Patricia Briggs by The Hob's Bargain

his eyes, being wider than any I’d seen on a human face. As I watched, a smile lit his eyes and touched the corner of his mouth.
    â€œHob?” I asked softly, half raising my hand to him.
    His smiled widened, exposing the sharp, interlocking teeth of a predator. Before the significance of that registered, he launched himself at me. His arms closed with viselike strength on my shoulders as his head darted for my throat.
    Somehow I managed to get the arm I’d been lifting between his face and my neck. His jaws locked on my arm with vicious force. I heard the crack of bone, shock momentarily protecting me from the pain. I noticed that the corners of his mouth were still tilted up in a smile.
    He smelled of musty leaves and damp earth. I tried to dislodge him, but for all his lack of size he was much stronger than I was. I’d left my knife back at camp, and there were no sticks within reach.
    He wrenched his head, twisting my forearm to an impossible angle. I remember hearing a loud ringing in my ears—then nothing.

    T HEY TOLD ME LATER IT WAS W ANDEL WHO FOUND ME . Kith had come across the creature’s spoor and was tracking it when he heard the harper’s shrill whistles. By the time I woke up, my head was propped on Wandel’s leg and he was mopping my face with a wet cloth. I was quiet for a moment, more out of sheer surprise than anything else. I hadn’t expected to wake up at all.
    When a cold drop of water hit my ear, I batted at Wandel with my unhurt arm and struggled to sit up. Upright, I was lightheaded and dizzy.
    â€œWho’d you meet out here, Aren?” called Kith from somewhere a fair distance to my right.
    I opened my eyes, but it was nearing dark and my vision kept trying to black out, so it took me a while to find Kith. He was kneeling beside something a short distance away. After a moment I decided it was a dead body.
    â€œDon’t know,” I croaked, closing my eyes again. “What’s it look like?”
    â€œ This looks like some malformed human child with teeth like a shark,” he replied. “But you met something else, too. No way you could break its neck like this. Whatever did this is stronger than I am—came near to ripping the head off while he was about it.”
    â€œWhoever it was, they bandaged her arm,” added Wandel.
    I’d been trying to ignore my arm. I had a clear memory of bone showing through flesh. I looked down and saw that someone had wrapped it with strips of my tunic. It still looked like an arm ought to, and I didn’t think it should. It also hurt.
    Kith swore softly. I raised my eyes from my arm and watched him pace back and forth, stopping here and there to examine the ground. My vision was better, but I was still dizzy.
    â€œLook at the bruises. He snapped that thing’s neck with one hand,” Kith muttered. “Then he used a stick to pry its jaw open. He tossed it from here”—he stood, as far as I could tell, where the creature had attacked me—“to there.” He pointed to where the body lay, some distance away. “Now it’s not huge, but it weighs a good seventy or eighty pounds, and I don’t know a man alive who could toss it that far—not even a magicked one like me.” He said some more, but I started seeing black again and only caught something about soft-soled boots.
    â€œA Beresforder?” guessed Wandel. “Some of those mountain folk are big enough to take a bear and toss it into the next valley. But then why didn’t he stay to meet us?”
    â€œNot a Beresforder,” refuted Kith. “I don’t think a human could do this. Certainly no one I know from Beresford.” He went on mumbling to himself about wildlings, but I was paying more attention to my arm than to what he said.
    After a moment Kith stopped speaking and knelt beside me. “How badly are you hurt?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I replied, breathing