Salt Fat Acid Magic [Nom-Fiction | Food Fights | Culinary Academy]

Nori could not escape.

Her torture began at dawn.

"Not so much!" Blanche squirmed away, but Mindy caught her neck with one hand—her arms were surprisingly powerful—and continued to dab her brush along Blanche's cheekbones.

"Quit moving so much. It'll look patchy."

"He likes a natural look!"

Nori stared at the ceiling and contemplated putting her pillow over her head.

Mindy sat back and glared at Blanche through the mirror. "You're the one that said you wanted my help with blush."

"Well, yeah! I want to look pretty! I just want to look natural, too. So quit putting so much!"

Blanche tried to get away again, but Mindy wrangled her back down. "He's a boy. He doesn't know what he likes. And I have to apply a lot. I can't help it if you sweat like a Glutton in a pie shop. Now quit moving!"

"Just make sure it blends well."

"Your face is half-sunburned. It's not hard to match. What about these caterpillars? Should we give them a pluck?" Mindy ran her finger across Blanche's eyebrows, prompting a little scream and squirm.

"No! He said he likes my eyebrows."

"Okay, okay. I think you're set. Ugh, I wish I had your lip color."

"They're still chapped."

"You need to wear a hat."

"Ooo! He got me a hat. Look!" Blanche scrambled over to the closet and grabbed a ridiculously wide-brimmed hat from the top shelf. She threw it on and struck a pose. "Nori, what do you think?"

"Cute." Nori thought she would have liked another half hour of sleep. She had stayed up later than she intended to due to a particularly interesting section in her book about how the invention of the tram system brought the people of the Crown and the Roots closer together. It inspired her to use the tram system to get farther away.

After a class of intense essence training and secondhand flirting, Nori found her chance. She made a surprise appearance at The Gift, where Chandler sat on the balcony over the entrance with her legs dangling over the edge.

"Nori!"

"Hey girlie. What're you doing up there?"

Chandler showed her handful of blueberries. "I like to try to drop them in people's hats."

Nori laughed and exchanged a wave with Rowan. The Black Jacket worked tirelessly in his little half-kitchen while making conversation with the guests. Nori poked her head inside and pointed up. "Can I take her for the afternoon?"

Rowan ladled out a bowl of stew. "Take her for a week."

Nori laughed and walked to the counter, waving at a couple of familiar dining faces. "She been bad?"

Rowan looked like he wanted to complain, but he persevered. "She's fine. I left her idle too long. Now I've got her with a tutor—a lady up the street that teaches four or five kids at a time, working on their letters. Two hours a day and you'd think she's working in the mines the way she acts."

Nori looked at the stairs. Chandler's sideways head poked out from above. Nori motioned for her to come down. "Want to look for snacks?"

"Yeah, go with Aunt Nori," Rowan added.

Chandler's head poked out more. "What kind of snacks?"

"Well, I don't know. Should we get something sweet or sour?"

Chandler's head disappeared, then her entire body came down, her footsteps rumbling on the wooden stairs. "Both!"

Nori had an easy time getting Chandler out of The Gift, but getting her past the first few stalls of the farmer's market was an impossible task. The child was unenthused by the stalls of green ahead of them and much more interested in the edge stalls that sold trinkets and pottery. She got her hands on a spin drum and got to work, the little stringed beads making a racket on the hideskin.

"Can we get this one?"

"Rowan would literally kill me." Nori snatched it away and preemptively moved a wooden kazoo so that Chandler wouldn't see it. "Let's get you something that doesn't make noise."

"I want something pretty. Rowan doesn't get me pretty things."

Nori took Chandler's hand and led her to a stall selling accessories. She grabbed a curved barrette that had a flower carved in it and a wooden pin. "Look. A flower."

"Ooo! Pretty!" Chandler hopped and clapped her hands until Nori held her shoulders down so she could fix the clip to the girl's hair. Chandler spun around.

"So pretty! Now come on, let's find something to eat." She took Chandler's hand and led her through the crowded market.

"Aunt Nori, it's fun doing things with you."

Nori's heart filled with love. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. I like doing girly things."

Nori chuckled at the thought that what they were doing was girly. But if it was good enough for Chandler, it was good enough for her. "Rowan probably doesn't do many girly things with you, does he?"

"No."

"I'll talk to him."

"Can you get me a pretty dress?"

"A dress?"

"Yeah." Chandler pursed her lips and squinted. Nori knew that expression as the telltale sign that Chandler was thinking of her past life. The fact that she knew to restrain herself convinced Nori that it'd be okay.

"Go ahead."

"I used to have a lot of dresses."

Nori looked up so that Chandler might not see how sad that statement had made her. Nori knew they had done the right thing in taking the child away, but that didn't mean that there weren't downsides. Even with the neglect and abuse Chandler suffered, she still had been taken from a life of luxury. Her fancy home, her pretty dresses, her bountiful feasts. She had lived like a princess. Of course she missed it, even if it was rotten at its core. Nori understood that better than anyone else.

"I'll get you a dress." Nori spotted a middle-aged Urokan Chef carrying around a basket of fried skewers. "Oh, Chandler, look! Have you ever had kushiage?"

"What's that?"

"Come on." Nori led Chandler over to the vendor. Their eyes locked before Nori arrived, and there was a look of recognition—not of person, but of race. Urokans were relatively rare in Ambrosia City, Urokan Chefs even more so. Nori peered into the basket and the smell took her back into her memory. She was in Boseki, and she was holding Dashi's hand, and she was the little kid, and he was sneaking her out for a treat.

"Hello," the vendor cooed, bringing Nori back from her daydream.

"Hi! What kinds do you have?"

The vendor tilted the basket down and pointed. "Pork, pork skin, shishito, and asparagus."

"Ooo." Nori looked down at Chandler. "What do you think?"

Chandler tucked her chin into her neck and looked away from the vendor. "I don't want pork skin."

"How about shishito peppers?"

"Are they spicy?"

"Not really."

"Oh. I guess I can still have that."

Nori laughed and purchased a couple of skewers. The breading was patchy, but the smell was divine. She handed one to Chandler. "So kushiage is when you deep-fry something and put it on a skewer. These fried peppers are what you call shishito tempura."

"Shishito tempura," Chandler repeated studiously. She nibbled on the side of one pepper, hardly enough to get a taste. "Mmm! I like it."

The vendor laughed and dug beneath a layer of cloth in her basket to pull out something wrapped in brown paper. She handed it over to Nori. "Here's something extra for the little one."

"Oh, thank you! Chandler, say thank you."

"Thank you."

Nori opened a flap in the paper and was struck with a pang of nostalgia. Between two slices of white, crustless bread, a massive slab of cream held cut strawberries in place. Nori hummed with a sad smile.

"Reminds you of home, doesn't it?" the vendor asked.

Nori nodded. She wanted to say that she already was home, but seeing the fruit sandwich had dispossessed her of that fragile notion. "Thank you."

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"Sure. I'll see you next week!" The vendor waved at Chandler and began her march upstream to sell more skewers.

"Here, try this." Nori unfolded a piece of the sandwich and held it down for Chandler. Cream spilled out as she bit down, making Nori giggle. "Do you like it?"

"Mmm!" Chandler grabbed the sandwich and held her skewer up in exchange.

Nori made the swap and munched on a pepper as Chandler made a mess of her sandwich. "I'm glad you like Urokan food. I can take you to a restaurant sometime. You can wear your pretty dress."

"I wanna wear my pretty dress to class."

"Is that right?"

"Mhm." Chandler took another bite, bits of cream covering her hands all the way up to the wrist. "Then I'll be the prettiest girl."

"You don't need a dress for that."

"Yes I do." Chandler chomped one of the strawberry slices in half. "Do you think if you wore pretty dresses that you would have a boyfriend?"

Nori nearly coughed out a pepper. "Who says I need one?"

"Archie has a girlfriend."

There was no escaping it. Even this innocent-seeming child was an agent of torture.

"And that means I need a boyfriend?"

"You can't be alone for forever."

"I'm too young to even know what forever means."

"Aunt Nori! You're old!"

"How old do you think I am?"

Chandler spun on one foot as she thought. "Umm…forty!"

"I'm nineteen! Give me that." Nori snatched Chandler's sandwich away. She wouldn't suffer such indignities on an empty stomach.

Chandler took her skewer back and awkwardly nibbled on a pepper. "Don't you want a boyfriend?"

"I'll get a boyfriend when the right boy shows up." Nori smiled and shook her head. Blanche wanting a boyfriend was how this all started—Nori suspected if Archie hadn't stepped up, Blanche would have already found someone else by now. But she would never tell that to either of them. They wouldn't last long, anyway. Nori dove into her sandwich and spoke through a full mouth. "You know, you can wear your dress and be pretty all for yourself."

"Alright." Chandler caught a half-eaten pepper as it fell off the skewer. She pointed ahead. "Look, it's another Yellow Jacket like you! Maybe he can be your boyfriend."

Nori looked up. Even from the back, she could tell who it was by his bronze hair and thin, tall build. "Yarrow?" she blurted out.

He turned around, looked at Nori, looked at Chandler, and offered a feeble wave before turning back.

"Getting stuff for Cafe Julienne?" Nori asked.

He only turned his head back halfway. "Keeping watch."

Nori looked further down the crowd and spotted Julienne and Mindy talking to a little old lady selling eggplants. They started moving again, Yarrow following them at a distance without another word to Nori.

Chandler waited a bit and then tugged Nori's sleeve. "I don't want him to be your boyfriend. He's scary."

Nori laughed. Yarrow was good-looking, but something was wrong with his head. There was something missing there. And she suspected that now wasn't the only time he watched Julienne.

Now, Julienne. There was a thought. He stood out of the crowd for more reasons than just his yellow jacket. He looked like a fine painting or sculpture brought to life. But Nori knew he'd make a terrible partner. She had been warned long ago about Chefs that claimed the kitchen as their first love. He'd be dreadfully boring the few times she could get him away from the kitchen, not that anyone would ever succeed at fully severing the tie between his soul and Cafe Julienne.

No, Nori was quite content with things. She pinched Chandler's cheek. "Why would I need anyone else when I have you?"

Nori got Chandler back before dark and joined them for dinner. Rowan had given up his tradition of giving random guests private dinners, and while Nori knew it bothered him, he knew better than to complain about it with Chandler around.

"I think you're suited to the dad life," Nori said.

Rowan laughed and wiped sauce from his mouth. "At least that makes one of us at this table."

Nori leaned toward Chandler. "What do you think? Does Rowan do a good job taking care of you?"

"Yeah!" Chandler munched on a crustless piece of bread—she had Rowan try to recreate the magical sandwich from that afternoon. "He lets me stay up late and I get my own garden and he's a really good cook and I get to meet all sorts of interesting people and he reads to me every night before we go to sleep."

"Awww." Nori smiled at Rowan. She hadn't known about that last bit. "What books do you read?"

Rowan raised his thick white eyebrows and looked away.

"Usually he reads recipe books."

"Recipe books?" Nori leaned back and crossed her arms at Rowan. "You read recipe books to a six-year-old?"

"I'm seven now," Chandler corrected.

"They are my recipes," Rowan said. "They aren't lists of ingredients and instructions. They have bits of my experience and travels in them. I think a proper recipe should have as much flavor as the dish it is describing."

Nori looked at Chandler. "Are they boring?"

"Ummmm…" Chandler caught a surprised look from Rowan and giggled. "I like some of them."

Nori shook her head. "I'm getting her books about princesses."

Without the first-year curfew hanging over her head, Nori took her time in leaving, helping to clean up and inspecting one of Rowan's recipes. It was for swiftlet nest soup, an odd dish made from the hardened saliva that swiftlets made their nests with, and it was more about Rowan's experiences getting to the remote Urokan island where the birds resided. The passage made Nori imagine an alternate reality in which she wasn't born to a noble family and was instead an island hopper. On the tram ride back, she realized that in essence, she was an island hopper.

She missed dinner but arrived in the lounge just in time to join Cress, Hyssop, Juniper, and Benedict in the lounge for Oliver's drink time.

"What do we have today?" Nori asked.

Oliver shifted on the sofa and motioned to the neat array of full cocktail glasses on the coffee table. "The latest experiment by Durtnell Drinks. Try for yourself."

"Okay, first of all, you need to come up with a better name."

"It's my name!"

"Well, it doesn't work. Makes me think I'm going to drink dirt."

"I've told him that a dozen times," Cress said. "He won't listen."

Oliver sighed and looked longingly at Benedict. "They don't understand genius, Benny."

"Second," Nori continued, "I'm not trying one of your experiments without knowing what it does or what's in it."

"Gin, syrup, lemon, and a liqueur."

Nori put her hands on her hips. "A liqueur? What kind of liqueur?"

Oliver leaned back and took a sip of the murky blue drink. "That is Durtnell Drinks proprietary information."

Nori crossed her arms. "And the effect?"

Oliver tightened his lips into a little dot and released them with a pop. "Well, it does come with a price. You have to tell me what you dream after having it."

"It's going to make me dream something?"

"Not always. Yet."

"Is it going to give me nightmares?"

"Not always. For now."

Nori looked to Cress for approval.

Cress shrugged. "This is my fourth time trying it." She raised her glass. "The joys of being a preferred test subject. I had a nightmare one night."

Nori picked up the drink and swirled it around. The liquid shifted from dark blue to purple to black and back again. "What was it?"

"I was falling from a very tall building for a very long time. I never landed, luckily. Or maybe I did and I just don't remember it."

Nori looked at Oliver. "I assume you've had nightmares."

"Just about my whole life," he said with a grin.

Nori sighed.

Oliver straightened up a bit. "I won't lie, first few times I had it, nothing happened. Then I had three or four nights of nightmares in a row. Then it got better. I'd give it about one-fifth odds of happening."

"You told me one tenth," Hyssop complained. She set her drink down as if she hadn't already had nearly all of it.

"It's not a science," Oliver countered.

"It should be!"

"Maybe." Oliver nodded, unaffected by Hyssop's climbing rage. "I'll have to get Sutton on it when he gets back."

"What was your worst nightmare?" Nori asked.

Oliver's smile faded. He looked into his glass and took a sip. "Taller building."

Nori frowned at her drink. "Does it even taste good?"

"Sure," Oliver said.

"Not really," Benedict said.

Oliver shot him a dirty look. "Benny!"

"What? It tastes like fingernails."

Nori recoiled from her drink.

"It's not that bad," Cress said. She gave Oliver a little shove. "And Oliver's too proud to say it, but he would appreciate your help testing it."

Oliver scoffed. "I'm not too proud at all. I need all the help I can get. Plus it might affect Urokans different."

Nori smelled her drink. Lemon and burn. Lots of burn. "If it's bad-different, I'm going to tell Tarragon that you want to be a training dummy next class."

"Deal."

Nori took a reluctant sip. The sourness made her lips pucker and her eyes squint, and the burn of gin made her grimace, and the liqueur did not do enough to make the drink an enjoyable experience. She couldn't explain the sensation exactly, but Benedict's comment about fingernails made an odd amount of sense.

"Oh, it's not that bad!" Oliver complained.

"The second sip is better," Cress consoled.

"Always is." Oliver raised his eyebrows at Cress, who rolled her eyes and shifted her body away from him.

Nori rushed to take that second sip in the hopes it would mask the first. The gambit was moderately successful. She wandered around the sitting area and leaned against the pillars of the open balcony as the others returned to a previous conversation about Waldorf's kitchen. She spotted two people walking along the torchlit path to the greenhouse below. She couldn't make out many details, just the long hair of one of them and the way they weaved apart and back together like a couple of drunk lovebirds.

Benedict walked up next to her and took a sip. "You just missed them. They took their drinks to go."

She let her pity show in a smile. "How are you doing with it?"

Benedict gave her a sad chuckle. "A summer away was good for me. It made me…I had the space to look inward."

Nori sipped and watched as the pair below doubled over in what must have been laughter. "What'd you find?"

Benedict took a while to answer. "I always wanted to be a Chef. But I never had an end goal in mind. I didn't want to become a Chef so I could be a great farmer or own a prestigious restaurant or shake up the culinary scene or become a renowned fighter. Becoming a Chef was just a means to an end that I hadn't decided on yet. The only thing I knew about that end that I wanted was that it involved a family. A wife. Since that was the only part of my goal that I had to work toward, I gave it too much importance. I like her, I really do, but I think I took how much I like that dream and I projected it on her."

Nori looked up at Benedict. She would have never guessed he could be so introspective. Most of her encounters with him were either about Blanche or overshadowed by a talkative Oliver.

Benedict smiled at her, his body loosening up. He looked like he'd be okay. "All of that is to say that I thought I was over her while she was gone. I did get a little sad when I found out, sure. Still working through that. But I'm happy for them. Really. I don't fault Archie for it, even if I wish it was me. Only thing left for me to do is move on. And I can do that because I found my real goal."

"And what's that?"

"I'm going to be a great actor." Benedict looked at the stars with such a thoughtful expression that Nori had to take him seriously.

Nori took another sip. A dizzying warmth swirled through her. "You don't have to be a Chef to do that, though."

Benedict laughed. "No, but it helps keep me fed. I'm hoping to skip the starving artist phase of becoming a great. Besides, I could learn some conjuration tricks to bring some extra theatrics to the stage."

Nori thought of Archie popping blueberries for the children. She thought of everyone pelting him with tomatoes and suppressed a laugh.

"And how are you doing with it?" Benedict asked.

"With?"

He nodded down at the pair as they entered the greenhouse.

"Oh." Nori recoiled and laughed once. "I, uh—I'm fine. Why wouldn't I be?"

Benedict pursed his lips and took a sip. "Just checking."

"Hey!" Oliver called out. "Don't stand near the balcony. You're not gonna like what that does to your dreams."

"I'm going to go read before bed." Nori held Benedict's wrist and poured the rest of her drink into his. "Dream for me, will you?"