Read Online Tales of the Dragon's Bard, Volume 1: Eventide by Tracy Hickman, Laura Hickman - Free Book Online Page A

Pixies wore next to nothing, being naturally warm beings to begin with and not caring for the weight that clothing added when they flew on their diaphanous wings. They had a humor all their own and a penchant for theft. Everyone knew that to invite a pixie into your house was to open your door wide to trouble.
    BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
    Merinda knew that she should just walk away from the door.
    But . . .
    The image of the little creature, blue from the cold and shivering on her porch step, kept returning to her thoughts. Little crystals had formed in its hair, and its pointed ears had quivered as it stood before her. She could not shake off the image of its large, violet eyes staring up at her.
    Merinda considered herself a good woman. She visited the Pantheon Church weekly and had promised the Lady of the Sky that she would help those in need.
    She wondered if that included pixies.
    “Merinda,” she said to herself, “what a notion!”
    She turned back to the alley door and opened it.
    “You promise to behave yourselves,” Merinda said, shaking her finger at the pixie named Glix.
    “Whenever have we not?” answered Glix with a sly grin.
    “Promise me!” Merinda warned.
    “That we do, ma’am! We promise to behave yourselves,” Glix nodded in the affirmative as he turned to his fellow pixies. “Don’t we, boys?”
    Merinda had plucked more than a dozen pixies out of the banks of snow in the alleyway. They had not been particularly difficult to find, since they glowed in the snow, but all of them were literally frozen stiff into little pixie statues, which she had brought into her kitchen and, not knowing what else to do, lined up on her mantel above the hearth. She had then enlivened the fire with a pair of well-placed logs and, within a very short time, the pixies had all begun to come around.
    The other pixies on the mantel, who had now lost their blue chill to a more healthy red-brown color and were looking far too animated for Merinda’s liking, all answered Glix in the affirmative.
    “Behaving yourselves we will,” said Dix.
    “We’ve never behaved like yourself before,” piped in Plix, “but we’ll be doin’ it fer you!”
    “Just how long would you be liking us to behave like yourself?” Snix wanted to know.
    “I don’t think you understand,” Merinda said nervously. “You’re all feeling better, I see, so perhaps if I just saw you back out the door . . .”
    “Back into that ice?” Glix whined. “We fell out of the sky on account of that! You wouldn’t be doin’ that to us now, would you? Us being poor little creatures on a night such as this and all!”
    “No, I suppose not,” Merinda answered wearily.
    “Don’t you worry, love,” Glix said with another wide grin. “It’s be a party you’ll not soon forget!”
    In the first hour of the night, Merinda tried to organize a dinner for the pixies. Finding it not to their peculiar tastes, the pixies threw the food in the general direction of the cleaning basins and set out to make dinner for their hostess instead as Merinda worked furiously to clean up the meal she had just made.
    By the second hour, the pixies had spilled cornmeal onto Merinda’s floor as they were in the process of mixing up their cakes. This led to the almost immediate discovery that the combination of cornmeal and pixie feet allowed for a tremendous ability to slide across Merinda’s floor. Pixies being what they were, they immediately established rules and contests for one another regarding sliding across the floor on cornmeal, a distraction that kept them from getting their cakes baked for quite some time. Merinda grabbed her broom almost at once and began sweeping up both cornmeal and pixies in an effort to once more establish the cleanliness of her kitchen. Unfortunately, the pixies considered this a considerable challenge to their game and added new rules incorporating the broom into their play.
    By the third hour, Merinda had managed to put her