The Hob's Bargain

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 gri

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, eh?" 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 i

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.