A warlock pays for its power in advance, and in small pieces of itself. The patron signs nothing. It takes a color, a habit, a sense, and leaves the rest alone until it wants more. Dorvald Eik, who lives above the salt village of Askelund on the north shore of Vesterfjord, has paid with the smell of rain and the ability to whistle. He still tries, mostly at dusk. A dry hiss comes out and the goats look up.
The earliest record is a parish roll from Askelund, written when the church still had a plank roof. It says a shepherd's son named Eik walked into the Hvitgrot, the salt cave under Kjellfjell, one autumn and walked out the next morning with white hair and no shadow at noon. The roll does not say what he found. It does list what the village noticed: the sheep on the lower pasture stood facing the cave for nine days and could not be driven.
Pyrsvik, a herring harbor across the water, keeps the next record. One winter the nets came up empty and the harbor sent a boat to Eik. The fish came in gray-green drifts and have come to his shingle ever since, so that Pyrsvik skiffs find the water off the harbor thin and the water off his landing thick. Pyrsvik has never asked him to undo it. Asking is a favor, and a favor is a debt. Dagmar Strand, who carries the post along the shore path, leaves his letters on a flat stone at the gate and never says thank you. Thanks count as payment owed, so she says "paid" and walks on.
I have made two visits. Around the cottage the moss is dead in a ring. On the first trip I laid a folding carpenter's rule end to end across it and got nine feet. Two winters later the same method gave fourteen, and the bare ground had reached the woodpile. White salt crusts every sill. He eats little: pickled herring, rye, black tea. On Thursdays he plays cards with the schoolmaster and loses, because the patron took his luck at cards last spring and he has not forgiven it. He accuses the schoolmaster of cheating. The schoolmaster, who does not, lets him. On the one windowsill stands a jar of rainwater sealed with wax, a gull feather floating inside.
- Classification
- Pact-bound human spellcaster
- Habitat
- Salt caves and fjord cottages
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 6 ft, stooped
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Northern fjord coasts
- Binomial
- Pactor salsifer
- Diet
- Pickled herring, rye, black tea
- Temperament
- Courteous, resentful, patient