Made with AI trained only on my own artwork. The honest story of how, and why →
Jeb had been steward of the Kotisi longer than most kingdoms had kept the same flag.
In all that time, there was one day a year they both dreaded and looked forward to, in equal measure.
Between themselves, they called it Loaf Day.
Chuck called it nothing at all. He never gave it a name.
He only appeared in the kitchen doorway on the right morning and tapped the frame twice with one knuckle. Then he said the same four words he’d said every year since Jeb first found him lost in his own hallways.
Three weeks gone, that time. Two stone lighter than he’d wandered in.
“Today’s the day, Jeb.”
By the time he finished the sentence, Jeb was already at the flour. There was no walking involved. There rarely was.
The recipe made no sense...and that, Jeb had decided a long time ago, was rather the point of it.
Bruised zaffra root. Three knuckles of it.
No more. No less.
A pinch of ash from a fire that had to be burning when you took it...never scooped cold.
Milk from a goat that did not exist...Jeb had checked. Forty years of quiet, patient, professional checking, and no such goat had ever stood on this estate or any other they’d managed.
Chuck brought the milk himself, from somewhere Jeb had learned not to watch too closely. It came in a small clay jug that smelled faintly of somewhere very far from the Cottage.
The mixing bowl came down off its high shelf, on its own, and settled softly onto the board. Jeb had not reached for a shelf in thirty years. There was no need.
The whole business took most of a day to bake.
The whole business was never, not once in Jeb’s memory, eaten.
“Smells done,” Chuck would say, hands folded behind his back at the kitchen window. He watched the loaf through the oven glass, still and unblinking. “Get the fire hot, would you?”
Jeb got the fire hot.
Chuck carried the loaf out himself. He never once let Jeb take it, not in forty years. He cradled it the whole way to the pit, like something still asleep.
Then he fed it into the flames. Whole.
He stood there until the smoke thinned out and the smell of it had left the air entirely.
Then he came back in, washed his hands twice, and asked what was for actual supper. As though the last four hours had not happened.
Jeb stopped asking why around the ninth year.
By the twentieth, they’d stopped wondering whether they ever would stop.
This Loaf Day had one complication the other nineteen hadn’t.
The complication’s name was Wendell.
He’d been at the Cottage three days, recovering from something Jeb had decided, on principle, not to ask about. The boy ate on a schedule set by his own stomach and nobody else’s.
Which meant that at the worst possible hour of the afternoon, he followed his nose into the kitchen doorway.
“Something smells amazing.” Wendell leaned in, sniffing. “Is that bread?”
“It is not for eating.” Jeb stepped sideways and filled the doorway, a move forty years of practice had made look like an accident.
“Everything in a kitchen is for eating.” Wendell craned around them for a better look. “That’s the whole rule of kitchens.”
“Not this one.”
“Why not?”
“Because.” Jeb used the voice they kept for guests who had wandered somewhere they hadn’t meant to and needed a graceful way back out. “It belongs to Master Chuck. Master Chuck has very particular feelings about his zaffra loaf. And I would take it as a personal kindness if you carried your very reasonable hunger to the dining room...where a far less complicated roast is waiting for exactly this moment.”
Wendell hovered. Boys his age always hovered near a thing they’d just been told not to touch.
He weighed his curiosity against the roast.
The roast won.
“Weird house.” He was already drifting off toward the smell of dinner. “Weird everything, honestly.”
“You have no idea,” Jeb said, to no one at all, and went back to the oven glass.
Chuck came for the loaf at the usual hour. Cradled it the usual way. Carried it out to the pit, the usual careful distance from the house.
Jeb followed. Close enough to be useful...far enough to stay out of it.
The loaf went into the fire. Whole.
Chuck watched it burn with his hands loose at his sides, his six foot snow-white beard nearly to the ground. None of the restless motion...none of the muttering he kept up over everything else in the world. From his tea to his shoelaces, to the sorry state of Ambaserre’s road tariffs...
Just still.
Jeb had watched him go still exactly one day a year for forty years. It never once stopped being strange to see. All that motion, folded up and set down. A man holding himself quiet on purpose.
The smoke climbed thin and pale.
For just a moment it smelled like snow...which made no sense in the middle of summer. In fact, it made no sense at all. Jeb had also, long ago, stopped bringing that up.
Chuck said something into the fire. Two words...maybe three. Too soft to catch.
Jeb did not ask him to say it again.
Some words aren’t meant for the room. They’re for whoever the smoke climbs up to find.
“You could just tell me,” Jeb said later, over the real supper. Chuck had gone back to his usual volume and his usual seventeen conversations at once.
“Tell you what?”
“What Loaf Day is.”
Chuck stopped with his fork halfway up, which for Chuck was a genuinely long pause.
“You’ve gone forty years without knowing.” He set the fork back down on the edge of the plate. “Best cook I ever hired. Never once burned a single other thing I asked you to burn. No questions. No fuss.”
“I have excellent professional discretion.”
“You’ve got something better than discretion.” Chuck looked at them then, and for about a breath, the wandering, muddled look went out of his eyes entirely. “You’ve got the good sense to know a thing can be private without being shameful. Some things are just mine, Jeb. Steering clear of them doesn’t make you any less trusted. It’s part of why I trust you at all.”
“I wasn’t aware I needed reassuring.”
“You didn’t.” Chuck picked the fork back up, and the twinkle came back with it. “I felt like giving it anyway. A man doesn’t get many chances to thank the people who never made him explain himself.”
Jeb said nothing to that.
There was no version of an answer that wouldn’t have come out soft. And forty years of running an impossible house for an impossible man had taught them one rule about a moment like this.
Let it pass. Don’t grab at it.
So they cleared the plates instead. Put the kettle on. Somewhere upstairs, Wendell was almost certainly halfway into something he shouldn’t be. The whole enormous, ridiculous, far-too-large-on-the-inside Cottage eased back down into its ordinary noise.
Three hundred and sixty-four ordinary days a year.
And one that wasn’t.
One that Jeb had decided, a long time ago, was never theirs to ask about.
That was enough.
It had always been enough.
