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Chapter 12 - Once a Harper...
🕑 Added 2025-02-12 20:00:06 +0000 UTC“So Nori,” Shiso chatted while they worked. “What was it like growing up on Kiham?”
Kiham was the prize island of Uroko. Situated in the midst of the Urokan archipelago, Kiham had the benefit of shallow waters and temperate weather. On top of producing many of Uroko’s ground crops, it also held the nation’s capital, Boseki. Naturally, Kiham’s prosperity meant that it also served as the home for the primary branch of the Harper family—not that Nori had outed herself as a Harper to Shiso just yet.
“I don’t think I ever mentioned being from Kiham,” Nori said as she sliced through a fish. She glanced up at Shiso, whose eyes widened once she realized her mistake.
“Oh—uh—I—uh—I’m from Kodoloun,” Shiso blurted out. She fidgeted as she rambled. “The lone island. Well, apparently I’m from Palm Coast, but my dad died before I was born, and then my mom moved to Kodoloun when I was just a baby, so I don’t remember ever living on the mainland. It’s kinda funny, being born on the biggest island of all, and then living on a little one way out in the sea.”
Nori’s eyes burned into Shiso, demanding a confession. Shiso tried to get back to fileting the fish in front of her, but her hands shook, keeping her from making the first cut.
“You—uh, uh, uh,” Shiso stuttered. Her head swiveled around, looking for an answer anywhere except in Nori’s face. Finally, she found it and looked up at Nori. Her hands stopped trembling, but her eyes still gave away her insecurity. “You have that Kiham accent.”
“No I don’t.” Nori used to have a Kiham accent in her early teenage years. But then her mother ironed it out by mocking her anytime she spoke with Kiham’s snooty lilt. Her mother would beat her hand fan against the table with every syllable as she made her recite words dozens of times—Nori could still hear the tuttuttut.
“Okay, fine,” Shiso confessed, her shoulders scrunching up into her neck. “I know who you are.”
Nori sighed. Shiso continued unraveling.
“How could I not?” she asked. “I mean, come on! It’s…every Chef in Uroko knows about the Harper girl that went to the Academy.”
Nori nodded over at Sauter, who fussed over a scraped up piece of wood on the Preserverance. “Does he know?”
“Probably not. I doubt he would be so friendly if he did.” Shiso finally found the composure to cut through the fish. “You know, people here just don’t get it. The oceans belong to Uroko. We have every right—your family has every right—to protect these waters.”
Protect them from what? Reduced profits?
An anger welled up inside Nori. She had heard the justification before and found it just as toothless then as she did now.
But she didn’t have the energy to fight Shiso’s brainwashing. Her conscience had weighed heavy ever since her dinner with the king. She tossed and turned at night, wrestling with questions of her identity and worth.
What had she truly done to separate herself from her family? Going to the Academy had put a physical distance between them, sure, but was that rebellion just a flash in the pan? Some lip service to make herself feel better about growing up in a life of luxury? What had she done for someone else?
She had worked at The Gift and fed the commoners of the Roots. But she had only done that out of obligation. Rowan was her ticket out of Uroko, so she did what he asked and never pushed herself to do more.
She had helped Julienne with his birthday dinner, but that had just been for the opportunity to cook at Cafe Julienne.
She had rescued Chandler. She felt good about that.
For a while.
But had she only done it for herself? In her self-doubt, she convinced herself that the act was a selfish one—she pushed Archie to danger and risked all of their lives because of her inability to come to peace with her own upbringing.
She had bullied Archie into it. And he had paid the price.
Harper behavior.
When she thought of her role amongst their classmates, who was she if not the bully? When she wanted something at the consequence of someone else, had she ever even hesitated?
The sound of a splash interrupted her thoughts. She turned to find the barnacle-scraping boys back at it again, braving the great pendulum of a boat that rocked in the turbulent dock.
“Hey!” she protested as she ran to the edge of the dock. “It’s too choppy today. You’re gonna get hurt!”
“We’ve seen worse,” one of the boys replied. But his eyes betrayed his words. Both boys kept their distance from the boat, holding onto the wooden pillars of the docks. They watched in fear as the waves combined and separated, lifting and dropping the boat with a smack!
Nori looked over at Sauter, who took a swig from a waterskin that almost certainly didn’t have water in it.
“Can you stop them?” she pleaded. “Tell them to come back tomorrow. The barnacles aren’t going anywhere.”
“Eh,” Saunter dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “They’re hungry today. And the boat’ll be kinder than anyone that catches them thievin’.”
Nori winced as she watched the boys.
The older boy—no older than fourteen—went for it, wading dangerously close to the boat. He stiffened one arm against the hull and got to work with the other. He tried to slice a barnacle off, but the ship rose on the waves and went out of reach. The boy kicked off at the last moment, avoiding the boat’s violent drop.
Knowing he had only a moment, he went at the barnacle again, hacking at the wood.
“Hey!” Sauter yelled down into the water. “You best not be cutting out the beam! I’ll break your bed down for the wood if you do!”
Nori started to protest, but Saunter pointed at the cutting station where three fish waited, flopping around. Shiso scrambled around to spike them, muttering to herself about the degradation of the meat.
“Don’t fall behind,” he ordered Nori.
She took one last worried glance at the boys before returning to her work in silence. She tried to focus on the sharp knife in her hands, but with each smack! of the wood against the water, she imagined one of the boys’ heads splitting open, their brother diving down into the depths to save them.
“So Nori, what’s Ambrosia City like?” Shiso asked as she finished sealing one of Nori’s filets. Whether she was trying to distract Nori or just didn’t care, Nori couldn’t be sure. “I heard a million people live there.”
Nori scoffed. “That’s ridiculous. A million people. It’s half of that.”
Nori shook her head as she sliced off a chunk of fish meat. For once, Shiso didn’t follow up a question with another question. The silence unnerved Nori. She looked up and saw Shiso pout as she sealed a piece of meat.
Nori sighed and cursed at herself. Shiso just wanted to chat. Nori could at least do that much for her.
“But sometimes it feels like there are a million people,” Nori said, starting the conversation back up. “Other times it feels…empty.”
Shiso’s frown vanished, replaced by a barely subdued giddiness. She really was just like Blanche—just a girl who loves to chat about everything or nothing depending on your mood. “How’s that?”
“I don’t know. Just…when there are that many people—everyone is so busy and has so many things going on. It makes the stuff you’re going through feel small. Makes you feel alone.”
Shiso helped one of the sailors untangle his net from a flopping fish. “Are there many Urokans?”
“Not really. I mean, I guess there are, but definitely less than the other kingdoms.”
“Maybe it’s not loneliness.” Shiso stabbed her spike into the fish. “Maybe it’s homesickness.”
Nori laughed at the notion.
But then she started to consider it.
She loved her life at the Academy. But was love enough to erase the imprint in her soul left by her childhood home? She had plenty of unpleasant memories of her upbringing, but when she painted her past in broader strokes, the cruelties were washed out by vague, warm details.
The humidity in the air, somehow different than Ambrosia City’s. All-wood buildings and sliding doors. Paper partitions and moveable screens. The low tables and little mat on the ground where they ate. Praying at altars. A hundred paper lanterns flying through the sky. Wind chimes all through the city, wooden ones with their hollow tonking and metal ones with their tinny tinking all blending with the endless sawing of summer cicadas. And the smell. Salty and earthy. Sea and land. There was a oneness with nature that she never found in Ambrosia City.
All of those little things that weren’t tied down to any specific memory…they had shaped her. While she was happy at the Academy, she felt an aching for her past.
“Maybe I do get a little homesick,” she said slowly, holding onto each syllable until the last possible moment just like she had held onto those paper lanterns, watching the flame fill the paper with air, not letting go until her mother made her.
“Do you think you’ll come back?”
“No,” she said abruptly.
Nori had no doubts about that. Her present cynicism would surely wash the warmth out of relived memories.
“Oh.” Shiso clenched her teeth as she sawed through the flesh of a fish, her knife bouncing off its bones as she peeled away the meat. “Ugh, this knife just cannot keep its edge.”
Nori pulled one of the knives out of her leather knife roll and offered it to Shiso. “Here.”
“Ooo,” Shiso cooed. She took the blade and marveled at it, holding it just inches from her face. Rather than moving the knife, she moved her entire head horizontally to study each inch of the blade. She flipped the fish over and started on the other side, the knife slicing through the fish as if it were air. “Wow. This is a nice knife.”
Shiso lifted the knife into the air to admire it again. The sun bounced off its metal and into her eyes, causing her to flinch and blink repeatedly to restore her vision. Against all odds and days of internal torment, Nori giggled. Something about the gaffe made her realize that perhaps she had been treating Shiso too harshly. The girl had done nothing to deserve Nori’s curtness and minor aggressions.
Nori didn’t want to be a bully.
“You can keep it.”
Shiso’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “Wait, what?”
“Yeah, keep it. Consider it thanks for teaching me how to seal fish.”
Shiso blinked and blinked and blinked. “Buh—but—I barely had to teach you anything.”
“Well, then…” Nori shrugged. Maybe it was better that it wasn’t payment. “Consider it a gift.”
“Wow.” Shiso recoiled from the knife, taken aback at it now being hers. “Wow.”
They returned their focus to their work, Shiso letting out the occasional “ooo” as her knife made easy work of the fish.
Nori felt better.
For a while.
But once there were no more fish to cut or busywork to be had and she found herself wandering aimlessly around the harbor, she felt that same loneliness that she had told Shiso about. The crowd shuffled this way and that, doing this job and that job, getting sandals cobbled and haggling for an extra bite to eat. In a weird way, Nori envied their poverty. She knew it was a ridiculous notion, but couldn’t stop the feeling. These people had focus. Purpose. They had to in order to survive.
But what did Nori have? Resentment? Self-pity? Any of the people that brushed past her would gladly trade lives with her. She had grown up rich beyond belief. She had nannies and tutors. Her own room. A yard to play in. And now she was a Chef. That alone made her one of the luckiest people in the world.
Yet despite all of these blessings, Nori had never been happy with her life.
An internal scream filled Nori to the brim. She needed to get out of her own head. She could go to one of the harbor’s many taverns—she had never tried to drink away her problems, but how hard could it be? She was a fast learner, anyway.
No, no. That was how her uncle dealt with things. It made him morose and ill-mannered. Always drinking, always pontificating on a better time. A time of Urokan independence. No bowing and curtailing to another kingdom. No need to spend resources propping up the other kingdoms. Of course, he had barely been born when Uroko’s king bent the knee.
Nori decided that maybe, just maybe, the best thing to do was to just sit down and cry.
So that’s what she did.
She sat against the stone wall of some brewery—the harbor was far too busy for things like benches—and cried. When was the last time she had cried? Her mother had always forbidden her as a child. “I’ll give you something to cry about,” she’d say as she closed her hand fan.
For a while, Nori couldn’t see anything through her tears but the blurred feet of so many passersby. But as the tears ran out—perhaps from feeling better, perhaps from being dehydrated from a day in the sun—she started to watch the people.
A man, covered in soot, smiled as he approached a woman, his white teeth shining in the midst of his dirty face. She hugged him, not caring about her white shirt or the imprint the man would surely leave on it.
A Green Jacket Chef wore his workday on his face, drooping with a thousand-yard stare, unaware of any single individual in the crowd that he shuffled through. But people were aware of him. They moved out of his way and looked at him with reverence. With so few Chefs in Khaldeer, their work was long, but people admired them for it.
A skinny wisp of a child, five or six, ran through the thicket of legs and found his younger, even thinner sister, pulling a burnt end of a loaf of bread from his pocket and giving it to her. Once Nori saw them, she couldn’t look elsewhere. They stuck out from the crowd like the bones from their skin.
And then she wiped her tears away, got up, and moved with a purpose back toward the docks. People moved out of her way and watched her like they had watched the other Chef. But while that Chef had looked defeated, Nori knew she looked inspired. She felt it—a fire behind her eyes, lightning in her chin.
She marched back through the harbor and found Saunter mending one of the sails on the Preserverance. In the water below, the two boys still struggled with the barnacles.
“Nori!” Sauter cheered. “Did you forget something?”
Nori didn’t respond. She stripped down to her thin, stained white undershirt, tossing her yellow jacket in a heap on the dirty boards of the dock.
“Whatchu doing?” Sauter asked.
Nori pulled her bundle of knives from her jacket and took the best one—a knife even a White Jacket would be happy to use.
“Nori?”
Nori stomped past Sauter, her bare feet thundering on the wood as she made her way to the boat. The two boys looked up at her. And what a sight she must have been. Short and thin, but full of fire. Full of determination. Standing there, looking down at the water, knife in hand, burning with purpose.
And then she jumped into the water.
The water was cold, cold, cold. How long had it been since she had swam in the ocean? Her body tensed. Her lungs contracted. But that cold did nothing to quell the fire that burned within her.
The boys moved aside for Nori as she swam up to the boat. Waves swelled and lifted the boat several feet over Nori’s head, but she swam forward still, undeterred. It crashed down right in front of her, but she didn’t flinch. She laughed, giddy with joy.
With a knife that had been made to the high standard of the most powerful family in the east, she cut the barnacles off the beaten down fishing boat.
[A/N: This last stretch of Nori chapters are perhaps my favorite chapters that I've written for this series. I hope you enjoyed them!]
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Adunn
She needs a hug
