for sure. She’d already lost everything. It was her whole kingdom. Everything was now a stranger. She could only be glad that her head was still on her shoulders, as the minstrel who had once joked outside her tower window. He, too, had only the wind in his pockets and a harp, and he used to sit for hours under her tower, especially during sunset. Yes, her head was indeed still on her shoulders, and perhaps that was something to be glad about, but her conscience would not allow it. What good is that preserved head if there is nothing else at all.
«Do you think it would be much better if the natives deprived you of your mind?»
The voice didn’t come through; she was probably just imagining it. No one would be out there in the nighttime woods. Suddenly it was a woman’s squeaky voice, like a tiny fairy perched on the nearest driftwood.
And yet there was a point to what was being said. Rhianon knew from the tales of bards and the frequent arrivals at the castle gates that an encounter with fairy folk could drive a man mad. It was to be believed. In the castle, even the most innocuous spell had the power to take the mind of any court lady or gentleman. It often happened. Someone was thus deprived of an enemy, but sometimes there were occasional casualties. That’s the worst thing about witchcraft, you never know what powers you might summon and against whom they might turn.
You wouldn’t want to meet a creature that would drive you insane without even noticing it. Or maybe it was worth the risk, to see if everything was as they said.
Rhiannon looked around carefully. There was nothing but fallen foliage, tree stumps, and bare branches that weaved an intricate lace overhead so that the sky was barely visible. There was no movement, not even a remote hint that anyone was around, and yet her senses could not deceive her. There was life bubbling nearby. And it didn’t matter that there was silence all around. Even the sounds of an entire civilization could not excite her as much as what she felt.
«Come, come, we’re almost there,» her companion urged her on and on. He must have said that a hundred times, as if he believed that his words would determine how quickly they reached her.
«What is it?» As the forest landscape in front of them began to change into a cave-like darkness, Rhianon became worried.
«They are only abandoned mines,» said the companion nonchalantly, walking hurriedly down the rocky steps in the darkness of the cave. – Wouldn’t you like to find gold down there? You said you wanted to believe in luck.
«Wait, that wasn’t our agreement,» she didn’t want to go with him to the bottom of some forgotten mine, but she didn’t seem to have a choice; she wouldn’t be able to find her way back, and the green cap of her escort was already disappearing around the corner of the rocky staircase. Here’s the thing, it seems that not long ago it was a hat with bells, not a cap.
«Well, are you coming or not,» she heard from the depths of the ground, where the crumbling steps led. Rhianon looked back one last time; there the forest was behind her, and in front of her went down an impenetrable darkness, and that was where she had to go. She was afraid to step on the stairs carved in the cave, and when she did step, the darkness became impenetrable. It was as if something had closed in behind her, cutting off the way back.
«Hey,» she called out to her guide, but her voice was lost in the cave’s ramifications. No one answered her, only an echo, but not the usual kind of echo, a kind of polyphonic and multi-voiced, as if thousands of tiny creatures were laughing back.
Rhiannon moved forward, hoping to find her guide, but he was long gone. She groped her way forward, hoping to find her guide, but she soon saw him gone, his green cap lined with a single bell on one of the steps. Rhiannon bent down and picked it up, and suddenly the world around her was transformed.
It was still a cave, but no longer as narrow and cramped. The stairway carved in the stone was far behind her, and ahead of her was no mine, only a vast oval-shaped hall, surrounded on all sides by uneven walls of caves. Rhianon was standing in the very center of it. Strangely, it was no longer dark around her. The girl lifted her head and looked around. The vaults of the ceiling were invisible to her, and up there, there was no source of light at all; the light was coming from everywhere, from the very depths of the earth and at the same time, from nowhere. Rhianon didn’t even try to lift the hat that had come off her head, and her hair fell loosely to her shoulders. Something in her clothing was also subtly changing, instead of the stiff man’s clothes she now felt the touch of brocade against her skin, and a long turquoise train swirled behind her.
«Look in the mirror, my dear,» came the voice of her recent escort, though he was still out of sight.
«There isn’t a mirror,» Rhianon said indignantly, but she glanced around for the strange creature who had brought her here. It might be hiding somewhere. But above her head was a wisp of silver smoke. Sometimes she could see the shape of a face through the smoke. Here and there the smoke swirled, causing her to turn back and forth so that she couldn’t let it out of her sight.
When she turned around for him once more, her gaze stumbled upon the mirror. She froze in amazement. The lady whose reflection she could see full-length in front of her was dressed far more richly and elegantly than the princess she remembered. A turquoise dress with a tight corsage gracefully encircled her figure, flowing from her slim waist in clouds of iridescent brocade and seemed not to end at all, because the train lying on the floor stretched endlessly.
«Shall I make it a little shorter?» The voice asked sympathetically. And why would anyone care so much about her? Rhianon turned around to examine it more closely, and the train itself seemed to her like a living snake that slid across the floor.
And then she noticed several more mirrors in the walls and was struck, but not because they perfectly copied and multiplied her reflection. It was something else that caught her attention. The mirrors were magnificent, but not straight, as if granite had grown into the amalgam and frames, the pebbles were unevenly interlocked here and there at the edges, and seemed to be an integral part of these strange shining mirrors. They did not grow out of the walls, did they? But then why were they not even hanging tightly against the walls, but as if they were growing out of them, like fungus or other parasitic growths. And there are more and more of them, whichever way you look. So many recesses with mirrors made the room seem polygonal rather than oval.
«You look beautiful, your Highness,» the same voice said, and Rhianon noticed that she had a diadem in her loose hair and that the long locks of her hair were being gathered into a beautiful hairdo as if someone were setting them and pins the top of it with tiny diamonds.
«Splendid,» the voice went on, «I swear you are the loveliest lady that could have been here, and if we hadn’t been there in time you might have had your charming head cut off.»
«What do you mean?» she said the question with her lips, but the silvery smoke above her rippled, took on a fuzzy shape, coiled itself in a thin ring around her head, and disintegrated back into a myriad of sparkling sprays. And still, even if for a moment it split or disappeared, it looked like one living thing.
«I recognized you,» she remarked toward the swirling silvery dust that made up the smoke. Though the shape was different now, her recent escort’s voice echoed her remark with a laugh thick as smoke.
«You’d better watch yourself,» he advised her.
She did so, noting with pleasure that she liked it better than what she’d worn at Court, and not because it was more beautiful, the brocade gently warming her skin without arousing the firestorm in her veins. On the contrary, it was
