himself, hoping to find a spark in the darkness of his ignorance. He thought of nothing else until he found himself eating dinner alone in the great hall.

An olive landed on his plate. He looked up. Nori had just tossed the olive and now put a single chopstick down on Archie’s plate.

“What’s this?” Archie asked.

“Olive.” She took a breath. “Branch.”

Archie held the chopstick up. “Branch?”

“Would you rather me get a dirty stick? It’s a peace offering, just take it.”

Archie sighed. He had been beaten. In their petty race to the bottom, he hadn’t realized that the only way to win their fight was to be the first to rise above it. “No. I…I appreciate the gesture.”

“We have to work together,” Nori explained. “We should at least try to not hate each other.”

“I didn’t realize we hated each other,” Archie said with feigned surprise. He knew his sarcasm spat in the face of her attempted reconciliation, but he couldn’t help himself.

Nori tilted her head with impatience.

“Alright,” Archie conceded. “You’re right. I was…I’m sensitive about some things, I guess. I said…I called you a brat. I shouldn’t have done that. I don’t know you. You’ve clearly had a tough week and I shouldn’t rush to make any judgments about you.”

While Archie meant what he said, there was still a part of him that claimed victory for being the first one to launch such a substantial apology.

“Yeah. I said some things, too.” She sat down with her food. “I’ve been…well, you dream of running away your whole life. Turns out that doesn’t make it easy.”

“I think it’s tough for anyone to leave their parents. Maybe even harder without their blessing.”

“Yeah.” Nori thought about it and nodded. “Yeah. So, let’s start fresh. We can work together on this soil thing. What’ve you figured out?”

“Well.” Archie leaned back and sighed. “I figured out that it’s going to be a long time before I’m good enough at magic to do anything cool.”

Nori laughed. With the bias of his resentment gone, Archie noticed how charming her laugh was. There was a little lilting giggle to it. “Well, it’s like Head Chef Quince said. The first magic is the hardest. I’ve had a lot of cousins go through the academies. They all started slow, but by the end of the year, they could do all kinds of stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Well…the Harpers are fighters as much as we are cooks. So it depends on what you consider cool. I had one cousin that could descale a fish by swiping his hand across it. Another one—the best fighter—he can turn his hand into a lobster claw. Although maybe that was his second year.”

Archie gravitated toward the second thing. “Cool.” He clapped his fingers to his thumb repeatedly, imaging the claw. Nori laughed again. Archie smiled. “So, yeah. The soil. Where are you at with it?”

“Ehhhh…about the same as you, I think. I’ve felt a little something moving back and forth from me to the soil, but…I definitely don’t have it yet.”

“Yeah, that—that—uh, tingle. I got that too. I guess that’s essence?” Archie looked at his fingertips. “Now we just have to figure out how to use it.”

Oliver sat down next to them with a plate of noodles five inches high. Archie’s and Nori’s raised eyebrows begged a question.

“Yeah, it’s a lot,” Oliver answered. “Turns out my sponsor hired me with the expectation that I would be good at cooking pasta. Why? Because I’m from Labrusca. So I must know how to make pasta, right?. I don’t know how to make pasta! I had to get Julienne to teach me over the weekend!”

Archie had never seen Oliver so worked up. Typically the class clown, now the stressed student, rubbing his eye sockets and forgetting to breathe. Archie struggled to not laugh.

“At this rate, I’m going to have to find a new sponsor next year,” Oliver complained. “That is, if they don’t find some way to boot me before then.”

Archie idly grabbed at a noodle, pulling it from the pile.

“Yeah, sure, help yourself,” Oliver said, raising his hands in confused frustration.

Nori brought them back to their original conversation. “Okay, so how do we use our essence?”

Oliver laughed. “Thinking about your little pot of dirt, aren’t you?”

Nori shot him a nasty look. “Blanche is the only one that’s made real progress. But even she doesn’t know how she did it.”

Oliver shrugged and repeated the line that had brought all of the students solace that week. “The first bit of magic is the hardest. Nori, can you swim?”

She looked back at him with a stone cold expression. “I’m from Uroko. You know, the place with all the islands? Of course I can swim.”

Oliver took a deep, frustrated breath. “Well, I’m from Labrusca and I can’t make a bowl of—you know what, nevermind. How do you teach someone how to swim? You tell them to kick their arms and legs, sure, but they’re not gonna learn until you lower them into the water.”

“My parents just threw me in the water,” Nori said.

“How enlightening,” Oliver said. “Well, I don’t want to think about what the equivalent of that would be for this school. My point is…you can’t be taught how to swim the butterfly stroke until you’ve figured out the doggy paddle on your own. Some things have to be learned on your own, not taught.”

Nori narrowed her eyes at him. “So…you’re not a complete idiot.”

“Oh, thanks. Think you can put that on a letter of recommendation while I go begging another restaurant to sponsor me?”

Archie sat through the conversation with a daydreaming, thoughtful expression. When Nori looked at him, he snapped out of his trance with an idea.

“Pull this,” he said, dangling the noodle in front of Nori.

She sighed again. “Can you focus?”

Archie wiggled the noodle. Nori blinked at him a few times before conceding and pulling the noodle. It broke in two.

Archie nodded and pulled another noodle off Oliver’s plate. He dangled it in front of Nori again.

They stared at each other. Archie wiggled the noodle again. Oliver looked back and forth between the two as if they were crazy. Nori sighed and pulled the noodle—harder this time. It broke.

Archie took a third noodle and dangled it again. Nori’s hands remained at her side.

“Last one,” Archie insisted.

Nori pulled. The noodle remained intact. Nori yanked at it. Nothing. She yanked again. Nothing.

Nori’s mouth hung open. “You figured something out,” she said.

Archie grinned back. “Where’s Blanche?”