The Hob's Bargain

a creature.
    I felt no fear, only a surprised kind of delight. If he had been standing on the ground, he would have come up to my shoulder. The wildling was a fragile-seeming thing, his feyness blending into the odd light as if he, not I, really belonged to this world. His arms and legs were slender, almost spindly. The bones of his ribs and shoulders were clearly visible, though his belly was round.
    He had the proportions of a child, his head too large for his small body. His skin was the warm brown of stained oak. If there were claws on the ends of his fingers, those fingers were long and slender like those of a great lady.
    He wore only a pair of roughly made hide shoes and a loincloth. His pale, ash-gray hair was braided in complex patterns with colorful beads woven here and there.
    His eyes were large, even in the oversized, inhumanly round face. Wide gray irises gave a strange beauty to something that might have been grotesque. His mouth balanced 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