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The monster winked at her with one glowing red eye and was gone. It didn’t even reach the open window, but climbed up the curtain and then crawled across the ceiling. Crossbows were fired at it, but it only showed its split tongue. It could never be caught again.
A frightened Janet cried. And Gloria couldn’t shake the feeling that the monster was still staring at her from the feasting table. Someone’s hands, covered with sharp golden leaves, were caressing her whole body, leaving scratches. The caress is like torture, but it is worth dying to feel it.
«If my people are uncomfortable with you, then I’m leaving,» the ghost-like woman turned to face the window. Behind her back, translucent snow-white wings were precisely rising. The lush dress looked like a wedding dress and the tiara like a royal tiara. Amaranta, if only it was her, resembled a fairy queen. A glittering train glided behind her through the dark space.
«Amaranta!» Gloria called out and went after her, but Angus grabbed her and pulled her tightly against him.
«How dare you!» Gloria wanted to be outraged, maybe even slap him. He’s so insolent, not even willing to let her go after her cousin. Gloria looked down and gasped. It turns out she had almost stepped through an open window high above the castle wall. She would have crashed. Angus had saved her from certain death.
He wasn’t going to explain to her what had just happened. And she more than needed an explanation.
«You’re not a healer, are you?» Angus asked suddenly. «You don’t know anything about herbs, do you?»
«No,» Gloria watched in horror as her hem soaked up the blood on the floor. There are so many maimed people here. And there doesn’t seem to be a healer in the castle. Angus mumbled something about how he’d wasted his relationship with the healers in the nearest village.
«There are some excellent healers in the village nearby, but they’re all a bit witches,» he lamented. «And if you let witches on your doorstep, you’ll be in a lot of trouble.»
«Why did you hunt such a monstrous creature?» Gloria was outraged. «How could you think you were so brave as to hunt monsters? You should have fought the giants!»
«What do you know of our harsh lands, girl?» Angus was angry about something.
What did she say?
Gloria noticed that the tapestry that stretched across the wall was dripping with knight’s blood. Instead of looking stained, it began to glow strangely. And on a ledge of the wall above the tapestry, some beautiful winged creature that looked like a golden-haired elf with green wings was perched on it. It was eating a pear, obviously stolen, from the dinner table, and laughing quietly, watching the people swarming below. The scene of Angus tearing the tablecloth into bandages and working as a doctor seemed funny to him for some reason. Gloria glared at the elf, and he caught her gaze. His eyes were seven-colored, iridescent and sparkling.
«I told you to bring your sword,» they seemed to inform her.
«There’s an elf!» Gloria wanted to denounce him in front of everyone, but the place where the elf had been sitting was suddenly empty.
«Naturally,» Angus muttered. «This tapestry is all woven by elves. Why are you so surprised?»
«I am!» Gloria saw that the elves were embroidered on the edges of the tapestry in gold thread. Only she didn’t mean an embroidered elf, but a living one. But he was nowhere to be found. But on the intricate tapestry in front of her, dozens of his copies were circling in a round dance and winking slyly.
The elf from the tapestry
It was hard to wait for everyone to leave the hall. Gloria wanted to examine the tapestry alone. It wasn’t until hours later that the hall emptied. Some gamekeeper had brought Angus an urgent message, and all the knights prepared to leave. Are they really going hunting again? And who were they going to hunt? Were they demons in the thicket? The disemboweled creature proved that demons can’t be killed, but apparently the warriors are empty-headed. They focus on physical strength, not wisdom.
Janet ran off to tear dragon apples and picked a whole bucket. Her fingers didn’t burn on the hot peel.
«It’s for self-defense,» she explained when Gloria caught her. «Dragon fruit is as good as a grenade. If the black fairies raid the castle, you can throw a dragon apple at them and they’ll explode.»
«Do you mean fairies?» Gloria shivered skeptically. She’d never seen a fairy in her life and never expected to meet one. Since the child believed in fairy tales, let her. It was commendable that Janet was looking for a means to defend herself. Gloria herself also grabbed her sword first and then went to catch the elf hiding on the tapestry.
There was no one behind the tapestry. No one was sitting or even hovering on top of it either. Probably the elf flew away after the knights?
Someone crept up behind her and pulled Gloria’s hair. She swung her sword blindly and seemed to hit someone. There was laughter instead of screams. It was unnatural, like coins clinking on the floor.
«Have you come to tear the tapestry?» A voice asked suspiciously, laughing.
«No,» Gloria would never have thought of that. The tapestry was gorgeous.
«All right, then!»
The speaker was in front of her face, not behind her back as it had first appeared. It was as if he had detached himself from the tapestry. Gloria stared and couldn’t believe her eyes. There was a real elf in front of her! Like in a fairy tale! He was dressed in all green. Green shoots grow from his caftan and even from his skin. On his golden curls he wears a green beret of leaves. Behind his back, thin golden wings glisten.
Wings! Gloria wanted to touch them. She reached out her hand, but the elf deftly intercepted it and brought it to her lips.
«I love courting young ladies!» He kissed her palm and then looked her straight in the eye. Gloria instantly fell under hypnosis. At first the elf’s eyes were as green as a spring meadow, and then they began to shimmer with seven shades of the rainbow.
It seemed to Gloria that the two of them were dancing on the rainbow. And then the rainbows multiplied, as if they were divergent bridges spanning the sky. Her feet slip. The elf was with her in flight. And then someone grim emerges.
Gloria struggled to wrench her consciousness from the tenacious tentacles of hypnosis.
«You are strong!«The elf praised, reluctantly releasing her hand.
«Am I strong? No one had ever said that about me before.»
She was usually described as graceful and fragile.
«I mean, you are morally strong. That’s what’s valued here.»
Gloria watched his wings flutter in amazement.
«Who are you? And what are you doing in the castle?»
«I live, of course,» the elf smiled disarmingly.
«And who let you in here?»
«It is count Angus, of course.»
«So he knows you’re here?»
«It is not exactly!» The elf was embarrassed. «You see, the thing is, I was brought here a few years ago along with the tapestry.»
«It is nonsense!»
There was no need for harmful fairies to be brought into the castle along with her luggage. The elf looked at her long and hard, and Gloria was embarrassed. He was too handsome to argue with. Why did she have to get into an argument with him? She could have made friends with him right away. Though there is a saying that friendship with elves is dangerous. It is especially for young girls.
«I’m Gloria,» she introduced herself.
«I know! I’ve heard what the knights called you. They’re all very nervous around here. They haven’t liked the company of beautiful ladies since Countess Amaranta attracted otherworldly admirers to the castle. I, on the other hand, long for female company, but the wicked Count banished all his wife’s ladies-in-waiting. You know she had maid of honor like a real queen.
«Amaranta has always been luckier than I have been,» Gloria looked at the elf and the tapestry. It seemed the tapestry was beginning to grow green shoots, as was the elf’s body. It must be magical.
«So you live on the tapestry?»
«It is inside it, to be exact.»
«But inside it is nothing but thread. And underneath it is a smooth wall, no secret passage.»
«There’s a whole state inside it,» the elf glittered his eyes enigmatically. «Look!»
He took Gloria’s hand and made it touch the tapestry’s woven pattern of turrets and fanciful elves’ houses. Gloria immediately felt dizzy. It began to seem to her that she was no longer standing in Angus’s castle, but at the gates of the land of the elves. A golden giant’s talking head was looking down at her and asking her something.
«Stop it! You’re messing with my head!» Gloria wrenched the elf’s hand away. «You’re trying to make me believe there’s something inside the tapestry.»
«Well, not inside it… but through it you can definitely travel far away from here to countries and areas that you humans consider to be off limits. The main thing is that once you’re there, no one realizes you’re only human, or you’re finished.»
Gloria snorted incredulously.
«Traveling through the tapestry is from the realm of fantasy, though it is like a map for a traveler through fairy tale places. Only the forest, the sea, and the nearby kingdom of Ilior are borrowed from the actual map. Everything else is fiction.»
The sea, too, was depicted as somehow strange, full of mermaids and watermen. And there was an inscription embroidered along the coast – the domain of King Seal. What cartographer could think of calling the Sea of Pearls that? And why does the tapestry itself look like a map? Something’s not right. In addition to images of terrain, magical or ordinary, the tapestry featured people and mythical creatures. The largest close-up was of a wedding of some kind. An elf wearing a crown was marrying a fair-haired girl.
«The tapestry changes over time,» the elf commented. «It originally depicted Angus’s wedding.»
«Who wove it?»
«They are Arachnas.»
«What are they?»
«They are fairies’ spiders.»
«Are they fairies? Where have you seen fairies?»
«Yes, everywhere!»
«I don’t believe it!» Gloria bit her tongue, remembering that she hadn’t believed in elves recently either. She saw one with her own eyes. Everything seems incredible until you see and touch it. By the way, she had never been able to touch the elf’s wings. Curious what they felt like?
Gloria dodged and caught the tip of a golden wing. Curiosity would do no good. The elf whipped her fingers painfully with the wing and flew away from her. Now he was hovering a few meters above her head, and Gloria stood below feeling like a bug.
«Come down! It’s hard to talk to someone when they’re hanging like a chandelier from the ceiling.»
«Promise not to pinch!»
«Okay, I didn’t know you were ticklish.»
Can you tickle someone’s wings, though? The elf flapped them gracefully, as if shaking off a mortal’s touch.
«By the way, why did you call me mortal? That was your voice, wasn’t it?»
«Aren’t you mortal?»
«Yes, but you made it sound like an insult.»
«It probably was, if you look at it from the elves’ point of view.»
His eyes sparkled slyly.
«Come on, let’s go for a walk!» The elf beckoned her over to the tapestry.
Did he really think it was possible to go inside it? From somewhere came the sound of jingling bells and clattering hooves, as if a cavalcade was galloping close by, but it was unreal. This is a feast room, not a road. The only horsemen here are woven on tapestry. Surely the sounds are just another obsession.
«I’m not going anywhere with you!» Gloria hurriedly removed the hand that the elf tried to grab behind her back. «You remind me of a crazy person! How can you walk on a tapestry? Only a madman could think of such a thing. I don’t believe you.»
«It is fine!»
The elf flew to the corner of the tapestry and suddenly froze on it with a golden vignette pattern. Gloria gasped in amazement. It seemed to be the same elf she had just talked to, and it seemed to be just a gold embroidered image of him.
The image suddenly came to life and winked at her.
«Are you delighted!»
The elf had already stepped down from the tapestry and was standing next to her.
«How do you do that?»
«It’s not a trick. It’s magic.»
That’s why she couldn’t find him behind the tapestry, though she could hear his voice. The little rascal was inside the tapestry, not behind it.
«So you’re a prisoner of the tapestry?»
«What makes you say that?»
«Are you a spirit inside the tapestry?»
«You are wrong again!»
The elf was toying with her and enjoying her reaction.
«Don’t pull that disappointed face! I didn’t screw you alone. I screwed everyone in this castle. Even Angus thinks I’m just part of the tapestry, and I’m really just a wandering elf.»
«Are there any wandering elves?» Gloria’s only ever met traveling peddlers in her life.
«There are definitely runaways! I’m a fugitive, but sometimes I have to be a lookout.»
«I don’t get it!»
«You don’t need to understand! I don’t need to understand with the ladies. I love to play with them, but not many survive after playing with elves.»
«I’m not just a lady! I’m a lady knight!» Gloria belligerently raised her sword, on which a lush scarlet rose bloomed again.
«Ah, old buddy!» The elf stroked the blade of the sword as if shaking hands with an old friend. The sword didn’t hurt him. I guess elves can’t be hurt. Or can they, but the sword doesn’t? Gloria was confused. She knew so little about elves that she was confused. Were there possible in the castle library some encyclopedia about the secrets and habits of the elves? But such reference books were unlikely to exist. If some scholar had compiled them, he must have cheated and invented them. After all, elves are unpredictable people. You’ll never understand them. Do they understand themselves?
Gloria understood one thing. It’s useless to threaten an elf with a sword.
