The Gift no longer looked quaint and homey. It looked like a lair. A den of secrets.

The vines covering the white stone walls were just things for lies to get tangled in. The messy array of chairs in the dining area was a distraction, the bees buzzing to cover up whispers. The open floor plan was a facade, the cluttered bedroom intentionally unsearchable.

Archie had filled Nori in along the way, taking a break in his ranting as they rode the tram down. He wouldn’t speak about his shameful heritage in such a public setting. He didn’t want anyone to know he was a Kent. His story had kept his anger sharp and his rage bubbling.

Rowan was cleaning up the empty tables. They had caught him between lunch service and his private dinner. Good. No guests to hide behind.

“Archie, Nori!” Rowan smiled, tossing a dirty rag down on the table. “I didn’t know you two were coming.”

Nori looked nervously at Archie.

“Wh—” Archie started.

“—wait! I have something I want to show you two,” Rowan interrupted, all smiles and cheer. “Come on!”

He left no time for argument, bounding up the stairs. Archie begrudgingly followed. On the rooftop, Rowan stood in front of six blueberry bushes, five forming a circle around the sixth. Despite all of the rage filling Archie, he still had room for more. He wanted more. The toxicity in his mind had tricked it into wanting even more reasons to hate. He let Rowan speak if only to allow himself to grow more impatient.

“See these five here? The ones that form the circle? These are from bushes you picked. And this smaller one in the middle.” Rowan grinned and nodded, oblivious to the maelstrom building inside Archie. “That’s the special one. You see, blueberries need to cross-pollinate. You can’t take two highbushes and create a third.”

Archie’s jaw tensed. His fingernails dug into his thumb. But Rowan continued.

“So this sixth bush here…it’s a cross-pollination of these five. The five bushes are meant to represent the five kingdoms, the sixth being United Ambrosia. It is with this sixth bush that I will create—”

Archie stepped forward, his rage bubbling to the surface.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded.

Rowan looked surprised. Then confused. Then inquisitive. Then defeated. “Oh,” he said softly.

A moment of silence. Muted city sounds. The rustling of the plants in the breeze.

“Oh,” Archie said harshly. “You knew my grandfather. You know about Petri—you ran Petrichor. And you didn’t tell me.”

“So you know…” Rowan looked at the ground. Nori felt pity. Archie didn’t.

“You were classmates. He was a Glutton. You ran Petrichor for him.”

Rowan didn’t respond.

“Why’d you sponsor me?” Archie asked. He wanted to rip up Rowan’s stupid blueberry bushes.

“Guit.” Rowan met Archie’s eyes. “Fear.”

Archie’s lips turned white as they pressed into each other. His hands balled up into fists.

“You—”

“I…” Rowan looked into the sky as if he’d find the words there. The tears in his eyes made Archie pause. “I grew up poor. I grew up hungry. I had a brother—he died. Sickness. Malnutrition. It was…It was good for us. Meant we’d be able to eat one more day per week.

“We lived on the generosity of others. My mother was always sick, couldn’t work. My father…well, he drank his wages. Three kids—before my brother passed. No one manifested. Until I did.

“I was seventeen. Resigned to my fate. Was doing back-breaking work. Construction. Plowing. I’d end the summers by spending a month in the rice fields. I’d come home covered in spider bites.

“We loved the Festival of Ambrosia. All that food being made. Being given out. We’d take as much as we could. We’d make it last weeks. It’d be the only day of the year that I wasn’t hungry.

“But I started to feel bad—taking advantage of all that kindness. So I decided I’d make a little pot of stew for the festival. Not an equivalent exchange, but it was something.

“We always made stews. Had to stretch the ingredients. Rarely had meat. But this one had a little rabbit in it. A couple of bites at most. I figured I owed at least that much to the community that took care of us. So I was stirring the stew, pushing the ingredients down into the bottom. A bite of rabbit meat bobbed back to the surface. Then another. Then another. Then another.”

He laughed at the memory. Archie felt some of his rage dissolve. But just some.

“You’d have thought there were three rabbits in the stew. But no, just the leg. I fed myself. Fed my family. Even managed to pay back the kindness of a few neighbors.”

Archie felt bad, but he had enough. It was time for answers. “What’s your point?”

“My point…” Rowan clicked his tongue. “My point…my life changed that day. I never thought my life could change. When you grow up in that kind of poverty, you don’t think you’ll ever escape it. Change is something that happens to other people.

“So when I came to Ambrosia City…when I saw the Academy…the towering buildings, the restaurants, the luxury…I decided then and there that I would never return to a life of modesty.

“And I was good. The best in the class. Looking back, I made better food than anyone else because I appreciated food more than anyone else. I knew what it was like to not have any.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“And then opposite in every regard…your grandfather. A terrible man.” Rowan’s face sunk. Archie was blinded by his own anger, but Nori saw the contempt in the old man.

“But he possessed a wealth that I did not know was possible. And a name. God, that name. Kent.” He spat it out, making Archie recoil.

“That name had all the power of royalty. I saw two possible futures. In one, I became an Executive Chef of my own restaurant. My talent would get me far, but it’d be slow going. I’d end up well enough, but there would be lean years.

“But I was done with lean years. So I picked the second option. I cozied up to your grandfather during our time together as students. Fed him three meals a day, then five, then ten. Somewhere along the way, he crossed that transgressive line between human and Glutton. My own doing.

“I became a remora, attached to the great shark named Kent. He became addicted to my food. Dependent upon it. I had planted the idea in his heads, but he said the words—’come run the kitchen at Petrichor.’”

Rowan snapped a twig off one of the blueberry bushes and threw it in the dirt.

“And there it was. I thought all of my problems in life had been solved. I moved to Sain. I sent money back home. For the first time ever, I walked into a bank without a cup.

“But your grandfather…He kept eating more and more. I’d come back to Petrichor and the pantry would be empty. For every meal I made, I had to make two more for him. The cost—”

He shook his head.

“I thought he stood in the way of my fortune. Avarice had blinded me. I was a rich man, but I wanted more. If greed were as sinful as Gluttony in the eyes of Ambrosia, I’d be deformed, too.

“I gave him an ultimatum. He would learn to control himself, or I would leave. He needed me to run Petrichor. He needed the money for his appetite. He needed my cooking.

“But Gluttons don’t think like we do. He saw the dinner tray being taken away while it still had some crumbs on it. He lashed out. If he couldn’t have my cooking, no one could. He salted the fields all around Sain. But…”

Rowan winced and shook his head in disbelief.

“There was something about that salt. I mean, do you know how much you’d need for that much land? And it would wash out in the rain. But it’s been decades and still the fields suffer. He did something. He did something to that salt. He had never shown a lick of magic before, but he did something there. Something unheard of.”

The story quelled Archie’s fiery anger, making room for curiosity. “He performed magic?” he asked. “As a Glutton?”

“I worry that may be the case….It wasn’t just creating an absence of essence…it was an aversion to essence. I couldn’t do anything to infuse the plants that grew there. He shouldn’t have been capable of doing what he did.”

Rowan turned and lazily walked away, letting his hand run across a row of wheat.

“I’m full of worries,” he said. “It’s why I sponsored you. After what happened at Petrichor I never sold another meal again. Twenty years, I’ve been living off of that past life.”

He walked in a circle around the rooftop, Archie and Nori following.

“In truth, that money has run dry. Now I mostly live off of what I can grow, making the rest for others. But I managed to get enough money for you, Archie. Just enough to get you through the Academy. Prince Waldorf has been snatching up half of the Student Chefs. I didn’t want you to work in service of a Glutton like I did. I didn’t want you to suffer that same fate. And I…I felt guilty. I enabled a monster that destroyed a whole town. A family. A legacy. A legacy that I profited from. Vultured on.”

He looked at Archie. His face was more sallow than usual, the wrinkles deeper. His voice had lost its bounce. The truth had revealed his age.

“I’m sorry, Archie.”

Archie no longer wanted to yell, but he wasn’t ready to respond to any kind of apology.

Meanwhile, Nori’s confused look alternated between Rowan and Archie. Something had piqued her interest, but Archie hadn’t noticed.

Rowan returned to the blueberry bushes, motioning at them. “I worry about our nation. I see the cracks. They’ve been there for ages. We think they don’t matter, but I see how just the right pressure could make the whole structure crumble.

“That’s what this is for. The sixth bush, representing United Ambrosia. I’ll accompany Grand King Flambé on his annual trip to Uroko. There, I will present a dish created from this bush. To show the great things that can grow when we work together.”

Nori looked at Archie as if asking for permission to speak. For so long, this trip had been about Archie. Now she was the one with questions. Archie shrugged with a single shoulder.

“You’re leaving?” Nori asked.

“For three months,” Rowan answered. “Next semester.”

“What about The Gift?”

Rowan took a deep breath. “I’ll close it for a time. Perhaps it’ll be good to give you two back your time—”

Rowan looked at Archie, then nodded to Nori.

Archie’s jaw dropped, panic flooding in. He knew where this conversation was going, but he couldn’t stop it.

“—so that you can raise the gold for Nori,” Rowan finished. He scratched his ear and looked down at the blueberry bush, so preoccupied with the previous confrontation that he was unaware that he had just opened the floodgates for another one.

Nori sucked in her bottom lip, her eyebrows scrunching up in thought as she stared at Archie. Archie’s heart dropped, dread pulling his face down.

“What does he mean?” she asked.

Rowan looked up at Archie and sighed. “I thought she knew…”

“What does he mean?”

Archie couldn’t bring himself to face Nori.

“Archie? What does he mean?”

He couldn’t answer.

Rowan stepped in. “Archie was the one that wanted me to sponsor you,” he said. “I told him I couldn’t afford to sponsor a second student. He said he’d raise the gold. If he doesn’t…I’m going to have to let you go at the end of the year.”

Nori scratched at the corner of her lips with her thumb while she thought things through. “And…how much have you raised, Archie?”

Archie’s heart beat so hard that he swore it shook his body. He opened his mouth, but stress had blocked his throat. With great difficulty, he managed to swallow.

“Maybe…ten—fifteen…gold,” he managed.

“Fifteen?” Nori asked.

“Yeah—maybe. Maybe ten…I…” Archie wasn’t sure because Archie hadn’t thought of the total in weeks. He had stopped going to the keep to wash dishes. He had stopped thinking about it entirely. In some immature, naive way, it had been weeks since he truly considered the consequences. He thought everything would work itself out. That he and Nori would keep working together and everything would go great and everyone would be happy.

But things didn’t just happen like that.

“Archie!” Nori stepped forward, breathing heavily through her flared nostrils. Her words poked holes in Archie’s already feeble emotional state. “It’s the last month of the semester. When were you planning on getting the rest of the gold?”

“I—I—I don’t—I don’t know. I—”

Nori sucked air in through her nose, pulling her bottom lip in and chomping on it.

“Forget it,” she hissed. “From now on, your problems are yours, and my problems are mine.”

“Nori—”

But she was gone. She bounded down the stairs before Archie could stop her. He looked back to Rowan, who started trying to make his own excuses.

“Archie, I—”

But then Archie was gone too. He chased after Nori, but she had already gotten out on the street.

“Nori, wait!”

She didn’t turn, but he knew she could hear him. She started to jog. Archie jogged after her. He couldn’t let the conversation end there.

Every few steps, they both quickened their pace. Soon, Nori ran in full strides to the gate that separated the Roots from the Trunk. She crashed into an Acorn Guard.

“That man has been chasing me!” she yelled, her charade convincing the guard to hold a hand up to stop Archie. As Archie struggled to explain the situation to the Acorn Guard, Nori slipped away, making her escape by the tram.