The servants were groggily going about their work with only a few muttering communications, ignoring Pocket completely as he ambled across. Of course, there was nothing strange about that. The humans rarely spoke or looked at him.

Years ago, Sir Corc had explained the reasons for their negligence during one of his brief stays at the castle, and Pocket had come to accept his place…eventually. He spent a long time trying to look like a human child, hoping to fit in, but he never got it quite right. His ears were over large, sticking out from the sides of his shaggy head, the hair even creeping onto his cheeks. His eyes were too round, his nose too wide. His mouth, ever smiling, dominated the lower half of his face, with thick teeth, slightly bucked, which may have been a result of Pocket’s two month obsession with becoming a rabbit. The rest of him did not fare much better. His fingers were heavy and blunt, his limbs squat and strong, far different from the thin, fair, near-hairless human children who liked to play with him until their scowling parents came to lead them away. By the time Pocket gave up trying to look like one of them, his clumsy attempt at humanity had settled, becoming his permanent form. Now he had to concentrate greatly to hold the slightest change. In the end, he was no more a human than he was a coburn. If he had it to do over again, Pocket would have much rather been a rabbit.

At the far side of the Under Hall was yet another winding stair, which Pocket took down to his second favorite place in the castle. The warm, fluffy smell of baking bread, mixed with the salty sweet aroma of pine nuts, was carried on the heat from the ovens, pulsing off the stone walls. Large archways served as openings into the massive kitchens that hunkered beneath the castle, well-appointed and filled with sweating cooks. Pocket trotted along, watching the chaotic preparations and went straight for the last archway at the far end. He turned and entered the kitchens, confident that he would find one of the few people in the castle to ever pay him any mind.

“Moragh!” he near shouted over the din of chopping knives, boiling pots and moving bodies. “I am finished!”

The old woman turned her large form and fixed him with a single bright eye, a knowing smile curving the lip underneath. The other half of her face was slack, the eyelid drooping, the lip turned down in a permanent frown, a result of the seizure she had suffered years before Pocket was brought to the castle. He loved that face, a constant reminder that not every human that scowled at him would rather he were elsewhere. Or dead.

“Did you spread fresh rushes?” she asked, her voice high and airy.