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The horses snorted, twitched their ears, glanced anxiously at the too close forest. People wrapped themselves in cloaks and nervously clutched weapons in their hands. The sorcerers looked the most calm, but their impenetrable faces, no, no, yes, had an alarming expression.

The first glimpses of dawn fell like scattered rays on a wide meadow and a gloomy, inhospitable thicket. And if in other places at first there was an ordinary living forest, and only then the border of Reeta rose, then here the lifeless world began immediately. Huge black trees did not hide behind the trunks of their brothers, they openly looked at the living. Red leaves swayed and rustled on their branches without wind, as if they were calling, inviting, pulling ...

A detachment of horsemen, consisting of thirty people, drove up to the Border at dawn. The people dismounted, hobbled their horses, and prepared to wait. The girl kidnapped from the palace was tied to one of the trees growing on the outskirts of the mea