The Hob's Bargain

to surround me. Someone tugged me off the horse, but I clung to Kith’s stirrup tenaciously.
    â€œThe elders,” I said.
    Albrin, who’d just dismounted, nodded, and said grimly. “Go with them. It will be a while before we can call them together. Planting must go on.”
    So I allowed myself to be hustle-bustled into the warm inner sanctuary of the inn’s kitchen by Melly, the innkeeper’s wife. Everyone called her that, though the innkeeper had little to do with the inn. He spent his days tending his turnips, carrots, and aristocratic pigs whose pedigrees were longer than Lord Moresh’s.
    The inn had three sleeping rooms for infrequent travelers and several dining and drinking rooms that were in use much more often. Food and drink were paid for mostly by barter, though Lord Moresh and his armsmen paid in hard currency. My father said Melly made little more than she spent, but it kept her happy.
    Melly lived up to her legendary charity by settling me in front of a vast bowl of her husband’s turnips.
    â€œHere, child, keep busy with these if you like—or leave them. But your gram always said busy hands are life’s great healers.” Then she shooed everyone else out of the room, closing the door behind her as she left.
    I took out the first turnip and concentrated on skinning the whole thing without breaking the peel. Apples were easy, but turnips required real skill. Melly’s knife was sharp, and it slid easily over the turnips. It required all of my attention and no thought, so it worked very well to take my mind off of what had happened—and what I feared was going to happen.

TWO
    I t was evening before the elders met. Earthquakes, raiders, ill omens notwithstanding, this was planting season, and a farmer worked in the fields from daybreak to twilight.
    They planted the lord’s fields first; then the villagers could attend to their own lands. This high in the mountains the seasons were too short for dawdling. The elders divided the land, which was held in common by the village, among families for farming. After the lord’s tithe, the harvest of each field belonged to the man who farmed it.
    The land rights passed from father to son. If a man had no sons, he adopted, or passed them to his daughter’s husband. Father’s land would go back to the village. The elders might wait a season for me to remarry, but the village could not afford to let cropland lie needlessly fallow. Next spring the elders would give it to a new holder or split it among those who held land already. With the lord’s tithe on the harvest and half the land fallow each year to keep it healthy, the village was sometimes hard put to feed itself through the long winter months. There was no emergency so great it could call the men from the planting.
    My knife slipped, and the turnip skin, which was half-peeled, broke in two. I sucked on my right thumb where I’d nicked it as I examined the turnip to make sure I hadn’t bled on it. My knuckles ached where I’d beaten them against the trapdoor, and my left thumb was bruised from the cauldron handle. My right thumb had been uninjured until I’d assaulted it with the knife.
    I went on with my thoughts, distracting myself from what happened this morning even if it meant thinking about what I had to do tonight.
    The elders could have met, despite planting. There were a number of elders who weren’t farmers. Albrin bred and trained horses and dogs. Cantier, the oldest, still went out with the young men to fish, though his wife often nagged at him to retire. I didn’t know how old he really was, but his eldest son was older than my father. Tolleck, the new village priest, was an elder by virtue of the office—though he helped in the fields, too, sometimes. Merewich, the headman who presided over all of them, had been a shepherd until his joints became too twisted for the work.
    For some things they would have been enough, but Albrin must have decided the earthquake, the disappearance of the river, and the blocked pass to Auberg, the village’s major market, would require the whole council.
    Sitting in the kitchen, I wondered what I would say to them. What if the magic I’d felt had only been the gathering earthquake? As time passed, the experience I’d had in the cellar became more and more dreamlike. But there were the visions. Visions such as I had never had before, coming one on top of the