The Hob's Bargain

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.
    â€œTurned to earth, eh?” he asked thoughtfully. “How did the village celebration of the spring equinox go?”
    â€œEquinox?” 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.”
    â€œAh,” he said. “Do you have a winter celebration? In my day, folk—even humans—celebrated the changing seasons: spring, summer, winter, and autumn.”
    â€œNo,” 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?”
    â€œSpying?” 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.
    â€œThey 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.”
    â€œAh,” said Caefawn, “I see.”
    I stared at him, but he continued to look at the ground.
    â€œNo 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?”
    â€œNo.”
    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