The Hob's Bargain

I laughed as the wind caught my hair and spilled it out of its loose braid. Free, I was free. Free of hiding what I was. Free of being less than I could be. I gloried in my strength, my freedom. The price had been too high, but it was paid. Now there was no one to hold me in subtle chains of wifehood, womanhood. No one to belittle my warnings because I was a woman, and women are given to such fits and starts. No need to hide what I was behind the image of what I should be.

I let out a war cry and shook my hair in the wind. Letting the cool fingers of air wash my other self behind me. The weak woman who cowered in her cellar was gone forever. The woman I was now had grown beyond her.

I stretched out my arms until they felt like wings as Duck ran down the mountain.

I came to myself slowly. I looked at the fetch and said, softly. "Go away."

Her eyes faded from brown to sea-green; her face shifted subtly, leaving behind cheeks more rounded, lips softer, jaw narrower than they had been. She snarled at me, and her face looked less than human. Then she was gone.

"About time," growled Caefawn.

I sank to my rump on the cold grass, which was damp from the spray of the small waterfall. My arm hurt as if it had been savagely ripped open, but there was nothing wrong with it. The hillgrim's scar was as it had been, and my wrist was unbruised. I covered my face with my hands and took deep, slow breaths until I felt like myself again.

The hob watched Aren put herself together again, one layer at a time. First she put aside the fear, then the rush of danger. She did it so thoroughly he could barely smell the remnant emotions on her. She had such control. He wondered if she'd learned it, or if she'd always been that way.

"Why is it that strong feelings broke her hold on me, just as it broke the ghost's hold in the garden?" Her voice was soft and calm.

"How do you control the spirits?" He asked not because he couldn't have told her the answer, but because she'd learn it better if she found it herself.

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.