I wake up after crying my heart out for at least ten minutes. When I do, I find a surprising sight in front of me.

“Are you alive?! Are you alive?!” Princess Laura is shaking my body like a ragdoll, screaming directly into my face. “Why is there blood?!”

What? Why is she so pale and scared?

Blood?

“Yo,” I say while bringing a hand to my mouth. It comes back wet with blood—tons of it.

It’s a good conversation starter. You can thank me later.

My brain quickly puts together what Lord Juler has just done.

“I’m fine,” I say to the woman still shaking me.

“Are you sure?! Why are you bleeding?! If you die, they will say I did it! Don’t you dare die on me!”

Jesus, woman. I’m superstitious. Don’t say that stuff.

“I swear, I’m good! This blood is totally random! I’m not sick, nor am I at risk of dying soon!”

After hearing my words, she finally seems reassured enough to notice that we are awkwardly close to each other. Wait, not awkwardly.

“Why are you bleeding then?” she asks, not letting me go.

“I think I fell and banged my mouth. I blacked out for a second because… maybe I was still weak from not eating yesterday?”

She nods even though my statement is formulated as a question.

“I have a potion with me; take it,” she fishes out a potion from the bag of holding on her belt and uncorks it with one hand, trying to feed it to me.

“I can do it—”

“Shut up and drink the potion!” she starts pouring the thing down my throat as if I just suffered massive internal bleeding.

I start coughing from the excess of healing potion this woman is trying to have me imbibe.

“Good! You stopped the bleeding! Can you please not drown me now?”

She sighs in relief and lets the body – my body – she was holding by the back fall to the ground. I bang my head on the rag I placed on the floor before I can stop my fall.

Princess Laura stands up and looks at my bewildered gaze with a pensive expression.

“Get up,” she orders me.

“What?”

“Get up!” she bends and takes my arm.

“WOAH!”

She hoists me up with incredible strength.

“What the—how are you so strong? I’m a bit skinny, but how—”

“The Royal Family has skills to pass on the best genes and skills from previous generations. Queens are trained for their role and won’t bear a child before all the right skills, potions, and rituals are in place. I got [Greater Strength] from my father at birth. And a bunch of other skills. I actually got a mixed heritage, half-magic, half-warrior.”

She says the last part with a note of resentment.

“Isn’t that good?”

“Shut it. Come with me,” she drags me by the simple shirt I’m wearing.

I look at my feet. Did I go to sleep with my shoes on? My mom would have killed me.

“Why are you dragging me downstairs?”

Princess Laura doesn’t say anything in response. She just looks forward with a relaxed expression while basically dragging me down an entire flight of stairs, putting me at risk of rolling down and cracking my head for good.

As soon as we hit a table, she roughly pulls out a chair and slams me on it.

“Don’t move.”

She goes into the kitchen with a gait akin to a military march and comes out a minute later with a steaming plate of different pieces of grilled meat. On the side, a dish full of lidulae and the weird purple potatoes that are a staple of Amorium’s diet.

“That’s a lot of oil,” I look at the meat and the vegetables doused in olive oil. It almost looks like my mother made those.

“If you die on me, Human,” Princess Laura says while gently putting the plates in front of me and nudging them in my direction, “my Ancestor will probably accuse me of having killed you. So, eat. Your bodyguard told me you starved yourself to learn how to do the paperwork for the bakery. You yellow-leafed, flat-eared idiot! I am the Princess of this Kingdom! Of this entire Continent! I could have you run a sex trafficking ring, and the Watch couldn’t utter one word of protest, and you worry about some stupid taxes!”

She sits angrily beside me, nearly punching the table multiple times but hesitating every time she looks at the food and my bloodied mouth and shirt.

“Are you eating, or do you need me to feed you?”

“I mean, I wouldn’t mind—”

“And I’m not going to make it pleasant, Human. I have heard from your other employees that you are a womanizer. Try something funny with me, and I’m chopping your virility away. Are we clear?”

“The clearest, for sure.”

“Then why are you not eating?”

“You didn’t bring me any cutlery, to be honest.”

She looked bewildered at my words before realizing that, indeed, she had brought no cutlery. She gets up and stomps into the kitchen, huffing, and swearing.

…

She has been staring at me for the last ten minutes as I cut the food and put it in my mouth. I feel like an anorexic daughter being forcibly fed by her worried parents and watched during the act. Will she make sure I won’t puke this in the bathroom? I mean, she looks like she would.

“I hate you,” she says out loud.

“Mh,” I nod while chewing, not impressed.

“I wish I could believe you had a political angle, that you were some sort of a spy trying to destabilize my country. But you are the most flat-eared idiot I have seen in my entire life. I even used an artifact to double-check your class. Not even an [Archmage] would be able to escape its effect, especially while passed out. It turns out you are only a [Luxmancer], a class advancement of [Light Mage]. The only weird thing is the lack of a [Baker] class, but given the idiosyncrasies I’ve observed so far, it’s not unexpected.”

“Idiosyncrasy,” I snort.

“What?”

“It’s a funny word, that’s all,” I wink at her.

“So, your employees told me you had a fight with my Ancestor because he wanted to humiliate me. And that my Ancestor – an immensely powerful man capable of deciding who sits on the Throne of my country – has been working at your bakery for almost half a year. And that he had been taking care of the paperwork and legal duties of this place, a thing that apparently drives you crazier than committing high treason by almost blinding the Princess of this country permanently.”

She brings a hand to her eyebrow and shakes her head.

“You fired him, they say. And now you have to take care of something that, allegedly, brought you to have a breakdown. Even your bodyguard said he never saw you like that. Would you have me believe that all of this is true and not a plot? That you wanted to safeguard my interests and that you lost my Ancestor because of me?”

“I mean, if you put it like that, I guess you own me at least one date, right?”

The Princess looks at me unfazed while taking her short sword out of the scabbard and calmly placing it on the table.

“Say that again.”