Patricia Briggs

by The Hob's Bargain

  It was hard for her to articulate what she’d done. A limitation of the language, he thought. He wondered if the bloodmages had their own language for what they did.

  “I take a little bit of their spirit inside of me,” she said. “If I separate it from the rest of the creature, they cannot attack me. I learned that from the noeglins.”

  He nodded. “It’s like knowing their real names. You have a part of them, and they cannot struggle against you effectively.”

  “So why can I break their hold by thinking about”—she hesitated. He could see in the darkness as easily as the light, so he watched the blush highlight her cheeks. “By thinking about strong emotions? It worked with the ghost, and now with the fetch.”

  “Not just any emotions,” he said, speculating about what strong emotions she’d been using. He could make a good guess, and it delighted him. “Only things that make your spirit want to stay with your body.” Experimentally, he ran his tail in a swift caress over her heated cheek. She was still nervous about his hands—perhaps it was his claws. But his tail she found amusing and peculiarly safe, and he used it to his advantage.

  She appeared to be lost in thought, and pretended not to notice when his tail slid over her shoulder and wrapped around her wrist. It was the slight dimpling of her cheek that gave her pretense away.

  Controlled she was, but there was also humor in her, if not mischief. He could almost remember having a mate with mischief—but he would make do with humor. She was so much better than being Alone. He tightened his tail a bit, though not enough to betray his desperation. He could make do with Aren.

  TEN

  I wiggled onto my stomach to get away from the raiders’ camp. The earth guardian’s shaper, who wore the body of an old, old man with none of the infirmities such a body should have, wiggled with me. I wasn’t sure if the earth guardian sent him to watch over us, or to keep the shaper out of trouble.

  The hob moved much more quietly than either of us, his gray coloring and brown clothes blending into the early morning light so well, that he almost disappeared in the grasses without magic.

  The raiders had chosen to hide their camp in the trees, reasoning that if we couldn’t find it, we wouldn’t be sneaking up on them from the forest. Even so, they would keep a heavy guard on that side of the camp because the trees afforded an attacking enemy good cover.

  We’d sneaked up on them from the field side because they wouldn’t be looking for trouble from there, and because we had the hob’s ability to hide in plain sight. I’d decided to count sleepers for Koret, so we’d have a better idea of the number of raiders. There were fewer than I’d expected.

  We were almost safe when it started to rain again, making the mud…

  …soft under my fingers. Hunger was hard in my belly. I looked across the field of sleeping men and smiled in anticipation of the blood that would flow. I heard a snigger beside me and turned to hush that one. If they didn’t hear us until we were upon them, there would be better eating. On the other hand, fighting was good, too. I remembered the feeling of bone breaking beneath my fingers and the feeling was good.

  Caefawn’s hand was hard over my mouth and his body covered mine, holding it still. I struggled underneath him, but he was amazingly strong. None of the bits of training Koret and Kith had given me had any effect at all.

  Behind the hold of his hand I screamed in frustration, and a little in the age-old fear of a fish caught in a net. If he didn’t let me up to warn them, the raiders whose camp we’d been spying on were going to end up dinner (or breakfast) for the hillgrims.

  I resorted to an old trick I’d learned when Quilliar used to cover my mouth. Caefawn’s hand was locked under my chin, but I managed to stick out my tongue anyway. His hand tasted of mud and rotting leaves, but my resolve was rewarded when he pulled it away in instinctive revulsion. The mud removed the last lingering taste of remembered blood, but I wasn’t sure it was really an improvement.

  I spit out a piece of grass and grunted, “Get off me.”

  He rolled off. I gathered my legs under me, and sprinted back to the camp we’d just left. We’d almost made it back to the trees, and the first stretch of field I ran over had been turned by Daryn’s plow, but hadn’t been harrowed to smoothness. Plow horses didn’t have much trouble with the ground, but people did. I fell twice, but used the momentum to roll again to my feet.

  “Ware, to arms, to arms,” I bellowed. If I was grinning, it was because I was imagining the expression on Caefawn’s face. He must think I’d lost my mind. Only shock could have stopped him from catching me. “Attack coming from the hills! Hillgrims!” Not that anyone in the camp would know what a hillgrim was, but the name sounded nasty enough to carry its own warning.

  As I pelted across the smooth part of the field, heading toward the rise where their camp was, it occurred to me that running into a camp of nervous raiders who thought I was the enemy wasn’t a bright idea. I was armed only with a knife; the crossbow was hanging under a tree on the other side of the field. It would be hard enough to crawl through the muck, and I hadn’t wanted to do it with my crossbow because the harness that held it to my back wasn’t tight enough to hold it steady while I crawled. I’d have to fix that, but for tonight I’d left it on a tree.

  I had time, running across the field, to wonder why I was so worried about hillgrims munching on a few raiders.

  “Beware, hillgrims,” bellowed a deeper voice just behind me.

  It wasn’t the hob, so it must have been the shaper. I glanced to my right and was treated to the sight of a hundred-year-old man running like a deer. He grinned at me happily. I didn’t see Caefawn.

  The men were on their feet and armed as I topped the rise. Most of them were looking at me—the moon was still old enough so they could see me in its light—so I pointed frantically behind them.

  “The west, the west!” I screamed.

  But from the swearing beginning on the hill side of their camp, I suspected that my cries wouldn’t be necessary much longer. There was a howling battle cry, and most of the men turned from me and ran to face the real threat.

  Unfortunately, two of them remained. One of them was staring at the old man, who grabbed a stout stick from the woodpile and jumped over an empty cooking pot half as high as he was, all the while howling madly, “Hillgrims! Hillgrims! Fun to kill hillgrims!”

  The other took a step closer to me, sword at the ready. “You?”

  It was Quilliar. The other Quilliar.

  I nodded. When he didn’t strike immediately, I headed for the woodpile, too.

  Quilliar was still waiting when I turned, his sword blocking the other man, who apparently had recovered enough from the sight of the shaper to decide I was a threat.

  “Why did you warn us?” Quilliar asked.

  Why indeed? Because I trusted Caefawn’s judgment, I’d come to accept that the village might need them to survive. Acceptance was a long way from risking my life to save them. They’d killed my family. When I thought of it, I knew I would kill the raiders I’d killed again if I were given the chance. Why fight for them, then? The answer, when it came, bothered me. I shoved it to the side and gave them a simple answer they could accept.

  “Have you ever seen a hillgrim?” I asked, an arm-long stick in each hand. “If you had, you wouldn’t ask me. Besides, I suspect our village and your company are going to need each other once the wild fully recovers. The hob tells me that goblins and trolls are hard to fight.”

  He weighed my answer, then turned to the other man. “She’s with us. At least for now.”

  He was right. I would welcome the chance to die for the village because I didn’t believe they’d ever let me live with them. A sort of variation upon the adolescent theme of “I’ll die, and then they’ll be sorry.” I would always be alone.

  I heard the shaper’s howl again and, involuntarily, I grinned. I wasn’t alone. I had the earth spirit’s guard and the hob.

  I started toward the sounds of ba
ttle, more because I was distracted by my thoughts than because I was eager to fight. Because something had occurred to me.

  I had never really been alone. Why had I thought that Quill and I were the only ones hiding what we were?

  Fallbrook and Beresford both were thick with magic. There wasn’t a family in either village who didn’t have a near relative taken by the bloodmages in the last three generations. I could even make a fair stab at guessing who the village mageborn were: the ones who hated me the most. I’d felt so alone after Quilliar died. It hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t.

  I darted around a tent and found a raider struggling with a hillgrim on his back. He’d dropped his sword and was trying to pry it off, but the ’grim had locked its jaws in the thick leather of a gaudy protective collar the raider wore around his throat.

  My weapons were too stout to do what I intended, so I grabbed a pair of wooden tent spikes set nearby. Stepping behind them both, I slid my chosen weapons between them. I braced the free end of each stick against the raider’s leather-armored back and used the leverage to force the hillgrim to break its hold or let my sticks crush its throat.

  It released the raider, reached behind, and grabbed me across the shoulder, wedging its claws in the soft flesh under my arm.

  A crossbow bolt took the ’grim through the skull, about two fingerspans from my nose, with a dull sound. With such a close-up view, I could tell it was from my bow.

  “Thanks, Caefawn,” I murmured, shaking free of the dead hillgrim.

  Trust the hob to do the most useful thing and grab my crossbow. No doubt he was perched high in one of the trees, killing hillgrims much more efficiently than any of us on the ground.

  “Thanks, brother,” said the man, whose back was bleeding from the scratches the hillgrim had made.

  He picked up his sword. He turned to me, and his jaw dropped. I tapped him on the head with a spike. Gently.

  “Close your mouth and watch your front,” I said, nodding at the hillgrim darting under someone’s legs to attack him. Then, remembering the odd stillness that had held me when the hillgrim had attacked me on the Hob, I added, “Don’t meet their eyes.”

  As I left the raider to aid another man with a similar problem, I called a belated “You’re welcome.”

  This time I didn’t try subtlety, I just jabbed one end of my right spike into the hillgrim’s ear with the weight of my body behind it. The end of the spike was sharp and slid easily for a few inches. I pulled my knife and used the handle to hammer the spike in deeply enough to kill the hillgrim. I had to pry the creature’s jaw open to free the raider, who’d fallen to his face, crying for help from the One God. A true believer, I thought. There were no more unoccupied hillgrims in the immediate area, so I took a good look at the raider’s wound.

  “The One God was with you today,” I announced briskly. “The ’grim got a mouthful of your leather armor, but not even a bit of flesh.”

  He turned over, a lad even younger than Quilliar. The bridge of his nose was freckled. He looked at me for a moment, then took my hand when I offered it, and got to his feet.

  Without a word we both turned back to the fight.

  It didn’t take me long to realize that I was able to help the other fighters because anytime a wildling started for me, it was felled with a crossbow bolt. Caefawn was good; no, better than good, because I was good and he was better.

  I caught occasional views of the shaper in his old man’s body as he put his club to good use. More often I heard him, cackling like a demented fiend and singing nonsense songs in a high, carrying voice. Even to me, who knew what he was, it was uncanny. It didn’t seem to bother the hillgrims, but it was fair spooking the raiders.

  “We need to get out now,” said Caefawn quietly in my ear. “Move slowly, and don’t look anyone in the eye. The hillgrims are retreating and the raiders will notice you before long, so it’s time to go. As long as no one thinks to look for you, he won’t see you.”

  His hand on my shoulder, he guided me around the battlefield. I wished he’d move his fingers so they weren’t pressed to the wound the first ’grim had given me, but I didn’t want to say anything to break his spell.

  The hob’s grip kept me to a slow walk until we reached the cover of the trees. Then he pulled us to a run. Exhaustion from the fighting caught up with me too soon, but the raiders wouldn’t be searching through these woods for a while. At least not until they’d counted their dead and wounded.

  I sat down on a rock that looked smooth enough to be more comfortable than the wet, pine needle-covered ground.

  “What’s wrong with your arm?” asked Caefawn after studying me a while.

  He didn’t give me a chance to answer, just pulled aside my shirt. Ignoring my yelps, the hob took a look at the cuts under my arm.

  “Sore,” he determined, “but not serious.”

  He took a little flask from one of the bags he wore around his waist. I could smell the alcohol before it hit my skin, and I whined as softly as I could when it hit.

  “This is like a cat scratch,” he said. “It’ll feel better once it’s cleaned off.”

  I muttered something uncomplimentary, and he laughed.

  “Mischief,” he said obscurely, then chided me. “Next time you want to alert a camp of armed men, do me a favor and think of a safer way. I suppose we also need to do something about those visions. If I hadn’t been there, you’d have had the whole of them upon you before you could defend yourself.”

  The euphoria of the run came back to me as the pain of my cuts faded. I grinned at him. “Good thing you were there.” I gave him a speculative look. “I thought you couldn’t do that invisible trick from this side of the river.”

  “You mean when I got you out of it? We weren’t invisible, just camouflaged. In the heat of a battle, there’s more than enough confusion to make it as effective as invisibility. If someone had been looking for you, they’d have seen us.”

  Having caught my wind, I stood up and started back toward the village. It was going on to full daylight, and I needed to get some sleep. “I wonder what the raiders will make of my warning them.”

  He sniggered. “I hadn’t figured on you. If Rook is smart, your village won’t have any more serious problems from the raiders.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him. “Who?”

  “Remember the two raiders who listened to you speak that first day?”

  He gave speak the same emphasis that I gave the sight. Perhaps it hadn’t been the White Beast’s presence that encouraged the raiders to listen.

  “Yes.”

  “The older one is Rook, second in command. I’ve been talking to him quite a bit. The raiders have been having some problems. Something’s been getting into their stores. Horses are going lame for no reason. Their leader’s getting a reputation for bad luck.”

  I laughed. “Rook will be better?”

  “He’s come to see the error of their ways,” replied the hob. “It should work.”

  He sounded a little tentative, but I’d come to believe in his infallibility. The hob had changed the villagers’ luck. Smiling, I looked down upon my cottage from the slopes above it. We’d come up with a way to appease the earth spirit; the raiders would join us and help; Fallbrook would grow and thrive. With the luck of the hob on our side, what else could happen?

  “WHY ARE WE GOING ALL THE WAY UP HERE?” I ASKED from Duck’s back as we trotted up the path to the Hob. It was light out, but the rain made it less pleasant than it might have been. I yawned; I hadn’t gotten much sleep after coming back from fighting the raiders. Caefawn had awakened me before the sun had risen well past the top of the mountains.

  The hob looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Didn’t you ask me to teach you how to keep the visions from overwhelming you?”

  I considered it. “I think that was your idea.”

  “Do I know anything about how visions work?” he asked, then continued without giving me a chance to say anything. “Of cou
rse not. No self-respecting hob would ever dream of having visions.”

  I pulled off my wet hat and hit him with it lightly. “No hob would ever dream of being self-respecting,” I returned roundly as I set the hat back on my head. “If he found he was in danger of it, he’d have to do something drastic.”

  He laughed. “True, lady. All too true. Well, then, I ask you, how am I to help you control your visions?”

  “I thought that was what I should ask you,” I said, yawning again. “Seeing as you’re so determined to teach me.”

  “True, but you didn’t know to ask it, did you?” He gave me a flirtatious glance before turning his attention back to where he was running.

  If he was going to play with words, I could, too. “Then why are you asking me to answer it?” I ducked under a low-hanging branch.

  “Because I am not a respectable hob.”

  I laughed. “Enough, already. Why are we going to the Hob?”

  “Because I think I know how to help you—but I need the mountain to show you.”

  We took a different path up the mountain than I had ever taken. But then, I’d been on the Hob only a handful of times. The rain stopped falling, leaving behind the fresh scent of a newly washed world. The sun began warming the wetness from my rough wool cloak.

  Duck enjoyed the sun, snorting and curveting as no responsible farm horse ever would. The hob was certainly having an effect on my horse—on me, too, for that matter. By all rights I should have been fretting and stewing about how we were going to appease the earth spirit and keep the villagers from assassinating me on sight, or I should have been examining my possibly upcoming nuptials and chewing my nails. Instead, I was chasing after the hob and enjoying it. His boundless energy and enthusiasm, coupled with the warm sun, made worry impossible.

  The path we took wasn’t well suited for a horse. Duck and I jumped over several piles of trees, and slipped and slid around a boulder too big to jump. The faint trail we followed didn’t climb up the mountain, but meandered here and there around her sides.