LITMIR.BIZ

      ISBN 978-5-0056-4539-5

      Created with Ridero smart publishing system

      The knight of dreams

      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

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