Conway's Curse Read Online Free PDF Page A

anger, the innkeeper let go, and Kail landed unceremoniously on his butt. The sprite stood, spluttering his outrage and rubbing his abused backside.
     
    “What’s the big idea dropping me, you clod?” Kail straightened his oversized shirt and planted his fists on his hips as he glared at the innkeeper. “And get a lamp lit, will you? I think I bruised my left butt cheek.”
     
    The innkeeper hastily struck a sulfur match from a box nailed to the door frame and lit the oil lamp that was pinned to the wall beside it. Yellow light flared, almost but not quite masking the flashing green fire in Kail’s eyes.
     
    “Tion, are you all right?”
     
    “I’m fine,” Tion said, turning his head to look at the woman who still jiggled him. “I feel like a tossed salad, but it’s a hell of a lot safer up here.”
     
    The woman turned to Tion, got a good look in the bright lamp light, and shrieked. She dropped Tion and the skillet with equal alacrity and promptly fainted, taking out two chairs and a table as she staggered and fell backward. Tion landed on his feet, and the skillet landed on the innkeeper’s.
     
    “Em!” the innkeeper cried, hopping on one foot.
     
    “Tion!” Kail shouted, dodging the hopping innkeeper.
     
    “Guys?” Conway said, collapsing into a heap. Almost immediately, he began to snore.
     

     

     
    “ Yes , we’re really sprites,” Tion told Marvin, the innkeeper, for what must have been the eleventh time.
     
    “You’re too damn big to be sprites,” Marvin muttered for the twelfth time, clutching Em’s hand between his. Once she had revived, she became a perfect, if somewhat wary, innkeeper’s wife, directing her husband to set up a cot by the fire while she chivvied Conway out of his pack and told him to lie down. She even drafted Kail to stoke the fireplace.
     
    “Blame the Oaf,’” Kail replied, gulping beer from a large cup before handing it to Conway.
     
    “We had an accident and got bigger,” Tion explained.
     
    Marvin nodded. “I c’n see that, youngster, but it still don’t explain why you’d be fool enough to traipse around in the dark woods.”
     
    Tion sat on the edge of Conway’s cot, swinging his feet, distracted by how they almost touched the floor. At the mention of the woods, he looked up sharply. “Conway mentioned something earlier about the woods. I got the impression he was afraid.”
     
    “He was wise to be,” Em said, patting Marvin’s hand and standing to resume her innkeeper’s wifely duties. She filled Tion’s smaller mug—it had once belonged to her own childer—and poured another for Kail. “Them woods are anything but safe since the woof showed up and started chewing on things.”
     
    “What’s a woof?” Kail asked, sitting gingerly on Conway’s cot beside Tion. He leaned appreciably to the right.
     
    “Big hairy brute,” Marvin replied. “Long fangs and flashing eyes. Kinda like his, only they’re red and not green.” He nodded toward Kail, who belched loudly.
     
    “Oh, a wolf,” Tion said, sipping his beer. Behind him, Conway groaned, and Tion patted the not-as-big man’s arm sympathetically.
     
    Marvin shook his head. “No, a woof. Only comes out when the moon is dark.”
     
    “Were?” Tion asked.
     
    “How should I know where?” Marvin said, shrugging his shoulders. “I ain’t going out there and get my face chewed on.”
     
    Em shivered, and the ale pot splashed. She set it down and sat beside her husband. “It makes the most awful racket sometimes.” She looked at Conway significantly. “When you came scratching at the door, we thought….”
     
    Tion glanced over his shoulder at the heavy skillet that had been replaced on its peg beside the fireplace. He looked back at Marvin and Em. “Hasn’t anyone been able to do anything about it?”
     
    “Tion.” There was a note of warning in Kail’s voice. “We’re just passing through, remember?”
     
    “But—”
     
    “Exactly,” Kail said.