Patricia Briggs

by The Hob's Bargain

  I watched his ears, trusting to his keener senses to let me know if any of the raiders were nearby. When he stiffened and brought both ears up to attention as we passed the sprite’s castle Wandel had been so impressed with, I shifted my weight back to stop him. He didn’t like stopping there, and let me know it by snapping his tail and dancing in place.

  I took a deep breath because the raiders didn’t bathe much. Since Kith had pointed it out to me, I’d smelled out several scouts whom I wouldn’t have seen. Over the scent of hot, sweaty horse and hot, sweaty me, I could smell something sweet and aromatic.

  Duck flattened his ears and bolted forward, making me glad I’d bothered with the saddle. He crow-hopped twice before settling into a thunderous gallop that took us well away from the clearing. I let him have his head. Whatever had startled Duck couldn’t have missed the racket we’d made leaving; it would be best to put some distance behind us.

  At last we came out from under the trees. As I rode beside the bits of cliff that had fallen here and there, I wondered exactly how I was going to attract the hob’s attention.

  HE KNEW THE MOMENT SHE RODE ONTO THE INITIAL slopes. It was the first clear communication from the mountain he’d heard since awakening, and it felt like coming home. He left off chasing the latest of the hillgrims who’d invaded his territory. They’d keep running anyway, never knowing he’d quit because they’d never seen him in the first place.

  “Why did you summon her?” he asked out loud, just to hear the sound of his own voice.

  The mountain couldn’t form its thoughts the way the hobs did…had—not yet. Instead, it pushed until he understood what it wanted. The first part was easy. The woman had come for a hob’s bargain, and the mountain wanted him to give her one….

  “No,” he barked, feeling his ears flatten and his tail twitch like a cat’s. Instantly he was drowned in the flood of a millennium of loneliness. Tears rose to his eyes.

  “All right,” he said, at last. “All right, just don’t expect me—or them—to like it.”

  The mountain had an idea about that, too.

  WHEN I FIRST REALIZED SOMEONE WAS PACING BESIDE Duck, it startled me. Duck and I were still climbing the foothills, and there was a hooded man walking beside us as if he’d been there forever.

  He was average in height, a little taller than I was, but so wide he looked shorter. I thought at first he might be stout under his cloak. A brief observation of his movements proved he didn’t sway like a fat person. He walked like…I tried for a comparison, but the only one I could come up with was Kith—but this man must have weighed half again what Kith did. The cloak he wore was an odd touch. This was high summer, far too warm for such a heavy garment.

  He wore soft leather boots, rough-finished and undyed. His trousers, what I could see of them underneath the cloak, were dark brown, and there was some kind of embroidery on them. The cloak itself was of the same raw leather as his boots, but it was embroidered with all sorts of outlandish things. Minuscule red and black beads were sewn along the hem of the cloak as thickly as ants in their nest.

  From his shoulders, strands of much larger red beads, some the size of walnuts, hung down in random lengths. Small, blue-black feathers were sewn into the hood, giving him the appearance of some sort of giant bird. In his left hand he held a wooden staff, dark and dull with age. The hand was charcoal gray and tipped with formidable claws.

  I’d slowed Duck to a walk when we started the steep climb, and now I brought him to a halt. The hob, for I supposed it was he, stopped as well, turning to face me.

  Under the hood of his cloak, his face was shrouded in shadows that seemed darker than the hood alone warranted. He did not speak, and now that I’d found what I had sought, I wondered if I could make him understand what I needed of him.

  Finally, I cleared my throat and began, awkwardly, “My thanks, lord, for your rescue of me when the—”

  “Hillgrim,” he supplied, his voice as rough and earthy as the bark on an old elm tree, though his accent was as native as any born to Fallbrook. “Your folks called them hobgoblins as well. But as they’re neither goblins nor hobs, I don’t use that name. Mucky-smelling things, goblins—though not as annoying as the grims. I am no one’s lord. You may call me…Caefawn.”

  He seemed friendly, though the hillgrim had fooled me in a similar fashion. I frowned at him a moment. Something about the way he spoke the last sentence called my attention to it. He’d sounded amused. “What does Caefawn mean?”

  He drew back as if affronted, but there was amusement in his voice when he answered me. “It is who I am, Lady.”

  There was a story there, and if Caefawn was his real name, I’d eat my cinch. He sounded too satisfied with it. I narrowed my eyes at him, wondering for a moment if I was attributing human characteristics to someone—or something—arguably not human at all. I dismounted in order to give myself some time to think.

  “If you are no lord, then I am no lady—call me Aren.” I remembered something Gram said to me once, a reason the hob wouldn’t give me his name. Names had power, she said, and the wildlings kept their names to themselves.

  “Ah, but every lovely woman is a lady in her own right,” he said.

  I frowned at him. I couldn’t afford to have him take me lightly—besides, I didn’t like it. The village men talked down to all the women. I hadn’t noticed it until they’d quit doing it to me. They treated me as they’d treat a man, even those who were wary or frightened of my talents. “Call me Aren if you want me to answer.”

  It occurred to me—too late, as usual—that arguing with the hob about names was a stupid thing to do when approaching him for help. I’d come here prepared to grovel, and I would, if he’d quit…flirting with me. No one knew where Kith was.

  “Aren, then,” he agreed blandly, but I had the impression he was laughing at me. “And Caefawn will do, Aren. It is not my name, but it is indeed what I am.” He touched his staff to the ground gently. “You come for the hob’s bargain.”

  “The what?”

  “Ah,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “Before the king’s mages came, claiming this land for whatever kingdom they owed their allegiance, human and hob lived side by side. There were things the humans had that my people did not. For these our peoples would trade. One thing for another, by which bargain neither party was the worse.”

  “You”—he pushed back his hood—“need my help, no?”

  I remembered those features clearly, but even so, face-to-face they were shocking. Reddish-brown eyes, catslitted and slanted, laughed out of a dark gray face. If he had been a carving, I would have said he was beautiful, but the color of his skin and eyes made it difficult to see past the strangeness. Black hair threaded with silver and white was pulled back into a thick braid that disappeared in the depths of his cloak.

  His ears were pointed and large; the right one was pierced several times with a chain that looked as if it were made of tiny wooden lengths woven in and out though the piercings. Three small, red feathers dangled from the end of the chain.

  When he smiled at me, I saw his eyeteeth were long, like the fangs of a cat. His ears fanned gently; from the expression on his face, he did it to frighten me—like a child clapping his hands to tease a deer into running away.

  The knowledge he was doing it on purpose didn’t stop it from being unsettling, but it did make me mad. I felt my jaw jut out in an unladylike fashion that aggravated the soreness from the blow I’d taken in practice last night.

  I’d rehearsed this speech all the way here, but I had intended to deliver it in supplicating tones, not bark at him like a territorial dog. “We need your help. There are raiders in the valley, and we can’t stop them alone. I don’t know what we can provide to you in return, but if you can help us, you are welcome to anything we have.”

  “Don’t promise so easily,” he chided, apparently not upset with my tone of voice. “I will talk to your elders before we seal the bargain.” He tilted his he
ad and looked out over the valley. “First, I will prove to them that my help is useful.”

  Duck pushed his nose into the hob’s shoulder, bumping him with a strength that would have sent me stumbling forward. Caefawn swayed a little. He scratched the horse under his bridle, then pushed him away gently, murmuring something for Duck’s ears alone.

  Shaking his cloak back over his shoulders, the hob started back down the trail at a rapid pace.

  When he pushed his cloak back, I saw he wasn’t fat at all, not even muscularly fat like Koret. He was just broad. The other thing I noticed was that he had a tail. The very end was tufted with long, dark hair, silver-streaked like the hair on his head. The rest of his tail was covered in short silver hair, like a dog’s, though it twitched with his irritation like a cat’s.

  For some reason the tail made him much more alien than the red cat-eyes and the fangs. He certainly didn’t look like the hob in Wandel’s song.

  “Come, now,” he said, without looking back. “If we do not use good speed, we won’t be in time.”

  Though he didn’t appear to hurry, the pace he set forced Duck into a slithering, sliding descent in order to keep up with him. I concentrated on staying on and bit my tongue against curiosity. It was enough he’d agreed to help us.

  At the bottom of the steep section, the hob began to run. Duck snorted and broke into his lumbering canter, but the hob continued to outpace us until my horse sped into a gallop too fast for the rough ground. It was difficult to tell on such terrain, but I thought Duck’s gait was choppier than usual. When Duck didn’t respond to my weight or the reins, I called out to the hob.

  He stopped immediately and waited for us to catch up, patting Duck’s foaming shoulder remorsefully before I could speak. “Sorry about that. Been a long time since I ran with horses. This one looks a little lame, eh?”

  I’d slipped off as soon as Duck stopped. “Right rear, I think.”

  The hob was there before me, looking at the swelling on the gelding’s haunch, just over the stifle joint. “Faen,” he commented, “best to avoid them if you can. Bite worse than a hornet, and they’re twice as mean.”

  “Faen?” I asked.

  Caefawn put his hand over the swelling. “Can’t do anything for the poison; only time will disperse it. But I can make sure it won’t hurt.” The bump didn’t look as if it changed any after he touched it.

  “What is a faen?”

  “Little people,” he said, surprised. He held up his fingers with just enough space between his thumb and finger for a butterfly to fit into. “Don’t remember that they minded humans, though the hob don’t have much traffic with ’em. Can’t trust them while your back is turned.”

  “Sprites?” I asked, remounting Duck.

  “Hmm, I’ve heard them called that.”

  “There’s a rock formation, it looks like a little castle—” I stopped speaking to settle more firmly in the saddle as the hob started off again and Duck followed. Whatever the hob had done to the swelling seemed to have worked, because Duck was no longer lame.

  “Ah, yes.” The hob’s gait was slow enough for Duck to resume his distance-covering trot. “I had forgotten they had a place here. Does this trail go close enough to it that you can see them?”

  “Yes.” I ducked a low branch.

  “No wonder they were upset. I’ll have a word with them when we pass.”

  A little earthquake, like those which had plagued us this spring, caused the ground to shudder beneath us. Caefawn didn’t appear to be upset by it. He cupped his hands around Duck’s head and blew gently into the horse’s nostrils. Duck mouthed his bit uncertainly, but his ears came up. Before the last of the vibrations died beneath his hooves, the tension was gone from his muscles.

  Duck was far more upset when we approached the sprite’s stone court than he had been during the earthquake. After seeing the welt on poor old Duck, I wasn’t sure I wanted to get too close to the sprites either.

  The hob stopped before we were in sight of the odd miniature building. He said a few foreign words in a courteous tone, waited a moment, then nodded.

  “We’ll wait here. That one was a guardian, didn’t have the authority to let us pass. They’re in the process of moving the trail away from their home, but it will take a week or two. In the meantime they’re trying to shut down traffic through here. They would let you and me through—but they’re not happy about the horse. Ah, here he is back.”

  The horse in question clamped his tail and shifted his weight, none too happy about the sprites. The hob talked a moment more, then started forward. Duck cringed as well as a big horse could until we were well past the court. I never did see a sprite.

  When we came out of the shadows of the trees and into the open area of fields, I searched, but could see no sign of life.

  “Be careful,” I cautioned. “The raiders attacked on this side of the river last night. The battle was well on the other side of the manor house, maybe a league or so. But their victory there gave them this half of the valley.”

  “No,” said the hob, unconcerned. “They’re hunting a few archers and the berserker down by the other bridge.”

  “Kith?” I asked, forgetting that he could have no way of knowing who it was.

  The hob looked at me without slackening his pace and nodded. “The one-armed man.”

  I shifted my weight forward, and Duck broke into a gallop. As we started to pass Caefawn, he reached out and grasped the gelding’s nose, pulling him to a halt. “They’ll still be there. No sense killing this lad to get there.”

  I closed my eyes briefly and nodded. When I looked up, I noticed a paving stone in the middle of the dirt path. Frowning at it, I sent Duck after the hob, who had resumed an easy jog. Scattered cobbles lay on the trail ahead, growing more numerous as we approached the King’s Highway.

  When we reached the rise before the bridge, I slowed Duck to a brisk walk to allow him to pick his way among the broken cobbles. It looked as if some giant had plowed the highway under. The earthquake hadn’t felt that bad to me.

  Caefawn slowed with me. “Good. The mountain wasn’t certain she could do this, but the bloodmagic seems to be weaker than she thought. Are you any good with the knife you wear?”

  I couldn’t pull my eyes from the damaged roadway. The mountain had done this? “My knife? No. Kith’s been teaching me, but I doubt I’d stand up against anyone with experience.”

  “You’ll do,” he said. “When we get to the bridge, we’ll let your horse return to his stable, and then you and I’ll take care of the raiders.”

  That caught my attention. I looked incredulously at the top of his hood as I ran through his words again. I thought of several questions, but discarded them before they touched my tongue. “The two of us,” I said finally.

  He made a noise that could have been agreement, laughter, or both.

  SIX

  The hob made little noise threading his way through the trees. I tried to imitate him, but the thin yearling growths of willow snagged at my clothing and rustled as I moved past. Not that I couldn’t move quietly in the woods, but I did it by avoiding dry leaves and dense growth like the stuff we were currently wading through.

  I was so busy grumbling to myself that when Caefawn dropped to hands and knees, I almost tripped over him. I crouched and followed the motion of his chin to see a small group of raiders talking among themselves not much over a stone’s throw away.

  They were using the garbled language Wandel called the patois, so I couldn’t tell what they were saying. If they’d been quieter, they would have heard me scuttling through the leaves.

  The hob drew a hollow reed from a pocket of his cloak and slipped a dart made from a porcupine quill into the reed. Placing the tube against his lips, he blew, propelling the dart toward the raiders. I lost sight of it as it traveled through the air, but one of the men jumped and rubbed his thigh. Battle-roused, the others dropped low and looked for their unseen foe.

  I held my breath
and tried not to rustle.

  The man who’d jumped first shook his head, laughing a little. “Just a bug,” he said in the king’s tongue.

  The others relaxed—so did I. Then the man hit by the dart collapsed in the grass.

  Eight of the men remaining held their weapons at the ready and crouched, each looking in a different direction. Both the hob and I held still. The ninth man dropped to his knees next to the hob’s victim. From the relief on his face, I could tell the fallen man wasn’t dead.

  After we’d crouched there long enough for my feet to fall asleep, the raiders relaxed.

  “Must have gone,” said one, a big man with graying brown hair who seemed to be their leader.

  “Or it really was a bug,” commented another.

  “What do you suppose it was?” asked the man who still crouched on the ground.

  The leader shook his head. “How should I know? We’ve got people what disappear, leaving behind nothing but blood and weaponry. We’ve got horses lame from bug bites nastier’an anything I’ve ever seen—not even when we worked the swamps a couple of years back. Food goes foul too fast, and something’s been robbing our supplies and scattering them. Now there’s some freaking berserker lurking in the woods. Maybe the same bugs what got the horses got Henwit, too. I don’t know.”

  Hmm, I thought, if their leader is that spooked, the men mustn’t be far behind.

  “What we going to do about him?” challenged the man on the ground. “I ain’t leaving Henwit behind to get chewed up by whatever happens upon him.”

  The big man threw up his hands. “Take him back, then. You explain to the captain what happened.”

  The raider tried his best, but the unconscious man weighed more than he did. It was obvious he couldn’t carry the limp body very far. Had Caefawn chosen the heaviest man on purpose?

  Finally two of the raiders took the heavy man and staggered off with him. The rest of the party headed away from where Caefawn and I crouched. Almost a third of this bunch was out of the fight, without our killing a soul.