Patricia Briggs

by The Hob's Bargain

  He paused, happily surveying the black marks. “But this, this is very old. Legend says that mankind stole writing from another race—the dwarves. There’s some of their work in the museum at the king’s castle of state. A goblet, three plates, and a sword. The sword has runes on it, one of which looks just like this.” He pointed to a faded mark, one that looked to me just like the one next to it—or the one above it, for that matter.

  “That’s a mark we don’t have in our Manishe, though it’s supposed to be read as if it were two other glyphs combined. Now a scholar who wanted you to think this was a message written by dwarves would probably write something that looked like this, but—” he said intensely, “—but how many scholars do you think would have climbed down the backside of this infernal mountain to do that?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Right. That’s how many of them I think came here, too.”

  His enthusiasm was infectious—I had obviously happened upon a hobby of his.

  “So you think it was written by dwarves?” I asked. The dwarfs had died out a long time ago, victims of plague, war, or the same thing that had killed the rest of the wildlings.

  “Perhaps, but we weren’t the only ones to steal dwarf runes. This says…” He continued speaking in a language that was harsh and nasal.

  HIDDEN FROM THEIR SIGHT, THE HOB WINCED, FLATTENING his ears against his head. His spells allowed him to interpret what they were saying, but he knew the language the musician was butchering. Manlings had little enough appreciation of beauty in their souls, but this was extreme. Never had he heard such an accent, though he supposed after—how long had he been asleep?—things could have changed.

  The girl, the one he’d seen in that brief seeking vision yesterday, spoke again. “What, exactly, does that mean?”

  The older man smiled, his face lit with the joy all scholars share in new discoveries. Some things had not changed. “It says, ‘Be welcomed here, fair travelers of good heart: benevolent souls have always been welcome on the mountains of the hob.’”

  Close enough, thought the hob.

  “Hob’s Mountain,” she said touching the stone.

  The hob drew in his breath at the magic that pulsed wildly around the girl. Didn’t they teach their younglings better than that? Such a signature would attract all sorts of nasties.

  I TOUCHED THE ROCK. IT WAS OLD, SO OLD THAT ONLY bits and pieces came to me.

  A dark-skinned hand, twisted with hoary years, held a brush that he carefully dipped in a clay pot of dark ink…a sense of mischief, for hiding the message would allow them to torment the wicked without warning them off.

  Foul weather, I thought—or maybe it was that long ago artist—mud and rust and broken swords. I looked at Wandel, but he was still examining the rock. I don’t think he would have noticed if I had fallen on my back and foamed at the mouth.

  “Unless they were known by another name,” he said, “I’ve only heard of hobs in two contexts. The first one is the name of this mountain. When I first came here…oh, thirty years ago now, I thought it was named for a man, like Faran’s Ridge. The headman before Merewich, Ivn, said not. Said that the mountain was supposed to belong to a hob. No one in Fallbrook, Auberg, or Beresford knew exactly what a hob was, except that it was a wildling and relatively benevolent, and it owned this mountain, or belonged to it. The other is in an old song that I heard far south of here—I’ll sing it for you after we make camp.”

  THE HOB SAT IN THE SHADOWS AND WATCHED THEM leave. Loneliness and fear ate at him, a loner by choice who had prided himself on his daring and courage.

  The last, he thought. I am the last one left. The thought left ashes of sorrow in his mouth, and he lowered his head and wept for his people, who had only a mountain to remember them.

  WHEN WE FINALLY GOT BACK TO WHERE THE HORSES waited, Kith had them ready to go. He led the Lass to Wandel.

  “Mount and ride,” he said, biting off the words.

  It was hard to tell if he was still twitchy from the same unease that had gripped him earlier, or if there was something else worrying him. I hurried to Duck and, after a quick check to see if Kith had tightened the cinch (he had), I mounted, falling back into my usual place behind Wandel.

  The area was relatively level, one of the shoulders of the mountain, almost a hanging valley except that the far side fell rather than rising in a peak. Kith led us into the grassy land at a brisk trot. Despite the rest, the horses were too tired to move quickly for long. As soon as we were on open ground, he slowed his horse and waved us forward.

  I could see a slight tic by his eye. Torch was collected and ready to sprint, though Kith was holding the reins loosely.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I thought I saw something up above us. Might have been an animal…but it didn’t smell right.”

  “Didn’t smell right,” I said neutrally.

  “If you’re on the trail for very long, you learn to use your nose as well as your ears and eyes,” replied Kith a shade too easily.

  I happened to glance at Wandel at just that moment. He looked sad.

  “Better to be safe than sorry,” the harper said after a moment. “With the magic free, things could change, no knowing how quickly. Old Merewich and our lass here”—I assumed from the context that he was talking about me and not his horse—“sound pretty certain that it will be sooner rather than later.”

  Kith met the harper’s eyes and said, “Yes, well, I’ve learned to trust…my instincts.”

  I saw something pass between the two men that left Kith cold-eyed and stone-faced while the sorrow on the harper’s face remained unchanged. I wondered what it was that I had missed. There would be time to extract it from them after we set up camp.

  Kith fussed around for a while before he let us dismount at the place he’d originally planned on, a flat, rockless stretch of ground not far from a stream but a little farther from the wooded area. I couldn’t tell if it was the place where we’d camped the time we’d come here. If it wasn’t, it was very similar.

  He’d reluctantly decided it was better to keep an eye out than to try to find cover where we’d not be seen. Muttering something about being so leery that his mother’s womb wouldn’t feel safe to him for a day or so, he stomped into the trees to find wood for a fire.

  We hadn’t brought tents, but Wandel and I laid down oiled cloth before we put out the bedrolls, and each of us had another piece to lay on top of ourselves if the rain held by the gathering afternoon clouds fell.

  Having laid out my own bedroll, I took Kith’s off Torch’s back. War-trained he might be, but he knew me well enough not to object to my fiddling—I’d helped train him. I patted his hip as I left.

  Now, I thought, try it first while you have Wandel alone. If Kith decided not to talk about something, it was almost impossible to get it out of him. The harper, on the other hand, liked to talk. “Why does Kith’s woodsmanship cause you to exchange sorrowful glances?”

  He looked up from digging the fire pit and waggled his eyebrows at me. “Ask Kith. It’s his story, not mine. I’d not last long as a bard if I were to tell other people’s secrets to anyone who thought to ask, now would I?”

  “Ha,” I said. “You’d tell the world what your best friend wore to sleep if you thought it made a good enough story.”

  “Tell her,” said Kith flatly.

  I started, not having heard him come back. He dropped a large pile of wood an arm’s length from the fire pit and unfolded one of the smaller oilskins with a snap. He tucked it carefully around the pile.

  He was all I had left of my brother…of my family, really, though we were not blood kin (at least not close kin). I wouldn’t have hurt him for the world. This had all started as mere curiosity. As I looked at Kith, I realized that this was not a little secret, and Kith was already hurt by it.

  I turned back to Wandel. “Tell me.”

  “After we finish camp,” he said.

  I TOOK THE DIRT WANDEL REMOVED FROM THE FIRE PIT and mounded it in a circle aro
und the pit, a further barrier against the flames spreading to the surrounding grass.

  Wandel stacked the grass-sod he’d cut and set it near the pile of wood. When we left in the morning, we’d shovel the dirt back in the hole and cover it with the sod—after a season the place would look as if we’d never been there. Kith unsaddled the horses, hobbled them, and let them free to graze.

  I washed the dirt from my hands at the stream. By the time I returned, the men were seated at the edge of the fire pit. Wandel struck flint to steel a few times, setting the small pile of tinder alight. Then he fanned and fed the growing flames. When at last the fire blazed merrily, the harper took up his harp and sat cross-legged on the end of his blankets.

  He fingered the strings lightly, then set the harp aside, politely waiting for his audience to settle itself. I sat rather gingerly at the end of my bedroll. Duck was too wide in the barrel to be an easy mount. Once Kith, too, was sitting on his bed for the night, the harper began.

  “Lord Moresh inherited his bloodmage from his uncle, his mother’s brother. Moresh’s uncle was the king’s high marshal before the king had him beheaded for unnamed crimes. He stood off the whole of the king’s army at a crofter’s hut with nothing but fifteen bodyguards—bodyguards that his bloodmage had created for him. They all died there, along with fourscore of the king’s men. If he could have, the king would have killed the bloodmage as well, but without a specified charge against the marshal he could not nullify his will. Jealousy is not a charge that can be lodged in the court, so the bloodmage went to Moresh”—Wandel looked at Kith—“where he continued to make warriors for Moresh’s use.”

  “Never too many, you understand, because the king limited the number he allowed Moresh, not wanting Moresh to gain too much power. The berserkers are scouts and Moresh’s personal guard. One of the old marshal’s men told me they can track like a hound and hear a bee sneeze in the next room. They fight as the old legends say berserkers did, not bleeding from their wounds until after the battle is over. Those who are maimed or sorely wounded are killed.” He looked at Kith. “Since Moresh can have only a few of them, he wants them whole.”

  Kith laughed without amusement. “Moresh owed my father a life.” He looked at me. “Remember, it was my father who found our lord’s heir when the boy got lost in the fog. So he sent me home last fall. Before the war turned so bloody, Moresh planned on being here for spring planting. Three months, he said, a fair payment for his son.”

  He turned his gaze to the darkening sky. “It’s not as if I can run: Nahag has his mark on me. One of us ran once. Silly fool fell in love.”

  Nahag wasn’t Moresh’s bloodmage’s real name, though I couldn’t recall what it was offhand. A nahag was a night demon who consumed children while they slept. It said a lot about the mage that he’d been given such a nickname.

  Kith turned to me with eyes lit with self-mockery and a message. “Nahag got to play with him, brought him out for our enlightenment every evening for two weeks. The bloodmage is as old as my father, and he’s been a mage since his parents abandoned him to the mage guild when he was a child—whoever he was once, the madness has taken him now. The runner died—I think, I hope—at the end of the first week, but it was a little hard to tell. I didn’t know until then that bloodmages eat their victims. Lord Moresh knew I wouldn’t run when they came for me.”

  For the first time I felt something about Lord Moresh’s death other than the vague fear of a sheep whose shepherd is lost—satisfaction. Such a man should be dead.

  I could feel my lips peel back from my teeth. “If,” I said softly, in a gentle voice, “he were not dead, I’d curse him that his kith and kin would know him not for the ague that would twist his bones. I would curse him that pain would make of him something neither human nor animal. I’d see to it that he lived forever knowing nothing, neither darkness nor light, for the agony of his transgressions.”

  Wandel looked at me as if he’d never seen me before.

  Kith gave a rusty chuckle. “That took me back. I haven’t heard that curse since the last time your brother and I raided your grandmother’s garden. Scared us silly.” He pulled up a blade of grass and played with it in his hand.

  “Anyway, now you know.” Kith stopped playing with the grass and met my eyes again. “And if we find Danci, you can tell her why I’m not a suitable candidate for a husband and father.”

  So that’s why he told me. My eyebrows shot up. “Why? Because a bloodmage, who is now dead, was searching for you?”

  “Because I’m dangerous enough to need him to do so.”

  “Dangerous to whom?” I sputtered. “No one at the village seems to be suffering from your presence.”

  He shook his head, the stubborn mule. “It doesn’t matter. Just tell her what the harper and I told you.”

  FOUR

  Crouched in the gathering shadows, the hob held very still as he watched over the party. He’d always avoided the traditional task of following well-meaning folk whenever he could—his talents and interests lay in tormenting the wicked. But here he was. No wine to sour, or horses to loose, just the soft sounds of the humans’ voices to drive away the loneliness. He hunkered down further and let the warmth of their camp wash over him.

  KITH JUMPED TO HIS FEET, STARTLING ME. “COME ON, then,” he said. “We’ve got some time now. Why don’t you get your knife, and I’ll see what I can teach you.”

  Grateful for a chance to put the last few revelations behind me, I took Daryn’s knife from my borrowed saddlebags and scurried back to present it nervously to Kith. I’d spent a good bit of time yesterday sharpening it, but Kith was particular about things like that.

  He took it and turned it over in his hand. “Good thing it’s got an edge on it. I’m not much of a hand at sharpening things anymore.” He grinned at me unexpectedly. “Father’s been putting the edge on my stuff, but it’s not like doing it yourself.”

  I smiled back. “I’d guess not.”

  “Right.” He gave me back my knife and watched how I held it. His frown made me shift my grip several times, but the disapproving expression didn’t change.

  “The first thing to remember is that the knife is sharp,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes. “And I haven’t been butchering pigs and cattle since I was old enough to crawl.”

  He smiled, and, drawing his own knife, he continued talking. “It can cut you as easily as it will cut your opponent: keep it away from your fingers. The second thing to remember is that you can do a lot of damage with it by just holding it in your hand and punching.”

  He closed his hand into a fist and demonstrated with an imaginary opponent. He moved with swift efficiency, and his imaginary foe’s instant death was obvious.

  “For now, forget you even have a knife,” he advised. “It will take care of itself—at least until you have more experience. You’re at a disadvantage because you’re a woman. A man will back off from another man with a knife, but he’ll not do the same for a woman.” He watched me try to imitate his move several times. I couldn’t tell if I’d done anything right or not. Probably not.

  “Put that away for now,” he said, in sudden decision. “We’ll practice with something else.”

  When I got back from storing the knife, Kith was waiting with three sticks a little longer than his forearm. They were green wood, and very nearly equal in diameter.

  He motioned for me to follow him to a flat area a little way from camp, then handed me two of the sticks and tucked the third under his arm.

  He adjusted my grip, then took up his own stick with a clever little toss. “The sticks will teach you the moves without either of us chancing a cut. The additional benefit is that the sticks are a decent weapon in their own right. Around here, there are always sticks of some sort.”

  Then he proceeded to teach me how to fight—at least that’s what he said he was doing. I thought he was beating me with his stick. Shows what I know.

  By the time he said “Enough,”
I was so tired that I stumbled while walking back to the fire. I knew if I just sat down, I was going to have some really stiff muscles in the morning. Maybe if I walked it out, they’d only be very stiff.

  “I’ll get some more firewood,” I said, turning away from the fire. “What we have won’t last the night.”

  “Best do that, I think,” Kith said. “Wandel and I’ll see about dinner.”

  “I thought the woman should do the cooking,” said Wandel, teasing but still half-serious. He hadn’t eaten what I could cook over an open fire.

  “We’ll cook,” replied Kith, who had.

  As soon as I was out of sight, I stopped to tie my boots. I could hear them talking…about me. A well brought-up person would have left.

  “She startled me when she spoke to your elders,” commented Wandel. “I’ve never seen her as a forceful sort of person. She’s always in the back of the room, never speaking unless someone asks her something.”

  “Not talking when the men talk,” agreed Kith. Was that sarcasm I heard in his voice? “Like a good little village woman.” Yes, it was sarcasm.

  “I’ve seen your village women. Most of them don’t act like that.” Wandel half-laughed, no doubt picturing Melly or the smith’s wife.

  “Hmm,” grunted Kith. “Let’s say her father’s idea of a good village woman. Or her mother’s. I’d guess it goes back to when Quilliar died—her brother.”

  “When you killed him,” said Wandel. It surprised me that he knew that; he hadn’t been in the village then.

  “He was my best friend,” replied Kith obliquely.

  “I wondered about that.” The harper grunted, and I pictured him tossing a chunk of wood into the fire. “From what I know of Moresh’s berserkers, I wouldn’t have thought you could act against orders.”

  “Neither did Nahag, or else I’d have been executed in Quill’s place.”

  “So you think Aren’s been trying to hide what she is so she doesn’t get singled out by the bloodmage or the villagers?”