The Hob's Bargain

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 shagged. 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.

"Fe

"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.

"Fe

"Dismount," said Fe

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," Fe

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 ru

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 Fe

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 Fe

"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 low-lander 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-black braid of hair was loosed, spilling in a wild curtain about him. His right knee was bandaged heavily, and his ears, pi

"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.