The Hob's Bargain

stride more landing room. It was no wider nor higher than jumps I’d taken on him before. But I hadn’t taken him out in a thunderstorm.
    Torch danced with eagerness, knowing, as horses will, what it was I intended to ask of him. He took the fence handily, resenting it when I asked him to slow to a walk. I intended to take him through the village by the alleyways; if we trotted, someone was sure to hear us. It would be best if no one saw me, especially riding Kith’s horse.
    The alleys in Fallbrook twisted around more than the roads—which weren’t exactly the King’s Highway. Some of the alleys were cobbled, and the heavy rain made them slick.
    I rode around the edge of someone’s storage shed, then down a gully into someone else’s backyard. That’s when I heard voices ahead. There were a number of people talking quietly. Torch stopped almost before I asked him. I couldn’t see into the next yard because of a bramble rose hedge and a sharp rise to the ground.
    I was still trying to remember who lived in the next house when someone screamed.
    I leaned forward, and Torch climbed the steep, mud-slick surface of the alley at a flat-out run. The hedge continued around the alley end of the yard, but it was lower, and Torch popped over it without slowing his headlong flight.
    There were six or seven people in the yard. One of them was down, rolling from side to side with something dark and furry on his back. In the two strides it took Torch to reach the man’s side, I saw that the animal was one of the odd creatures I’d seen in the Fell bog.
    Pikka, that’s what Caefawn had called it. I jumped off Torch’s back while he was still running and used the momentum to lend strength to the blow I struck with my cedar staff. It hit the creature in the ribs with a satisfying crunch.
    The pikka shrieked and, unlike the hillgrim, it let go and turned to face me. Pig-sized, intelligent eyes assessed me as I appraised it in return. Growling low in its throat, the pikka paced back and forth, looking for a path to me that would elude the bite of my staff. I backed away, little by little, trying to lure it from the fallen man.
    Pikka used magic to go undetected.
    If I’d been riding Duck, the second pikka would have killed me. As it was, I heard Torch squeal and felt the ground shake beneath his hooves. I turned my head just in time to see him strike another pikka behind me. My lapse in attention gave the wounded one time to slip past the cedar staff and attack.
    I turned farther away from it, and the pikka grabbed for the nape of my neck. It got a mouthful of hair and cloak instead. I dropped over backward, on top of the pikka, jerking loose the frayed strings that held the cloak to me. I rolled over without shifting my weight off the animal. Its sharp claws and sharper teeth were, for the moment, tangled in the tough old cloak. I tried to reach for my knife, but when I loosened my hold on the cloak, the pikka’s struggles increased and I had to take a better grip. I could see my knife, touch the haft with my elbow, but it was tantalizingly out of reach.
    And then it wasn’t.
    The knife slid out of its sheath and onto the cloak. Despite the thrashing of the pikka, the knife traveled smoothly up the cloak until I could shift and snatch it up.
    Knife in hand, I looked across the wet grass to the pikka’s victim. It was Poul. He’d rolled over onto his stomach and his eyes were on mine. He gave a short, painful nod, then his eyes closed as he grimaced in pain.
    My left hand held the pikka’s head against the ground while my knees on its shifting shoulders kept it relatively still. I drove the blade of my knife into its throat through the cloak. I stayed where I was until the creature was still.
    I looked up and saw the people who’d been gathered in the neat garden. I had to laugh at the irony. The pikka had interrupted a meeting of magic-haters. Poul’s mother was there, and the smith’s wife. I wondered if the smith knew his wife was involved with the people who’d killed his brother. No, I’d forgotten, he’d been told it was the raiders. Perhaps it had been—or the fetch, or any one of a number of deadly creatures. The pikka weren’t the only things invading the valley.
    I couldn’t help but wonder if the smith’s wife had found Touched Banar a burden she could do without—a grown man who couldn’t tie his