—Ruck's Ballad of the Mink
The squire was clad in a sky-blue velvet coat, long and loose with a row of big silver buttons down the front, a cabbage rose on each flared lapel, a thick fall of silver lace over an olive-green weskit, lime breeches in white calf boots. His blunderbuss was tilted carelessly up over one crooked elbow, for he trusted to the iron-shod hoofs of his hunting stallion to smash the rebel into the muck of the valley. He was a portly, floridly handsome man of some thirty summers, and he would not live to see the sun rise again.
Revel turned at bay. He was just under the overhang of a short cliff, on his right hand a swamp, on his left a pack of approaching hounds, and before him the squire on his upreared horse. He had just boosted Jerran up to the cliff's edge, and the little man was scrambling away, calling to him to follow; but there was no purchase for his fingers, and the thing was too high to jump, at least in the brief moment he had. So he was brought to bay.
The Mink drew his daggers, his fangs of Ewyo's more or less generous bestowal. The horse poised an instant before bringing its mallet-hoofs down on his head, and Revel leaped in and thrust—hands together, knuckles pressed tight, so that the blades drove deep into the flesh just below the rib cage of the stallion, their points not two inches apart. Revel jerked them apart and out, and the horse contorted and writhed together in a thrashing heap and came down, its blood hissing out from a foot-long gash. The squire, unable to realize what was happening, fell sideways on top of the Mink, who stabbed upward blindly as he rolled away from the dying horse. The squire took one dagger in the groin of his spotless lime breeches, the other just under a silver button above his heart. The world shut out for him in pain and terror and a loud, broken screech.
Revel fought out of the tangle of limbs and crumpled corpse, shot to his feet in time to meet the charge of a pair of slavering hounds. He knew he was done now, there was no more running for the Mink, and he cursed his fate even as he blessed whatever power had sent him so many gentry to be pulled down with him. The dogs leaped, one died in mid-air and the other carried him down once more, its lean teeth snapping off a patch of hide and muscle from his shoulder as its guts poured free of its body through a frantically-given wound. Revel was up again, shaking himself, grappling with a third hound whose knowledge of men made it wary of his blades. It hauled away as he slashed at it, lunged for his throat, caught an ear instead, and coughed out its life as it was flung over his shoulder in time for him to run the next dog through the skull as it sailed at him.
He was bleeding like a punctured sack of wine, though the wounds were far from mortal. One ear lobe was gone, his left shoulder felt as though it had been scalded by boiling pitch, and his whole frame was stiffening somewhat from the myriad tiny cuts it had received. Revel was in his glory, although he counted his life in seconds now. The whole pack was not in the valley, these four dogs had not run with it, and only men remained. Yet above were the orbs, to take a hand if he should prove too mighty for the gentry's handling.
A squire galloped up, jumped from his saddle and came at the Mink. Revel blinked blood from his eyes.
"Rosk!" he said, grinning. Now the gods were kind!
The lean-jawed squire halted twenty feet away, presenting his gun to the Mink's breast. "A fine fox," he said admiringly, "a damned fine fox, but too vicious for the hounds. Die, Mink!"