The Hob's Bargain

for the world. This had all started as mere curiosity. As I looked at Kith, I realized that this was not a little secret, and Kith was already hurt by it.
    I turned back to Wandel. “Tell me.”
    â€œAfter we finish camp,” he said.

    I TOOK THE DIRT W ANDEL REMOVED FROM THE FIRE PIT and mounded it in a circle around the pit, a further barrier against the flames spreading to the surrounding grass.
    Wandel stacked the grass-sod he’d cut and set it near the pile of wood. When we left in the morning, we’d shovel the dirt back in the hole and cover it with the sod—after a season the place would look as if we’d never been there. Kith unsaddled the horses, hobbled them, and let them free to graze.
    I washed the dirt from my hands at the stream. By the time I returned, the men were seated at the edge of the fire pit. Wandel struck flint to steel a few times, setting the small pile of tinder alight. Then he fanned and fed the growing flames. When at last the fire blazed merrily, the harper took up his harp and sat cross-legged on the end of his blankets.
    He fingered the strings lightly, then set the harp aside, politely waiting for his audience to settle itself. I sat rather gingerly at the end of my bedroll. Duck was too wide in the barrel to be an easy mount. Once Kith, too, was sitting on his bed for the night, the harper began.
    â€œLord Moresh inherited his bloodmage from his uncle, his mother’s brother. Moresh’s uncle was the king’s high marshal before the king had him beheaded for unnamed crimes. He stood off the whole of the king’s army at a crofter’s hut with nothing but fifteen bodyguards—bodyguards that his bloodmage had created for him. They all died there, along with fourscore of the king’s men. If he could have, the king would have killed the bloodmage as well, but without a specified charge against the marshal he could not nullify his will. Jealousy is not a charge that can be lodged in the court, so the bloodmage went to Moresh”—Wandel looked at Kith—“where he continued to make warriors for Moresh’s use.”
    â€œNever too many, you understand, because the king limited the number he allowed Moresh, not wanting Moresh to gain too much power. The berserkers are scouts and Moresh’s personal guard. One of the old marshal’s men told me they can track like a hound and hear a bee sneeze in the next room. They fight as the old legends say berserkers did, not bleeding from their wounds until after the battle is over. Those who are maimed or sorely wounded are killed.” He looked at Kith. “Since Moresh can have only a few of them, he wants them whole.”
    Kith laughed without amusement. “Moresh owed my father a life.” He looked at me. “Remember, it was my father who found our lord’s heir when the boy got lost in the fog. So he sent me home last fall. Before the war turned so bloody, Moresh planned on being here for spring planting. Three months, he said, a fair payment for his son.”
    He turned his gaze to the darkening sky. “It’s not as if I can run: Nahag has his mark on me. One of us ran once. Silly fool fell in love.”
    Nahag wasn’t Moresh’s bloodmage’s real name, though I couldn’t recall what it was offhand. A nahag was a night demon who consumed children while they slept. It said a lot about the mage that he’d been given such a nickname.
    Kith turned to me with eyes lit with self-mockery and a message. “Nahag got to play with him, brought him out for our enlightenment every evening for two weeks. The bloodmage is as old as my father, and he’s been a mage since his parents abandoned him to the mage guild when he was a child—whoever he was once, the madness has taken him now. The runner died—I think, I hope—at the end of the first week, but it was a little hard to tell. I didn’t know until then that bloodmages eat their victims. Lord Moresh knew I wouldn’t run when they came for me.”
    For the first time I felt something about Lord Moresh’s death other than the vague fear of a sheep whose shepherd is lost—satisfaction. Such a man should be dead.
    I could feel my lips peel back from my teeth. “If,” I said softly, in a gentle voice, “he were not dead, I’d curse him that his kith and kin would know him not for the ague that would twist his bones. I would curse him that