White and red roses braided the frame of the mirror. The spiky stems were as if they were alive. They crawled upward like snakes. Janet thought she was dreaming. She was standing in her bedroom in her father’s castle in front of a huge mirror. The room was quiet and dark. And there was a battle going on inside the mirror. There was the scraping of metal against metal as the swords of the fighting men crossed. Horses roared beneath their riders and clubs and shields gleamed. Some knights wielded conventional weapons, while others deployed magic. Men fought against supernatural beings.

So this was a dream after all! Janet watched the battle in the mirror and tried to determine whom the crests belonged to? None of the families she knew had coats of arms with salamanders and roses. Some of the banners belonged to humans, some to supernatural creatures. The banners of men, meanwhile, had been trampled. Knights of flesh and blood were killed by warriors of fire. Flames invaded the battle as if spewed from a dragon’s mouth. Standing close to the mirror, Janet felt its heat. Is it possible to feel heat in a dream? What if this wasn’t a dream after all? The girl reached out to the mirror, hoping she wouldn’t run into the glass barrier. Then it would turn out that the ornate frame was just a window to another world.

Before Janet could touch the mirror, the rose thorns dug into her hand until it bled. The blood on her fingers was real, and the pain of the scratches was real, too. So this was no dream!

One knight suddenly stood close to the mirror on the other side. He was looking directly at Janet. The girl flinched. He had such eyes! Like green pools in which you were about to drown. The face was covered by a visor, and the helmet itself was made in the shape of a dragon’s horned head. Surely this knight was not human. But why was he fighting on the side of men?

Who are you?» she tried to ask the question out loud, but her voice was drowned out by the noise from across the mirror. The fire was devouring the bodies of the vanquished. And the knight, as if he had emerged from that fire, held out his hand to Janet. His gauntlet almost touched her, but the roses that braided the mirror clenched and hissed. They wouldn’t let him in. Janet’s blood was on their thorns. And behind the mirror there was already a wall of fire.

«You want to see me in reality, not in a dream?» The knight’s voice was muffled. It sounded from beneath his visor, and it seemed as if the dragon depicted on his helmet was speaking to her, not he himself.

Nevertheless, Janet looked into his eyes and knew that she wanted to see him always.

«Yes!» she answered. Her voice, as before, was drowned in the noise of the fire, but the knight heard her.

«Then set me free!» His hand, encased in a heavy gauntlet, caught her arm and squeezed it until it ached. Janet even cried out. How strong he was! Why couldn’t he free himself if he was so strong? He reeked of power and fire. He managed to tear the stems of the roses, step over the frame of the mirror, and embrace Janet. His embrace lasted even less than a moment. The girl realized she was not in the arms of a man, but of a pillar of fire. Her skin was burning. Now she was going to burn!

And that was the end of the dream. If only it had been a dream. Janet awoke at dawn. The larks were singing outside her father’s castle window. And the girl’s arms were blooming with burns and pricks from rose thorns.

So was it a dream after all, or not a dream?

Flaming legends

The girls played ball in the meadow. It had recently become a local pastime, except for tournaments. Some pedlar brought balls here and showed them how to play. Several years had passed since then, and the game had taken root here as if it had never been played before.

Janet remembered that boy. He was as red as autumn, with pointed tips of his ears sticking out from under his green beret. He carried a heavy box of merchandise behind him, sometimes showed tricks, and smiled sweetly at everyone, but he only winked at Janet.

«They say elves walk in a circle in those hills,» Nyssa tugged at Janet’s sleeve and pointed farther away, to where the sun was setting. «They walk in those hills over there! The wanderers saw them, and then they died. Elves are rumored to be dangerous to mingle with. They will charm you and then destroy you.»

Janet watched the flaming sunset, and it seemed to her that the silhouettes of flame dancers loomed on the hill, making a strange round dance with abrupt unnatural movements.

The girl shook her long braids. To her, it just seems. The flame dancers in the hills are nothing more than a play of light and shadow. The sunset is the same shade as these figures – it’s easy to see where anything comes from.

«People who fall under the spell of the elves,» Nyssa went on, «develop green skin, a poor appetite, insomnia, and nightmares. They even suspect that they see evil spirits everywhere. They do not live long. They wither and die quickly, as if someone had drained them of all their strength.»

«Has that ever happened to anyone you know?» Janet raised an eyebrow mockingly, glancing sideways at her talkative friend.

«Of course not, God forbid,» Nyssa said with a prayer that she didn’t think it would happen to anyone we knew. After all, the creatures of the forest and the hills can drink all the blood out of us…

«You speak of it so well, as if you had seen it with your own eyes.»

«I only heard with my own ears,» Nyssa protested without mocking. «And you, if you weren’t so proud and talked to the boys from the next town, you’d have heard things that would give you the creeps.»

«I don’t believe it!» Janet said dryly, not really wanting to admit that her father was trying to keep her out of the castle and limiting her communication with anyone he considered unworthy of his daughter’s company. Nyssa, for instance, if she said anything of the sort in the presence of the old earl, she would immediately be chased out of the castle. And she’ll never be Janet’s maid of honor again. Maid of Honor! Normally, only queens have maid of honor. But the local feudal lord was like a king to the surrounding peasantry, so it didn’t seem strange to anyone that his daughter had maids of honor. In fact, her father wanted to surround her with a lot of boisterous girlfriends so that she wouldn’t go anywhere, as her mother had once done. Chatty girls would be sure to denounce her if any stranger started seducing her and asking her to go away with him. Nyssa would call such a daredevil an elf from the woods. And more reasonable people called them either kidnappers of married ladies or desperate hunters for a bride with a dowry.

Janet wanted to believe that her mother had been kidnapped by some king and held by force in his court. It was easier to think that way than that her corpse, which had long ago been stripped of all its jewels, was resting in some wooded hollow.

Officially, Janet’s mother was considered dead, not a runaway. But that didn’t make her father feel any better. He grew older by the day. At forty-something, he already resembled an ancient old man, his hands ringed with signet rings. He was constantly afraid that something might happen to Janet. But the girl was in her eighteenth year, and nothing untoward had happened to her.

«Seventeen years of careless living is no guarantee that in your eighteenth year you won’t be tested?»

Who said that? The voice was thin and hoarse, like the cawing of a crow. Janet noticed that the girls were no longer playing ball, because the ball rolled right back to her feet. It looked as if a trail of blood stretched across the grass, but it was just a trail of sunset glow.

«At your eighteenth birthday you can even die!»

This time Janet looked up to the branches of the tree from which the voice had come. There sat a bird, all black. Only a few feathers in its tail and crest were as colorful as a rainbow.

What kind of bird was it? It was neither a crow, nor a peacock, though its tail was very long and lush. Its forehead burned with something that looked like a third eye or a jewel! Janet didn’t get a chance to look at it, as she was required to pick up the ball and continue the game. She had to defer to her friends. The girl stubbornly refused to call them maids of honor. She was not, after all, a queen. Even if illiterate peasants did not know the rules of the royal court, but she had read a lot and learned everything.

«Don’t get your train caught on the edge of the magic realm!» a bird cawed angrily as Janet’s train got stuck in the roots of a stump that didn’t seem to be there a second ago. The girl barely managed to free the brocade cloth, but a flap was left on the roots. The bird cawed defiantly, and either the eye or the stone in its forehead glowed red.

It was all sunset games! Janet raised her ball, and almost jerked her hands away. It seemed to her that from the ball the face of the pedlar who had once brought the game to the castle was smiling at her amiably. The illusion lasted only a moment.

Janet went to her girlfriends, but the sensation of holding someone else’s head in her hands only intensified. Nyssa made her play with everyone. Janet was quickly out of breath and tired. What kind of game is it to flip the ball from hand to hand? But the girls laughed merrily, catching it. They enjoyed the game as much as boys enjoy spears and swords.

Janet remembered the mirrored shields of the imps that she had seen in her dream fighting earthly knights. What a dream that had been! She was still terrified to remember. She must have dreamed it all because of Nyssa’s chatter, and also because of the stories of two travelers who had spent the night in the castle not so long ago. Over dinner, they told many tales of the strange creatures of the forest they had encountered along the way. They could, after all, make up stories to amuse their guests and thus work off their overnight stay. But how dark her father became when he listened to their stories! It was as if he knew something he had never spoken of.

Elves in the woods! Roundabouts in the hills! Janet looked away, to where the edge of the forest was black on the horizon. It was forbidden for anyone who lived in the castle to go there. Allegedly, there were a lot of wild animals there. But then why didn’t people go there to hunt anymore? Janet remembered that in her childhood, when her mother was still alive, they often went hunting in the woods and came back with game.

Only once, instead of the usual carcasses of fallow- deer and deer, the old knight brought an unusual creature to the house. It spoke even after it had been gutted. It complimented her mother and even sang. Not long after that, her mother disappeared. All Janet was left with was a locket of her portrait, which she wore around her neck. That was all!

It was sad that other girls of her age had living and caring mothers and she no longer did. Her father, too, seemed only half alive. He had become moody and taciturn and withdrawn ever since his wife had disappeared.

«If I could only find their kingdom, I would blow them all away!» said he to someone on the night of his mother’s disappearance. Janet got out of bed then and eavesdropped under the opened door. Her father had a visitor who had a bad reputation in the nearest town. He was even nicknamed the foul trapper or inquisitor, but he returned all the gold he had paid to his father because he could not help him. He was stern, but honest. Because he returned from the woods without the countess, the purse of coins was also returned. The gold jingled on the table. A circle of tiny figures danced in the fireplace.

«Come to us!» They called to Janet. She stared only at them, hardly listening to what her father was saying to the trapper. Only one phrase stuck in her memory.

«I would destroy them all, if only I could find their kingdom among the forests. But no one can find them!» Some scrap of paper in a woman’s delicate handwriting fell from his fingers. The earl made a fist of his strong arm, which was gleaming with precious rings like armor. Since then, his hand had grown flabby and wrinkled like a dead man’s. The only thing that reminded him of his former strength were his rings. They bore the insignia and seal of his noble house. Her father never took them off. It was as if those rings were the only talisman against those voices that supposedly called to him from his window at night.

The grass lapped beneath Janet’s train. A black bird was flying behind her now in the height of the sunset sky. The other girls had spotted it, too.

«It was following us like a pesky cavalier,» one of the girls joked, and everyone else laughed in unison. Janet didn’t laugh.

«It followed me, not you,» the earl’s daughter wanted to say, but said nothing. Why spoil the mood for those who were having so much fun. She herself suddenly felt cold and was frightened. And it’s May, after all. Now was not the time to be shivering from the frost.

The cold spread from her fingertips to her whole body. Janet walked through the blooming meadow and froze. And a bird cawed overhead, as if laughing.

«Catch!» The ball would have hit her chest if she hadn’t put her arms forward. Janet caught it deftly, and again she thought the ball was the head with the smiling face of a redheaded boy she hadn’t seen in years.

The girls looked at her in amazement.

«Why don’t you throw the ball?» Nyssa asked.

It seemed strange to them. Janet had been looking at the patterns on the ball for a minute. The girls only noticed the golden patterns. She, on the other hand, saw a smirk and boyish features in them.

Twenty incomprehensible pairs of eyes were fixed on her, and Janet didn’t know what to say.

«Aren’t you sick?» Nyssa moved cautiously toward her to feel her forehead, but suddenly everyone was distracted by a sudden apparition. A scrawny young man with a box behind his back was striding down the path, flaming in the sunset rays.

«Quentin!» the girls exclaimed cheerfully, and rushed toward him. It seemed as if they were about to kiss him, but they only began pushing to look at his luggage.

«How do they know him?» Janet wondered.

«He’s a successful trader in town. You don’t go there,» Nyssa scolded her, «otherwise you’d meet a lot of interesting young men.»

Janet caught sight of the pedlar and was taken aback. This was the same redheaded boy who used to sell ribbons and fabrics. He’d grown surprisingly fit, but the pointy tips of his ears still stuck out ugly from under his red hat. Apparently he had already sold his green velvet beret to someone. So his name was Quentin! She couldn’t remember his name, though. But she well remembered his impertinent, mocking look.

When the other girls had sorted out the goods they needed, the guy beckoned Janet to him. She approached only to look at him, not to shop. She had enough of the dressy belts, signet rings, and ribbons in the castle. She didn’t need any more. And you can’t carry that around in a lifetime, even if that lifetime stretched for centuries.

«There are girdles, buckles, belts, buttons, beads!» Quentin offered his wares to the others, but he would not describe them to Janet. He merely took her hand and put it to his lips, as only a nobleman should do. It was fortunate that the others did not notice. They were too engrossed in picking out things. Quentin even had mirrors and boxes in his box. Nyssa bought a mirror with the gilded face of some goddess on the back. It was just gorgeous.

«Did you steal it?» Janet whispered softly. She watched Quentin’s face curiously. He was very nice, handsome even.

«I don’t steal anything. But sometimes they give me something. Not people! There were other, not greedy gentlemen!»

What nonsense he was talking! Janet would have walked away from him immediately if she hadn’t enjoyed looking at him. He had unusual clothes, and the freckles on his cheeks were folded into a whimsical pattern, as if they were gilding rather than freckles.

«This is for you!» He pulled a fancy bracelet out of his pocket, not from the box, and held it out to Janet.

«But I wasn’t going to buy anything,» she protested.

«And you don’t have to! I’m giving it to you. It is a token of friendship.»

You can’t be friends with commoners and strangers. And Quentin was both. The father would have objected to such friendship. But Janet was enchanted by the bracelet. It wasn’t made of gold or silver, some kind of orange metal that looked like the setting sun in color. And it was made in the shape of dancing orange figures. They joined together in a bracelet, as if in a circle. Janet didn’t even dare touch the bracelet.

«Who forged it?»

«It isn’t important! Take it!» Quentin insisted. «Wear it all the time.»

Where do they make such things? From what distant kingdom did Quentin bring it? Janet didn’t dare ask that, because the redheaded young man was already flirting with the other girls. It makes sense, after all, they are customers who pay coins for the goods, and the earl’s daughter was only bribed with a gift so that she would not interfere with others’ choice of goods.

The bracelet wrapped around Janet’s wrist like a fiery ring of whimsical, tiny figurines. Though it seemed fiery, it didn’t burn her skin. Even touching the burns and scratches left by the strange dream, the orange metal didn’t hurt. Janet contemplated the metal figures. They were dancing in different poses. Some were winged, some were horned, other had tails, other were reptilian-like. But as a whole they all formed a fairy-tale circle. And that circle was now wrapped around her hand. Quentin was to be thanked.

But he was long gone. Janet looked up from her bracelet and saw that the young boy was gone. He was gone when the last light of sunset faded, as if he’d vanished into thin air.

The magic bird

This bird had no black feathers, no jewel in its forehead, but it sang so sweetly that Janet did not hesitate to follow it to the creek in the morning, while everyone in the castle was still asleep. Dawn played in the bird’s feathers with iridescent reflections. Janet didn’t know what to call the bird either. It looked like a peacock, but peacocks don’t have seven-colored iridescent feathers and such a fluffy tuft on their heads. Janet had never seen such a bird before.

A bird flew onto her balcony in the dawn light and called after her.

«Call her Rainbow,» someone whispered in Janet’s ear. But who was it? Was it a mischievous page boy? Janet turned around and saw no one behind her. It was strange, because the voice sounded so close. She couldn’t have imagined it.

Just as it didn’t seem to her that the bird’s singing was sometimes human. The latter hardly surprised Janet. There were talking parrots in the castle’s birdhouse. True, their voices were hoarse and speech was poorly understood. But, perhaps, there is a breed of bird that can produce melodious phrases in the human language, only barely alternating with a chirp.

Janet listened as she followed the bird, and before she knew it, she had stepped her feet into the flowing water. It was a spring. It was almost at the border of the forest. All she had to do was cross the meadow to get to the edge.

There was no further to go. Janet remembered the horror stories about the forest. People disappeared there. Not just frail women, but well-armed knights would simply disappear on a hunting trip.

The bird sat on a branch of a willow tree and began to peer at Janet with her unusual orange, sparkling eyes. The girl looked closely and noticed that the bird’s eyes also changed color, as if repeating the color of her seven-colored feathers. There were as many tones in the rainbow as there were in her plumage.

Janet got as close to the willow tree as she could and reached up, but the bird was sitting too high. She barely managed to touch the tip of its fluffy tail.

«So who are you closer to, the peacocks or the birds of paradise?» Janet joked.

«It is closer to the rainbow ones!» A voice behind her answered. «There are a lot of rainbow birds in the forest kingdom of Medea Shai, but there are blackbirds in it too.

Who said that? Janet turned nervously over her shoulder. There was no one. She looked around. Meadows and fields and sparse trees with trunks so thin a child couldn’t hide behind them. The voice seemed to be that of a child. The children in the castle had long ago been taught not to be naughty. None of them would dare follow their mistress and tease her. Could there be another bird circling nearby that could talk coherently?

Janet looked up into the sky. No birds in sight either. The bright dawn rays hurt her eyes. But in the waters of the spring, they highlighted every pebble in the bottom. It seemed to Janet that the stones in the water had taken on a rainbow of colors, too, and were now a blaze of seven: blue, green, yellow, orange, red, pink, blue. She wish she could collect them all. Good if they don’t lose their bright coloring when she pulls them out of the water. After all, it might just be a game of light. Janet soaked her feet and the hem of her dress. And it was, after all, her best outfit – emerald green, woven with gold flowers and pearls. She wore it only because today important guests were to come to the castle. For the first time in years! The lace in the front helped her put it on without the help of the maids, who were still asleep. Usually they woke up before the sun had risen, but today seemed to be a special day.

Perhaps an unusual bird had been sent here from a delegation of guests, like a carrier pigeon. That would explain why Janet had never seen such a bird before. If it is not from these parts, there are no such birds here. True, there was no message attached to the bird’s leg, but at least the thought has common sense. It was better to think so than to think the bird was complete magic.

She sat over the spring like a living rainbow, watching Janet’s every move. The girl bent down to fetch the stones from the water, but she could do nothing. The stones slid in her fingers like water. They could not be pulled to the surface. It was like catching the water itself. Only once did Janet manage to catch a sharp pebble with her fingers and pull it out of the water. Examining it, she wondered. It was not a pebble, but a key. It was very unusual. Its head was in the shape of a sun and its teeth were curved underneath, imitating tongues of flame. What a find! Surely this key can’t unlock anything. It looks purely decorative. Was it made by nature, like a nugget or a lump of gold? Or has some fairy lost it? Then one can explain why it is so unusual.

Clutching it in her hand, Janet looked into the water and noticed that there were many more such keys in the spring. Unlike the pebbles, they were easily fished out. They were all as unusual as the first, but slightly different. One had a crown-shaped head, another in the shape of a sickle of the month, a third in the shape of an apple, a fourth in the shape of a doe’s head, and a fifth in the shape of some fantastic flower. Janet collected more than a dozen of them. Who could have scattered them in the spring?

«Now I have a handful of keys that don’t unlock anything, apparently…» Janet stared at the findings. Indeed, where would there be such unusual doors to which all these wonderful-looking keys would fit.

As she collected them, she moved along the stream, and lo and behold, the woods were quite close. The clearing was black nearby, and danger was coming from there.

«Go into the woods!» Suddenly a rainbow bird sang. «There is someone waiting for you in the forest!»

Janet looked at it in amazement. Now the bird’s trill sounded so much like a human voice, as if it were a girl singing, not a bird.

«Go into the woods!» The bird flew down from the willow tree and soared over Janet’s head, covering the sun with its wings. «In the forest kingdom there will be doors to which all the keys will fit.»

But it’s the woods where you can’t go! It’s dangerous there! Everyone knows that! Janet had so often been frightened by stories of wild beasts bullying to death people who wandered into the thicket.

«Follow me!» The bird sang, circling over Janet. «Follow me! Come right after me! You won’t regret it!»

Janet clutched handfuls of keys in her palms and did not know what to do. The bird, seeing her indecision, descended quite low, catching the lush tail on the girl’s cheek. Before Janet could dodge, the bird nimbly pulled the satin ribbon from her hair with its claws. Even magpies aren’t that adept at stealing.

The bird must have assumed that Janet would surely follow her to retrieve what she had stolen. What an intelligent creature it is, however. Nightingales, white peacocks, and even the talking parrots in her father’s castle were not so intelligent.

Janet wanted to go into the woods, but she didn’t. It wasn’t wise. Besides, the guests would be arriving by noon. She wanted to talk to them, to ask them how life was going from here to there. As she left, she had the feeling that someone was waiting for her in the woods. It was not a bird at all. Some creature in a mask of leaves was peeking out of the thicket, or so she thought when she turned around.

A shadow lay across the meadow, as if some chariot was racing straight across the sky on winged horses. The shadow certainly looked like a chariot, but why would there be one in the sky? It was all just a dream. Janet knotted her golden-red braids, intertwined with pearl threads. They were heavy and long, and the ends were wet in the stream. Her hair grew faster than all the other women’s. Her braids almost reached to the hem of her dress, and if she braided them, they would be even longer. Her maid tired of inventing elaborate hairstyles for her to style the unruly mass of strands. It was said that Janet’s unusual hair color was a sign that she had been chosen by the fairies. Her father would fall into a rage upon hearing this phrase. Once he even pounded his fist on the table and shouted back loudly that Janet was his daughter, not someone else’s.

As if a fairy’s daughter could take root in the castle! Janet remembered that as a child her hair had been of the usual brown color, and only began to redden as she grew older. Now it looked like the color of the sun.

Involuntarily Janet wondered; what color was the hair under the helmet of that knight who had appeared to her in her dreams. The dragon-headed helmet he had never removed. Maybe the helmet was his head. After all, it was only a dream. And dreams can involve many reckless things.

Tonight she dreamt of the knight again. He was all fire and called her with him, into the flames! And then she was awakened by a bird. A moment before she almost stepped over the mirror frame into the fire.

The dream of the knight had been repeated ten times. And each time it featured all the same things: the frame of the mirror, the flames, the rattle of metal weapons, and the excited voices of the magical creatures. This time they seemed to say:

«She’s coming! She will destroy us all!»

Their frantic screams lingered in her ears even after she awoke.

There used to be a woman in the village who knew how to interpret dreams and prepare potions of herbs for any ailment. If she is still alive, Janet must go to her. The last time Janet had seen her was when she was a child herself. Janet’s mother had gone to her for some herbal potion, which the herbalist gave reluctantly and demanded a huge fee for it. Even then the old woman was ancient, gray and frail as a dry twig, but, how much anger was in her gaze. She was not ashamed to speak rudely even to noble lords, and no one punished her for it. Apparently, her skills really were irreplaceable.

When Janet returned to the castle, everyone was still asleep. Even the sentries were dozing at the gate. How strange! It is nearing noon, and the inner chambers resemble a sleepy realm. And this before the arrival of the long-awaited guests! Usually at this hour, the castle was buzzing with the work of the servants like a beehive.

Janet noticed that the wattles of roses on the castle wall had grown unusually large. Scarlet and white! It seems they had only been white before. Their mother had planted them back in the day. They symbolized something, but Janet couldn’t remember what. After last winter they had withered away, and now suddenly they were blooming again. The withered stems were full of life again. There seemed to be a quiet rustling coming from the flowers, like a whisper.

«Don’t go there!»

Where? Janet was used to the fact that birds could talk, so could flowers. Barely had she gone up to her chambers when the people in the castle began to gradually wake up. Apparently, they were quite surprised themselves that they had slept through the afternoon.

Nyssa was the first to arrive. On a whim, she liked to help Janet arrange the heavy braids into her hair and hold them in place with turtle combs. She was even better at it than the maid.

«There you go! You must go into the town looking like that,» she suggested. «When the guests are gone, we’ll take one of the carriages and go to Rhodolit. It’s the nearest town.

«It’s dangerous to leave a guarded castle for no better reason than to go there,» said Janet shyly.

«Come, we don’t have to go through the woods. The knights in our guard know a much shorter way to Rhodolit.»

«Is it true that the town has long been impoverished, and that the jewelers who once made fine jewelry there have left?» Janet wondered.

«No, they haven’t! The city is thriving. It lives up to its name, which it got from the semi-precious stones they use to make intricate jewelry. But, apart from jewelers, there are many other entertainments there now. For example, not long ago, the greatest fortune teller sailed to Rhodolit from across the sea.»

12 3 След.

Tamlane – Prisoner of the queen of the fairies

The knight of dreams

Flaming legends

The magic bird

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