Xaxac sat on the sofa in the sitting room while his hands moved of their own accord turning string into a baby blanket for his sister. The clock on the mantelpiece told him that it was after nine pm, and still, Agalon had not returned.

No one had.

The house was too quiet.

Lorsan had left the door to the hall open, but Xaxac had shut it.

He wondered if anyone was going to bring him any food.

He wondered if he had been forgotten about.

He had been starving since he awoke, but Agalon had never come back. He wouldn’t… wouldn’t just go away and leave him to die, would he?

Because he was going to die. His vision was beginning to swim, and he had difficulty getting his hands to move the way they always had before, the way they had been trained to. They moved on their own, without input from his brain, and shook so badly he was afraid he was going to drop his stitches. So he stopped, took a deep breath, and made a decision.

He pushed all his stitches to the back of his needles then stabbed them into the yarn in his bag. He shoved himself unsteadily to his feet and the movement made him so disoriented that he spread out his arms to avoid falling right back onto the sofa. The gold belt he wore jingled as he swayed, unsteady on his feet, but he made it to the doorway, turned the knob, and pulled it open.

He put one hand on the wall to steady himself and used it as a guide to get to the chain he would have to pull. It would ring a bell, and Lee would hear it and come to him.

He was so tired.

He was so hungry.

Shifting really did a number on him. Why would Agalon leave him? Leave him alone the day after he had shifted? He had to have done something awful. He may never come back.

He pulled the string, heard the ringing of the bell, and leaned heavily against the wall. There were strange black and white spots in his vision, so he held a hand in front of his eyes to see if it would do anything about them.

It didn’t.

He thought he was hallucinating for a moment when he saw the person who had come marching down the hall as if the sound had been a great disturbance to her. She looked angry, a strange expression for a houseslave, but it did not shock Xaxac.

Mrs OfAgalon hated him. He had gotten her sent away to town for punishment, because she had tried to hit him. If she tried again now he didn’t think he could avoid it as he had then.

“Oh lord,” she said when she saw him, “What on Xren are you doing out here? You know you aren’t supposed to be out of your room.”

“Please,” Xac begged, and he could not stop the tears that spilled from his eyes, “Please I… I get real hungry after I shift and I’m starvin. Please can I have somethin to eat? Where’s Lee? Where’s Jimmy? Where’s everybody at?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” she huffed, “I’ve told you, time and again, that you need to stop asking nonsense questions and do as you’re told.”

“Can I please get somethin to eat?” Xac begged, trying to blink vision back into his eyes, “Please? I just…”

“No, the cook isn’t here,” Mrs OfAgalon said matter-of-factly.

“Mama ain’t here?” Xac asked, and did not understand. His brain wasn’t functioning as well as it usually did, and he could think of nowhere else she could be. It made more sense that Mrs OfAgalon would be lying to him. “Please! I’m starvin. I’m gonna… gonna pass out.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Mrs OfAgalon said, “Go back to your room.”

“We seriously starvin folks now?” Lorry asked as he stomped into the hallway, “That what we’re doin, Nancy?”

“Lorry, don’t fight,” Xac begged as he slid down the wall to sit on the floor, “I can’t take it. I’m gettin sick.”

“Go downstairs,” Lorsan said with the kind of ice in his voice Xaxac had only ever heard from his father, “And make him dinner. Don’t make me tell you twice. Daddy ain’t here. I am.”

“It’s fine,” Xac said, “I’m just gonna lay down a minute.”

“Thesis’s glowin eyes,” Lorsan huffed, “Xac?”

He snarled, and the last thing Xaxac heard before he slipped away was Aggie, the way he sounded when he was angry, the way he had sounded when he talked to Billy.

“Now!”

“Xac, you gotta get somethin in your stomach,” Lorsan said as he propped Xac up against the arm of the sofa, and Xac blinked, trying to get his vision to focus.

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Something smelled delicious, sweet and savory at once, with hints of honey and onions.

His mother? It smelled like his mother when she had been baking cornbread.

He tried to push himself up, because though he was tired, he was even more hungry. He took the piece of cornbread Lorry offered and shoved the entire thing in his mouth.

His mother wasn’t there. This wasn’t… this wasn’t her, exactly. Whoever had made this had put too much onion powder in it. Alley, maybe? And it was too light, not dense enough. But it was food, and he was starving, so he chewed it down, swallowed, and shoved himself into a proper sitting position.

“You alright there, buddy?” Lorsan asked.

Xaxac shook his head.

“Me neither,” Lorsan agreed and ladled hot beans into two bowls from a pot he had somehow acquired and laid out on the coffee table along with two pones of cornbread, glasses, and a bottle of wine. Xaxac watched as he cut another piece of cornbread, crumbled it up over one of the bowels, then handed it to him.

“Thanks,” Xac said, took the spoon, and stirred it until the bread absorbed the broth, then began to eat.

“You needed somethin heartier than a fuckin salad,” Lorsan huffed as he prepared his own bowl. “This is weird. Like, we agree this is weird, right? You’re expensive. Daddy wouldn’t have left you to die. Wouldn’t have left me. Where the hell’s he at?”

Xac shrugged.

“I gotta leave here in a few days,” Lorsan said, “I gotta go back to school.”

Xaxac took a huge bite of his beans and let the flavors dance over his tongue. He was starving, but he was afraid to eat too quickly, because he had become nauseated, and he feared if he put much in his stomach he would throw it right back up.

“Lots of folks are gone, I think,” he said after he had swallowed, “Mrs OfAgalon said mama was gone.”

“Yeah,” Lorry agreed, staring at the fireplace, “Lots of folks is gone. Lee bein gone makes sense; daddy don’t go nowhere without him, but my valet is gone too. And the cook. I don’t like that. You don’t take your cook with you unless you’re gonna be gone a while. I can’t leave and him gone. I’m the only other elf on the plantation. I can’t abandon it. I mean… I could, I could leave Nancy in charge, but… I don’t wanna… might lose half the staff.”

Xaxac nodded.

It felt so good to eat.

“He woulda took you,” Lorsan continued, “that’s what I can’t figure out. You’re a shifter. You’re rare, prized… he wouldn’t have left you to starve.”

Xac nodded again and realized he had finished his food before Lorsan had even started eating. The moons were waning, but still so bright that they shone in through the windows and lit the room. It struck Xaxac, not for the first time, how much Lorsan looked like his father; he had that same long, straight, blond hair, those same glass green eyes, the same slim build and angular face, though there was a bit more baby fat on it; Xaxac thought they would look even more similar once Lorsan was completely grown.

He didn’t think Lorsan would want to hear that, that he would likely not consider it a compliment, so he kept the thought to himself and wondered, instead, where his mother was. Why would Aggie take his cook with him? Where did they go? Who else was missing?

“You want some more?” Lorsan asked and Xac nodded.

“Thanks,” Xac said.

“It makes you hungry?” Lorsan asked, “Makes you tired?”

“Yeah,” Xac said, “Wears me out, like a long day at work… back when I used to work. Seems like it’s been so much longer than it has… Seems like it’s been years.”

“Any time I’m here it seems longer than it is,” Lorsan said as he refilled Xac’s bowl and handed it back to him, “This place stretches time… everything’s wrong here.”

“I dunno what other places are like,” Xac said.

“Fall’s fell,” Lorsan said as he got up and went to stand by the window, looking out over the fields, “It’s gonna get cold… move into winter… I hate bein here in the winter. I wish, all the time, that I lived farther away. Not everybody goes home for the solstice. If I lived… up in the mountains, or down in Seaweed… I wouldn’t have to come here. Sometimes the snows get too heavy… I get trapped.”

“There’d be so much snow we couldn’t get the door open,” Xac said, “Folks would tie string to the barn and the greenhouses so we could get in there to work. If you gotta go out and do repair work sometimes folk get lost and by the time they find um their fingers and toes quit workin. My daddy used to warn me about that…”

“Wait, the field hands work outside in the snow?” Lorsan asked.

“Yeah, fixin fences and stuff,” Xac shrugged, “there’s work to be done around here, all the time.”

Lorsan looked as if this information annoyed him, and turned his attention back to the window.

“Sometimes daddy goes to the capital for the solstice, instead of me comin home,” he said, “on account of Xandra throws a solstice party, and he’s the Duke. I don’t like that castle. I never did. I don’t like nothin around here… I wish…” he took a deep breath, and asked the moons, “You reckon he’s dead? Reckon that’s why he ain’t come back? You know, Xac, daddy dies that makes me the Duke of the Agricultural District. And I’d do things a helluva lot different around here.”

“He ain’t dead, Lorry,” Xac said, “An… you ought not say stuff like that.”

Lorsan made a sort of humming noise, indicating that he had heard him, but not that he agreed.

“I bet,” he said at length, “That if we put you in some kinda enclosure, like the cage at Satra, we could show you off without you bein able to get out. People’d pay money to see that. Daddy’s gonna figure that out.”

Xaxac had no response to this, and thus said nothing.

“What’s it feel like?” Lorsan asked, turning to look at him, “When you shift? What’s it feel like?”

“I can’t remember,” Xac said, “I get real scared, my whole body kinda… hurts a little bit, and then… I wake up. That’s it. I’m sorry.”

“I just can’t figure out how that works,” Lorsan admitted, “I can’t… it don’t make no sense. There ain’t no kinda spell what can do somethin like that. Not no earth spell, noways. But somethin’s happenin to you. I seen it with my own eyes. This is real. You’re real. It don’t make no sense, but that’s how it is.”

“There some kinda law sayin I gotta make sense?” Xac asked, “Cause I don’t, most of the time. It’s too hard to keep track of.”

Lorsan stared at him, as if studying his face, for a long time, before he broke the silence with a question.

“I learned divination at school. Want me to go get a pack a cards and tell your future?”

“No,” Xac said, “I know my future. It ain’t… that hard to predict. Seems a pretty set path, don’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Lorsan shrugged.

“I think I’m just gonna go to bed,” Xac said, “I’m tired and it’s late. He ain’t gonna get back tonight.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Lorry said, straightening himself back up, “You get lonesome tomorrow come and wake me up. My door’s open.”

“Thanks,” Xaxac said, set his bowl on the table and stood, eyeing the wine neither of them had touched, “I’m… gonna go on to bed.”

“Sweet dreams,” Lorsan said.