Patricia Briggs

by The Hob's Bargain

  Once away from the bell where the raiders and villagers worked out their differences, the streets were deserted, just as in my vision of the bloodmage. Without the raiders, without the bloodmage, Fallbrook had a chance to survive. They would have to appease the earth spirit, but no doubt Merewich could manage it somehow. Perhaps the death of the bloodmage would be appeasement enough.

  I stopped at the place where I’d seen the mage in my vision. On my right was the house where I’d forced the creatures to wait for me. The noeglins’ stench was spooking Duck, or maybe he could smell the wiggins’ corpserot odor. The latter was more subtle, but I found it harder to bear.

  Slowly, I slid off. When I was steady on my feet, I took the bridle off Duck’s head and shook it. He planted his feet and snorted at me, until I yelled at him. My yell became a shriek I couldn’t control as the power from my captives threatened to shake me apart. I plugged my ears and dropped to the ground. The sharp pain in my knees from the little bits of rock I’d fallen on cleared my head a bit, and I was able to stop shrieking.

  Duck was gone, but the fetch knelt on the stones beside me, a smile on her face. I closed my eyes, unwilling to let her distract me. Gradually the creatures subsided, satisfied they would be free only when I chose.

  The battle over for the moment, I rolled to my feet and opened my eyes. The fetch’s clothes were wrinkled and stiff with dirt and sweat. Dark hair had escaped its braid almost entirely, and she was paler than before. She smiled, and I saw that her lip was puffy and bleeding slightly—I didn’t remember doing that.

  “I thought that you could only come out at night.” I tasted the blood on my lip when I spoke.

  The smile turned to a velvety, smokey laugh, and for the first time I saw that her eyes were still in that odd, almost pupilless state. No wonder Kith had stared at me. “With your call I can go where you demand. Without you, do you think the noeglins could escape their bog?”

  “When I release you, you will go back where you came from,” I stated with more confidence than I felt. What if I’d released these things to terrorize the village? Without me or the hob to protect them, the people would be helpless.

  She laughed harder. It was difficult to believe, looking at her, that she wasn’t exactly what she appeared to be. As soon as the thought crossed my mind, she stopped laughing and dropped her head to meet my eyes. She stepped toward me with snakelike smoothness.

  “Yes,” she said, “believe in me.”

  I took a deep breath. “Go now and wait in the house for what will come.”

  She raised her chin, but I was too tired for theatrics. “Go.”

  I put all the force I could muster into my voice. It must have been enough, for she left.

  I’d called the spirits to this place because I wasn’t certain I could draw upon their power if they weren’t near. I hadn’t paid enough attention when the ghost had shown me how it was done. Maybe if I failed, the creatures would strike the bloodmage down before they left for their usual haunts. I took a firmer grip on my cedar staff as if it would save me.

  The wait seemed to last forever. Bored and terrified, I stood until I swayed, then sat on the ground and drew pictures in the dust of the road. Big loopy flowers were easy, even with the awkward length of the staff. I erased them and drew a square. A few more lines and it was the widow’s house. While I rubbed the house out with my hand, I glanced up and saw the bloodmage.

  The sun was at his back, and I squinted against the glare. He started his horse toward me, so he must have stopped when he saw me. I stood up and dusted my hands, one at a time, on my skirt.

  He stopped again, just a few paces away, playing with the hob’s chain, rolling the little beads through his fingers, which were stained, like the earring, with the hob’s blood. He rode alone, as the sight had foretold. Caefawn must have found a way to lure the berserkers away, perhaps even killed them before he died. The blood on the beads was dry and it flaked off, drifting to the bloodmage’s hand.

  The sight stilled my doubts. The spirits I held were quiet as I gathered their power to use against the mage. It took longer than I’d expected. Each spirit had to be dealt with separately; each extracted something of me for its gift. We were interbound until I felt there was little left that was only me.

  “Well, now,” said the mage, who’d watched me patiently. His voice was a polite, mellow tenor.

  “Sir,” I said politely, more from habit than anything else. A polite greeting of strangers.

  Moresh’s bloodmage had given me nightmares as a child, nightmares that had worsened after Quilliar’s death. Even then, the red clothing made more of an impression than anything else about the man. He was only my height, with ordinary features, dark coloring, and Beresforder blue eyes. There was little in his face that hinted at what he was—only the subtle softening of what had once been a sharp-featured face. His eyes were quite mad.

  For the first time since I took the initial noeglins, I felt that I was thinking clearly again. Facing the bloodmage at last, a deep calmness had taken root in my soul. Within me I held the power to destroy him. It was a heady feeling. My whole life I had feared this man, and now I did not. The power I held vibrated my bones like a building storm—of evil.

  How, then, was I different from the bloodmage?

  He was talking, but I didn’t hear him. My own question consumed me.

  Death! roared the spirit of evil in my head, a spirit made of the bits of my servants. Kill it, and all will be gained! We shall not fear the Green Man. What can he do to us? We can save the village from him as we save Kith from the bloodmage.

  “How could I have missed you?” murmured the bloodmage in my ear. He must have dismounted while I was distracted, because he stood just behind me now, embracing me like a lover.

  Yes, shrieked my spirit, take him now. Bind him and make him ours. Hurry! Do it quickly. Take his power.

  A surge of magic shook me.

  “Never seen anyone with this kind of power,” continued the bloodmage. He gripped my shoulders and turned me toward him. His expression was filled with the same greed for power that had seized me far more tightly than the mage’s hands.

  When the spirits whispered to me, the bits of them that were becoming part of me answered. I knew then that if I managed to kill the bloodmage this way, I’d be an even greater danger to the village than he was. Merewich, Koret, and Tolleck trusted me. There were other mageborn in the village; I knew that, and so did the vile things who’d sifted it from my mind. Mageborn without the benefit of the hob’s training, and thus easy victims. Part of me writhed in horror, part of me thought, Prey.

  No wonder Caefawn had watched me when I called the ghosts. He had been willing to kill me, rather than let me access the ghost’s power—now, too late, I knew why.

  I twisted out of the bloodmage’s hold and shouted, “Go!” Using the voice of command I’d learned had a strong effect on the spirits, a matter of emphasis rather than volume. And I released the spirits, all of them. I returned the power they’d given and took the little bits of myself, of my spirit back. I could feel their disappointment as they scattered.

  The widow’s house rattled and creaked.

  “What was that?” said the mage, turning to look at the house where the spirits had waited.

  His distraction gave me time to realize I had nothing to fight the bloodmage with. For a while I’d forgotten to fear him. I remembered now, remembered just why I’d been so desperate to destroy him. But it was too late. I’d used what little power I’d had to hold the spirits. Sweat dripped down my forehead as if I’d run a league rather than waited here for the bloodmage.

  “My dear,” he crooned after he’d determined there was no danger in the widow’s house. “You are a treasure.” He stepped to me and locked his hands on my face.

  He took my mind.

  Oh, not all of it. Some cool part of me observed what he was doing. It was not so different from what I had done to the spirits I’d taken. Perhaps, in a diffe
rent time, he would have had the sight and been a spirit speaker.

  He broke something within me, part of a deep tie between spirit and…soul, I suppose. I almost heard it give, like a bone crushed by a hillgrim. It broke, and I was his.

  He stepped back, pulled his mind away, and left me an observer in my own body. He patted my cheek, but I felt it only remotely. “We’ll wait here for Kith. I’ve called him, so it shouldn’t be long now. I have three other berserkers I managed to save. They were out hunting, but I’ve called them back to me. I’ll need a few more men from here, too. With a guard attachment I should be able to reach a more civilized place again and sell my skills.”

  My eyes, drifting without direction, caught on the hob’s ear piece, still laced through the bloodmage’s fingers like a talisman.

  “You may call me…Caefawn,” said the hob.

  The knowledge that Caefawn was dead brought tears to my eyes.

  “What are you crying about, child?” asked the bloodmage with little interest.

  I would have answered him if I could have, but the broken part of me seemed to have lost the ability to turn thoughts to words. I stared at him silently, and he shrugged. He started to do something more to me, but the sound of hoofbeats stopped him. He left whatever it was he was trying half-done.

  It was one of his berserkers. He and his horse were covered with mud. His coloring was lowlander, but he was bigger than even Koret, and very young. But his eyes held the same old knowledge Kith’s did. It made me sad even through my terror.

  “Fennigyr, I felt your call.” His voice was emotionless, and he moved with the same bone-weariness his horse did.

  “Well? Where are the others?”

  “Gone. Renwyr took off after a white horse, and I lost Stemm in a mudslide. I’ve been looking for them, but then you called.”

  “They’re not dead,” the bloodmage said after a moment. “One of them is hurt, though. We’ll have to find them later.”

  Frantically I tried to figure out what the bloodmage had done to me, how he’d separated my soul from my spirit. Caefawn had told me that people (and his definition of “people” was considerably broader than mine) were composed of three parts: body, spirit, and soul. The mage had separated my soul from my spirit and body.

  It was my spirit now that controlled my body, like a different sort of ghost. Not precisely without intelligence, but it was an intelligence obedient to the mage’s will, just as the ghosts had obeyed me.

  Horse hooves clattered on the road. My head turned, and I could see Torch approach at an easy canter. Kith sat so still that he appeared less real than the fetch had. He’d crossed the stirrup leathers (sized for me) in front of him. His face, I saw as he neared us, was as frozen as stone.

  “Fennigyr, I heard your call,” he said. “What do you wish?”

  “Dismount,” said Fennigyr, pursing his lips in thought.

  She (I couldn’t think of her as me, though I suppose she was) picked up the staff of cedar from the road and began drawing flowers in the dust, turning her attention away from the men.

  I could hear them talking, but I was forced to stare at the dust flowers. The restriction reminded me of a vision. A vision, I thought, looking at the cedar she held in her hand. Oh, she was looking at it, too, but not the way I was. I focused on the cedar and pulled at it with my mind. Caefawn told me to use it as an anchor. I hoped it would help me to bridge the division the bloodmage had drawn. I could feel a weakness in his spell, perhaps where he’d begun to alter it when the berserker distracted him.

  “Ah, Kith,” Fennigyr said, “you were my best, my favorite. Did you know? I always liked the men with a little less bulk and more speed. I had to talk Moresh into using you at all—he liked them with more bulge and height. I asked him, Who’d you have an easier time hearing in the woods, a moose or a ferret?”

  The force of Kith’s stare drew her attention away from the cedar staff.

  “In this light you almost glow, Firehair,” continued the mage. “I always like my works of art to be pretty as well as functional, and I’ve always been partial to red.”

  Kith’s eyes were still holding mine. If I hadn’t known him so well, I wouldn’t have seen his mouth tense when the mage called him Firehair. I wouldn’t have seen the power that name had over him. It bound him to the mage. I could see the tie, spirit to spirit.

  I remembered what Caefawn had told me about names. Kith had a name, given him by earth, air, fire, water, and magic. Given to him by the bloodmage—who was evidently a man of little imagination. Firehair? My poor Kith.

  I could feel the part of me constrained by the mage’s spell. It itched like an infected tooth, and I pushed against it.

  “I’m not Moresh,” the mage said. “He didn’t know how much of myself I put in each of you.”

  He spoke like an artisan—didn’t the saddlemaker say that very thing so often it had become a running joke in the village? I paused in my thoughts—hadn’t I given part of myself to the creatures I’d commanded? Perhaps Fennigyr meant it literally.

  I focused on Kith, trying to see him as I’d seen Wandel while he’d practiced, as I’d seen Kith’s ties to the bloodmage a moment ago.

  Kith broke into the bloodmage’s speech. “What did you do to the girl?”

  “She’s not your concern,” purred the mage. “One of the things I liked best about you was that you were never quite tamed. Moresh thought it was a weakness. He feared you, did you know? What he couldn’t see was that the difference made you better than the others. You’re older than any of my other men.” The mage stared sadly at the sky. “Such hard work to make, and so easily destroyed. He didn’t see you were more than just a man without a shield arm. I could kill you….”

  She looked at the sky, too, but all we saw was clouds. I needed to see Kith. Or my staff. If I could have spoken, I’d have sworn. I swore to myself anyway, though I continued to struggle with the spell and my fear.

  A harsh grunt returned her flittering attention to Kith. He was on his knees, and I could see the veins in his forehead. I could see how the mage used his bonds to cause pain.

  “…how easy it would be?” asked the mage. He hurt Kith some more.

  Kith’s fair skin had turned dark red.

  I fought; the itch turned to an ache—how strange without a body, and at that moment it turned to outright pain as something tore. I would have screamed if I could. I’d done more damage, but I’d also damaged Fennigyr’s control.

  I’d freed my magic, too, what little there was of it.

  Firehair, I thought. Holding Kith’s real name to me, I looked at him. With his name, my spiritsight was much clearer than it had been with the harper. Like Wandel’s, Kith’s spirit was full of light. If ghosts were a candle, then living spirits were a glass, magnifying the light of the soul. I could see the little bits of foreign spirit tied into his own, and I plucked at them. But when I pulled one away, I had to replace it, because I saw I’d damaged Kith. Without those little bits, Kith’s spirit would be wounded beyond healing. So I attacked the spirit bond that tied him to Fennigyr instead. It fell apart like a poorly knitted sock, leaving Kith’s spirit damaged, but free.

  “What?” exclaimed the bloodmage, staring at Kith.

  Kith gasped a deep breath of air, unaware that it was not the mage who had released him. The mage was not so handicapped. Kith didn’t have time to look up before the mage’s swiftly drawn sword slid into his back and out his belly.

  She turned her face away from Kith’s death as wild grief sliced through me. Her gaze passed by the other berserker, and I could see the pain on his face. The lowlander had loved Kith, too.

  Failure and agony almost distracted me enough that I didn’t see what lurked behind the berserker, but no one could miss the solid thwack as Caefawn’s staff hit the berserker in the head.

  Caefawn’s cloak was gone, and his remaining clothes were in rags. His charcoal gray coloring was somehow more foreign, exposed so openly. The neat silver-b
lack braid of hair was loosed, spilling in a wild curtain about him. His right knee was bandaged heavily, and his ears, pinned tightly against his head, were free of ornamentation.

  “Bloodmage,” growled Caefawn, sounding something more than human.

  Hope flared inside me for a moment, but I’d lost my belief in the hob’s omnipotence sometime since the day I’d ridden up to fetch him from his mountain. The hob did not have the power to take on the bloodmage, not on this side of the river. I could feel the bindings that held him to the mountain and drained his strength. For the first time I understood that not only did the mountain augment his power, but he also fed her.

  I would get to watch him die while I wondered if I could have fought the bloodmage better if I hadn’t weakened myself by taking the spirits for their power.

  “So you’re the thing that’s got my berserkers chasing their tails,” observed the mage, sounding fascinated. I could hear nothing in his voice that suggested killing Kith had bothered him, though he’d sounded like a love-struck boy just moments before. “What are you?”

  The hob snarled like a cornered lynx, beautiful and inhuman. His red eyes glowed even in the full light of day. “I am Death,” he hissed.

  “No,” breathed the bloodmage. “I am.”

  Something dark left his hand, something vile that made my spirit flinch and step back. It hit Caefawn and spread down his chest. But as if it couldn’t adhere to his skin, it dripped off him to puddle on the ground. The dirt beneath the hob’s feet melted and steamed beneath the force of Fennigyr’s magic.

  Caefawn sprang onto the mage but hit some invisible barrier a foot away from Fennigyr’s body. It propelled the hob backward a bodylength, and when the hob came to his feet he was clearly favoring his bandaged knee.

  “I am your death.” There was mock sorrow in the mage’s voice.