Read Kender, Gully Dwarves, Gnomes for Free Online

would have been called in the
     faraway mountains of his homeland. Flint watched the eerie blue race of breaking
    clouds across the white mantle of the snow. He shivered, more from the memory of an old
     legend than from the cold. Behind him Tas's pipe faltered, then fell silent.
    In an odd little exodus, as soon as the snow had stopped falling, moments after the wind
     finally died, Tas's strangely assorted menagerie of storm refugees had filed past him into
     the night. Still, even after the last creature had left, Tas had continued to play, hoping
     that Tanis and Sturm would hear the pipe's music, feel the call of its magic.
    Magic! Flint thought now. The word felt bitter and hard in his mind. He told himself that
     he never had believed. Some wild coincidence, some quirk had led the animals to the
     shelter. It hadn't been, after all, any of the pipe's doing. Though he could still feel,
     in memory, the frightened race of the rabbit's heart against his palms, and later the
     confiding warmth of it where it lay against his foot. Nonsense! The poor little beast was
     too exhausted and frozen to care where it finally collapsed. He refused to remember the
     deer and the goat, the mice or the owl. He sighed and kicked at the blackened embers of
     the fire. We can go out and look now, he thought. He would not allow himself to think
     further. He did not want to consider what they must find.
    “They're home.” Tas's voice was oddly hollow.
    Flint turned slowly, the skin on the back of his neck prickling. “What did you say?”
    The kender's face was white, etched with weariness. But his eyes were bright with some
     pleasure or satisfaction that Flint did not understand. “They're home, Flint. They're
     back.” He put his pipe aside. Wobbling to his feet, he went to stand beside the dwarf. He
     was tired, but it was the best tired he'd ever felt.
    Flint peered out into the night. Two shadows intersected those pouring across the gleaming
     snow. They were darker and more solid than that weird blue flow. Snow ghosts?
    Shivering, the old dwarf squinted harder. Not yet! he thought triumphantly. Not yet,
     they're not! But one of them was staggering, leaning on the other.
    Flint grasped Tas's shoulders and hurried him back inside the shelter. “Stay here, Tas.
     STAY HERE. They're back!”
    Tas smiled and nodded. "Of course they're back. I TOLD you they were. They heard the pipe,
     they felt the magic -
    Flint! Where are you going?" Yawning mightily, forgetting Flint's warning to stay
    inside the shelter, Tas retrieved his pipe and jogged out into the snow.
    As he had for the past two mornings, Tanis leaned against the door jamb, smiling at the
     winter sun as though hailing a well-met friend. Beside him Sturm gingerly lifted his pack.
    “You're certain you are well enough to travel?”
    The youth nodded once. “Yes.” He was pale yet, but the dressing covering his wound had
     come away clean with its last two changings.
    “You did well, Sturm.”
    Sturm's solemn eyes lighted, then darkened. “No. I almost cost you your life, Tanis. I
     couldn't go on, and you stayed.”
    “I did. It was my choice. And,” he said quickly, forestalling further protest, “it was a
     choice, at the time, of freezing with you or a few yards farther on. Where you did well
     was in another place altogether.”
    “I don't understand.”
    “You are a good companion, lad, and one I would not hesitate to travel with again.”
    Plainly Sturm still did not understand. But he took the compliment with a notable absence
     of youthful awkwardness.
    In the silence fallen between them Tanis heard the beginnings of an argument between Tas
     and Flint that had become all too familiar these last two days.
    “There was no mountain goat,” Flint growled.
    But Tas was insistent. “Yes, there WAS. And not only that, there was a deer - ”
    “There was no deer.” Grinning, Tanis went to join them. "Flint, there WAS! You saw them.