Patricia Briggs

by The Hob's Bargain

  “I dreamed,” I said. “I dreamed I was burrowing up through the basement of Belis’s house, prepared for battle. When I woke up, I realized it hadn’t been a dream.

  “How did you know that it wasn’t a dream?” asked Merewich.

  I shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know.” I looked for something else to talk about and said, “Where’s Kith? I would have thought that he’d be out here in the fighting.”

  Merewich shook his head, “He collapsed after he got his father settled. Wandel said that it was to be expected after the day he’d been put through. I’ve never seen anyone fall into such a sound sleep so fast. I imagine he didn’t even hear the alarm.”

  Koret had been looking over my shoulder as Merewich talked. He frowned suddenly. “Aren, I’d like you to go meet the…hob this morning. It’s going to take a while to get everyone calmed down and decide who should meet with him. We’d like you to explain what happened, and see if you can’t get him to be a little patient with us.”

  I nodded my head and started for the barn. I was saddling Duck before I connected Koret’s frown, his sudden anxiety about the hob, and the way the villagers fell back, whispering and afraid, out of my path as I walked to the stables.

  He was worried the attack would give added spark to the anger against magic—against me. It hurt. It didn’t matter that I was the one who warned them. It only mattered that the creatures were wildlings, reminding everyone how evil magic was. I wondered what they’d think of the hob. Maybe they’d turn away from the only chance they had of saving themselves because the hob was a wildling.

  Koret met me at the door of the barn and handed me a stone ax. “Take this with you. It belonged to one of our attackers. Maybe the hob will know something about them.”

  I took the weapon and mounted Duck before I replied. I wanted to make certain he wouldn’t hear how upset I was.

  “I’ll ask.”

  AS I APPROACHED THE MANOR, I PATTED DUCK’S SUN-WARMED shoulder, more for my comfort than his. The silence of the abandoned building reminded me too much of Auberg. It was like some sort of spreading disease. By winter, Fallbrook might be shrouded in stillness, too.

  The building was not fortified or designed for heavy defense. Generations ago there had been a great wooden fort, but the valley was too isolated to see much fighting. When Lord Moresh’s many-times-great-grandfather had decided to modernize the old fort, he’d settled for a stone-walled manor. The walls were thick and the windows on the first floor were narrow, but that’s as far as he’d gone for security’s sake. It still would have taken more than the bandits’ group to take the building if the lord’s contingent were there.

  I rode to the main entrance and dismounted, slipping the bit from Duck’s mouth when it became apparent that no one else was there. Thus freed to eat, Duck nibbled on the long grass. The quiet munching sound was soothing, allowing me to ignore the hollowness of the building behind me.

  The sun hit the grass and released its fragrance into the air. Like the smell of fresh-baked bread, the rich earthy scent was cheering. I couldn’t change the villagers in a season, but perhaps time would help. When they weren’t as frightened by the attack, maybe they’d remember I’d saved them from a surprise attack. Maybe Duck would sprout wings and fly.

  I yawned, closing my eyes. When I opened them again, the hob was holding out an oatcake to me.

  “Almost given you up,” I commented, trying to sound nonchalant as I took the honeyed oatcake. As I took a bite, I realized I hadn’t had anything to eat since I had gone to practice yesterday—no, the day before yesterday.

  The hob sat cross-legged on the ground beside me, his cloak set to one side, munching on the twin of the treat he’d handed me.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve been here a while. Waited a bit to see if others were coming, too.”

  He appeared to be enjoying his cake. I couldn’t tell if he was concerned about the absence of the elders or not.

  “They’ll be along,” I said, finishing the cake and accepting the waterskin he handed me. I drank (it was water, as far as I could tell) before explaining about the attack. “It could take the rest of the morning to get folks calmed down enough to listen, but they’ll be here.”

  “Ah,” he said, licking his fingers. I noticed he was careful to avoid touching his claws with his tongue. They must be as sharp as they looked.

  I turned away so he wouldn’t see me smile. It was odd seeing him doing something as human as licking his fingers, even if his tongue was black and his fingers had claws. It was odder still to find myself more comfortable in his company than I was with most of my fellow villagers. I’d known him a very short time, but that was enough for me to get used to his gray skin, fangs, and cat-eyes. Even his tail.

  When I was sure I had control of my face, I turned back to see him watching me quizzically. When his left ear twitched at the sound of Duck’s snort, the wooden chain bounced against his cheek.

  “Didn’t it hurt when they pierced your ear like that?” I asked.

  The habitual hint of humor left his face. “I don’t know.”

  Without the humor, his face was cold and frightening. Even though I’d seen what he’d done to the grim and to five…no, six raiders yesterday, I’d forgotten he was dangerous. The smile had only to leave his face and I could see the hob was a predator. I hoped he never considered me prey.

  I decided it would be best to change the subject. “With those fangs,” I said casually, “I’m surprised you eat oatcakes.” Yeah, I thought sarcastically, that was a good subject change.

  But it actually seemed to be one, because the hob grinned and said, “Oatcakes are good, but I do like a few hillgrims or a deer now and again. Trolls, though, are poor eating. No matter how well you clean them, they still taste like the north end of a southbound horse.”

  I laughed. This time, when his face sobered, it didn’t scare me. I think it was because there was no coldness in his expression.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Ask me what you like, but I find that I don’t remember a lot of personal things. It’s…disconcerting. Some things are as clear as yesterday, but anything I cared about might as well not have happened. I suppose that’s the mountain’s doing. She has only me left.”

  He didn’t seem to be finished, so I waited.

  “We hobs tend to be a gregarious people,” he said finally, after wiping his hands on the grass with rather more attention than such an action deserved. “I think she took my memories so I would live.”

  I thought about what I’d feel if someone took my memories from me. Took all the pain and guilt, leaving me free of it all—and marveled he still stayed near the mountain.

  “Perhaps it’s just the effect of the passage of time,” I offered. “It has been a very long time.”

  He nodded his head politely.

  “How is it that you survived, when no one else did?”

  “There may be more hobs, elsewhere,” he said. There was a wistful tone to his voice: as much as he wanted to, he didn’t believe there were any more.

  He ran his fingers up and down his staff. “I can remember a little. There was a battle with…something.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “I think it was an army of humans. Many of us were killed, and I was hurt badly. My people took me to a cave we used when our own magic wasn’t enough, a place where the mountain mends her children. I was there when the death-mages did their work. I was the only one that the mountain could save.” His nimble fingers fiddled with one of the feathers on the chain in his ear, and he abruptly changed the subject. “You said that you were attacked this morning. By what?”

  I launched into a description of the things that had come boiling out of the baker’s basement, though I was thinking about his relationship with the mountain. Did it serve him or did he serve it? When I handed him the stone ax, he took it and tested it on a hair he plucked from his head. Laid on the edge, the hair split neatly in two.

  “Turned to earth, e
h?” he asked thoughtfully. “How did the village celebration of the spring equinox go?”

  “Equinox?” I stumbled over the word.

  He raised an eyebrow. “The coming of spring.”

  I frowned. “We celebrate the harvest, but the spring is planting season.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Do you have a winter celebration? In my day, folk—even humans—celebrated the changing seasons: spring, summer, winter, and autumn.”

  “No,” I said. “At least nothing devoted specifically to the seasons. What does that have to do with anything?”

  He grunted. “It might have nothing to do with it at all—or not. Let me think on it.”

  A butterfly flew by and landed on a wildflower near the wall of the manor. I watched it for a bit, rolling his answer this way and that. He said I could ask anything. “Why are you agreeing to help us? I mean, I know that we need help—yours, someone’s. You seem anxious that we know how much you can help us. Why do you need us?”

  An emotion crossed his face too fast for me to tell exactly what it was. He dug into the grass with his staff. “Because the mountain says I do. What is it that they do for you?”

  Startled at his question, it took me a moment to reply. “What do you mean?”

  He pursed his lips, looking at the place where his staff had dug through the grass into the dirt. “What do they do for you? The old man cares, perhaps, but it seems to me that he looks to you for aid in saving his village rather than having any true affection. The one-armed one, Kith, yes. But soon, I think, the singer will destroy him if he doesn’t do it himself first. Maybe the big man with the beard cares. How long do you suppose the zealots, the ones who hate anything that hints of magic, will let you live?”

  “Spying?” I asked angrily, raising my chin.

  He said nothing.

  It was my turn to look away. What he said hurt me, but I couldn’t afford to forget that they needed him. And I needed them.

  “They are my people.” I said fiercely, after only a brief pause. “I will do my best for them whether they want me to or not.” If I could make them people rather than “villagers,” maybe it would help. “The baker’s mother used to give me extra frosting on her sweet rolls when I was a child because once I found her lapdog. Kith’s father taught me how to ride and how to track rabbits. Tevet, the woman who is the loudest to condemn me, taught me how to mend shirts so that no one would know they’d been torn. Her uncle was taken by the bloodmages.”

  “Ah,” said Caefawn, “I see.”

  I stared at him, but he continued to look at the ground.

  “No doubt you do,” I said shortly. I don’t know why I was angry with him—or if it was him I was angry with.

  I pulled my knees up to my chest and buried my face against them, listening to the sounds of Duck ripping up grass and eating it. The hob was silent.

  The wind picked up, rattling the branches of the trees. My anger left me, and a feeling close to self-pity replaced it. Bitterness and anger I could accept, but I’d had enough self-pity for a lifetime. Time to get up and do something. “Have you been inside the manor?”

  “No.”

  I jumped to my feet. “Let me show you around, then. There’s no one here to object any longer.” Moresh’s steward had been one of the men who died in the fighting. No one would care if we poked around. I pulled Duck’s bridle off completely and tied it to the saddle. If he wandered off, he’d only go to the inn.

  I took Caefawn to the kitchen door set in the side of the house, unobtrusively hidden behind a wall of hedge.

  “The old cook, Fenwick, used to give bits of leftover food to the village children if the lord wasn’t here. The old steward didn’t mind, said it kept us from raiding the gardens. We’d all come in through here.”

  The kitchen was a mess. The bread oven was tipped on its side, its door flung several paces away. Broken bits of crockery were scattered here and there amid the litter of food on the floor. A bedraggled dog scuttled out as we came in. Flies buzzed about their business, unimpressed by visitors.

  “Fenwick would be horrified,” I commented, stepping over the mess as best I could. “She kept this place as if it were the king’s kitchen.”

  It felt right leading him through the manor, introducing him to things I’d known all of my life: the small drawing room where the lord met with the villagers on business, the great hall where the harvest feast was served. I tried to let him see past the recent destruction, into the life of the valley before the mountain had fallen. That life had centered around the manor house. We villagers had our own lands, held in trust from the lord, and we served him and tithed to him to keep them. In return he protected us from raiders and, upon occasion, fed us in hard times.

  The upper floors had fared better than those below. I had never been above the ground floor, so I fell as silent as the hob, letting my feet take me where they would.

  The gaming room was full of tables with strange markings on them. I picked up a ball from a large table in the center of the room and sent it spinning off the edge and onto the floor. Caefawn ran his hands over the carving on the fireplace. His claws made light clicking sounds on the hard, polished surface.

  I moved to the next room. It was shrouded—covered against the lord’s return, I supposed. Even with the sheets, I could tell that it was a bedroom, though it was larger than my whole cottage. I wandered among the ghostly forms, trying to decide what each was. A table. A desk. Near the far wall was an object that defeated my guessing. It stood a full head taller than I was, narrow and rounded in shape. Finally admitting defeat, I pulled the sheet free.

  A fully articulated human skeleton hung on a frame from an eye hook drilled into its skull, which stared emptily at me, jaw gaping wide. A strange thing to have in a bedroom. This must have been the bloodmage’s domain.

  I wasn’t bothered so much by the skeleton as by the strange double vision I had that tried to tell me it was a young man instead. Chills ran down my spine as I looked at the skull hanging some inches above me. His eyes were honey-brown, framed by hair a shade darker than my own. A small scar trailed from the side of his right eye, like a tear that had been etched in. Laugh lines lightly touched the corners of his mouth. Something drew my attention back up the edge of the scar to his eyes; but this time they seemed…almost yellow.

  I stepped forward, lifting my hand to touch bone or flesh and see which one was real. Before I could touch it, the skeleton glowed green and red briefly before dissolving into ashes at my feet. Dissolved by magic so strong I could smell its acrid scent in the air. Hob’s magic.

  “By the mountain, lady,” growled the hob from behind me, “’twas ill-done. That poor lad had enough to bear without being summoned back as a wraith.”

  “What?” I asked. Even to my ears my voice sounded foggy. His words were plain enough, but I didn’t understand the meaning. Still captured by the memory of the skeleton’s eyes, I found it hard to think. “A wraith?”

  He glared at me a moment more, then frowned. His ears flared widely and he shook his head.

  “Tell me, Lady, what magic do you possess?”

  I rubbed my face briskly with my hands, but the vagueness didn’t go away. He took my hands in his and spoke even more slowly. “What powers do you have, Aren?”

  “I see visions.” There, that was right.

  “Of what?”

  “Things that happen.” That didn’t seem a good enough explanation, so I made another effort. Finally the fog in my head dissipated. “I used to get just feelings mostly. You know, that something bad was going to happen. Now I see mostly events that have already taken place or are happening somewhere else. But I saw the things that attacked us this morning before they did.” I shook the last of the fuzziness out of my head and smiled ruefully. “Sorry, that wasn’t very coherent. I guess I’m a little dizzy. Too much excitement, too little sleep.”

  “Too much ignorance,” he said in a disgusted voice.

  I was about to ask him wh
at he meant when the sounds of horses in the courtyard below announced the arrival of the people Merewich had chosen.

  The hob said something in another language. From the expression on his face, I didn’t think it was a nice word.

  I let him lead the way down while I tried to figure out what had happened in that room. I knew what a wraith was, or at least I’d heard stories of them. Nasty things that sucked the marrow from the bones of people and animals unfortunate enough to encounter them. Why would a touch transform a skeleton into a wraith? Was it something the bloodmage had done? Or was it—I looked down at my hands, which certainly didn’t appear any different than they had before—was it me?

  MEREWICH AND KORET WERE WAITING FOR US WITH THE priest, Cantier, and Ice. They looked grim-faced and a little pale. It might have been this morning’s battle, but I suspected it was the first sight of the hob.

  I stepped around him and bowed shallowly in an imitation of court manners. “My lord,” I said to the hob, “may I introduce you to Headman Merewich, Martial Commander Koret, Elder Cantier, and Elder….” I paused, because I couldn’t for the life of me think of Ice’s real name.

  As I stared at him, he grinned suddenly. “Eannise, lord. Some folk call me Ice.”

  His good humor broke the tension a bit, enabling me to finish the introductions. “Goodmen, all, may I present to you Caefawn of the Hob?”

  Merewich took over from there, as was proper. I took the horses and led them to where Duck grazed, hoping his good manners would keep them there—otherwise we’d all walk back to the village.

  By the time I returned, the elders had found seats on the stairs that led to the manor’s main entrance. Caefawn sat unconcernedly on the ground below them, legs crossed in a relaxed fashion. I stopped, unwilling to intrude.

  “Can the lord’s harvests feed the people you’ve got for the winter?” Caefawn asked as I came close enough to hear.