The fairy Aurora
The dragon was spitting fire from every one of its seven heads. The horse began to neigh and rear, so that our hero could not strike with his sword.
"Hold! This won't do!" said Petru, dismounting and seizing the horse's bridle with his left hand, while he held his sword in the right.
That plan would not do either. The hero saw nothing but fire and smoke.
"I'll go home—to get a better horse," said Petru, and he mounted his steed, and went away to come back again.
When he reached the place his nurse, old Birscha, was waiting for him at the court-yard gate.
"Ah, my son Petru! I knew you would be obliged to come back again, because you didn't set out right."
"How ought I to have gone?" asked Petru, half angrily, half sadly.
"You see, my dear Petru," the old nurse began, "you can't reach the fountain of the Fairy Aurora unless you ride the horse which your father the emperor rode in his youth; go, ask where and whose that horse is, then mount it and depart."
Petru thanked her for her directions, and then went off to inquire about the horse.
"May the light grow black to you!" said the emperor. "Who told you to ask me that? It must surely have been that witch of a Birscha. Are you crazy? Fifty years have passed since I was young, who knows where the bones of the horse I rode then are rotting? It seems to me that there's one strap of the bridle lying on the stable floor. It's all I have left of the horse."
Petru went off in a rage and told his old nurse the whole story.
"Just wait," cried the old woman, laughing. "If that's the way things are, very well. Go and bring me the piece of the bridle, I shall know how to turn it to some account."
The floor was covered with saddles, bridles, and straps; Petru chose the most tattered, rusted, and blackest, and carried it to the old woman, that she might do with it what she had promised. The old nurse took the bridle, smoked it with incense, muttered a short spell over it, and then said to Petru. "Now take the bridle and strike the pillars of the house with it.
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