The village schoolmaster, and the first adult outside the family to have an opinion about Arthur.
Who he is
an older man, thin in the way that some old men were thin, more from a lifetime of nervous energy than from any lack of eating (ch. 243)
He taps his pointer against the hanging map without noticing he is doing it, "the particular unconscious tic of someone who had given this exact lesson so many times that his body performed parts of it without requiring his mind's full participation".
He is willing to be funny at a province's expense:
HOB: Drennick, the Iron Reach [...] harsh country, harsh people, though I'll deny saying that if any of you repeat it to a Drennick trader.
The geography lesson
Ch. 243 is his, and it is where the saga establishes Maeris, the seven provinces, the Sea of Serenity, and the Ruined God.
He tries to change the subject off Valdrun and a child does not let him:
GIRL: Why did it fall, Master Hobbes? HOB: That's a longer story than we have time for today. GIRL: But why?
He sets the pointer down before answering, which the chapter reads as "the particular pause of someone deciding how much truth a room full of small children could reasonably hold". He answers it.
What he says to Arthur
Arthur stands up mid-lesson and declares he will defeat the Ruined God. The room laughs. Hobbes stops the laughing with his pointer, then says something the chapter refuses to categorise:
HOB: Ambition's no laughing matter, whatever else it is. Sit down, lad. We'll see what becomes of it.
It wasn't quite a defense. It wasn't quite dismissal either.
That ambiguity is the whole of his position on Arthur so far.
He recalculates
Ch. 251. He crosses the yard "at a pace none of the children had ever seen him move at, his coat still half buttoned", and the chapter marks the change in him:
his eyes sharp now in a way Arthur had not seen from him before, the particular focus of a teacher recalculating everything he thought he knew about a student.
He examines the scorched ground, then the burn, and reasons out loud, "half to Arthur and half to himself, the particular careful working-through of a man encountering something he did not yet have a framework for".
HOB: This isn't a burn from being struck. [...] This looks like a burn from something that grazed past, not through.
Then he takes Arthur inside.
ART: Am I in trouble? HOB: No, Arthur. I don't think trouble is the word for this at all.
HOB: I think we need to have a conversation, you and I, about exactly what just happened here.
Ch. 252 is "What You Might Be".
The office
Ch. 252. He makes Arthur tell it twice, "Sometimes the second telling finds things the first one missed", and the second telling produces the word he needs:
ART: it felt like that, exactly like that, the same motion, just my hand instead of a blade. HOB: A parry. ART: I suppose. I don't know the proper word for it. HOB: That's the proper word.
Then he interrogates the exposure, pulls down a thin worn book with a cracked spine, and offers the theory that explains the whole rest of the saga. See The built ability.
He refuses to oversell it, twice:
ART: So I'm not Unmarked. HOB: I didn't say that.
HOB: I want to be honest with you that I do not know its full shape or its limits, and I do not know that anyone does.
And he refuses to let Arthur thank him:
HOB: Don't thank me yet. Thank me if it comes to something. For now, go home. Tell your parents everything, all of it, they deserve the truth of today more than anyone.
The letter
He offers to open the door to Solmere, seven years early.
HOB: I want to write to a colleague of mine. In Solmere. There is a school there, the finest in the province, and they take a small number of exceptional students each year regardless of family standing, if they show something worth cultivating. ART: You want to send me away? HOB: Not today. Not for years yet. You're eight years old, there's no rush in it. But I want the door to exist, when you're ready to walk through it, and doors like that one don't simply appear on their own. Someone has to open them.
This is the origin of Arthur's place at Solmere, which the author's notes have him reach at fifteen.
His last word to Arthur in the chapter
ART: Do you think it'll work? [...] Do you think I can really get better at it? HOB: I think you already have started, whether you meant to or not. Whether it gets better from here is entirely a question of whether you keep doing what you've apparently been doing all along. Enduring. Refusing to break. I would wager, having met you, that you will.
Later, from the author's notes chapters nobody has read yet
Marked as planning rather than text.
The book arrived. Ch. 252 has him reach "to a shelf behind him, pulling down a thin, worn book with a cracked spine", so that part is text rather than plan. What Arthur does with it later is not.
- Arthur goes looking for the same book again in the Solmere library.
- His letter is referenced at the end of Acts 12 to 14, when Headmistress Seraphine formally recognises Arthur, as a "full-circle moment against Hobbes's letter and Kade's early skepticism".
Ch. 340: the letter, from his side
He is eighty-one, which the archive did not have, "and had got slower in the ten months and had not got slower in any of the ways that mattered". Same garden, same disgraceful hedge, which he now says bites.
HOB: Well. ART: Master Hobbes. HOB: You'll not call me that. ART: I've called you that since I was six. HOB: You were six.
Arthur gives him an account he does not give his parents, "because Hobbes was the only person in Hollowell who knew what the letter had been and what it had cost him to write it and what he had been risking on a boy with nothing".
What the letter cost him
This is the entry's largest addition, and it is the recommendation of ch. 253 told from the other end, ten months later.
HOB: Ten months ago I put a letter in a bag on a cart and then I did not sleep for four nights. I want you to know that. I'd written it, and I'd sent it, and then I lay there working out that if it went badly it would be my doing, because you'd not have gone if I'd said nothing, and you'd have stopped in this village and been perfectly content and never once known there was a thing you hadn't tried.
ART: It didn't go badly. HOB: I can see that. That's not what I'm telling you. Ask me what I was afraid of. ART: What were you afraid of? HOB: That I'd send a good boy away and get a clever one back.
Calder had said almost exactly that on the porch an hour earlier, independently. Arthur tells him so.
HOB: Your father's a fool about a great many things and he has never once been a fool about you.
What he asks for, and what he gets
HOB: Go on, then. What have you got? ART: I've got a friend who runs a mill's accounts four days a week now because somebody wrote eleven numbers down for her. I've got a boy who bet against me and told me so. I've got twenty-seven circuits and a shoulder that came out and a headmistress who wants me to write to her, and I have no idea what I am, and I've stopped needing to know before I get on with the day.
Master Hobbes drank his tea and did not answer for a while, and when Arthur looked over, the old man was crying slightly and doing absolutely nothing about it.
HOB: That's the letter. That's what I put in it. I said, this one will be worth watching and he will not know why.
That is the first time the archive has the letter's actual content. Ch. 253 has him write it and send it. This has him quote a line of it back, ten months on, to the boy it was about.