“How is this possible……”

Lately, once Kyle transformed into an eagle, there were times he wouldn’t return to human form for nearly a month. When that happened, Lemiere would sweat through one excuse after another to explain to the other officials why the emperor hadn’t taken a single step out of his chambers.

“Is something wrong?”

Kyle looked at the speechless Lemiere and raised an eyebrow with perfect composure.

“Not at all, but……”

Lemiere stared at Kyle for a long moment, blinking.

From that point on, something unexpected began to happen.

Kyle started seeking out Shiloh’s bread.

Lemiere briefly considered hiring her as the emperor’s personal baker, but something about it sat uneasily with him. An emperor who had never touched bread suddenly taking on a personal baker might invite strange talk. If word got out that Kyle was finding mental stability through her bread, it could add yet another stain to his already troubled image.

While he was still deep in that worry, Kyle called for him one day with an unusually grave expression.

“I intend to visit that baker’s shop.”

“In person, Your Majesty?”

“I’ll go quietly.”

*

A few days earlier.

“What did they put in this bread?”

Kyle held a knife and cut through the banana cake, studying the inside with sharp eyes.

He had eaten Shiloh’s bread when he felt unsettled and found his composure restored more than once. Strangely, after eating her bread, he was able to shift between eagle and human form at will, steadily and on his own terms. Things that would ordinarily make him angry were calmed with a few deep breaths, and he no longer lay awake unable to sleep from rage.

‘Shiloh, they’re called. What kind of person are they?’

Before falling asleep, Kyle tried to picture the baker’s face in the dark behind his eyes.

‘Shiloh’ was a name used for both men and women, but bakers did heavy physical work, and most were men of sturdy build. The image that came to mind was a thick-armed man with a round belly.

‘Probably middle-aged.’

The more he imagined, the more unbearable his curiosity became. The next day, Kyle transformed into an eagle and flew to ‘Shiloh’s Bakery.’

He landed on a stone wall across from the small, somewhat isolated shop tucked at the far end of an alley.

He waited a long while, but the baker did not appear. It was a slow afternoon, past the busy hours.

Creak.

The sound of a wooden door swinging open noisily made Kyle look up.

The person who emerged was a slight, young woman.

Far younger and more feminine than he had expected, Kyle’s gaze wavered.

Her blonde hair was neatly pinned up with a velvet ribbon, and she had a small, compact figure with delicately pretty features. There was a smear of flour on her cheek she hadn’t quite wiped off, and her bare skin glowed like waxed parchment.

‘I heard there are no employees, so this must be her.’

Kyle swallowed.

She sat down on the bench in front of the shop, took a large, expressionless bite of a sandwich, and chewed slowly with her small lips. She appeared to have finally stolen a moment to eat in the middle of work.

There was something forlorn about the sight of such a slight woman making do with such a meager meal.

‘I thought it would be a sturdy man.’

Kyle clicked his tongue.

‘A woman who looks that fragile does the baking?’

Shiloh had her head bowed over her food.

While Kyle was watching her intently, a low rumbling sound came out of nowhere.

Rumble. rumble.

Kyle flinched and looked up at the sky.

‘Is it going to rain?’

The sky was perfectly clear, without a single cloud.

Strange.

‘That was definitely thunder.’

Kyle looked back down at Shiloh.

She swallowed the bite she had taken and her head drooped.

Kyle’s eyes narrowed.

Rumble. rumble.

This time a quieter sound came, like the croaking of a frog.

‘Is she dozing off?’

He was about to let out a hollow laugh when his beak slowly fell open.

Half a sandwich was dangling precariously from her fingertips, on the verge of falling.

Kyle dove off the wall on instinct.

Whoosh.

Wings spread wide, Kyle swooped in and snatched the sandwich that was just slipping from her drowsy hand with his beak.

He set it down carefully on the bench beside Shiloh, then tilted in the breeze with a lazy beat of his wings.

Scratch.

“Mm……”

Shiloh’s brow twitched at the sound of talons scraping the bench and she opened her eyes.

Whoosh.

At the same moment, a small gust from the eagle’s wings brushed through Shiloh’s hair.

Shiloh looked around, and her eyes met Kyle’s.

The clear, deep eyes, like a spring of water, made Kyle go blank for a moment.

Her mouth had fallen wide open, and her lashes trembled like butterfly wings.

“Aah!”

Shiloh scrunched her face and screamed.

Kyle flapped away in a near-panic and clipped his head on a tree branch, lurching sideways.

“How did you even get all the way here?”

Shiloh shuddered as if shaking something off. Then she turned and noticed the remaining sandwich piece on the edge of the bench.

“Nearly gave me a heart attack……”

She picked up the rest of the sandwich and shoved half of it into her mouth.

She chewed with puffed-out cheeks like a squirrel.

Kyle watched from hiding, catching his breath.

A few pale pink petals drifted down on the breeze and settled on top of her head. They suited her perfectly, like a hair ornament someone had arranged with care.

A yellow cat trotted up in front of her and planted itself there with the air of asking for bread.

“Want some bread?”

The moment Shiloh tore off a corner of the sandwich and tossed it to the cat, Kyle’s eyes went wide.

The cat caught the piece in its mouth and bolted, disappearing around the corner of the alley in no time.

Kyle let out a quiet, amused breath.

He didn’t know much about her yet, but the way she looked after a stray animal suggested she wasn’t a bad person.

After Shiloh went back inside the shop, Kyle flapped over to the wooden sign by the door. The ‘premium bread reviews’ posted by customers were nothing but praise.

His gaze lingered on one line in particular.

「Since eating this bread, every day feels like magic.」

*

Kyle visited Shiloh’s shop from time to time, circling the area as if keeping watch.

One day he spotted her outside the city walls at a mill, loading heavy sacks of flour onto a handcart and hauling it all the way back to the shop herself.

She was tougher than she looked.

Her voice was usually soft and girlish, but on the uphill stretch she grunted like a laborer, pushing from the gut.

“Heave!”

Her flushed face made it plain she was struggling.

The sight of her slender wrists straining against the cart made him wince.

‘She could spend a little more and hire a cart.’

The urge to say so rose all the way to his throat, but he couldn’t let it out.

She also seemed to work quite late. The light in the shop never went out until well into the night.

Back at the palace, Kyle lay in bed before sleep, thinking of Shiloh working into the late hours, and turned restlessly.

The review he had seen at the confectionery came back to him.

「Since eating this bread, every day feels like magic.」

Come to think of it, since he had started eating her bread, Kyle had been living something like magical days himself.

The sudden thought that she might be staying up late doing magical research made him uneasy. But he quickly concluded the idea was absurd.

‘A mage wouldn’t be living that hard a life.’

From everything he had seen, she was most likely not a mage.

‘She ought to take it easier, really……’

Kyle felt a tightness in his chest and let out a sigh, brow furrowed.

If she were a mage, at least he wouldn’t have to worry like this.

‘Does she have to work herself that hard?’

But he was hardly in a position to talk. He was just as consumed by work himself, buried in state affairs day after day.

‘She’ll manage on her own. No reason for me to stress.’

Kyle pulled the white cotton duvet up and forced himself toward sleep.

The next morning he read a column printed in the back pages of the Imperial Gazette.

「Are the Working Conditions of Bakers Acceptable?

-Baker Bread Johnson, Dead at Twenty

Bread Johnson was a baker trained under the renowned master baker Sir Willy of Belmae, a country famous for its desserts.

Unable to endure labor of nearly twenty hours a day, he died of overwork last weekend.

Can this be called a problem unique to Bread Johnson alone?

Bakers generally face long working hours and insufficient sleep, placing them at risk of death from overwork……」

Kyle’s brow drew together in a deep frown as he skimmed the article. A baker dying of overwork was not an uncommon occurrence in the Empire.