"Would you really go?" Archie couldn't find the courage to look into Nori's eyes.

"I don't…I don't know." Nori leaned back. She hadn't eaten a bite of her breakfast even though she'd been sitting there for nearly half an hour explaining her situation—she had tried to explain it the previous night, but she could hardly make coherent sentences through her sobbing.

"You need to eat." Archie grabbed her skinny forearm, his fingers wrapping all the way around with room to spare.

But she didn't hear his concerns. "I need…I need to not have to make the decision. If I can figure out another way to keep fifty people fed, then I'm not…I don't—I…I can live with myself. With not going."

Archie slid his hand up to hers, running his thumb along her knuckles. "We'll figure something out, Nori."

Nori sucked in her bottom lip, her cheeks quivering and pushing into her eyes. Archie knew he only had a few seconds before she started crying again. He bent forward to look up into her eyes.

"That's what we have Sutton for," he joked. "He's basically redesigned the way the Monastery keeps inventory, and I know he's been dying to talk to someone about it. Start there. Maybe there's some hidden surplus."

He managed to get the joke across the line just in time. Nori smiled, the threat of tears subsiding.

Barley approached their table holding two palm-sized blocks of ice. He held one out for Archie. Nori pulled her hand back from Archie's.

"Time to go?" Archie asked as he took the ice cube. He took a deep breath as he accumulated essence in his hand, letting it form a layer over the ice. Breathing in the cold morning air helped him find the right styling of cold, minty essence.

"Can't keep Buart waiting too long."

"What's with the ice?" Nori asked.

Archie remembered that Nori had been gone for two weeks—and even before that, she spent all her time at the docks. She was never part of their routines. "Essence endurance training. We see how long we can keep them frozen. I usually make it all the way to Buart's—about an hour."

Nori rubbed an eye and looked up at Barley. "Do you beat him?"

Barley squeezed his lips together into a little dot. "Depends."

"Depends?" Nori grinned and looked at Archie. "Sounds like Barley wins but is being modest."

"Well," Archie sat up with playful combativeness. "I can hold my essence longer."

"But you get distracted," Barley interjected.

"But I get distracted. If I try to do multiple things at once, my essence goes all out of whack and I lose the ice. But—but! If the task is simply to keep the ice frozen for as long as possible, I win."

Barley closed one eye and looked up.

"Most of the time," Archie added. "I will admit that Barley's abilities are certainly more potent. Once my ice starts melting, it's too late. Barley can nearly refreeze a puddle in his palm."

Barley smiled at Nori and put his free hand on her shoulder. "Are you alright?"

Nori smiled and nodded tightly. Archie smiled too. He knew how healing a single reassurance from Barley could be.

"Alright," Archie said. "Let's get Hawthorn and get going. Hawthorn!"

Archie stood and looked around the Monastery. Khaldeer residents filled up over a hundred tables, but Archie had grown comfortable enough in the Monastery to yell over all of them.

"Hawthorn!"

Hawthorn popped up from his table, his green jacket making him stand out in the crowd. "I'm coming!"

He jogged over, Shiso in tow.

"Nori!" Shiso exclaimed, dashing over and draping herself over Nori, squeezing her tightly, leaving her just enough wiggle room to pat Shiso's back in one of the most one-sided hugs Archie had ever seen. "I was so worried about you!"

"What are you doing here?" Nori asked.

Shiso stood up and hopped over to Hawthorn, wrapping herself around his arm. "Eating breakfast with my Hawty."

A moment of choking nausea overtook Archie, forcing him to cough.

"Oh," Nori said, her face drawn up in a confused wince. "That's…unexpected."

"Sorry, Nori," Hawthorn said as he pulled his arm out from Shiso's grasp and wrapped it around her. "You were too slow."

"Oh," Nori repeated. "That's…okay."

There was a silence so uncomfortable that even Barley couldn't stand it. "So, we should probably…"

"Yeah!" Hawthorn kissed Shiso on the cheek and untangled himself from her. "Let's go, boys."

"Nori, are you going to the docks today?" Shiso asked.

Nori sucked in her bottom lip. Archie saw that same look, the harbinger of tears, and intervened. "She has some stuff to do around the Monastery today."

"Oh, okay." Shiso shrugged and started skipping away. "See you tonight, then!"

Nori leaned in toward Archie and whispered. "Tonight?"

Archie used the back of his icy hand to cover his mouth so Hawthorn wouldn't hear—not that he needed to. Hawthorn was too busy watching Shiso leave. "She's here all the time now. Her and Hawthorn are like…crazy."

"Gross," she whispered back. She leaned back and spoke normally. "So where's Sutton?"

"He's working on his maps. He left at sunrise to go interview someone that has hiked through part of yeti territory. Why don't you just rest for a while? He'll be back later today." Archie stood up. "And eat," he added.

Nori rubbed her thumbs across her eyebrows. "Maybe they could use my help in the kitchen," she mumbled.

Archie sighed but knew better than to press. He smiled and started walking away with Hawthorn and Barley.

"You'll be back, right?" Nori called out. Between her tone and her wide-eyed expression, she seemed borderline manic.

Archie offered a reassuring smile. "I'll be back after lunch. Then we'll train with Picea. Then we'll have dinner—something good. Then we can just hang out, okay?"

Nori nodded rapidly. "Okay. Okay."

Archie waited until he turned around before frowning.

Nori was that way for a while. Fragile. Everyone fell into routines as they prepared for their adventure, but Nori never really seemed to settle back into the Monastery.

In the mornings, they worked. Archie, Barley, and Hawthorn went to Buart's to help him break in a recent purchase of a dozen of the most unruly cattle to ever live. Sutton did his inventories and tidied up the Monastery's records. Most days, Blanche went to the nearby mountains to forage, bringing back big baskets of herbs and mushrooms. She took Nori a few times, mostly just to get her out of the Monastery.

If Blanche didn't have a job that day, she trained, adding various challenges for herself. She forced herself to start from the edge of the yard and limited the amount of times she could touch the soil again to locate the crops. Once she started being able to detect farther, she tested her ability to detect specific distances.

She allowed herself only one scan with her essence and then attempted to walk to the spot. The farther the crop, the more inaccurate the guess. But after a few days, she started being able to pinpoint crops that were fifty feet away with just a two-foot margin of error.

Blanche even found a little way to cheat. She scanned for crops and then summoned flowers near where she felt pockets of essence, giving an above-the-surface marker for her to find. Picea met this discovery with applause and a new challenge—identifying the types of buried crops. Blanche struggled with that for a while, but at least learned to tell the difference between a root vegetable and a flower.

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In the afternoons, Picea played the role of the yeti, lumbering with impenetrable defenses at the students and attempting to swoop them up in a bear hug. Even once they got over their fear of hurting her, they still couldn't stop her. Her lesson was clear—the only guaranteed way to win a fight was to escape from it.

The physicality of the training benefited Nori the most. She couldn't sulk or get in her own head when practicing in the yard. Her time away had left her unable to compete with Archie's quarterstaff skills, so she focused her time on her lemons.

Sutton managed to avoid afternoon training, instead scouring for information about their mission. He found dubiously accurate maps of the far north and worked hard to correlate and consolidate them into something reliable. He spent late nights reading journals of people that had traveled into yeti territory. He mapped out their journeys to get a sense of the terrain, the dangerous areas, and where to look for the grove of trees.

He interviewed people that had traveled through yeti territory, putting their unwritten stories to paper. By the time they were ready to leave, Sutton had written enough pages to surpass the longest book Archie had ever read—in other words, light reading for Sutton.

Sutton etched each story onto a map, outlining their estimated paths and marking any yeti sightings. While each line came from a story, it was the spaces they left that told the story Sutton was looking for. The places that no one dared to go. Sutton found three likely candidates within a few days of each other.

He grew thin and weary, pushing himself not only to help Archie, but to help Nori too. He obtained a copy of the Uroko-Khala trade agreement, going through it line-by-line as he listened to Nori's accounts of the docks. Some nights, he even went down to the docks alone.

Other nights, Archie and Barley stayed up late with Sutton to go over their progress. As the most experienced in the mountains, Barley tried to use the terrain maps to estimate their speed. The yetis had been relegated to some of the harshest terrain, but in the midst of the mountains there were still some easily traversable valleys. Barley estimated their speed at anywhere between one and three miles per hour.

Archie, with Sutton as a human calculator, figured out the times of potential routes and weighed them against the risks. Everything became a balancing act. If one location didn't have the trees, they could go to the second potential location by cutting through three days of dangerous territory, or they could back out of yeti country, go around, and then re-enter, taking six days, but only being at risk for one or two of them.

Sutton created a sprawling list of every route decision they might have to make, assigning distance, danger, and time values to each of them. Then he made that same list four more times, giving a copy and a map to everyone in the group. "Redundancy becomes essential in matters of life and death," he said.

Archie oversaw every part of the preparations. He worked with Barley and Hawthorn to determine what supplies they needed for the trek, and he worked with Sutton to procure the equipment. Archie couldn't believe how much hiking equipment cost—even in a land that didn't value coin highly.

Sutton, with his obsessive nature, welcomed Archie's micromanagement. They obsessed over every detail. Every possible route. Every pitfall. Every pound of their packs. They considered the nutrition of dried meats and fruits against their weight, desperate to save a pound from each pack that might get them to their destination an hour quicker.

For as much as Sutton hated the outdoors, he loved the academic pursuit of learning survival methods. He flaunted his booksmarts by teaching Archie about the five C's—cutting tools, cover elements, combustion devices, containers, and cordage. Hawthorn, having actual experience, insisted on the five S's—socks, another pair of socks, some more socks, yet another pair of socks, and, just in case, some more socks.

As thanks for their service, Buart provided Archie and Barley with a pair of small old handaxes. Together with a knife in each person's pack, they covered the cutting tools. They purchased a tarp for each person—they wanted to purchase cotton tarps, but Hawthorn and Barley insisted they upgrade to linen so that it wouldn't soak up snow and rain.

They waterproofed canvas bedrolls with linseed oil and beeswax and filled them with yak wool blankets. They attached two leather waterskins to each pack and distributed their growing collection of dried foods. As everything started to come together, they tried to limit each pack to fit between the carrier's hips and the top of their neck—bad news for the large-backed Barley.

Archie spent an entire day cooking noodles to make them as strong as rope, saving a possibly-vital four pounds from each pack compared to the heavier twine ropes. He made extra spools of noodle-rope and cooked a batch of blueberries to be as hard and deadly as he could make them. Every day he worked on his slingshot, improving the snappiness of the band and learning how to aim.

During their weeks of intense preparation, the group still found the occasional moment of fun and joy. They shared dinner every night, learning to deal with the public displays of affection from Hawthorn and Shiso. They learned how to make butter tea and tsampa and yak jerky. They hid in the yard and ambushed Picea, nearly managing to take her down to her knees before she decided to stop going easy on them.

But as the time to leave crept closer, the fun times became sparse. For a couple of months there, they got to believe they were having a fun summer abroad. But then the mood darkened. Blanche and Sutton were both exhausted from their preparations. Archie struggled to keep himself from snapping at people—Barley helped by forcing him to participate in the morning prayers. And for Nori, she saw the end of summer coming, looming over her.

The night before they left, Picea gave them all a gift and a hug—she picked Sutton up and swung him around, his legs dangling.

"You've all done a great service for the people of Khaldeer," she said. "I wanted to send you off as real Khalyans."

Archie ripped open the tissue paper to reveal a Khalyan-styled Chef's jacket. He grinned as he unfolded it with a shake, the tan kalypo fibers turning orange at his touch. The jacket was closer to a gambeson than a traditional Chef's jacket, padded diamonds quilted into the fabric with four leather buckles holding the jacket closed on one side.

Blanche put hers on first, turning her shoulders this way and that, striking a dozen poses in half a dozen seconds. Sutton bundled up in his—the Platterian jacket had always been a little too thin for the boy that ran a little too cold. Archie put his on and looked down at it, wondering what his dad would think. Even Nori seemed to forget about her troubles for a while, giggling and slapping Blanche's hands away as she tried to adjust the fit.

But Barley never put his on. He took care to make sure his hands never touched the fibers, said a small thanks, and snuck away in the chaos.

He didn't come down for dinner, and Sutton took his meal on the go, claiming he had one last order of business before they left. Archie envied the other boys for having found reasons to leave. Instead, he sat and shared his horror with Nori and Blanche as Hawthorn and Shiso fed each other their meals between kisses.

When Archie went up to his room, Barley had already blown out the candles and bundled himself in bed. Archie shed his new Khalyan jacket as quietly as he could and tiptoed into bed. He took his omnihandle from the corner of his bed and started practicing in silence, but eventually his curiosity got the better of him.

"You awake?" he whispered in the dark.

"Yeah." Barley's voice was crisp and clear, unburdened by sleepiness.

"Are you excited for tomorrow?"

Barley was quiet for a bit. "Yes," he said in a way that made Archie think that excited was the wrong word for whatever he was feeling.

"Are you…" Archie winced. He wasn't sure how to offer comfort. He wondered how Barley did it so effortlessly. "Are you okay?"

No response.

"Barley? You still awake?"

"Yeah. Just thinking."

A heavy silence imprisoned Archie, leaving him afraid to even move. Fortunately, the spell was broken by the jostling of the doorknob. Sutton's head poked through the door.

"Archie? I need to talk to you."

Archie sighed and got out of bed. Sutton "needed" to talk to him most nights, but it was usually about something trivial. But once Archie stepped out into the light of the hall and could see Sutton's face, he knew this was important.

"I…" Sutton looked down the hall at the girls' door. He motioned for Archie to follow him farther down the hall, speaking quietly. "I wanted to tell you first. To see what you wanted to do about it."

Archie felt eyes on him. He looked down the hall to make sure they were alone. "What is it?"

"I found a solution. For Nori. For keeping fifty people fed."

Archie's joy washed away his anxiousness. He grabbed Sutton by the shoulders and grinned. "Sutton, that's great! You should be telling Nori this!"

But Sutton didn't smile back. He shushed Archie and leaned in closer. "It might not be so simple."

Sutton fished what looked like a big rock out of his pocket, turning it over and causing Archie to recoil in disgust at the alien-looking clam within.

"What is that?!"

"Acorn barnacle. From the moment Nori told me about her experiences at the docks, I thought this might be the answer."

"Barnacles?"

"The Urokans see it as food for poor people. This has left a certain blind spot in their trade agreement. You see, the Khalyans are limited on what they can catch, but there is nothing in the language that regulates what grows on the Khalyan ships while they're asea."

"Okay, so that seems pretty simple. Why are we whispering?"

"Well, I've been running an experiment." Sutton jostled the barnacle in his hand, smiling with pride at it. "I used wire to create a controlled zone—big enough for barnacle larvae to get through, too small for fish."

"Larvae?" Archie looked at the barnacle with a new level of disgust. He had no idea what barnacles really were, how they grew, or how they tasted, and he didn't want to find out the answers to any of those.

Sutton didn't let the interruption slow him down. "I set up a few boards and rubbed them with peppermint oil containing varying levels of essence. While I had insufficient time and would never publish it as scientifically verified, there was a noticeable effect on the speed of growth and the size of the barnacles."

"So…more essence, bigger barnacles, more people fed. People really eat this?"

"I tried the largest one to ensure its quality," Sutton said. "It was actually pretty good."

"This isn't the largest one?"

Sutton laughed. "I set up five boards. This one grew on the third board. The biggest was double this size. And in only a couple of weeks."

"That's good, right?"

"It's spectacular."

"Okay…" Archie looked around in confusion. "So again, why are we keeping this a secret?"

Sutton pushed up his glasses. "Well, the method that I used would be economically nonviable. There's a reason the Khalyans aren't already doing it. I picked peppermint oil for its concentration of essence, not for its abundance. To scale this solution, we'd need to find a better way to infuse essence in wood. Or find wood that contains a large amount of essence already."

Archie smiled. "The yetis."

But Sutton frowned. "Correct."

"Again, what's wrong?"

Sutton licked his lips. "Well, we're negotiating, right? Odds are if we ask for an acorn and a branch, we might only get one."

"So…" Archie's mouth hung open. "You're telling me this because…"

"If the yetis don't give us everything we want, which I doubt they will…you might have to choose between restoring Sain and keeping Nori around."

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