Archie’s headache lasted through the night. If the layout of the monastery weren’t so simple, he’d have gotten lost getting to his room. Whereas the ground floor was open to the public, the upper floors were for the Chefs. The single hallway made a square around the courtyard, bedrooms lining the exterior wall. Kitchens lined the interior, their heat being pumped out into the yard to provide warmth to the gardens.

  The bedrooms were built for two beds and not much else, prompting a discussion about which of the three boys would get their own room. Ultimately, Sutton won out as neither Archie nor Barley wanted to deal with Sutton’s late, late, late night candlelight reading.

  They ate bread and potage downstairs and went back up to their rooms, none of them having the energy to explore after so many days of travel. Archie watched the sunset through the oilpaper window of his bedroom while Barley unpacked.

  “Hey Barley. What’s it like being back?”

  Barley refolded his extra orange jacket, speaking to the clothes in a grumbling voice. “I don’t know. Weird.”

  Archie waited for elaboration that never came. He missed Oliver’s ability to get the conversation going, particularly in the company of the reserved and soft-spoken Barley. Archie didn’t push the topic, instead deciding to unpack his things.

  He put his extra orange jacket in the dresser, lowering it gently. He threw his pants into the corner of the drawer. He examined the hiking boots he had brought. They served him well on his blueberry-picking adventures, but he worried that they might not last long hiking in the Khalyan countryside.

  He removed books from his trunk—they had all been subjected to carrying pieces of Sutton’s personal library. As he put his three books on top of the dresser next to Barley’s eight books, Archie was glad he had gotten off so easily.

  His heart skipped a beat when he looked back down at his pile of belongings. A handle stuck out of a wad of shirts. Archie brushed the dust off his hands and grabbed it. The handle was just that—nothing was attached on the other end.

  “An omnihandle?” Barley asked.

  “Yeah.” Archie flipped it over, checking the resin handle for scratches. “I totally forgot about this. It must have been bundled up in some of my clothes. My dad gave it to me when I left for Ambrosia City.”

  “It’s a lovely gift.”

  “Yeah…” Archie stared at it, lost in thought. That had been only a year ago, but how much had happened since then? New friends, new magic, and two near-death experiences. Too much.

  And what about his father? Archie had hardly seen or spoken to him since becoming a Chef. They had only spent a week together at the end of the year. The group of students had stopped by Sain on their way to Khala, but only for a night. A pang of guilt stabbed at his heart. Part of him couldn’t help but wish he had stayed for the summer. He could have worked at Petrichor and spent time with his father. With his mother.

  But there would be time for that. He believed in Sutton’s research. He believed that he could help the world to better understand Gluttony—and in turn, conquer it. Archie’s episodes, his heritage, his imprisonment. All of his suffering in the past year could be traced back to Gluttony. If he had the ability to do something to prevent someone else from suffering, he had an obligation to do so.

  “Do you know how to use it?” Barley asked, startling Archie.

  “Huh?” Archie looked up. “What?”

  “The omnihandle.”

  “Oh.” Archie put his essence into the handle in an attempt to conjure a pan with a curved lip. He managed to conjure a flat circle no bigger than a spatula. “Not really,” he admitted.

  “It’s alright,” Barley encouraged, putting an unnatural amount of cheer into his voice. “You’ve got a good start. Just need to get used to it.”

  “Yeah…”

  “You should practice while we’re here. That’d be useful when we go hiking.”

  “How much hiking are we gonna be doing?”

  “Well, there aren’t any carriages to Jakha.”

  “Jakha?”

  “My home?” Barley smiled.

  “Oh, right, right, right, sorry.” Archie made a personal resolution to not be so self-involved. “Yeah, we’re going in a couple months? I think I could get this down by then.”

  Archie tried to create a fork with three prongs, but only managed one with two. Still functional. He could live with that.

  While Archie studied the omnihandle, Barley studied his own belly. He had rolled his jacket up to look down at it. “I need to lose some weight before we go to Jakha,” Barley said as he grabbed a roll of belly fat.

  “I feel like you already lost a lot of weight during Tarragon’s class.”

  “Yeah…” Barley let his jacket flip back over his belly. “But I put on a lot during Pomona’s. That first semester…”

  Archie laughed. “Really, I think you’re fine.”

  Barley pulled his jacket back up and frowned down at his belly. “It would be disrespectful of me to go back looking like this. Like I’ve been living a life of indulgence while they fight for scraps.”

  Archie opened his mouth to speak but thought better of it. He pursed his lips together and just listened.

  “I feel weird about it,” Barley continued. “Going to the Academy. I’m glad I did, but…” He took a great, heaving breath. “Nevermind.”

  Archie frowned. “If you want to talk about it, I’m always here.”

  Barley smiled. “I know. One day, I’m sure I will. I’m still trying to figure out how I feel. Then I’ll need to figure out how to put it into words. Then I’ll need to be willing to say those words.”

  Archie thought back to the conversation with his father when Archie had declared that he wouldn’t be coming home for the summer. “I understand.”

  “The Head Chef that’ll be looking after us, the one I wrote. Head Chef Picea? She’s a renowned fighter. We should get her to train us. It’d help us lose weight.”

  “I don’t think I need to slim up.” Archie circled his thumb and middle finger around his other wrist to demonstrate his point. “But I’d love to learn how to really fight. I feel like I was just getting my footing in Tarragon’s class.”

  “We’ll meet in the middle, then. I’ll get a little thinner, you get a little thicker.”

  Archie laid down and tried the omnihandle again, producing a long, thin strip of curved metal. “You any good with a quarterstaff?”

  “Yeah. Used to practice when I was a kid. Why?”

  Archie conjured a pointed bar when he meant to conjure a ball. “Need you to teach me. Gotta beat someone up.”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Barley sat down, both him and the bed letting out a big sigh. “Why not just cut out the middle man?”

  Archie looked over at Barley, who smiled back at him.

  “I’ll beat them up myself.”

  They both laughed. Archie was excited to see what version of Barley he’d be getting now that they were in Khala. He tossed his omnihandle on his bed.

  “Alright, I gotta go check on Sutton,” Archie said. “For all we know, he only got as far as unpacking a single book and is sitting there reading it.”

  Archie went out into the hallway and immediately wished he hadn’t.

  “Oh, hey! Archie?” the Green Jacket from before called out from down the hallway. Archie made a break for Sutton’s door—only a few feet away—but the Khalyan was already jogging to intercept.

  Archie was just a second too slow. The Green Jacket slipped in between Archie and Sutton’s door. He stood there with his stupid smile, expecting a response.

  Archie defied expectations.

  But the Khalyan still stood there. “How’s the head?” he asked.

  “It’s fine,” Archie monotoned. He didn’t want to invite further conversation. But he couldn’t help himself. “You didn’t hit me that hard,” he added.

  “Well, I didn’t hit you at all. You hit yourself. Remember?” The Khalyan grinned. He expected Archie to laugh.

  Archie defied expectations.

  “What was your name again?”

  “Hawthorn.”

  “Hawthorn. Do you mind?” Archie pointed at the door. “It’s getting late and I was hoping to talk to my friend.”

  “Yeah, of course, of course.” Hawthorn hurried out of the way and smiled. “If you need any help settling in or have any questions, just holler at me.”

  Archie hated how Hawthorn wouldn’t let him hate him.

  “Seriously, whatever you need,” Hawthorn added.

  Just the worst.

  Archie pulled the door close behind him in fear that Hawthorn might manage to slip in. He closed the door and then gave it an extra pull just in case.

  Sutton didn’t bother to look up. He hadn’t even bothered to pick himself off the floor. He sat cross-legged on the wooden floor reading a thin book—seemingly the only thing he had pulled out of his luggage.

  “What’s this one about?” Archie asked as he plopped down on the spare bed.

  “The Reign of Queen Tamani,” Sutton groaned.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Sutton pushed up his glasses and turned the page. “Ten pages of material stretched to fit ninety. And lacking contextualization. I mean, Queen Tamani? Queen?”

  “Was she not a queen?” Archie held up a pillow, balancing it on one hand.

  “She was a Diptla.”

  “What’s that?”

  Sutton turned another page. “It’s what they used to call their female rulers. They didn’t start using the term queen until about a hundred years ago.”

  “So it’s effectively the same thing, isn’t it?”

  Sutton scoffed. “Not using the era-appropriate term is indicative of the academic shortcuts and rigidity with which this author did their research. I found it vacuous the first time I read it. Now, I find it obtuse.”

  “My bad.” Archie let the pillow fall on his face as he tried to make sense of Sutton’s words. He lifted the pillow again. “So if you already read it, why did you bring it? Why read it again?”

  “For the differences. The differences.” Sutton closed the book with a snap! “Why are we here?”

  Archie pursed his lips and looked side-to-side in mock confusion. “Because…we’re researching Gluttony?”

  “But why are we here?”

  “You mean like…”

  “Why are we in Khala?”

  “Because…They don’t have Gluttons?”

  Sutton’s lips curled into a smug grin. “Then why do they have a story about the wendigo?”

  Archie’s eyes darted side-to-side again, this time in genuine confusion. “I don’t…Yeah, I guess that doesn’t make sense, does it? Maybe they used to have Gluttons but don’t anymore?”

  “Unlikely. If this wendigo really is the cause of Gluttony, you would expect to see more Gluttons in Khala. No other kingdom suffers half as much from food insecurity. It has the lowest incidence rate of Chefs. The least fertile land. The least amount of Ambrosial essence.”

  “That’s not necessarily true.” Archie twisted his fingers around to spin the pillow above him. “If there is food insecurity, then there are fewer opportunities to gorge oneself. How can you display Gluttonous tendencies if you have to go a week between meals?”

  That gave Sutton pause. “You know, sometimes, you can be kind of smart.”

  The pillow slipped off Archie’s fingers and plopped on his face. “Thanks,” he said, his voice muffled by the pillow.

  “It’s a valid point…but flawed. According to the legend, it takes a horrible act to catalyze the possession by the wendigo. This seems validated by our experience, given your story of how Sorghum Ackers transformed after beating his child over food.”

  Archie winced as the image of the bloody, bruised, collapsed Chandler flashed through his mind. He wished Sutton had the courtesy to speak around things rather than speaking through them in a brutalist manner. Archie tried to comfort himself with the thought of the girl picking blueberries on The Gift’s rooftop.

  “Given the higher incidence of survival situations in Khala, there are more opportunities to commit a truly vile act. Imagine a harsh winter in which the food is running out—something all Khalyans must experience at least once in their life. If a person chooses to exceed their rations, they might be forsaking someone else to death.”

  Archie sighed. He had already reconciled the reality that most of his time spent in Khala would be as Sutton’s sounding board, but he wished his duties could start after shaking the weariness of a week of travel. “Okay, so they must have Gluttons. Maybe more, maybe less. So where are they? How are they a secret?”

  “Maybe they have a way of dealing with Gluttons.”

  “You mean like killing them?”

  Sutton shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe it’s punishable by death. Or exile. We humans are pack animals, after all. We’d cast one out to save the rest. Or maybe…just maybe…they have a cure.”

  Archie sat up. “A cure?”

  Sutton shrugged again, taking pleasure in the uncertainties. Each unanswered question was just another piece of kindling for his great academic fire. “The one thing I do know…We’re unlikely to get a straight answer from anyone here. These people, they have their own set of rules. Rules for studies, for storytelling. That’s why I’m reading this.”

  Sutton held up the book and shook it. “Then I’ll read stories of Tamani from the Khalyan perspective. They won’t tell the full story. But there will be differences. Each of those differences is a hint. A little glimpse at a greater, untold story. They are the threads that I must pull.”

  Archie understood. Mostly. “So, some Platterian scholar called her queen. The Khalyans called her…dip…?”

  “Diptla.”

  “Diptla. There’s a difference. What’s the significance of that?”

  Sutton rubbed a finger back and forth across his bottom lip, humming as he thought. Once he arrived at an answer, he held that finger high in the air. “There was a cultural shift. A specific point when the Khalyan people stopped calling them dipte and diptla and started calling them king and queen. Likely brought on by Urokan influence.”

  Sutton stood and paced around the room, nodding like a madman. “Yes, yes. It wasn’t just a shift. It was an appeasement. The Khalyan royalty making themselves more palatable. A negotiation tactic. Whenever it happened, they must have fallen on hard times. They needed Uroko’s help, so they allowed a cultural subjugation. Yes, that’s it.”

  Archie yawned. “So why does that matter?”

  Sutton held his hands out in disbelief. “It means they were starving! There would be a higher incidence rate of Gluttony. There will be censuses. Written accounts of those times. There might be first-hand stories and records of people becoming Gluttons.”

  As impressed as Archie was, he was rapidly approaching his limit of academic discussion—especially considering he still had a little hum in his ears from his brief spar with Hawthorn. He stood and brushed the wrinkles out of his pants. “And that will give us…”

  “A brick.”

  “A brick?”

  “Major discoveries don’t just happen, Archie. They’re built. Brick by brick. Details glued together by minor revelations. We’re here to lay bricks.”

  Archie stopped himself from groaning by reminding himself of his purpose. He was here to help people. To learn about Gluttony. To learn about himself. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t glamorous. But it was the right thing to do.

  Archie walked to the door. “Well, let me know how I can help.”

  Sutton rushed back to his luggage, sitting back on the floor and digging for another book. “Well, you can—”

  “Tomorrow, Sutton. Let me know how I can help tomorrow.”

  Sutton chuckled but didn’t look up. He pulled out another book and started reading. It was as if Archie had already left.

  Archie opened the door. No reaction. “Don’t forget to sleep, Sutton.”

  Sutton shooed him away with one hand.

  Patreon is getting a personal favorite, chapter 34, today—I think of it as book 2's Lifted Spirits.