"So, Julienne," Mindy started as the carriage hurtled past the countless vineyards and chateaux of Labrusca. "Are you excited to be going home?"

Julienne stretched his neck to one side and rubbed his shoulder. A day and a half in the carriage had taken a physical toll on him, but the mental toll was far worse. He hated the idleness of it. Getting to spend a night in Duke Frolletti's luxurious kitchen had helped to settle a bit of anxiety, but Julienne's stomach acid had started its fiery gurgle that night, a little burn that kept him on his left side as he slept. He knew it'd only get worse from there.

"Cafe Julienne is my home," he said.

"Okay. Are you excited to be going back to the place where you were born?"

"I don't know if excited is the right word."

"Okay." Mindy took a deep breath and smiled. No one could put on a smile like Mindy. "Are you feeling strongly about going back to the place where you were born?"

Julienne laughed at her formal tone. She egged him on.

"Perhaps you would like to share your strong feelings with a trusted friend that could help you to process them in the interest of making this an enjoyable trip for everyone?"

"Oh, this trip will be plenty fun. We have Oliver!"

"What?" Oliver yelled from the back of the carriage.

"Go back to your cards," Julienne yelled back. Yarrow's iciness had been no match for Oliver's relentless energy. The two had spent the entire second day playing cards. The last time Julienne had checked, Yarrow had lost twelve straight.

Julienne returned his attention to Mindy and straightened his body into a board, mimicking and exaggerating her stilted cadence. "Perhaps I am feeling nervous about seeing my parents for the first time in eight years."

Mindy let her body melt into the seat, no longer playing Julienne's game. She twirled her blonde hair around a finger. "Don't forget to be nervous about all the people that want to see you. Last I checked, that list contained…everyone in Toral? How many restaurants have we been scheduled to cook at?"

"Uh, seven?"

"I'm surprised that's it."

"That's just the first week. Enough to make it known that we're touring Toral. The idea is that the other restaurants will clamor to book us. We're expected to keep a busy schedule."

"So you get to pick which restaurants we cook at?"

"That's right."

Mindy's eyes wandered away from their conversation, a hint of nervous shame in them. "Could we pick some that aren't so…upscale?"

Julienne narrowed his eyes as he tried to figure Mindy out. He couldn't think of how exactly to phrase his question, so he just let the moment linger until she couldn't take the silence anymore.

"Look, I just…" Mindy sighed. "There's just a certain…snobbery to it all."

"Snobbery?" Julienne grinned. The statement was too unexpected to be offensive.

"Yeah! Like, why can't cooking just be cooking? Why do we have to dress it up in all of this? It's a big parade. Every meal is an event. An experience. Oh, we put microgreens on this microbite of a dish. Why can't we just slap down a big steak? Why do we have to always spend so long on presentation?"

Julienne grew more bewildered with each statement, his mouth twisting into a half-smile, half-frown. The last one made him recoil with confusion. "You're so great at presentation, though."

"Just because I'm good at something doesn't mean I like doing it. People don't really care about deconstructions and narratives and chiffonade. They care about what the sauce tastes like and how much of it they get."

The smiling half of Julienne's expression faded, Mindy's words starting to dance on his nerves. "We're not just Chefs. We cross the border into art. And our patrons care, Mindy. And that means that you should too."

She raised her hands in concession. "I know, I know. I'm just saying that every so often it'd be nice to just make some shlop out of ground beef, mustard, mushrooms, and onions, and then have them scoop it up with bread. No…curated experiences. Just good eating. Don't you ever get tired of the way we dress up something as simple and universal as food?"

"It's the only way I've ever known," Julienne said with finality as he rotated himself to look out the window. He was afraid of silence, but he was more afraid of losing his nerve at Mindy. He needed to be a leader. He needed to maintain others' happiness before his own. And so he let the silence envelop him and the familiar thoughts come creeping back.

He wondered if his father's hair had gone fully gray. It had been black with little speckles of silver when Julienne last saw him. Julienne couldn't remember how tall his father was, either. He hadn't even reached his father's shoulders when he was sent away. Julienne could only imagine him as a giant.

When Julienne thought of his father, it was all physical. How tall was he? Was his hair gray? What did he smell like? What was it like to be in his presence?

But when Julienne thought of his mother, she hardly had a physical form. Only an emotional one. He couldn't remember exactly how her face moved when she talked or the cadence of her walk. He could only remember how she laughed or how she cried or how she loved him or how she had said goodbye.

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Julienne twisted his face as he sniffled. He flexed his stomach until its acid bubbled up and burned his heart. That was something he knew how to process. He breathed in, in, in, out.

"Carriage change!" the guard yelled from outside as the carriage came rattling to a stop. They had abandoned the dirt roads of the countryside for cobbled streets.

"Want to pause the game?" Oliver fanned his cards at his face to fight the heat.

Yarrow slammed his cards down. "I give up."

"Thirty three in a row!" Oliver cheered as he scooped up the cards.

"You're cheating. I just haven't figured out how." Yarrow scowled at Oliver before turning to Julienne. "What's with the carriage change?"

"Toral has thin streets. Thinner than Ambrosia City's. If we took this carriage, at best we'd take up the whole road, at worst we'd get wedged between two buildings."

"Fix your hair, Yarrow," Mindy scolded. "We're about to be paraded."

She patted blush powder on one cheek to even it out as she put on a lipstick made from roses. She had been at it for nearly half an hour. Not that she needed it. She was the only person Julienne knew that woke up prettier than him.

Yarrow quickly slapped his hands on the top of his head, pushing his hair down to his eyebrows. "Done."

Mindy rolled her eyes. She took one last look in her hand mirror, nodding with approval just as the carriage door opened. Julienne stood in the well of the carriage, taking her hand and helping her to the door. He motioned for Yarrow and Oliver to go ahead. They nodded at what they likely perceived as politeness. But really, Julienne wanted to stay with the carriage for as long as possible. He had gotten into it in Ambrosia City, and Ambrosia City was just an extension of Cafe Julienne. But once he left the carriage behind, he'd have nothing tethering him back home. He'd be adrift.

Yarrow must have recognized Julienne's hesitation. He waited just outside the door, offering a slight smile. "You coming, Julienne? I mean, I think I can manage from here, but everyone else will be pretty disappointed."

Julienne breathed in, out, in, out, his chest heaving, his heart racing. He took a deep breath to reset his pattern. In, in, in, out. His nerves settled down. He stepped away from the safety of the carriage, ready to breathe the open air and to take a moment to stretch out.

The applause started the moment his foot touched the ground.

"Welcome, Julienne!"

The cry echoed across the crowd of some fifty people that had gathered for his arrival. There were old nobles and young merchants and children that clapped and jumped and cheered, even if they didn't fully understand what for. The welcome hit Julienne like a thunderclap, robbing his breath of its newly found rhythm.

Julienne was used to fame and attention, but this was different. People in Ambrosia City looked at him and saw Cafe Julienne. These people saw something else entirely. He tried to smile for them. But he couldn't. He raised a fist over his mouth as if covering a cough and waved with his other hand.

The guards raised their hands in warning as the crowd inched forward. But it was someone else that made Julienne feel safe. Yarrow turned to face the crowd but stayed close to him, shielding him from them. But then someone in the crowd yelled, "Yarrow!" and he stepped away from Julienne, forgetting about his friend and waving in awe that someone knew his name.

Julienne wondered how long the people had been waiting for him and whether or not his uncle would be pleased with the showing. More people joined the crowd, drawn by the noise. The guards from Labruscella moved the belongings from one carriage to the other while the guards from Labrusca formed a hallway for the students to get through.

This new carriage had not been built for the comfort and protection of its passengers. It had been built to show them off. There was no roof overhead. No door. Just low walls of wood with looping swirls carved in it and a shiny golden finish. Even the horses that pulled the carriage had been decorated with capes of roses.

Julienne sat and felt more exposed than ever. He flinched when someone threw a flower at them. Then another came and another and another, a barrage of soft petals and hard stems. Yarrow smiled and waved awkwardly, unable to get a handle on the thrill of fame. Mindy swiveled her hand back and forth ever so slightly to wave at the crowd, subtly moving her head to get her hair just right. No one handled attention quite like her.

Except maybe Oliver. He gathered up the flowers, put one into his mouth, and bowed for the crowd. The crowd cheered loudly for him—even if they didn't know who he was.

Julienne fixed his posture, straightening his shoulders with a pop and sticking out his chest. He brushed his wavy black hair off his face and smiled for the crowd. He needed to be perfect. He needed to rise to the significance of a Julienne returning to Labrusca. Word of his arrival would spread like wildfire, and that word should be one of regalness.

From his new vantage point, he spotted a Red Jacket Peintrissier with a hand on a flour-caked canvas. Colors swirled through the flour as the artist used essence to capture a quick sketch of the scene. Julienne lifted himself off his seat to try to see how he looked in the recreation, but he couldn't make out the details. He settled back down with a sigh before he remembered to smile.

The carriage lurched into motion, Julienne having to grab his seat in fear of falling off. The crowd followed for a bit before their adoration was lost in the clopclop-clopclop-clopclop of the horses moving them along the cobblestone. Others came out to watch, but their fervor never reached the point of the initial crowd's. In the relative silence, Julienne was able to appreciate the view.

At some point in his life, Julienne's memories of Toral must have bled into his reality of Ambrosia City. When he thought of Toral, he remembered it buzzing with chaotic energy. But now that he was in it, he saw romance.

Vines married stone as they wove through their crevices, moss growing on corners, the entire city colored gray and green. Little rivers danced their way through the city, and thin, long gondolas danced with them as they carried passengers. Narrow roads and alleys brought nearby shops and cafes together as families, sharing smells and overhangs and iron-wire seating. Everything was close. Intimate. People stopped to eat at whatever was nearby, their passion belonging to the city, not any particular place.

Everything was old and new all at once, ever-breathing, a city that had not overrode nature but rather joined it. Every store had a story, every stone a history. The students sat in silence for a while as they admired it, visitors in a museum.

They squeezed through alleys and crossed bridges. No road was straight in Toral. They all ran in a circular spiral from the center of the city, giving it more layers than an onion. As the carriage curled toward the center, Julienne spotted grand cathedrals, hundreds and hundreds of years old.

They passed through layer after layer of well-guarded walls until the royal keep was finally visible. Whereas Ambrosia City's keep rose to touch the sky, Toral's was an entire campus made up of several unconnected buildings and even hosting a small vineyard. Julienne could only see the tops of the towers, but he still tried to remember which building was which.

By the number of years, he had called this his home for the vast majority of his life. But that had been a different life. He struggled to access its memories. Its warmth. Instead, he only felt nervous as they passed through the final gate.

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