Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight TowerCopyright © 2020 by Tamsyn Muir. All rights reserved.

Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2020 by Tristan Elwell. All rights reserved.

Print interior design Copyright © 2020 by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.

Edited by Navah Wolfe

Electronic Edition

ISBN

978-1-59606-992-3

Subterranean Press

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

subterraneanpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

WHAT HAD HAPPENED WAS that the witch put Princess Floralinda in a tower forty flights high, but said it wasn’t personal. She told her to cheer up. “Princes will be flocking from near and far to rescue you,” she said. “I’ve covered all my bases. There’s a golden sword at the gates for a prize, if the prince doesn’t care overmuch for princesses, and once he battles his way up thirty-nine flights you’re free to go. I don’t really mind what happens from this point in.”

“I do think you might ask for a ransom from my mother and father instead,” said Floralinda, still dabbing at her eyes. “That’s quite normal these days,” (for she did not want to be rude and suggest the tower was déclassé).

The witch shrieked with laughter.

“You! No!” she said. “You have butter-coloured curls and eyes as blue as sapphires. The moment I saw you, I knew a tower was crucial. Witches are all slaves to instinct. This is a really commonplace cruelty for a thing like me,” she finished, modestly.

“But I think a tower so restrictive,” poor Floralinda persisted. “Why don’t you trade me to foreign kings, or sell me to a sorcerer?”

The witch accused her of having a low mind. “I am doing this for the art of the thing,” she said. “I’m certainly making nothing off this endeavour. Nothing about it is economical. The bottom flight is guarded by a dragon with diamond-encrusted scales. They say it’s a bad idea to put the most expensive one at the bottom, but I like to let princes know I mean business.”

“It sounds very difficult for the prince,” said Floralinda.

“Oh, horribly; I never skimp where monsters are concerned. There’s a different kind on each floor and I have picked them specially for abhorrence. I had difficulties with my princes-per-month rate the last time; I’ll be interested to see if I’ve corrected it. Now, Princess, no more questions—you wait patiently, and lock the door and don’t go down the stairs, because the flight below this one is filled with goblins (a sort of digestif, you understand) and they’ll tear you to pieces. I have left you a flask of water, a flask of milk, a wheaten loaf and a white, and an orange; and there’s a knife to peel the orange and cut the bread. That’s more than enough to be going on with. Be a good girl, and I imagine a prince will be along presently.”

With that the witch exited from the window, in the common way, and Princess Floralinda was left by herself.

At first, it was quite a nice experience; like going away for a seaside holiday, with strange rooms and unusual things to eat. The tower room was very clean and comfortable, with a wash-stand and chair and table and so on, and the bed had silver hangings and feather pillows, the latter of which Floralinda did not really like. There was a dear enamel hearth that was there for ornamental purposes, with a grate filled up with painted pine-cones, and a set of the sorts of things you might poke a fire with, only you wouldn’t want to get such a lovely little hearth dirty. There were a great many books that had most likely been picked to be on subjects princesses might like, such as Monarchic Positions on Economic Models and Feudal Estatehood, and a hoop you could embroider upon with a pattern and needle-and-thread and the tiniest pair of silver sewing-scissors. The pattern was of calla lilies and buttercups, and the buttercups had been embroidered already. Floralinda could look out the window and see the forest spread like a nice dark green cloak upon the land: forest as far as the eye could see, unrelieved by chimneys, or houses, or canals.

The water in the flask was always cold, and the milk in the flask never curdled and always had nice fresh yellow cream on the top, the sort that one only gets as a treat when convalescing. The wheaten loaf and white were always warm, and the orange perfectly sweet, with not too much pith. The witch had really been very careful. The flasks and the loaves and the orange would renew themselves obligingly once eaten or drank. Floralinda thought it humorous to see the orange-peel zipping itself back up when the last segment was gone, and bulging out again with fruit, like a balloon-skin being breathed into.

By sunset, no prince had come to fight the diamond-encrusted dragon and take her home. Floralinda was obliged to spend the night, then the next night, then the night after that. She had investigated her quarters thoroughly by then, and had begun to find peculiar things.

The furniture, for instance, while pretty on first glance, showed that it had all been put in damask covers with stained ones beneath; the wooden furnishings were old and dented beneath their fresh coats of paint and varnish. It was long past the time when your mother and father looked at it and said, This ought to go into the nursery; and even past the time when the nursery-maid looked at it and said, This ought to go on the scrap-heap. The thriftiest housewife alive would not bother to freshen up such rag-tag objects. There being no bath, Floralinda had to sponge her face and her hands with water from the cold-water flask, which was indeed extraordinarily cold and made Floralinda’s face come out in red patches, and did not show her very well in the old mirror with the silver-gilt peeling off behind.

Nearly a sennight had she stayed in these peculiar quarters, when suddenly—princes!

They came one by one, at first. The moment Floralinda heard horses’ hoofs she sat very shyly inside and did not peek out the window. She sat down on the bed and busied herself with Monarchic Positions on Economic Models and finishing a calla lily on the hoop, being a patient girl, and very well-brought-up. It would not be quite nice, either for the prince or oneself, if the prince made it all the way up the tower simply because he liked the look of one’s face.

But—and this was dreadful—he never made it up the thirty-nine flights to her, nor did he ever come out. There was a lot of noise from the bottom, and a faint sound Floralinda was horribly afraid was a dragon crunching him up. Her fingers were still plugged into her ears as she watched his horse shake free from the tether and plunge off into the forest.

But although she wept a little, and felt very badly over it, she did not have time to mourn him overmuch. A short time after the unfortunate first prince, two princes turned up; she knew they were both princes, for she had peeked out of the window and seen the glimmer of what must be coronets. They had a cordial discussion Floralinda could not hear, being as they were forty flights down and she forty flights up, but they were moving about each other in that unmistakable ‘You first, of course’ and that ‘No no, I insist’ as though standing before revolving doors at the hotel.

She was too high up to tell if they looked young and strong and handsome, and could only conclusively say that they were polite and good at queueing, but oh dear! whatever the case, they didn’t fare much better than the prince of before: the first prince was inside for hours, and then came that dreadful sound again, and then the second prince waited a few minutes for show before going in himself. There was no dreadful sound after that, which was hopeful, but—nobody came up, and nobody went out.

And hours after that came the sound of diamond-tipped dragon teeth dutifully crunching up princes (quite unfairly loud considering it was fully forty flights down from Floralinda), owing to the dragon taking a break and not wanting to risk indigestion, maybe.

But there was indigestion in its future. The tower became inundated with princes of all kinds. This high up it was impossible to distinguish tall ones from short ones, or brown ones from pink ones or other common colours of prince, but there was certainly a hubbub of them, and probably even some archdukes and earls. On the worst day they all crowded around before going inside, and after a bit of squinting Floralinda concluded that they were drawing lots. Each in his turn went in, and none came back out. Figures came in and out of the forest to take the abandoned horses. Floralinda did not stand out on the balcony and wave her handkerchief at them—she was simply not that type of princess—but she watched through a crack in the curtains.

It is dreadful to think that a prince has been crunched up by a dragon all in the name of rescuing you; but when fully twenty-four princes are crunched up by a dragon while trying to rescue you, it is another thing altogether. Princess Floralinda was deeply embarrassed. But by the time she had gathered up the courage required to stand on the balcony and say things like, “Oh, please don’t,” or, “Could somebody send for a ladder instead,”—the princes stopped coming, and she never got a chance to say them.

For if one prince being crunched up by a dragon is inspirational, twenty-four princes being crunched up by a dragon is cautionary. By the time Floralinda had become used to feather pillows and had read all of Monarchic Positions, which was easily over eight hundred pages in small type, and had grown sick of milk and wheaten loaf and white, and oranges, the princes had dried up. She had waited quite as patiently and meekly as any Griselda, and perhaps it had been a good thing that she had never emerged to greet her saviours, because her petticoats were extremely tired and her butter-coloured curls were growing limp.

This was not the only issue, though it was the most distressing. Once the princes stopped coming, something had begun to make an appalling noise. A low, bubbling howl sounded continually from the first floor of the tower, rattling through each rock and stair before it abruptly stopped. Then it would begin again, and every so often after that, and each time the noise grew more maddened and plaintive. Floralinda thought it must be the dragon with the diamond scales.

During the day, it made her feel very pensive. When it came at night, she began to feel afraid. It made all the other sounds of the night-time strange and unfriendly, in the way that an ordinary conversation, heard through a wall, can sound not like language at all; and at times it sounded as though it were happening right outside her door. Floralinda went to the door and turned the big, heavy key, and opened it just a crack, to hear: there was a flight of stairs, and down the stairs was a very empty, gnawing sort of darkness. The silence in that staircase was complete.

But then there came a scraping sound—like a cat wanting to be let in—far off, but not too far off; and having spent all her courage, Floralinda pulled the door closed and locked it all in a hurry. She did not sleep easy that night on the feather pillows or the musty sheets.

The discovery of the diary came as a total surprise. She had looked nearly everywhere, but not in the first place she should have looked, which was down the back of the armchair. If you have ever tried to find a good hiding-place in a sitting room, you would have known to check there; but Floralinda, it must be said, suffered a little too much from being good. The diary had been forced nearly to the bottom of the seat, which was her only excuse.

Its contents were written in a pretty, careful hand much like Floralinda’s own pretty, careful hand. The first pages after the fly-leaf were nothing but charts—Floralinda puzzled over these; afterwards, a series of tallymarks. The diary part started a few pages after this, and at first the entries were disappointingly nondescript, such as “Day twenty-two: cluster of godwits flying south” and on “day twenty-nine,” a sketch of a great many points on a grid. On day thirty—

A prince has come. I saw him quite plainly and waved to him from the balcony (Shocking! thought Floralinda) and his man held the destrier. I thought I saw the sword glint in the sunshine.

And at the end of the page: Now it is sunset and he has not yet come out.

Day thirty-two—

He did not come out.

Day thirty-three—

He did not come out. The sword glimmers at the gate. Why does it shine still, with such cheer?

Floralinda pored over the pages until there was really no daylight to read by, hastening past entries such as “I sicken of oranges,” and squinted her way to “Day seventy,”—

I was mistaken. The stars here are so different from my stars that I might be at the end of the earth. The prince will not come out. I am killed by bread. The golden sword at the gate has no heart. Each night the diamond-encrusted dragon howls its head off and nobody will shut it up, will nobody hear and come to shut it up

And then the entries stopped being dated; and the last entry read—

He did not come out. I shall go out the window. Remember me to my parents as their loving Princess Mellarose, good-bye.

Floralinda’s heart beat quite fast, and she had to lie down for a while.

THE WITCH HAD SAID that the flight below Floralinda was filled with goblins. The princess had never met a goblin, not even in a zoo, and could not accurately describe one. In her stories they had appeared to steal thimbles and lead pixies or fairies astray, and had never been illustrated as very large. In those days of interrupted sleep, lying awake in the grey darkness before dawn, she came to the idea that they might be bargained with. And if they might be bargained with, who knew but that the rest of the creatures might be bypassed somehow? This idea cheered her up so much that she scrambled around before there was really any light to see by, taking inventory of the whole room, trying to catalogue things that a goblin might like.

She had a pretty locket on a fine gold chain, one that had a complicated latch of old heavy gold that took quite a lot of pressure to release, which meant it wasn’t a good prospect in case she couldn’t get the latch off. She had two ruby rings (one ruby being of inferior quality), and a ring set with silver pearl, which her mother had always let her wear at parties because she had said it wasn’t worth much. She had a silk dress—really not at its best—and two magical loaves, a flask of milk and a flask of water, and the everpresent orange. She had a number of important, boring books and hangings of silver gauze. This seemed enough to offer even a very avaricious goblin.

Floralinda picked over these things and decided to try her luck with the loaves. The witch had said goblins, plural; a bread loaf might be pulled in half, and in any case it would then regrow, which could impress goblins in any plurality. At first she contemplated keeping one loaf behind, but decided that was greedy. She wrapped both loaves up and turned the key in the door. It made a loud, affronted scrape when she turned it, which seemed to rasp all the way down that silent staircase. The morning light from the window did not really penetrate that greedy dark. Princess Floralinda gathered her courage, took a breath, and started downwards.

The staircase was almost pitch black despite the spitting brazier at the bottom, which revealed a dark, musty passage onwards. This passage was of narrow stone, slippery and damp, filled with a fetid smell. Floralinda’s hands trembled on the greasy walls, which she did not want to touch, but she was frightened about the footing: it seemed as though at any moment her feet might shoot out beneath her, like taking a step on an icy surface with your skates still on. The sooty orange glow of the light hurried her steps, until she perceived that at the end of the hall, limned by another spluttering brazier, was her first goblin.

It was large—much larger than the pictures. It came up to about her knee, and was hunched and mottled grey. The bristling teeth and slime of the mouth shone clearly in the firelight, and it was naked. The big, black pupils seemed to take up most of the eyes, and they rolled madly in the light of the brazier. It looked transfixed. Floralinda said in an unused voice, “I am a princess, and will reward you—” before it went for her.

Its hunched back and purblind stare belied its quickness, as it was on her in a trice. She was knocked to the ground and became paralytic with fear and disappointment, and then merely with fear as the goblin’s long fingers came for her throat (she did not know that goblins are stranglers, and their teeth are just for chewing gristle and all the worst parts that you never want from the roast). Floralinda pressed the parcel of loaves at its face in a panic, but it was obvious that the goblin did not care for loaves either white or wheaten; it smacked the bread away. This meant it had parted company enough with Floralinda that she was able to kick out at the creature, and scrabble on grazed knees back down the corridor, shooting forward down that greased-up space like a lost bar of soap. The goblin scrambled after her, then chased her up the stairs.

It dogged her heels all the way upstairs—thrust itself inside her room before she could slam the door shut—and she slapped at its slavering face, rather ineffectually, as she was not a girl inclined to slap. The goblin bit her hand. Had it been a larger beast, this might have been the last Floralinda ever saw of her hand, but goblin teeth are rather like the spikes one finds on the mallet Cook keeps for preparing meat: sharp, most certainly, and quite unpleasant, but with little ability to rip or splinter. Floralinda snatched her hand back with a cry and unwisely slapped the goblin with the other hand, which it seized and bit in turn. This was really a form of cruel play for the goblin, like a cat with a butterfly. The only reason it had not called its fellows was because it knew an easy kill and did not want to share.

When she pulled the other hand free of its jaws, bitten red and bloody, it seized her leg out from beneath her and toppled her to the floor. Here Fate, who had previously been at other appointments with regards to Princess Floralinda, took pity. Floralinda grasped blindly for any handhold as she fell, and upset the little table with the flask of milk and the flask of water, and clattered the bread-knife down with all the rest. Somehow in her terror she got hold of the knife and slashed at the goblin.

It was a bread-knife, not a steak-knife; it did not do much more than leave scrapes. But this made the goblin smack Floralinda full in the face, and the shock of that blow scared her senseless, and she took the knife in both fists and thrust it as hard as she could into the goblin’s throat. It stuck fast. The goblin staggered away from her, long fingers clutching at the knife, gouts of grey and brackish blood squirting out onto her dress and her face; in affrighted pity—Floralinda had not taken any nursing classes—she seized the knife, and both goblin and Princess pulled it from the throat with a great sour arc of blood. The goblin lay flat, gasping and choking for breath, until with a moist gurgle it was still. Floralinda sat in her armchair and stared.

How long she stared, she did not know; she must have sat until the sun was quite set. In the thin evening light the goblin seemed very small and fragile. She started to cry. The crying grew really awful, with deep pulling breaths that made her heart feel as though it might jump out her chest, and she had to pinch both her cheeks until she stopped.

Floralinda dragged the goblin over to the window-sill—her hands bled terribly—and heaved it over the side. It was such a long way down that it seemed as though it would never land, though of course it did, and quite close to the golden sword. Floralinda was too high up to hear it go SPLAT, but she fancied that would have been the appropriate noise.

She bathed her poor hands in water, and though it was a really hopeless case, she took off her gown and sponged where it was muddy with goblin blood. Her last memory was of wrapping her hands in silver gauze from the hangings. Floralinda was too exhausted to recall putting herself to bed, or weeping herself to sleep.

FLORALINDA WOKE up with terribly swollen hands, with ugly red tooth-marks all over. They were so bad that she was obliged to pull off her little rings in a fright, as the fingers with rings on looked more purple than they should, and she was afraid that they would come off entirely, like lamb’s tails. It was agony to work the rings off. The room was quite sultry; she was a little feverish, and had to lie down with the flask of milk pressed against her forehead, to cool it. Her fingers were so thick and stiff that she could barely peel the orange, and of course she did not want to use the knife. She picked at the fruit without wanting it very much. What she really desired to do was to go back to bed and sleep and sleep, like the sleeping princess Briar Rose, who by all accounts had been very lucky. In the fairy-books, all Briar Rose had ever had to do was lie down the moment things got hot, and when she woke up everything had been done for her, which is a fairly universal dream.

Floralinda still had the flask of milk and the flask of water, an orange and a dirty knife, but she no longer had the loaf of nice white bread or the loaf of wheat. The white she mourned as she liked white bread better, but she knew vaguely that wheaten was more wholesome, with nutritious parts like the angiosperm. She also had an alarming amount of scabs and some wounds that weren’t closing over, but that bled whenever she moved her hands in the wrong way.

In the mild delirium of fever, it seemed to her really too awful that she had lost both loaves for the privilege of getting bitten very badly by a goblin, and then having to watch that goblin die, and then having to roll the same out of a window; it wasn’t remotely fair. For a princess who had previously thought of bread as the foodstuff you had to butter thinly and dutifully chew before you could concentrate on the nicer parts of the meal and then a pudding, Floralinda became quite obsessed with her lost loaves.

It was also true that although one might survive on an orange, milk, water and two kinds of bread, milk and oranges by themselves do not sustain a grown person. Floralinda woke the next fretful day with her hands just as sore and her stomach in anguish from oranges. The sky had grown a deep purple, and even from forty flights up the forest smelled like wet, waiting loam. It was stuffy and close in her room. Even after pressing the flask of cold milk to her temples, Floralinda’s head was still very hot, and ached; she longed for bread.

The thick, foggy air, like standing in someone else’s breath, refused to give way to rain. Floralinda’s head pounded. Her hands were really terribly sore. The mad longing for bread had become a fear of hunger. The more she seemed to think about it, the worse it got. This fear of starvation replaced the fear of what lay on the floor below, or at least started to convince her that a quick trip—the quickest of trips downwards, to retrieve that lost bread, wasn’t frightful at all, especially when the alternative option was dying of hunger. (Floralinda did not know how long it took one to die of hunger, and had reckoned it at about a day, notwithstanding the presence of milk and oranges.) She dressed herself in the gown that had not really dried out all the way, and found her bruised and broken hands turning the key once more within the lock.

Princess Floralinda crept very stealthily down those stairs, and went at a snail’s pace along that greasy hallway. It was empty. She stalled at each imagined scrape and each perceived breath, until she came to where the hallway widened into the room with the brazier, where she had found her first goblin.

There was no more goblin to be found—but no loaf, either. She was deranged with disappointment and relief and a secondary infection. If she had come this far, mightn’t she go a little farther? The room had two other hallways running off it—one that she thought must have gone around the tower’s edge, and one straight toward the centre—and she picked the one that led to the centre, which was lit by crackling, bad-smelling torches. It brought her to a small room which was altogether empty, but for a heavy trapdoor in the floor with an iron ring. Her hands were too sore to pull it, and even had they been whole Floralinda did not know if it would move for her. And so she stood there, hesitating, torn between fear of hunger and fear of being bitten very badly.

Snuffling, scuffling sounds drew her attention, and made the decision for her. With a certain fever-derived lightheadedness she hurried back to the first room, lit up sooty orange in the glow of those everlasting braziers; and when she peeked down the final corridor, the one that seemed to lead off around the tower, there in a little alcove sat two goblins, each one eating a loaf.

They were so bloated as to be nearly spherical, and awash with breadcrumbs. They must have been eating bread, and doing nothing else, for quite some time. Compared to the pitiful thing that had died with its grey teeth bared to her ceiling, Floralinda was transfixed again by how big these goblins seemed, how grimy and verminous and grey. There was another noise from further off down the corridor, and something that sounded a great deal like chittering (if you have ever heard two squirrels argue over a conker, you have heard this sound) and the goblins startled—at a third goblin, who had appeared from the opposite direction, and was now staring at Floralinda.

Its two gluttonous fellows turned their heads to follow its gaze. The whites of their eyes shone in the darkness, thin rings around enormous black pupils. They both dropped their loaves.

This time Floralinda knew when to run for her life. She took to her heels with three goblins behind her, squabbling away in their own guttural talk, hot in pursuit as she sped down the corridor and flew up the staircase. They were much quicker than she, but did not work well in narrow quarters together. She made it up to her room just as the two biggest goblins thrust the third out of the way, and they crashed very hard against her door as she slammed it shut in a trice. She turned its key and locked it, and all three banged and shrieked and clattered the handle.

A light rain had started to fall outside, pattering on the windowsill. This was so welcome that Floralinda went with her injured hands and pinned the window-sash up as high as it could go, so that the cool wet breeze could circulate through the room. Before long the banging and shrieking and clattering ceased, and the sounds of wind and rain were all that was heard in the room. Eventually, the princess thought the goblins must have gone away, and went to check.

But the goblins were possessed of dumb cunning, and in any case were not at all afraid of Floralinda. When she tremulously turned the key and peeked out—they burst in on top of her!

There were only two, as the third had grown impatient and trundled off. Floralinda ran to stand stupidly on the bed, like a girl faced with two rats; one goblin caught her by her long unbrushed butter-coloured curls and tugged, meaning to drag her to the floor as the first goblin had. She leapt from the bed in a fright, dragging it with her, screaming with the goblin’s hands stuck fast in her hair, and her scalp feeling as though it must depart from her head entirely; she wheeled about, blind with panic and pain, trying to tear the goblin from her head; she shouldered her burden to the window, slapping at it aimlessly until it let go and fell from the sill. This would not have accomplished much except that it fell from the sill outwards, which made it, a few seconds later, the second goblin to die very close to the shining sword.

The other goblin—full of bread, and warier—turned and scampered back to the doorway, perhaps to go and call for more of its kind. In a panic Floralinda flew after it. She caught up with it just as it reached the head of the staircase down, and not knowing what else to do, she gave it a good push to the hunched shoulders with her foot. As she watched, it tumbled down each steep stair back to floor thirty-nine, which had the effect of breaking its neck.

Princess Floralinda then had the presence of mind to turn the key before being sick. She also had the presence of mind to be sick in her chamber-pot rather than anywhere else, which would have added insult to injury. She was ill until she could not bring up anything else, just nasty-tasting froth; then she sat on her bed. Her heart beat fast, and her brain beat faster. The rain had turned from a nice light pattering sound to a thick pelter, and this heralded a storm. The room shook with a full basso profundo of thunder—a deep, throaty roll somewhere quite close—and though the rain splashed in over the sill to the floor, Floralinda did not pull down the sash, but stood at the window as the storm broke over the trees and the tower, and stared down guessing at what must be the remains of her fresh dead goblin and its less fresh colleague. She stared out the window; she stared at the sky, and the feverish purple clouds; she stared down at the ground until she couldn’t look any more, as it wasn’t very nice. If you have ever stood at a great height in the rain, with a storm breaking all around you in a very effervescent way, you will know that it is a good time for having Ideas, even if you are a princess.

If Princess Floralinda had been the type of princess who got very still and pale when she was frightened, things would have happened differently. But she was the sort who shrieked and tried to run in three directions at once, which had exasperated everybody who had tried to teach her to keep a good seat on a horse. It was due to this, along with the Idea, that she unlocked the door and crept once again down the long steep flight of stairs to floor thirty-nine, bread-knife brandished woodenly before her, stepping over the dead goblin without much thought.

She retraced her steps to the alcove where the goblins had been eating her bread. There were no goblins there now, but there were the loaves, a little shabby but recognisable. She pulled a chunk off the white to press into her mouth immediately, but then thought better of it. Instead, Floralinda crept back to her room, crumbling bits of both the white and the wheat—just in case the goblins had a preference—to form a trail behind her, though being fresh the bread didn’t crumb very easily. Both loaves refilled themselves in her hands as she tore pieces off them, so that by the time she was back in her room they were as fresh and as whole as they had ever been; and she did not lock her door, nor did she even close it. She made a path of bread all the way to her window, then strewed more around the sill, just in case. Then she stuffed both loaves safely down the back of her armchair in an unusual access of good sense, and she hid under her bed.

The storm raged outside, and occasionally in through the window. Every so often there was a flash of lightning that lit up the whole room in hot white light, and then the answering peal of thunder to show how far away the storm was (each second counts for a mile; this is the truth, and you can check with a teacher). It did not die down after the sun set, but in fact got noisier. Floralinda’s plan came to fruition when two goblins crept into the room, very cautious, peering at their surroundings in the dark; though goblins have excellent night vision and a keen sense of smell, it was raining furiously and the fact that Floralinda had been sick earlier confused the scent. They did not seize on her beneath the bed, as they surely would have in better conditions. One goblin went to the window, conscientiously eating bread as it went: and from there she burst from her hiding-place, and pushed him out where the first two goblins had gone.

The last goblin sprang. Floralinda grappled with it, and it bit her savagely as the other goblins had, with those powerful fingers wrapping around her forearms to keep her still. But Floralinda took Monarchic Positions on Economic Models and brought it hard down on the goblin’s head. She hit it over and over, her hands bleeding with each blow, until it fell down dazed. Then she took her pillow and smothered it; and then it went the same way as its three fellows, down into the dark and the rain.

Princess Floralinda would later wonder at it. She would later be amazed at her need, and at how terrible a thing need was. It had all been dreadful; but she was beyond thought, which was also a blessing. She was running a temperature, she had re-opened all the sores on her hands, and she had her bread back. She ate of the white loaf until she was pretty sure it was sleep or be sick; so she lay down and slept as the preferable option.

And that was how Floralinda triumphed over the thirty-ninth flight. She did it all independently, with a little help from her fever, and the long-windedness of economic textbooks.

FLORALINDA SLEPT for a very long time, though she had no way of measuring it. She woke to tiny sobs, each of which sounded like a delightful little bell being tinkled, or the tiniest trickle of a mountain stream.

She opened her eyes very slowly, as she also woke up to find that almost every inch of her poor body felt tremendously battered and bruised, and her hands sore beyond reckoning. It was like the day after she had learned to trot on her pony, only a thousand times worse. Floralinda did not sit up, but lay there listening to the sound: it was so beautiful and it was so sad, with both feelings mixed, that tears sprang into her eyes.

With a great deal of effort, she sat up. The storm had cleared, leaving only the tenderest of summer mornings, and a nice fresh smell to mask the sour illness one. The only sign that the tower had ever been rocked by thunder and lightning was a very sodden part of the rug where the storm had blown something through the window. On that sodden part, there was—a fairy!

It really was a fairy, and it looked exactly the same as fairies did in all of Floralinda’s picture-books. Then again, it might have been a pixie: she wasn’t quite sure of the overlap. Both kinds were depicted as tiny, beautiful persons with brightly-coloured butterfly wings, and sure enough this was a tiny beautiful person small enough to be comfortable in Floralinda’s hand. But none of her picture-books had ever depicted such a sorry example of Fairyland, this one being wet through, and quite tatty, and worst of all—

“Oh,” said Floralinda, moved to pity, having learned absolutely nothing about the veracity of children’s story-books, “oh, you poor thing!”

Rather than butterfly wings, as illustrated, the fairy’s wings showed clearly as being rather like a cranefly or dragonfly’s, split into two pairs: long and transparent, with all the tiny veins showing through. The pair on the fairy’s rightmost side were fine, if a bit ragged, but the upper wing on the leftmost side had been torn to drooping shreds, and the lower wing was missing entirely.

The fairy, or the pixie, ceased its beautiful sobs and looked up at Floralinda. In the early morning light it was the same colour as a delicate white rosebud, with green and blue lights like the veins inside a petal (if you have pulled apart a rose-petal you will know what I mean). It had a pretty, plaintive sort of face, very delicate, and scarcely bigger than one of Floralinda’s old dolls that she pretended not to still play with. Everything about it had the air of an exceedingly well-done doll in a doll’s house, in fact, right down to the cunning thistledown skirts so wet through from the storm. The exquisitely tiny curls of hair had taken a wetting and, as they dried, stuck up like duck fluff. It is hard to describe the exact colour of that hair. It was a bit like what happens if you are very blonde and take a dip in the public swimming baths, and it takes on a greenish aphid tinge, from all the chemicals they use to keep the water clean.

The fairy said, in a surprisingly piercing voice for its size:

“Do you have a mother currently in hospital, and you’re feeling rather out of the way, and there are new little jackets everywhere, and your nurse isn’t paying you any attention, so you’ve run away from home to the bottom of the garden?”

“Pardon?” said Princess Floralinda.

The fairy repeated itself. Floralinda could answer in all honesty, No, not remotely; so the fairy pressed:

“Have you disappointed your grandmother by telling her that you don’t believe in fairies; and now you’re having an awful dream that you’re only about as big as a daisy-stem?”

Floralinda answered No again; and added that she was a princess, in case that helped the situation. The fairy mulled on that one for a while, and then said doubtfully, “Was I at your christening?”

“I don’t think so,” said Floralinda cautiously. “My aunt had a baby at around the same time and there was an argument about who got to use the christening dress, so my mother said she felt she had to be gracious because she was the Queen, and in any case it was a frightful expense and family only.”

“Then we have nothing to say to each other,” said the fairy.

Princess Floralinda, in a rush, tried to explain her situation; but the fairy sat there in the wet sunshine unmoved. “I am a bottom-of-the-garden fairy,” it said. “My area is nominally children who need to be taken to Fairyland and removed just in time for their mother to bring a new baby home. I’m going to get in terrible trouble for being here,” it added, somewhat passionately, “only each time you finish the job you have to find a new garden where exactly one child has been born, so I’m obliged to always be on the move. This whole business has been simply ruined by modern society. Children are so knowing right now. I wanted to be the fairy who put the underneaths of mushrooms on, or made buttercups able to reflect whether or not you liked butter, or something chemical and practical; but they said the industry was saturated, so here I am, at exactly the wrong time professionally; and I’m sure to get into a most dreadful bother, and nobody ever trusts me.”

At this point it stamped its little foot and started crying again, which was quite nice, as its voice was not so pretty as its little weeping sounds.

“But perhaps you could help me escape,” said Floralinda feebly, who had a pounding headache, and was feeling rather the worse for wear. “I am so tired of being in this tower. The dragon yells at all hours, and there were a great many princes but none of them did very much, and I’ve had very bad times with goblins, and I’m—so—lonely.”

Not having known how lonely she had been, Floralinda began to cry herself. It was not the great hysterical yowls of before, but an exhausted kind of lying-back-to-cry where the tears squeezed out of her eyelids. At this the fairy stopped its crying, displayed the first flicker of interest, and dragged itself over to her—finding it could not fly on one wing, it made a sort of hop-skip-jump attempt, and nimbly climbed up the remaining panels of silver gauze.

“Are you truly a princess?” it said.

“My mother is a queen and my father is a king,” said Floralinda sadly, “and what’s more, they’re even married to each other.”

“It’s just that the tears of a real princess can be very useful,” said the fairy, with the attitude of someone aware that they could be being rude. “Apart from being pearls if she’s good and frogs if she’s bad, I mean; they’ve got properties I understand to be solvent and even medically valuable. Of course I’m only an amateur.”

And—though Princess Floralinda was a bit outraged—the fairy reached forward, and took some of her tears, and applied them neatly to the broken wing. At the briefest application of princess tears, all the glass-like chambers of the wing seemed to run together, as if they had been held close to a flame, and the ripped-up parts were made whole again; but the lower part which had been ripped off did not grow back.

“Well,” said the fairy practically, “that’s something; perhaps if you could cry something other than tears of loneliness, it would be even better. Could you cry for a broken heart, do you think?”

Princess Floralinda thought she could not cry for a broken heart, certainly not on command. But the fairy had become a bit friendlier, and up close was certainly so pretty that it was hard to be angry. Such beautiful little features—such cunning little pointed ears and nails on each finger and toe—such eyes, iridescent, like the chips of opal in her grandmother’s rings. It said, “Then could I prevail upon you to carry me down to the bottom, or to lower me down on a string?”

As there was nothing in the room that could be lowered down any further than two or three flights at best, and as the difficulty of getting to the bottom was the problem whole and entire, Floralinda supposed not.

“There’s nothing for it,” the fairy said. “I shall have to wait to bathe in the light of the full moon, and we’ve just had one, so it will take weeks. The wing will grow back then, and by that point you will be gone, so at least I’ll have full use of the tower.”

A great hope seized Floralinda.

“Oh,” she gasped, “oh, do you really think that I will be gone?”

“Naturally, yes,” said the fairy. “Those are goblin bites on your hands, aren’t they? They’re quite infected. Goblins are filthy. You’ll be dead in a week.”

At Floralinda’s new bout of tears, the fairy said a bit diffidently, “Cheer up; you might die earlier.”

“Oh, please,” managed Floralinda, “please, I really don’t want to die; it would break my mother’s heart, and there would be such a fuss over the funeral, and I wouldn’t even be there in the coffin, and my aunts would say dreadful things—oh, please! Don’t you have any fairy magic that could make me well, or couldn’t you take me to Fairyland, or call the birds and beasts to help us?”

The fairy didn’t think much of that idea; it didn’t seem to rate birds or beasts very highly. “Fairy magic is mostly wish-based, and very particular and contextual,” it said. “As I said, if you were a child without modern biology textbooks or access to a free-thinking nanny, I might do a great deal. It’s not that I’m not sympathetic to the idea. I think the limitations of fairy magic are really restricting us in this day and age, and I’ve said so, and proved so. No, fairy magic won’t make you well, and I can’t take you to Fairyland and wouldn’t if I could.”

Floralinda sank back into the pillows again, her head and her hands hurting, feeling white with dismay. She was exhausted. Maybe she was dying. She had never died before, and the closest she had come was contracting chicken-pox and six colds and very mild scarlatina. “Perhaps,” she whispered, “perhaps I’ll live, and you could go and get a doctor, or at least tell someone where I am?”

“I think that would probably annoy the witch who put you in here,” said the fairy frankly, “and I have enough trouble in my life without annoying witches. You must understand that it is really none of my business.”

“That’s very hard on me,” said Floralinda.

“I would blame the princes,” said the fairy. “Princes aren’t what they used to be. They’re soft. Fancy not coming to look for you, just because twenty-four of them were eaten up already.”

But Floralinda had not been able to blame the princes. It seemed hard lines for them too. If she had been a prince rather than a princess, and had been told, ‘Get out to that tower and have a go, there’s a good prince, don’t get precious about yourself,’ she would not have liked it either. All the big strong fat princes had probably been crunched up already, with just the small weedy princes left over, or worse the small chubby princes, for whom it would have been twice as unfair. She said this, and the fairy said she was being soppy.

“If you tell me your name,” it said, with the air of someone conferring a great favour, “I might whisper it into a bluebell, and the bluebell might whisper it to a foxglove, and the foxglove might whisper it to a daisy, and daisies will tell anyone anything. That can hardly be tracked back to me.” (And this seemed to please the fairy, being relatively easy and not really any skin off the fairy’s lovely nose.)

“My name is Floralinda Amelia Melisande Augustina Eleanora Selina,” said Floralinda.

“Ho, ho! Daisies will make absolute Whispers-down-the-Lane of that,” said the fairy. “My name is Cobweb.”

Which made Floralinda happy, because it was just like in her Shakespeare.

Her head still ached, and her eyes kept closing of their own volition, and talking seemed harder than it ever had when she had been back home and had talked nineteen to the dozen all day to everyone. She did not know what to do now that she was dying; but she bravely held on to hope.

“And you are sure, Cobweb,” she said, “that I can’t make a wish? Perhaps if it’s a very small wish, you’ll find you’re able to grant it?”

“Have a go,” said Cobweb indifferently, “but do keep in mind I think the whole thing’s a bit embarrassing.”

“I wish that I might be rescued,” wished Floralinda.

“Too large a wish; make it smaller,” said Cobweb, after a moment.

“I wish that I didn’t have to die,” wished Floralinda.

“You are misunderstanding ‘smaller’,” said Cobweb.

“I wish that I might be safe,” wished Floralinda.

“Too woolly,” said Cobweb. “You’re not listening. Try to get as close to ‘How I wish Mummy would come home from the hospital soon, and bring me a dear little baby,’ as you can.”

Floralinda did not know if her mother was in hospital, though of course she hoped not; but she did not quite want her mother to bring her a dear little baby, which sounded as though it would create problems. The whole matter of who was in current possession of the christening robe would be brought up all over again. Her head felt as though it was full of broth, and none of her thoughts were floating to the top.

She thought back to all the days and days of tally-marks in the diary down the back of the armchair, and she thought of the tops of the trees of the forest spread out beneath the tower window, and of the ceaseless, unending cries of the diamond-tipped dragon on the first floor. She thought of the taste of wheaten bread and the taste of white bread, and of oranges, and milk, and water. She thought of how she was always afraid, and how when she wasn’t afraid she was bored to tears, and how no matter whether bored or afraid she was always in pain.

So Floralinda raised her weak voice, and she was so ill and tired that the wish came out as—

“Please, God, please let things be different.”

“You’ll regret that one,” said Cobweb.

But Floralinda was already asleep.

PRINCESS FLORALINDA HAD part of her wish come true immediately: with Cobweb around, things changed. It could not be said that they changed exactly for the better. Of course it was delightful to have someone to say, “Good morning,” to, and to be able to express a thought and have a response that wasn’t just made up inside your own head. Anyone who has been inside a sick-room for ages will know how good it is to see a new face. But although Cobweb was really delightful to look at, it didn’t have very nice manners, and wasn’t at all sympathetic, nor indeed particularly interested in Floralinda.

The wounds on her hands were much worse by evening. Her head and her arms felt hot, and she couldn’t sleep for all that she was oh! so tired; and she was hungry, but then when she tried to eat she suddenly wasn’t hungry and instead was fearful that she was going to be sick again. Cobweb was not a very good nurse, or even really any kind of nurse at all, and instead poked around the tower room and made little heaps of dust and brooded over the moss growing in the corners of the windowsill. Floralinda could hardly move her arms, which made it very difficult to get at the orange.

She humbly asked Cobweb if Cobweb wouldn’t mind peeling it for her; Cobweb obviously did mind, but nonetheless got very interested in the orange.

“This is witch-work,” it said. “And very powerful. You see here—the orange is really an orange—’tisn’t just gilt paper and sponge, done up to make you think it something else. (Fairy-magic can’t get over making things out of gilt paper and sponge. They should investigate the links between Fairyland and the men who make gilt paper and sponge.) Why, you could do anything with this—and you’ve been eating it?”

“Well, yes,” said poor Floralinda, “it’s good for your skin and hair.”

“Yes, yes; vitamins, and all that,” said Cobweb, “but also an unending supply of citric acid, which is a druggist’s dream. And you say that the milk flask always produces milk, and the water flask always produces water? Witches don’t know miracles when they create them. The opportunities! The implications! May I take them away, after you die?”

“I don’t see why you should,” said Floralinda, whom pain had made a little fretful. It seemed as though the light was very bright, and her hands felt very queer. The bite-marks had gone stiff and greenish; they bled, but also shed some nasty yellow-coloured stuff that Floralinda hated to see. She continued, “The witch gave them to me, and the flasks are bigger than you are, so you’ll have a time flying out of the tower with them. And I don’t care that they’re so wonderful; they can’t do much for me.”

“You are displaying a very small-minded attitude,” said the fairy, who seemed genuinely grieved by this. “Consider the orange-peel, which by itself has many very nice properties. Now, if you had a more educated brain (I cannot consider myself educated; I have only attempted to better my situation) you would have immediately said, ‘Why, if I had some liquor, or even very hot water, I could extract some oil from this orange-peel, which as everyone knows is antibacterial; that may well do my hands some good,’ and you wouldn’t be in such a stupid predicament.”

“Would it really do my hands good?” said Floralinda, doubtfully.

“Ye-e-s,” said Cobweb, appearing to regret the suggestion a bit, as it distanced the fairy farther than ever from securing the flasks for its own. “Well, it does depend, rather. Boiling the water would be necessary. Which is impossible, as you haven’t any source of heat—”

But Floralinda had pushed away the bedclothes, which was a relief as they were quite damp from her sweating, and although she felt rather dizzy she tried to not think about it, as thinking about things was often when the difficulties started. She wrapped her hands about with the silver gauze, although it made tears prick at her eyes, and unlocked the door. Floralinda felt the cool, still air on her skin from the stairway down to the thirty-ninth floor, and wrinkled her nose at a stink she was afraid was coming from the goblin that had broken its neck. It was such an awful smell that she was worried it would hurt her, and resolved to do something with the goblin later; but she was more interested in the brazier of coals, and the fire in them that never seemed to go out.

But how to take a coal? Of course she might light a taper—there were plenty of pages in Monarchic Positions that could be burned, chiefly the endnotes—but fires wanted more fuel, and even a princess could see that she only had so many books and sticks of furniture. The coal would be essential. Floralinda picked her way back up the stairs—Cobweb the fairy sat on the end of the bed looking more like a blossom than ever, but quite a judgmental blossom—and went to her own picturesque hearth with the false front, where there was an ornamental poker, and ornamental tongs. She removed the bowl of painted pine-cones from the grate. The tongs Floralinda took in her hands, and oh dear, didn’t it hurt to use them!—but they opened and closed just as they ought to have done, which displaced quite a bit of dust. Thusly armed, Floralinda crept back downstairs, and with all the care she could manage, she took a coal from that spitting, greasy brazier, and brought it upstairs.

She put it in the unused hearth, and some of the dust caught fire, but otherwise the coal sat there safely with its little flame always burning. It made her face hotter than it had been, and her hands had bled; but there was fire. The coal did not get any cooler, and the flame did not recede.

How Cobweb stared!

“This place,” it said, “is a dream of combustion.”

Floralinda had thought combustion was a sort of garment they put over one’s corset in the old days.

“Yes,” said Cobweb, when Floralinda ventured this, “but you are not very clever.”

Princess Floralinda supposed not.

But the fairy got quite excited, for all that. It directed Floralinda to get a few more coals to heap up in a proper little fire, and to bring over the copper basin that sat in the wash-stand, and all the while it took about seven oranges’ worth of orange-peel—for the peel, as it turned out, grew back just as readily as the flesh did—and pulled it all apart. It was quite fun to watch Cobweb work: shaking out an orange-peel as though it were a blanket, and ripping this into shreds, more finely than even the tiny grater Cook uses to make powdered nutmeg with in your kitchen. The whole room began to smell like walking through an orange grove, and Cobweb’s pale hands were stained yellow, especially the underneaths of the tiny fingernails, and it sat before a fairy-sized hummock of wet grated orange-peel. Floralinda filled the basin with water, and rigged it up over the coals. When it was on a rolling boil Cobweb tossed the orange-peel inside.

“Most of the good stuff has already evaporated,” it said. “This isn’t really efficacious. If I had good-quality oil, or rubbing alcohol, we might do better. The witch didn’t leave any of that, did she? No? Bad luck—take it off the fire—use those cloths to guard your hands—now, take off that gauze, and plunge your hands in the water when I say so; it will feel pretty dreadful.”

When Cobweb gave the direction, Floralinda plunged in her hands. It was indeed pretty dreadful. She was sick again. She was also forced to look at her hands, and the wounds looked a fright; her hands were so swollen that she felt sure all her gloves would have to be remade at the glover’s. Cobweb made her keep her hands in the water until she really couldn’t stand it, and then she was allowed to take them out; and they looked simply horrid.

“You must do that three times a day,” said the fairy, who had grown quite pompous from bossing her about.

Floralinda gasped, “And will I live?”

“If you die, it will be an education,” said Cobweb reasonably.

“But if I die, I’m sure I won’t learn a thing,” protested the princess; to which the fairy explained—

“But I would have learned a great deal.”

Which did not really satisfy Princess Floralinda.

Come that lunchtime, she felt so horrible that she was certain dying was better than having to put her hands in a fresh mixture of citron-peel and hot water. That whole dusty little tower room reeked of oranges until she wanted to weep from it. If the late Princess Mellarose had felt herself killed by oranges, Floralinda felt sure that she was doubly dead from them; but the little fairy seemed so absorbed in skinning the orange over and over again, and arranging some of the long strips to dry in the sun, and amusing itself by separating the pith and the peel, that Floralinda did not feel it in her power to call a halt. But this time she was careful to keep the chamber-pot next to her, and began to anticipate the pain, which for a princess was shocking; for your average princess can’t anticipate pain, even if she has pricked her finger on a spindle half a dozen times, or slept on hard peas for half a year.

In the early afternoon she slept a little, woken only when the diamond-tipped dragon decided to roar. At dinnertime Cobweb made her steep her hands again, until Floralinda was beginning to feel less like princess and more like a soup-bone.

This dreadful process went on for days. On the third day, Floralinda felt a great deal worse, and could barely leave the bed that morning, and couldn’t at all that night, although Cobweb chivvied her unmercifully to do. She ran such a fever that the bedclothes were wet through. But on the fourth day Floralinda began to feel better, and to want more of the milk, and more of the bread.

On the fifth morning she was quite cheerful. The holes in her hands were still scabby, and her bruises had gone bright yellow; but the swelling in her hands was not half so bad, and there was no greenish tinge. It must be said that the fairy Cobweb, who had amassed quite a large amount of pith by this point, was quite disappointed.

“We must count it a success,” it said bracingly.

Princess Floralinda, sitting up to eat her breakfast (wheaten bread in milk, for nourishment) enjoyed the breeze coming through the tower window, and the fresh sunlight, and the bed-linen set to dry in it, even if that had forced her to take off the valance and sit on the slats of the bed. Princesses are also not often just glad to be alive; they don’t notice it. She should have still been very unhappy about her situation. And of course she was; only she was so relieved that she was not going to succumb to the goblins after all, even if they had managed to give her a raging case of proto-septicaemia.

She was sitting in her petticoats and spooning mush to her mouth, and she thought about a thought that had been slowly rolling around in her head, which was also quite a feat for some princesses—

“Cobweb,” she said, “did you say that you were in trouble, back in Fairyland?”

“No,” said Cobweb instantly.

But Floralinda was not so stupid as all that, and thought about it as hard as she possibly could, over her bread and milk.

“But I heard you say it—quite distinctly.”

Cobweb hedged, “Are you certain? Everyone knows princesses hear all sorts of things. Talking horse’s heads and flights of swans, and so on.”

But Floralinda said Yes; so Cobweb wiped its hands clean of orange-juice, and smiled at her, contriving to appear quite sweet, with its greeny-golden curls looking like coloured spun sugar in the morning light, and its skin looking more like the creamy heart of a lily than ever. But Cobweb, for having all of the beauty a fairy might have, was not actually very good at smiling. A smile on Cobweb’s face always looked a bit like last season’s hat on this season’s gown; it spoiled the whole effect.

“It’s true,” it said heavily, dropping the attempt at once. “I am in trouble already. They say I am not good at being a bottom-of-the-garden fairy, and that if I don’t keep my nose clean I’ll have to give it up and do something menial, like paint black bibs on boy sparrows, or put the hairs on traveller’s joy. Paint sparrows! It’s not my fault I’m so progressive.”

“But Cobweb,” said Floralinda, “what did you do?”

The fairy sighed, and it was not a very penitent sigh, but a sigh that remembered something beautiful, and was sorry not to see it again.

“I learned how to make things burn,” said Cobweb, dreamily.

BEING A NATURALLY TIDY GIRL, once she felt better Princess Floralinda set to making the tower spick-and-span; it would be dreadful if a prince managed to get up all thirty-nine flights—though he would now find flight thirty-nine rather easy—only to think her some kind of slattern. She cleaned everything with hot water, and washed her hair with orange-peels, and made sure there was no trace anywhere of her having been ill; and though Cobweb complained terribly, and wasn’t a bit of help, Floralinda’s heart felt lighter at flapping her silk gown out and getting it completely dry. The silk gown was a perfect fright now; it used to be that Floralinda felt the need to retire a dress if it had a snag or if the lace had touched on a nail, but this gown was now all of Floralinda’s wardrobe, and there was no thought of retiring it. Having hot water made things a great deal easier, but washing everything in plain hot water made everything dry a bit stiff, and washing everything in orange-water made everything dry a bit stiff and smelling like oranges and tinged yellow on top of that.

Wishing to be altogether tidy, Floralinda addressed the issue of the now extremely dead goblin at the bottom of the stairs. Having ascertained bravely that there were no more goblins left, she also addressed the issue of the trapdoor she had found earlier, which lifted with surprising ease. If she had known what flight thirty-eight contained, she might never have tried it at all.

It opened on to a ladder, and a great empty dark space that she did not want to investigate without a candle; and then, faced with the nasty corpse of the goblin, Floralinda did something very silly and not very far-thinking. She did not want to drag the goblin back upstairs and get any mess on the floor she had scrubbed, and so she heaved the thing down that black space instead. She regretted it the moment she did it, thinking, ‘Oh, but I shall step in it later, if I ever go down there!’; but then she stopped thinking about it very hard, given that she had also recently learned how to make toast, and wanted some.

What Floralinda did not know was that flight thirty-eight was a large empty space that contained a giant spider. She did not know that it was the type of spider who was not above eating dead prey, especially as it was giant and greedy; she now knew a little of goblins being filthy, but did not know that the blood of a goblin was tremendously foul too. Thankfully, neither did the spider. It gorged itself and became deathly ill, which is a moral lesson for spiders everywhere, as Floralinda unknowing went upstairs and heated slices of wheaten bread and slices of white over her ever-burning fire.

That was, inadvertently, the end of flight thirty-eight, which Floralinda had solved by dint of being at once too houseproud and too prone to cut corners when it came to rubbish removal.

Otherwise, it would have proved very difficult. The witch thought no spider was worth it unless it was exceedingly venomous.

“I THINK you ought to tell me your long-term plan,” said Cobweb.

“I was about to say the same thing,” said Princess Floralinda.

It was early in the morning in the tower, and summer was starting to take its leave, it having been quite late in the season when poor Floralinda was locked up anyway. They had enjoyed some truly beautiful golden days of good weather, but now it was becoming chilly o’nights, and this made the princess very pensive again. The fortieth flight had not become really homely and indeed was shabbier than ever now that Floralinda had taken up long residence, but it was familiar, and she tried to keep it tidy, and she only wore her gown when she really needed to feel like a princess. It was difficult to feel like a princess when she saw the puckered white parts on her hands, and even more difficult to feel like a princess when Cobweb bossed her about. Every so often when she felt particularly wretched she put on the gown and her rings and combed her long golden hair, which still shone beautifully in the sunlight, but had a tiny bald patch where the goblin had ripped out a piece. Floralinda could feel it with her finger.

But that morning she sat on the bed in her petticoats with the blanket about her shoulders, dipping bread into some milk she had warmed up, as Cobweb sat in a single sunbeam and looked picturesque, and she continued:

“I have hit upon a plan that I think is quite clever, Cobweb—really quite clever; so please don’t criticise it before you hear the end.” (Cobweb did this a lot.) “But before I start, I would like to say: It is getting colder.”

“Yes,” said Cobweb.

“Would it be worth my while to wish for clothes, do you think?”

“As none of your other wishes have come true, no,” said Cobweb, “especially since I am not a haberdasher. I’m a full-time bottom-of-the-garden fairy and an amateur chemist. Do please try to keep that straight in your head.”

“Something will come along somehow,” said Floralinda, “but until then, I am obliged to be in my petticoat, and I have noticed that your clothes have never recovered, and are falling off.”

For this was so, the clothes having been rose-petals and spider-silk, the latter of which was famous for strength but not much for modesty.

“I think we ought to make some clothes,” Floralinda said, “for us both; I had the idea this morning, but then I had a truly terrible thought, because, Cobweb—are you a boy—or a girl?”

The fairy looked at Floralinda as though she had taken leave of her senses, but since Cobweb looked at Floralinda this way about sixteen times an hour, this did not make her quake as it had done in the beginning. At any rate, Cobweb had such a beautiful face for being contemptuous with that it was difficult to keep one’s feelings straight. Even when it screwed its face up in horrified thought, as it did right then, the effect was very nice.

“Must I be either? It sounds tedious.”

“I thought all fairies were girls; there’s always a fairy-queen; but then again, there’s Robin Goodfellow. Oh dear, how confusing!”

“If the fairy-queen chose to be a girl, then that is her particular cross to bear,” said Cobweb. “I don’t see why I should put myself out.”

“But you see, I wouldn’t know what to do about clothes, so do decide,” said Floralinda.

Cobweb mulled it over.

“Whichever one is superior,” they said eventually. “I have no interest in trading down, so please give me the one that is better to have.”

“Oh, but it doesn’t work that way at all,” protested Floralinda, at the same time suffering a guilty pang that she was not really communicating all the facts. “There’s advantages and disadvantages to both. Boys seem to have lots of good times, but they’re often obliged to be killed; girls don’t have as many good times, I believe, but they have lovely hair.”

“Then I really don’t have a preference, and indeed I don’t care,” said Cobweb, picking minute pieces of pith out of its fingernails.

“Well,” said the princess eagerly, setting down her bread and leaning in, “would you mind terribly being a girl fairy? I’ve always hated dressing boy dolls, and I don’t like sewing hems on trousers. I also think it would be more polite, because there’s only this room and I’ve had to get dressed and undressed already. I really don’t think it would be altogether nice if you were a boy fairy the whole time. At first I thought you might be a boy fairy, because I didn’t like you very much; but now that I like you a bit better, I’d prefer if you were a girl,” she finished.

“Then I will be a girl, though I really can’t say that I’m interested,” said Cobweb, who had just entered herself into a bondage that she had very little idea about, which was perhaps quite cruel on Floralinda’s part. “But I don’t care for made clothes. When the time comes I’ll dress in some of the full moon’s beams, which have the benefit of being attractive as well as cheap.”

“That does sound sweet, but it’s too far away; it’s not polite of you to go naked now,” said Floralinda, promptly proving the difficulties of Eve. “But you haven’t heard my plan, and I’m quite proud of it. Dear little Cobweb” (you see attitudes change immediately), “the witch has put a different dreadful creature on each level of the tower.”

“So you’ve told me,” said the fairy. “I frankly wish they’d all go hang together. I’ve never heard such bellows as from the dragon with the diamond scales. Some creatures think they can do exactly as they like.”

“But don’t you see,” said Floralinda, growing quite excited, “it has now been ages since the witch made this tower, and surely none of them have been fed, because the goblins were so excited to see my loaves? All I have to do is wait until they die of starvation, which I’m sure some of them have done already, and then I can simply go downstairs and leave. The dragon has probably survived due to all those princes, but there haven’t been any in simply forever.”

This had been quite a difficult idea for Princess Floralinda to come up with, which was why it was really wretched when the fairy looked up at her and said, “Why, you fool! Nobody needs to eat in here.”

“What?” said Floralinda.

“There’s a spell on the whole tower,” said Cobweb. “Nothing here will ever die from not having enough food. The witch would have been bankrupted with feeding you all otherwise.”

“But I’ve been so hungry,” said Floralinda, falteringly.

“That’s the problem with spells like these,” said the fairy. “A dumb animal gets hungry, but it won’t know it’s meant to be dead, so it’ll just carry on looking for food ad infinitum. Human beings know that if they don’t eat they’ll starve, and so eventually they’ll convince themselves they’re starving and die when they don’t have to, all due to instinct. I expect that’s why the witch gave you the food, now that I think about it. A princess is not exactly the type of person with a great deal of mental fortitude. I had assumed that she was filling you up as a side-bet in case this tower wheeze didn’t work; but I never heard of a witch who’d fatten up a princess rather than a good stupid child. You’re mostly hair and eyes…Good grief! You really didn’t know? I would have experimented, first thing, and not eaten for a week, to see if I died.”

“But the goblins ate up everything,” pleaded Floralinda, and Cobweb said: “Goblins eat as a hobby. Dear, dear! You really know nothing about anything.”

At which point the princess became very disheartened, so much so that Cobweb said grudgingly, “It wouldn’t have been the stupidest plan, if not for that. But it wouldn’t have worked all the way down anyhow. Dragons, for instance, merely hibernate when there is a scarcity of food, and don’t die for centuries.”

“But now I shall never get out,” said Floralinda, in tears, “there is no solution to my problem that isn’t a prince, and I’m all out of princes, and I don’t want to jump out the window and die. This is the worst conundrum I ever heard of.”

This was always a good tack to take with Cobweb. The fairy loved to think about solutions of all kinds: either the ones to riddles or cross-words, or the type of thing you got in a pan once you boiled it too much. She stretched out languorously in her sunbeam (though now that she was a girl, Floralinda thought Cobweb ought to look as though she were enjoying herself a bit less) and said—

“Then you need to travel down, and get rid of the monsters, and go out through the front door.”

“But that’s impossible,” said Princess Floralinda.

“You got rid of five goblins well enough,” continued Cobweb, “which, mathematically speaking, means you have already defeated more than zero monsters; and given the enormous leap from zero to a whole number—why, the distance between zero and something is much greater than the distance between one and a million; don’t let a mathematician tell you otherwise.”

The Princess put aside her bowl of mush and wrapped the blanket around herself, to think. The gears in her golden head turned in ways they had never been taught to turn, and had they been able to make a sound, they would have sounded like the squeaking wheels on a very rusty bicycle.

“I could tame the beasts with kindness, and ask them to let me pass,” she said.

“You have a very short memory,” said Cobweb, who had been apprised of the goblin episode.

“I could send smoke-signals from the balcony, spelling out H-E-L-P,” she said.

But she had to admit that she didn’t know any smoke-signals to spell out HELP; and Cobweb quite cruelly suggested that everyone already knew where she was, and was just trying not to think about it, and maybe playing beautiful music if the dragon got very loud.

The gears in Floralinda’s head were squeakier than ever.

“I once left the plug in the plug-hole in the nursery sink, and the tap running, and they had to replace all the carpets,” she said. “Mightn’t I put the water flask at the top of the stairs, and let it pour out, and flood everything? The beasts might try to escape themselves, if I got them damp, and they might even drown.”

Cobweb sucked her breath through her teeth like the man who comes to fix your plumbing and asks you what kind of cowboy put that in.

“That’s a much more interesting idea than any you’ve had thus far,” said the fairy, “but the tower isn’t watertight, and anyway it would take a much longer time than you think. You might as well just tip the flask out the balcony and wait for the earth around the tower to become so soggy that the foundations sink.”

“What would happen then?” said Floralinda, eagerly.

“The tower might come down altogether, and smash at the bottom,” said Cobweb.

Floralinda didn’t like that idea much; so she thought again and said, “I might throw bread down to the base of the tower until it piles up, and jump off into it, and land safely.”

“That’s also interesting, but quite stupid,” said Cobweb. “Keep going.”

“That’s four ideas; I’m quite out,” said Floralinda. “Dear Cobweb, you are so clever. Don’t you have any?”

The fairy preened in her sunbeam. She was also very susceptible to flattery and thought quite a lot of herself, which Floralinda also did not think was quite appropriate now that she was a girl. But Cobweb was clever, and knew all sorts of things Floralinda didn’t know, and was pretty besides; she supposed that some girls simply had all the luck.

“I can’t have ideas until I have all the facts,” said Cobweb. “I don’t even know what kinds of beasts the witch has put in the tower. The dragon and the goblin were the only confirmed ones. The rest of the tower could be filled with gorgons, or rattlesnakes, or goodness knows what. Mark my words, it’s them you ought to be thinking about. Jumping out the window is nonsense; it would take you years to get the bread thick enough and high enough, and then you’d probably just jump into a pile of stale bread and drown. You’re the type. Why can’t you do what you’ve done so far, and try to fight the things?”

“Oh, don’t say ‘fight’;” Floralinda begged, “I positively couldn’t fight anything.”

“Then get rid of them, you absolute goose. You could at least go and see what’s in the floor you haven’t seen. I would have gone and looked at it in a trice, but I am an intellectual.”

That is how Floralinda found out the truth about the spider. She had discovered that if she put one of the burning coals in a dish, she could carry it about with her like a lamp; and Cobweb had cunningly tied a handle over it out of knotted silver gauze, and damped the gauze so that it wouldn’t catch alight, and Floralinda was pleased as Punch with this invention. She went downstairs and lowered the lamp down the trapdoor to flight thirty-eight. When she saw the dead spider, she screamed and screamed, and dropped the dish altogether, which clattered all the way down to the next floor: but the coal thankfully fell onto the cold stone and didn’t do any harm; and the spider had stiffened all its legs up and made itself much smaller, as spiders always do when they die.

Cobweb, when she reported back, was unsympathetic.

“I don’t know why you’re not more cheerful about it. Don’t you see, that’s another creature down,” she said.

“But I can’t see how it died,” said Floralinda. “I hope something worse didn’t kill it; it’s so big and dreadful. It’s at least the size of the bed, Cobweb dear.” (In death it was the size of her bed, so in life it would have probably looked more like the size of three beds, but Floralinda wasn’t to know this.) “I do hope it is dead, and not just asleep.”

“Poke it with a stick and see,” Cobweb suggested; but Floralinda shuddered and said she absolutely couldn’t. “Maybe it died of boredom. I am experimenting currently to see if this is possible. Say, did it have a web around? Spider-web is useful stuff, you know.”

But Floralinda said No, it hadn’t, and Cobweb said it must have been the other kind, who build a cunning little burrow underground and wait for you to walk over their front door, and then pop out at you; and this did not make Floralinda love spiders much more than she had already.

“This merely proves your excellent success rate,” said the fairy that evening, who at the time was busy pinning up long strands of pith close to the fire, to dry them out. Floralinda was cutting a frock for herself and a frock for Cobweb out of one of the curtains. It was more like a smock, owing to the paucity of material; but it was more genteel than watching each other run about in petticoats or ripped-up petals, even if they were both girls now. Cobweb continued, “Why, I’m sure that by the time I’m gone, you’ll be all the way down to flight thirty-two or somesuch, and I won’t even have to tell anyone about your troubles; you’ll be enjoying yourself no end, and won’t want to be interrupted.”

Floralinda laid down her sewing.

“Must you go, Cobweb?” she said sorrowfully.

“Yes,” said Cobweb baldly, “and I can’t wait to leave. I have been looking at the moon closely and I feel that a fortnight will do it, unless I die of boredom first.”

“But I feel as though we have become friends,” said the princess.

Cobweb looked up at her over the rack of drying pith and orange-peel, and said:

“That is because you are not very clever. There’s no precedent for a bottom-of-the-garden fairy and a princess doing anything together. We live in totally different worlds, and as someone with a shaky start in my industry I don’t desire to change the status quo.”

“I suppose you are right,” sighed Floralinda. “But I do wish I was clever; I do wish I knew more; I do wish sometimes—that I was someone else!”

Which were all dreadful wishes, when carried to a logical conclusion.

FLIGHT thirty-eight really had nothing in it except for a dead spider and a dead dried-up goblin with no blood in him, and a spiral staircase that led down to the next flight. Cobweb grew quite interested in the spider when they ascertained that it was really dead, and wanted to be taken down there to fuss over it, and do quite dreadful things, and ‘experiments’. Floralinda summoned up all her courage and descended the spiral stairs, with her coal and her dish in hand, to see what was next on the agenda.

The stairs led down to the top of a room that was split-level, so that the landing from the previous floor was at the top, and you went down another flight to the bottom, where there was another staircase on the far side of the room. And such a mess that room was! It was all dry twig and old greenstuff, and stank; for you see, it belonged to a night-boar.

The night-boar had the shape of a common hog, but much larger, and would have resisted furiously all attempts to make it into bacon. Each tusk was the size of an elephant’s, and its black bristles stood up on its back like a hedgehog’s quills. They were so black that in some lights they were almost purple. It lived chiefly in jungles, and the witch had acquired it through calling in favours from her friends; it was too big to climb stairs, but sat at the bottom and screamed at Princess Floralinda until red spittle fell a-dripping from the tusks. Sometimes it would take runs and butt the bottom of the staircase hard enough to make it shake, but for all its pawing and squealing, it could not get to her. If it had, it surely would have gored her through, or tossed her up on its horns so that when she landed back down she broke every bone in her body.

Floralinda was so frightened that the most she could do was sit at the bottom of the main staircase and listen to the night-boar squeal, and think about all her problems at once. The goblins had been very frightening and a long-term problem—their tooth-holes had healed as a great many shiny, puckered white marks, which quite ruined the effect of her slim young hands—but they had been got rid of; and the spider had died, which had been a welcome move on its part; but this monstrous boar did not look as though it was going to die any time soon, and she did not feel up to pushing it out of a window. And there were no windows in any case on floor thirty-seven.

The princess thought about Cobweb and Cobweb’s upsetting remarks, and yet about how unhappy she was at the thought of losing Cobweb; or at least, if not unhappy, very scared. It must be stated that she tried quite hard to love Cobweb, as princesses are expected to love everything beautiful; but loving Cobweb was rather like loving a wet cat, who if it gets into your lap makes your lap very uncomfortable, and is likely to scratch. Cobweb’s main advantages were in being lovely to look at and in knowing more than Floralinda knew. (Floralinda should not have rated both of these things as high as each other, but we must forgive her, because of society.)

And all the while the night-boar gruntled and oinked murderously, and sometimes in the background the diamond-tipped dragon roared its tower-shaking roars, and Cobweb made awful sawing noises with one of the needles she had given an edge to, in order to cut things. Floralinda could hardly think, and when one wants to think more badly than anything, it gets even harder to think than before.

The lamp dropped from her distracted fingers. The coal fell into the sett, and the dry twigs took like kindling. Soon the twigs were totally afire, and the night-boar squealed fit to bust. Floralinda fled from the staircase and past Cobweb, away from those squeals and the rising crackle of flame, and all the way back up to her bed in terror.

Before very long she started to smell smoke, and then it pricked her eyes and made them stream. It took a very long time for the fairy to make her way back, and by then the smoke hung in the room like it had been pinned up to dry; and wasn’t Cobweb cross when she got there! “I am not used to walking,” she said resentfully on the threshold, and coughed three to six times.

“Oh! I am sorry,” said Floralinda, contrite. “I just had such an awful fright; I thought that I might have just burnt us all up, and I didn’t know what to do; and oh! that terrible pig did squeal.”

“I might have died,” said Cobweb, after a fit of coughing, “and then I would have had to become a baby’s laugh, or a piece of orange-blossom, or something else equally sickening. The full moon can’t come quick enough, I tell you.”

Floralinda thought this was a bit rich, as Cobweb all along had been very cavalier about whether or not she died; but the fairy was so annoyed that she didn’t dare point this out. She was glad that she hadn’t aggravated her further, because Cobweb said:

“It’s also not fair at all that stupidity has gotten you this far. That’s another creature you’ve killed simply by having no brains, which makes anyone with brains feel as though it isn’t worth the headache of having them.”

“Then it has roasted up and died,” said Floralinda, rapturously. “Oh, Cobweb, how wonderful!”

The fairy pointed out that the night-boar probably went from smoke inhalation rather than burning to death, but admitted: “It was fun to see it all go up. All that straw took in a trice. I wonder if there’s anything left of it?”

“Why, Cobweb, couldn’t I just drop coals in the tower all the way down?”

But Cobweb said that she would likely smoke them both to death if she tried that game again.

And it was true that for the rest of the evening and all the next morning great grey clouds of it blew through the tower, and Floralinda’s eyes and nose streamed, and she coughed so much that she got a bad sore throat and had to take to her bed for a whole day. And it wasn’t even very restful there, on account of all the smoke hanging around the bed; she had to put her sheets over her mouth and nose. But the night-boar was well and truly dead. She went down to flight thirty-seven to check, and to make sure the coal was not doing any more damage; and there were no squeals from the big charred lump that had once been the night-boar, only a dreadful smell of roast pork that nonetheless made her very hungry.

Princess Floralinda had grown quite confident over these easy victories, which was unfortunate. It is like thinking you are very good at swimming when everyone you have tried to swim a race against has been eaten by the local shark. She was even quite enthusiastic to see what lay on flight thirty-six, and despite Cobweb’s prophesying had not quite discounted the idea of simply dropping half a dozen coals down the trapdoor. The stairway down to the next flight took a whole week to be cool to the touch, and it still made her cough horribly every time she went down there; but she had gone down there, and she had seen the trapdoor, and had started wondering what was below.

If she had asked Cobweb the correct question, Cobweb might have given her an answer that made her more worried; but Cobweb now spent a lot of time in the glow of the fire looking very hard at the moon, which was waxing quite fat and white in the night sky. The correct question would have been, Cobweb dear, have you noticed anything about the order of the monsters so far? And Cobweb would have said, The witch is sandwiching expensive ones next to cheap ones, if she did not say, Oh, do stop bothering me!

Goblins are cheap; very venomous spiders are expensive, especially if, when alive, they are the size of three beds; night-boars give a lot of show for the money, but don’t honestly cost a lot if you know where to get them; so it stood to reason that what was coming next was going to be worth the cash.

THE TRAPDOOR DOWN to flight thirty-six opened to a very long ladder, balanced up against the wall on pegs. Flight thirty-six itself, once Floralinda looked down there with her lamp, was quite empty and light: unlike in the earlier floors, this flight had windows. They were very large, but up so high that there was no hope of opening or shutting them, and they had iron bars at their bottoms to stop you from touching the glass; these iron bars were very bowed and scratched, which would have been an awful sign had Floralinda thought about it. But they did let plenty of light through, so that Floralinda could see clearly that there were no leaves, nor wood, nor straw, putting paid to her fire idea. There was only a central column of stone, and up against that central column was sat—a big, yellow, furry bear!

“Then I can’t leave too soon,” said Cobweb, once she described what was down there to the fairy. “Tomorrow night ought to do it. You can see that the moonlight is already helping my wings, and I’ve come up with a fool-proof story. I’m simply going to say that I met a child in the woods who didn’t believe in fairies, and that we had a dialogue; at the end I saved it from a wolf or a lack of imagination or something; that’s unexceptionable, especially if you count the woods as a very large back-yard,” she finished.

Floralinda did not think this story was very good, and she was frightened all over again at the idea that Cobweb might soon go. She said, “I think it’s dear that you’re scared by a bear, Cobweb; but I’m not; bears and princesses have historically been fine in close quarters, and we even marry them under the right circumstances.”

This drove Cobweb into a frenzy. “Hark at her! Think it’s dear! You carry me down there right now, and I’ll tell you something you won’t like.”

Which was an offer that you or I might have been able to say No thank you to, but Floralinda was puzzled, and she carried Cobweb on her shoulder all the way down to the end of flight thirty-seven.

“See!” said Cobweb, when they were peeking down the trapdoor. “Now, why has a bear been chained up, as though it were in the circus?”

Floralinda answered that perhaps it had used to be in the circus and wanted to feel comfortable, to which Cobweb was so disgusted that she could not speak for a moment.

“That is a devil-bear,” said the fairy.

Floralinda had heard a little of devil-bears. Even she knew that devil-bears were larger and cleverer and crueller than their other ursine brethren, and indeed often cleverer than men, though their cruelty and men’s was probably of a muchness. As Cobweb spoke, the bear began to pace around its pillar and strain the length of its chain. Floralinda could see clearly now that its fur was matted and pallid and ought to have been white, not yellow at all, only it had grown discoloured, like lace that hadn’t been stored properly. When it peered up at them, she got an awful feeling in the pit of her stomach. The devil-bear had eyes like human eyes, with long white lashes, only the iris was red as blood.

“That thing is certainly cleverer than you are, and therefore deserves to swap places with you,” said the fairy. “I certainly think it would be funnier if a prince fought all the way up the tower and found the devil-bear instead of a princess; and he’d probably get a more useful wife in the bargain.” (Cobweb was being very horrid here, but perhaps for her own reasons. Cobweb was always at her most horrid when she had pangs of conscience, and tried to get rid of them by being horrider than ever, which I’m sorry to say sometimes helps.) “You’re in a great deal of danger. I would almost be interested to see if you can somehow be so silly that it turns to genius, as before, and get past it somehow; but I’m much more particularly interested in not sharing close quarters with a devil-bear.”

The devil-bear moved slothfully, but with purpose. It kept pausing to stare up the ladder at Floralinda and Cobweb, with its eyes rolling fearfully around in its head, but making no sound. Because it had not screamed and fretted to get at her as the night-boar had done, Floralinda had convinced herself to be bold; but now she was more disconcerted than ever at how it sat there on its haunches and tried to look agreeable, with its ghastly eyes. Every so often it tugged at the iron collar around its neck, but tugged on it quite idly, and without violence; it was more as though it was worrying a fly bite.

Cobweb had told her that she might come up with something if she tried to be as stupid as she possibly could, but the problem was that Floralinda was not actually natively stupid. She did not process things very quickly, and certainly she knew nothing of the world, and hadn’t much of an imagination, and not very much courage or grit either; but she was not really stupid. The really stupid have a wonderful time of it, and often go on to marry royalty and kill giants. Princess Floralinda was just a princess, and thought like a princess, and had princess habits, which made her not stupid but simply a trifle dull.

“Come away from that trapdoor,” said Cobweb, who had grown uncomfortable watching the devil-bear, “make sure it’s shut tight”—which was very silly of Cobweb too, as you will see.

It was a miserable afternoon, for they both knew the full moon would rise that night, and the moonbeams would not only provide Cobweb with a nicer outfit than the little smock that Floralinda had sewed, but they would heal her wings and she would fly away to tell the other fairies about false dialogues she had undergone in the woods; and Floralinda would be left alone with nothing better than the devil-bear for company. There was nothing to do except unpick the latest calla lily she had embroidered so that she could embroider it again, as all the while Cobweb sorted her piles of pith and stuff into order so that she knew what she wanted to take. And all the while Floralinda grew sadder and Cobweb grew happier, which made for a really dreadful time (chiefly for Floralinda).

Late in the afternoon they were interrupted by a terrific clatter and crash. As there had been no noise in the tower up until then that wasn’t Floralinda, Cobweb, or the dragon, both grew very pale in the face. They rushed down to flight thirty-seven, and stood at the top of the stairs in the room which still stank of smoke and burned-up sett—only to find that the devil-bear had seen that the trapdoor opened and shut, and to find that the witch had put the devil-bear on a very long chain after all. It might have clambered up to get at Floralinda and Cobweb any time it liked. It had climbed up all the way up its ladder to flight thirty-seven in order to feast on the dead night-boar, and the chain was still slack even so, and then it saw that Floralinda and Cobweb had come back.

It did not hold off this time. The devil-bear went for them both. It fell to all fours and sprang up those stairs quicker than a cat would, right in front of them, which neatly cut them off from escaping back to flight thirty-eight. Floralinda screamed and darted down-stairs; Cobweb hollered just as loudly, and clung to Floralinda’s shoulder like anything, not having wings to fly away with. For a moment they all played chase-around-the-mulberry-tree with the big dead burnt-up corpse of the boar, until the devil-bear got sick of the fun. As Floralinda ran every which way, the devil-bear picked up its chain in its mouth in an altogether unnatural manner, and tugged on it just as Floralinda ran over its length; this tripped Floralinda up neatly, and she went flying.

“The ladder!” bawled Cobweb, “you clod, get to the ladder,” which Floralinda would not otherwise have done. She rolled over and over as though she were doing somersaults, and when she came to a stop she was quite close to the open trapdoor. She skinned down that ladder to the next floor in a trice, giving herself frightful splinters as she went in her haste; she saw the devil-bear staring down at her with those terrible eyes from the top.

“Get it off the pegs,” the fairy shrieked, and once she understood what this meant she started shaking the bottom of the ladder, which was really fairly heavy, trying to work it off the two metal pegs that affixed it to the wall just under the hatch. Neither Cobweb nor Floralinda had expected the devil-bear to follow. It wrapped its yellow paws around the ladder just like a man would, delicately, and came snout-first after them. This wobbled the ladder back on to the pegs, and then off again, and then on; the devil-bear saw what they were about and slapped the ladder firmly back on to the pegs, so that it would have a safe descent.

It was here that one of Floralinda’s wishes came true.

She had wished to change, and in that moment she did. She did not do what a princess would have done, which would have been to run to the other side of the room, and cry in a self-pitying way as the devil-bear ate her; nor did she even just sort of run about in a circle like a dog let out into the garden. She planted both feet firmly on the ground, and she heaved at that ladder as hard as she possibly could. Floralinda did not even know quite what she was doing. Cobweb had said to get it off the pegs, so get it off the pegs she must. The truth was that it was long past the time when getting it off the pegs would do anything useful, as Cobweb had thought to remove the ladder before the bear could get a hold of it, not anticipating the bear’s quickness on its paws. But Floralinda pulled with all her strength: and the ladder came off its pegs.

For a moment the devil-bear was in a very awkward position. It was clinging to the top of a tottering ladder like a stilt-walker on a pole, and its weight was pulling the ladder forwards, away from the wall and into empty space. Being an agile creature, it decided to leap clear, aiming for the iron bars that were fitted across the lower part of the nearest window—which it must have judged would make for a convenient hand-hold, or rather paw-hold. But at the precise moment it tensed to leap, Floralinda, still possessed by her overriding desire to get the ladder down, gave it one final furious tug, and made it lurch suddenly over to one side.

This threw everything out by a crucial distance. The bear leaped, but instead of hitting the scratched-up iron bars across the bottom of the window, its bulk collided with the upper part of the window, where there were no bars, only glass. It went straight through that glass with such a smash, and the chain sailed with it—Floralinda had to get out of the way of the chain in a hurry as it sped up, and then most of the chain was out the bear-shaped hole, and then all the chain was out of the bear-shaped hole; and there was a terrible sound as the chain snapped taut, and the iron ring it had been attached to nearly came all the way out of the pillar. But it had been driven in there very deep, and so all that happened was that the devil-bear came to a sudden stop, and a bad end. There was profound silence.

“That was a lovely lesson in angles,” said Cobweb, after a moment, more than somewhat shaken.

Floralinda sank down to her knees, which had gone like jelly.

“Cobweb,” she whispered, “oh, dear Cobweb, you saved me; you told me what to do.”

Cobweb got very uncomfortable.

“It shouldn’t have worked,” she said. “That was a one-in-a-million chance. I suppose you were quite brave pulling at the ladder like that.”

But Floralinda just kept repeating,

“You saved me, Cobweb, dear. I should have made you a boy; you were quite as wonderful as a prince.”

And the look in her blue eyes was not altogether a look that any princess had ever had before. It was more the look of a man who lives all alone on an island, and who has just seen a boat being rowed towards him; or, worse, the look of someone who stands in the street and gives you a religious tract. But Cobweb, for all her smartness, did not really know about Looks.

FLORALINDA WAS REALLY VERY biddable after that, possibly from the shock. She was not even ill after her knees started working again. It took quite a lot of doing getting the ladder back on the pegs, and there were a few near misses which might well have meant that they would have had to make their new home on flight thirty-six. But they got it back on after all, and less than fifteen minutes later they were sitting up in front of the warm fire again, with flight forty’s everlasting smell of oranges and coal; and there Floralinda did nothing more aggravating, even to Cobweb’s mind, than sit in a blanket by the fire and take little sips of milk. Even as the sky turned to dusk and Cobweb said things like—

“The moon will soon be up, you know”, all Floralinda did was say a bit vacantly, “How nice!” or, “Really!” in the way people do when they are not listening to you at all.

In fact, Cobweb was altogether relieved when the sunset made the room all orange and gold, and Floralinda grew pensive, as she so often did at sunsets, and said—

“I do wish you wouldn’t leave me, Cobweb.”

“I’m sure I’ll think about you often,” said Cobweb, who hoped entirely otherwise.

“It’s horrible to be thought of,” said Princess Floralinda wearily. “If one does nothing but think of someone, it takes up all the time you could use to do something about them. I wish nobody thought of me, but did a lot for me instead. It’s just like someone else going to the sea-side when you’re not, and sending a card back saying they’re thinking of you; it’s worse than if they weren’t thinking of you at all, and now you have a horrid card that you have to be grateful for. And I have decided that I don’t like being grateful—at—all.”

There was nothing to say on either side after this extraordinary speech.

Floralinda drank her milk and it all filled up back into the flask, and she huddled on the bed as the sun set and the moon began to rise. Cobweb had finished wrapping her heaps of material into little packets by then, and had tied them all together with embroidery floss, and was proud of the effect; when she looked back at Floralinda, Floralinda looked very glum, and Cobweb in turn looked beautiful and irritated.

“I suppose this is goodbye,” said Cobweb.

“I suppose this is,” said Floralinda.

“I’ve resolved to whisper your name into a foxglove first thing I do, rather than make it a middle-man,” said Cobweb, as though it were a great concession. “That means that it’s nearly a sure thing that a daisy will get told; they might even remember up to two of your names. That’s a risk on my part, you know.”

“I’m very grateful, I’m sure,” said Floralinda, falteringly.

“I’m sure it’s also been charming to be a girl, and to learn how you people live,” continued Cobweb, paying no heed, “so perhaps I shall even keep on being one, on alternate Sundays,—until I forget to, that is.”

The room had grown quite dark, except for the coals burning forever in the hearth. The full moon floated up from behind the trees like a great white balloon, very clear and crisp against the sky. It was really a very pretty sight, and Floralinda had the best view of it you could ever possibly have. The evening star twinkled in that navy blue like a very nice-quality diamond, and Cobweb waited before the window looking so beautiful and eager that you couldn’t get a prettier thing to look at in a children’s story-book colour plate. She nearly danced as the full moon rose, so excited was she; and she was so pleased that she was very nearly good. Fairies are only ever nearly good when they are happy.

The first shafts of moonlight fell on Cobweb, and it was even prettier to see the fairy bathe in that light of Diana like you or I would bathe in hot water. It fell on her in streams and rivulets—real streams and real rivulets; she cupped her hands up and Floralinda could see the moon-beam pool in them, thick and glistening as liquid pearl. She splashed her face with it daintily, and from her back, her ripped-up wings mended back up and shone with all the colours of the rainbow, until it seemed that Cobweb was gowned in moonlight and made of it all at once.

It was at this point that Floralinda rose and hit her with the pillow.

Floralinda smashed it down over Cobweb in the exact way you’d hit a spider; it was a soft pillow, so Cobweb didn’t go splat, but it was heavy, being filled with those feathers that Floralinda so hated. It stunned the fairy senseless, and then the next thing she knew was that she had been grasped right in the princess’s bite-scarred hands: not to the point where she was crushed, but firmly enough that she was frightened. And in the next moment, a loop of heavy gold came down around Cobweb’s neck; and the moment after that—snap!

For Floralinda had latched her golden necklace with the locket on Cobweb, only taken the locket off first; and she had fixed all her rings to the end, so that it was the neatest little ball-and-chain you had ever seen. It would have been impossible to fly carrying such a weight. All the rings together were very heavy, and the latch, as generations of princesses before Floralinda had learned, was a nightmare to work. You had to really squeeze it with your thumb. Cobweb’s little fairy fingers would never have had a chance.

“I won’t let you go,” panted Floralinda. “I can’t let you go; not until I’m all the way down to the bottom. I’ll let you go once I’m there, but I can’t let you go before. I need you, Cobweb; I’m not clever, and you are; I don’t want to die, and I don’t know what to do, and you’ve got to tell me.”

The bottom-of-the-garden fairy looked at the fine gold chain leading away from the latch, which was terribly heavy on her chest; and at the rings, and then at Floralinda, with her obstinate un-princesslike mouth, and big lovely blue eyes, and golden hair that had quite stopped curling long ago.

“This was really the cleverest thing you could have done,” said Cobweb, and burst into tears.

YOU MAY HAVE FELT VERY sorry for Cobweb when she was taken prisoner, and indeed Princess Floralinda had done something really quite evil. It is a sin to capture a fairy, or any wild winged thing, and keep it against its will; but you can at least be sure that Floralinda did not hear the end of it. Cobweb ranted and complained, and cajoled and threatened and cursed, and had Floralinda in tears three times daily; but Floralinda was inflexible, which should have told Cobweb something important. Princesses are very rarely inflexible.

When Cobweb had exhausted her raging, she said to Floralinda—

“If you insist on this, you must do everything I say.”

The princess said resolutely, “I will.”

“You must keep your promise, and let me go when it is all over.”

The princess said resolutely, “I shall.”

“You must figure out a way so that if you die, I can escape,” said Cobweb, but Floralinda said, in a crestfallen manner—

“I’m afraid I couldn’t think of a way to do that, and in any case I thought that wasn’t very smart, because then you might tell me to do something that would kill me on purpose, and get away thereby.”

“That is exactly what I planned on doing,” cried Cobweb in anger; “that’s really too bad; I can’t stand you getting clever now,” and was so cross that Floralinda was obliged to wait for half an hour to continue the conversation.

After which Cobweb said—

“You’re a weakling; you’re an absolute fright; if you’re going to be clever, you might as well be strong. I want you to do calisthenics and stretches, and to squeeze india-rubber balls with your hands.”

Floralinda hated this idea, but she said, meekly—

“Yes, Cobweb.”

It was just as though they were married, though of course most marriages don’t involve one party being knocked out before the rings are put on. I wish I could say that no marriages involve that, but it wouldn’t be altogether truthful.

And Cobweb, for her part, was not a nice wife at all, though it cannot be said that Floralinda was a nice wife either, considering the terrible thing she had done. It was not as though Floralinda wasn’t sorry about it, but she was not really as sorry as she ought to have been, and a tiny part of her was even relieved. A princess should have wept to hear about it.

The next thing Cobweb said was, “You need a weapon.”

When Floralinda first imprisoned Cobweb, the fairy was really just saying any old thing that came into her head, to try to buy enough time to sit back and think how to get out of her predicament; but once she had said this, she realised how true it really was. Any cave dweller in the Iron Age would have understood the same principle, which is why we have such a rich resource of arrow-heads and flints for museums now.

Floralinda had said Oh, such as a sword?; but Cobweb had pooh-poohed this, still thinking hard.

“No, swords are for strong men, who have been trained. You’d only cut yourself, and you’re not strong or good for much. You mustn’t get very close to anything. I would say that you needed a bow and arrow, only we haven’t got a bow and arrow, and I don’t know anything about making one,” (Cobweb was at least very honest about things she didn’t know) “and I know enough to be sure that arrows are a lot of trouble to make fly. You need to be able to fletch. I will return to chemistry as my starting-point, and educate myself in other areas. Go and count up all the books on the bookshelf, and tell me what they’re about.”

Floralinda dutifully went to count up all the books on the bookshelf, and reported that there were thirty-two, with twenty being about general economics, and ten being about the need for leather imports, grain imports, iron ore imports, and imports of all kinds of cloth; and the last two were Reader’s Digests.

Cobweb had written all this down, and thought about it some more.

“Tell me how many needles there are in the embroidery hoop,” she said at last.

Floralinda was bewildered by this, but felt much more at home, and could answer after checking that there were forty, of assorted sizes, with the most numerous being the large blunt-eye tapestry kind, and the second most numerous double-endeds.

Cobweb wrote all of this down too and thought about it all for at least thirty minutes, or so it felt to Floralinda.

“H’m! Things we could use if only we had more of them, and things we have in abundance that we can’t use,” said the fairy. “I’ve decided. Take down one of the wooden poles that holds up the curtain—you’ll have to climb up there somehow, and for goodness’ sake don’t break your neck, or that’s the end of me.”

It took quite a lot of balancing—the curtain-pole was hung very high, and Floralinda had to stand on a chair and then tip it off using other things, and it hit her on the cheek, which smarted; but once she had slid the curtain-rings off they had six feet of fairly solid wood, about two inches thick in diameter. It was rigid but not totally inflexible, and not too heavy.

Then came the curious part. Cobweb looked over the wood, and hemmed and hawed, and at last said—

“Now let’s put the end on some of those coals. Tie a wet rag around it—just so—so the rest of it doesn’t catch alight, and take it out when I say so.”

That was a very long day. Floralinda sat in her underthings and got quite sooty and hot, with a red face and hands, holding that curtain-pole into the fire. Cobweb had her take it out whenever the exposed end got charred, and then she had to sit with the pole on the stone floor, and take the knife that had been meant for cutting the bread, and use it to scrape the ashes off until the pole started to have a point. Halfway through Cobweb changed her mind and made Floralinda get the iron dustpan from the hearth instead, and use the flat flanged end to scrape with; that was much easier, although being ornamental it cracked in two quite early, and she had to use one half and be careful not to cut herself on the edge.

This process took all of one hot, dirty evening, but by the end of it Floralinda had a long wooden shaft sharpened to a wicked point. It had split a bit in parts, but it was quite nicely done for a first-timer, as Floralinda did everything Cobweb told her to do.

“That’s your weapon,” said Cobweb. “The only thing you need to know about it is that you can thrust it. It’s not fancy; you can’t do anything interesting with it. You just stand and push it into something else, which you have proved that even you can do, on a good day.”

And that was Princess Floralinda’s introduction to the spear.

In the dying days of summer, long past the full moon, Floralinda had to get up very early and practise holding it, and thrusting it forward, all of which was very dull: and they had no india-rubber balls, and so Cobweb made her squeeze smoother chunks of broken brick. She was forced to tie her lovely long hair back, and sort of pin it up over her head, so that it did not get in her way; and she did not like how she looked in the mirror, but at least she was not everlastingly pushing curls out of her face. She did not know that Cobweb was really doing this to get her own back rather than to teach Floralinda anything, but Floralinda became familiar with holding the pole, and far too familiar with squeezing lumps of rock. Her fingernails often came off, and she became pale and sad, and her mouth got lumps in it.

“You need better food,” said Cobweb. “Just because you won’t die without it doesn’t mean that you don’t need nourishment. You are too weak-minded to get strong on thought alone.”

This was a little more to Princess Floralinda’s tastes than being told she needed a weapon, especially when Cobweb added, “Like a beefsteak, or kidneys; something with protein.”

“Red meat is bad for the complexion,” said Floralinda.

“So is anaemia,” said Cobweb. “You can’t think how delicate human beings are; they can’t just eat nasturtium petals, or drink spring dew, as anybody normal might. They need all kinds of variety or their hair drops off. You’ve really saddled me with an awful burden here.”

Floralinda had hoped that fairy-magic might be used to procure a beefsteak, using beefsteak wishes, but Cobweb just laughed at her. The fairy was unkinder than ever when she laughed, because now Cobweb was really frightened too. Floralinda regretted then that she hadn’t made Cobweb a boy, as perhaps she would have been less scared.

“Just be quiet and do as I say,” commanded the fairy.

Which Floralinda had, unfortunately, agreed to.

So Floralinda crumbled up some of the loaf into breadcrumbs under Cobweb’s instructions, and left breadcrumbs out on the broad windowsill for the birds, who were now getting hungry as it got colder; and Floralinda stood very still among the sparrows as they alighted down and feasted on the bread, and then—whump!—got them with the pillow; and I am sorry to say Cobweb wrung their poor necks. Floralinda plucked what feathers she could and burnt the rest off on the fire; and she roasted them on sticks, and ate them!

The first time Floralinda roasted those sparrows she thought she couldn’t possibly. She knew nothing about cleaning birds, and had never had any interactions with poultry aside from broiled guinea-fowl and chicken-breast. Anyone who has ever dealt with a whole little bird knows that they are very small amounts of meat and mostly bones and insides; and then there was Cobweb, saying cruelly, “You’ve got to eat it; you won’t get strong otherwise,” just like every awful grandmother who ever was.

And I am sorrier to say that Floralinda ate those sparrows, bluetits and songbirds up, even the insides, and on those first nights when they caught and ate them she slept well for the first time in a while.

How those first autumn nights nipped! Floralinda had to make a sort of cloak from a blanket, and cut holes in it and wear it, and even then she thought she was cold. It was a pathetic sight in those days to see Floralinda in her blanket-coat, holding that spear and squeezing bricks, being told savage things by a fairy, and spending her nights sucking sparrow-bones clean, and sighing over it, and having tears prick at her blue eyes every time she thought about how sweet sparrows were.

But that was not the end of the sparrows’ woes (in aggregate, that is; all the individual birds who had their necks wrung by Cobweb found their woes over very suddenly, for they went directly to bird heaven). In those early days, when her brain had been working so quickly, Cobweb had made her own preparations, and had told Floralinda to take her down to flight thirty-eight. There she had set up a sort of laboratory, with a fairy-sized fire made of half an ever-burning coal, and cunning containers that she had cured out of orange-peel and made watertight. She had also made for herself a whole sort of visor out of orange-pith that was very funny to look at, but that protected all of her face, and the most beautiful little gloves of peel to shield her hands. She would put this all on, looking like the funniest orange doll, and make quite a lot of mess, and a fairy’s-building-site amount of noise what with the fire, and the bubbling containers all sloshing, and the chain with all the rings on clinking every time Cobweb moved. What exactly she was doing Floralinda wasn’t aware of, because it all took place very close to the big dead spider and Floralinda didn’t like to look.

But the culmination of those early experiments came to pass in those autumn evenings. Cobweb made Floralinda tie some of the gauze into a sort of sack, with a string through the top made of curtain-cord, so that it could be pulled shut in a hurry. They put a lot of choice breadcrumbs inside this sack, and Floralinda sat very still until a little bird hopped inside, and then—tug! the cord was pulled, with the bird struggling within.

Cobweb put on her orange-skin gloves, and took one of the tapestry-needles, and unplugged the pith top of one of her miniature orange-skins, and dipped the needle inside. She was as careful as a tiny surgeon as she held the needle over the skin until all the excess dripped off, and then she plugged it up again; she held it before her as she advanced to the struggling, cheeping bag, and as Floralinda held the bag still Cobweb pricked the needle through the gauze and into the bird.

How terribly that bird flapped! Floralinda was relieved that Cobweb had not run it through, which she had been afraid of; then Cobweb stared at the bag, and commenced counting out loud. Before she had counted to two, the bird’s struggles slowed; and before she had counted to five, the bird had stopped struggling altogether. When they opened the bag, the bird had curled up its poor bird toes, and was dead.

“Oh!” said Floralinda.

Cobweb looked it all over, and checked its eyes, and listened to its heart, and did a number of awful things besides. Then she sighed in relief; she took her pad of notes (this was one of the fly-leaves of the Reader’s Digests, cut up into squares with the embroidery-scissors, and tied together with thread) and her pencil (a scrap of lead from a whole pencil that Floralinda had found in a drawer) and wrote down in fairy-sized letters:

SAMPLE #1. ACTIV. ASSEUMD NEWROTOXIN. (Cobweb did not possess a dictionary.)

“Cobweb,” said Floralinda, “why, what did you do?”

“I didn’t do much,” said Cobweb, “but that spider venom jolly well did; that bird’s asphyxiated, as any fool can see.”

Once it had been explained to Floralinda what ‘asphyxiated’ meant, she said she was very glad that the spider had not bitten her.

“Oh! it wouldn’t have done that to you,” said Cobweb.

Floralinda was relieved.

“I get the impression that you would have gone rigid, asphyxiated and then melted into a sort of nutritious slop,” said Cobweb, “that the spider could have crunched up into a nice moist ball to suck dry; you see, a spider keeps all its poisons in different pouches and mixes them up as needed, as if it kept them all ready in one it would kill itself. I have correctly mixed one poison, so now, if you get back into position, we are going to need four more birds.”

And Princess Floralinda was not relieved at all!

BUT IN THOSE early days Floralinda still congratulated herself, in her terrible secret heart-o’-hearts, that she had stolen Cobweb. She tried to justify it to herself all the time, because she was really a princess still, and it hurt too much to think that she had committed such a mortal sin as imprisoning a fairy. Floralinda still wanted to go to Heaven, and even though she hadn’t put a penny in the box since being kidnapped, still hoped she might go there if she didn’t do anything too horrid; so she had to tell herself that she had done the right thing, and that if you looked at it a certain way she had even given Cobweb much more stimulating employment than she used to have. And of course she was as nice to Cobweb as she knew how, and made a lovely little bed for her right next to her pillow, and sewed her beautiful little frocks embroidered with miniature rosebuds in the tiniest of stitches. Even Cobweb admitted these were pretty.

But if you have ever been walloped because you were naughty, and then you were taken out for a good time afterwards to cheer you up about it, you might have a good idea of how Cobweb felt, which was all mixed up. She hated Floralinda with all her fairy heart, and more besides, because Cobweb was more intelligent than most fairies and therefore quite unusually good at hating; and it was all mixed up with grudgingly admiring Floralinda for doing the exact thing she would have done, and feeling a furious pleasure at bossing Floralinda about, and then disrespecting Floralinda for being bossed, and being frightened at all times throughout. That is how Cobweb felt in those early days. So she just thought as hard and as quickly as possible, and muddled through somehow, and kept long-term thoughts boiling in the back of her pretty little head.

“Now go and see what’s on the next flight; you’re such a slowpoke that the dragon will die of old age,” said Cobweb.

“You’re teasing me; dragons live for ever,” said Princess Floralinda plaintively. Which was the first time that Floralinda had contradicted her.

The first flight they dealt with after that fateful moonlit night was flight thirty-five, which Floralinda still hoped in her obvious heart could be taken care of with some fire, or some other trick; but when they opened up that staircase door, a sooty red glow hit them with dazzling heat, like opening an oven. This was quite pleasant for the first few minutes, as the cold had drawn in, but then it grew stuffy, and Floralinda had to take off her blanket coat.

The air shimmered before them like it does in the desert, and it was quite dark except for slithery orange lights here and there. The hot, airless room didn’t have any windows, and instead was separated into rocky partitions with liquid reflections in them, as though someone had heaped up stones in a pool. Even Cobweb had no idea what they were looking at as those orange lights moved and scattered, and then she said—

“Salamanders, of course.”

For salamanders they were, amphibians the size of dogs, who like to live in volcanoes and take dips in the lava. The witch could afford the lava but couldn’t afford the keeping thereof, so there was no real lava in that flight; but there was plenty of boiling oil, which the salamanders kept boiling themselves. It must have been a little rough on the salamanders, but if we begin to feel sorry for every single thing the witch locked up, we shall be here all day, so let’s not begin. Very few things that the witch had captured were completely innocent, after all.

The moving orange lights had grown still. In the hot darkness, ten white lights that both Floralinda and Cobweb had taken for reflections turned towards them: they were pairs of eyes. Cobweb drew Floralinda back from the trap-door and they heaped stones upon it, because they had learned from the devil-bear (whose chain was still stretched taut out the window and who had since expired, we hope, or otherwise was having a worse time than anyone else in this story).

“It’s terribly hot down there,” said Floralinda cautiously, “and there’s not a great deal of light to see by; I don’t think the spear will be much use, Cobweb, dear.”

Cobweb, dear said briskly: “Nonsense. This is all part of my grand plan. I am happy with this outcome. Salamanders are flesh and blood like anything else is, even if their blood is boiling hot; that’s what we wanted. You should have guessed what we are going to do.”

But Floralinda could not think. Even if you are currently delighting in a diet rich with two types of bread, milk, water, oranges, and everything inside a little bird, it can be difficult to think if you are under stress. She was getting better at thinking all the time, but her avenues and promenades of thinking still centred fundamentally about the danger of getting hurt, and how she wouldn’t like it if she did.

“But,” she said, after screwing up her forehead with thinking (she had found this helped), “but those little birds didn’t die right away, you know they didn’t; and the salamanders are bigger than birds.”

“Yes,” the fairy admitted grudgingly, as she always did whenever Floralinda had a point. “The venom isn’t as efficacious as it was when the spider was alive. I’m applying quite a lot more venom to the spear, but you’ll have a few seconds when the salamander will still be coming after you.”

“Will it bite me, do you think?”

Cobweb thought No, for salamanders didn’t have teeth; but she said, “It will slap you with its long tongue, which it keeps hotter than boiling, so if you let it touch you, you’ll get a terrible burn and die. And it will take you ever so long to die in that way, and hot water and orange-peels won’t save you.”

This was rather the wrong approach to take with Floralinda, who was so petrified that it took her a long time to pick up the spear and go anywhere near that trapdoor. She had been biddable in those early days after the full moon, when all that squeezing bricks had done was make her hands sore, and all that practise with the spear had made her body sore, and eating birds had merely made her miserable. Now she turned stubborn, and wouldn’t do anything that night, and was so frightened that she cried herself to sleep and didn’t bother to keep it quiet. Kidnapping Cobweb had been a crime of passion and opportunity that she really had not planned on doing until a few seconds before she had done it, and now she regretted everything, and occasionally wished she were dead, or worse.

The fairy argued and taunted, and then—though she really wasn’t good at it, and in a way it frightened Floralinda worse—she spoke sweetly and patiently; but nothing could convince Floralinda to try until Cobweb said—

“Don’t be such a coward. Let’s coax one of the salamanders upstairs; they’re dumb animals, and I’m sure they don’t hunt in packs. Wave your handkerchief at the door, and we’ll see it coming up in plenty of time,” and other such blandishments.

In the end this cured Floralinda’s mulishness, alongside the fact that the next morning her toes were freezing cold, and had to be stuck close to the fire in the hearth before they got any feeling in them. It was getting chillier all the time, and she wasn’t dressed for any season that wasn’t the middle of summer, and she knew that flight thirty-five was currently the warmest place in the tower.

Eventually, Floralinda permitted herself to be guided downstairs, and she opened the trapdoor, while Cobweb rubbed the point of the spear over with one of the venoms; and she stood there, trembling, her mouth dry and her heart feeling like the drum section in a marching-band. Cobweb sat as far away from all this as possible, which did not feel quite fair to Floralinda. The princess fluttered her handkerchief at the mouth of the trapdoor, and darted back, and then peered over when nothing happened; but a salamander wouldn’t come upstairs. Cobweb told her she wasn’t waving it well enough, and in the end, she got impatient and sat on Floralinda’s shoulder, chain and all, and waved the handkerchief herself.

Although neither princess nor fairy knew it at the time, this was what excited the salamanders. It was not because Cobweb was very good at waving a handkerchief, as the salamanders could tell the difference between a handkerchief and something nice to eat; it was because as Cobweb got more impatient her wings fluttered. A salamander is a kind of lava-dwelling amphibian, after all, and amphibians love nothing better than a mouth full of moth or butterfly, or even better, small birds; and Cobweb moved in quite the same way as a small bird did.

One salamander started lumbering up the staircase, showing itself for the first time. It was easily the size of a Labrador retriever, and covered in thick pebbly scales on its underside with soft, dreadfully hot parts on top (this is how a salamander gets rid of excess heat), steaming in the air as it went. Here Floralinda had her first success. She was frightened, but when Cobweb shrieked, “Go!” she thrust out with her spear. It might have been harder had salamanders had hard stuff on top and soft parts on the belly, but the soft parts were well within reach, and Floralinda got it first try. Even better, the salamander, grazed by the venom-scrubbed tip of the sharpened shaft, took fright and jumped back down the staircase, not knowing it had been poisoned. It was dead very quickly.

Another salamander came up to investigate. Again, Cobweb shrieked, and Floralinda stabbed out wildly with the spear. This salamander escaped upwards into flight thirty-six, and Floralinda ran around the central pillar until the salamander flopped over, and died. By this time three more salamanders had emerged from the trapdoor, and whop!—Floralinda jabbed one with her spear, and whop! Whop!—two more, and it was just as easy as playing Blind Man’s Buff when you don’t have the blindfold on. The salamanders would have been difficult to kill with swords, since they were very quick and hard to catch with a fatal blow; but they had no defense against spider venom, so all Floralinda had to do was scratch their flesh and then stay out of their way for a little while. Their corpses sizzled and smoked against the cold stone floor.

There was a frightening moment when both Cobweb and Floralinda noticed that the tip of the spear had charred, from the heat of the salamanders’ skin, and all the venom had burnt off, and the point was in danger of catching alight; and yet there was another salamander coming up the stairs. They made what is called a ‘tactical retreat’, and Cobweb, who had thought ahead, doused the spear-tip in cold water, and re-applied the venom. Floralinda gripped the spear and went back to the head of the stairs, and immediately shrieked, for the salamander was right below her; it did indeed flick out its horrible tongue like a flame—it glowed red beneath the thick black leathery skin—but Floralinda stabbed downwards, which put paid to that.

It is very lucky that flight thirty-five was salamanders. The story would have been different had it been something difficult. That first victory was so easy, and so unexpected, that Floralinda laughed and cried alternately for half an hour afterwards; it was as simple as the first flights had been horrible, with the added sweetness that unlike the spider, who died by accident, she had set out specifically to make these things go away, and had managed it. It was like beginning an exam where the first questions were impossible, and then encountering a question along the lines of What sound do cats make (10 points)?. She was so excited, and so close to hysteria, that she ran rings around the central pillar ten times.

Once Floralinda had been calmed down, and once she had eaten some orange between two slices of bread, and unwillingly eaten a wren and a mistle-thrush, she took Cobweb in her hands and danced all around the top of the tower.

“Perhaps with this success you have grown independent and confident, and you’ll take off this chain, and enjoy getting down the rest of the way yourself,” said Cobweb.

“No, not at all,” said Floralinda earnestly, “for, Cobweb, I couldn’t have done that without you at all. I so appreciated you saying what to do, as it solves all my problems. My difficulty is that when I’m frightened, I have no idea, so I just empty my mind and do whatever you say,” she finished.

“The next few flights may not be so easy,” said the fairy.

BUT THE NEXT few flights were easy. In no time at all, Princess Floralinda travelled down three whole flights with no real difficulties. The harpy made things a great deal easier by flying straight at Floralinda first thing, screaming and trying to claw at her with her wicked talons and razor-sharp feathers; there was no time for Cobweb to scream anything like “Thrust!” or “Go!”, but the harpy flew into the point and scratched her arms, and lay paralyzed on the ground until Floralinda got up the courage to scratch her a few more times on her flanks. So too it went with the giant rats, who should have known better, as rats are intelligent; but I am afraid that Floralinda presented such a sight, nervously holding that spear as it shook, with its burnt-out tip, not looking at all like a danger, that they let themselves be scratched and died in record time.

The biting fishes were sunk into a neck-deep pool on flight thirty-two, and they presented a problem Princess Floralinda would not have been able to solve herself at that time. There were hundreds of them, each no bigger than her hand, so that when they all schooled and roiled together it looked like a mass of sequins thrashing in that brackish water; but after thinking about it carefully, and remembering the spider’s death, Cobweb suggested they toss in one of the giant rats that had been poisoned. The fish converged on that rat in a way that made Floralinda feel very grateful that she had not stepped into the water, and they stripped all the meat from that corpse. Twenty minutes later they had pretty much all of them floated to the top and died, and the ones who hadn’t eaten the rat tried to eat them, and it ended badly all round.

And it was so easy—a few hits—brief panic—and a dead rat!

Which meant Floralinda had quite a lot of fish to eat. She had to learn how to cut a fish’s head off (and weren’t those biting fish ugly!) and take out its guts, which she tossed off the side of the tower, much to the delight of the local animals (who had known better than to touch the rotting goblins, but enjoyed fish guts). They had poison in their systems, but Cobweb thought it would be fine, seeing as they had eaten so little; and indeed all that happened after eating was that Floralinda’s mouth went a bit numb. How ugly those fishes were; but how good white, flaky fish meat was, even if you had to peel it out of the fish-bones, and be careful that you didn’t swallow one. Floralinda ate some of them roasted, and ate some of them wrapped in orange-skins so that they tasted a bit like orange (though she wasn’t so fond of the taste of oranges any more) and some of them she ate on slices of sweet white bread. Cobweb even set up a little rack of sticks, and most of the fishes she dried into a kind of jerky in the thin afternoon light. Floralinda wasn’t at all sure she would like to eat this jerky, but Cobweb said she would want it later.

The season had dipped into autumn, and the trees in the distance started popping into their Hallowe’en clothes. They burst among the evergreens in every shade of yellow and orange, and scarlet and gold, which was all delightful to look at, but the tower was terribly hard to keep warm. The witch was not well-acquainted with insulation.

And Floralinda was in quite a silly mood, being young and confident, and feeling as though she had done a lot. Sometimes she sang, and sometimes she even danced, and in the mornings she would say, “Good morning, dear Cobweb! I wonder what’s on the next flight down?” and had quite forgotten to be frightened, or more importantly, cautious.

Whereas Cobweb knew not to hope too deeply, even if there was a particle in her brain that kept thinking about how nice it would be if they got all the way down to the bottom before the winter came, and how nice it would feel to have her ball-and-chain removed, and fly again. Sometimes when Floralinda was asleep she would try to work at the latch with the head of a needle, but that didn’t do the slightest bit of good. And she had great plans to try to make pliers, but didn’t quite have all the things she needed to make pliers—in fact at that point in the autumn she had a dead harpy, two dead rats and a lot of fishes that were going bad, but these were just beautiful distractions on the path of Freedom.

Cobweb had also not expected Floralinda to get that far, not exactly, and not so easily. Floralinda had gotten fatter on fish and songbird, and her regime of squeezing bricks was making her hands blistered and strong. She was also getting dirty, because she was growing so reluctant to take all her clothes off, and sponge.

BY THIS STAGE, Cobweb had started trying to teach Floralinda other instructions, rather as you’d teach a dog who had managed ‘Sit.’ She was teaching Floralinda ‘Duck’, and also ‘Back up’, which are useful. Floralinda could hold one instruction in her head at a time, and had practiced thrusting with the spear so often that it came quite easily to her; but she did not know how to practice ‘Duck’, even if Cobweb sat flinging sparrow-bones at her.

The feathered serpent on flight thirty-one was what caused Cobweb to try to teach Floralinda ‘Duck’, for the feathered serpent could really fly (or at least glide from perch to perch, before it hung there and spat poison directly into one’s eyes at an alarming length, far farther than you or I could spit a cherry-stone). It flew right at Floralinda first thing, and Cobweb shouted, “Duck!” and Floralinda panicked and thrust her spear forward instead; and the serpent’s feathered tail struck her in the face, and she fell flat backwards. The feathered serpent wound itself around its perch, and directed a perfect stream of venom where Floralinda’s eyes had been, but weren’t any more, owing to her being flat on the ground. She had fallen over her spear, and thankfully had not fallen on Cobweb, who had the presence of mind to cling rather painfully to her neck. Floralinda watched as a beautiful puff of serpent-venom went overhead, right until Cobweb threw herself over her face, in case there were stray drops.

The feathered serpent couldn’t spit again in a hurry, so Cobweb urged Floralinda to her feet, and there was an awkward moment where Floralinda forgot how to thrust the spear, and battered the serpent with it instead, which did more damage to the spear than to the serpent. Then the serpent coiled around the point of the spear, and on Cobweb’s direction, Floralinda drove the spear into the wall. It is hard to say what killed the serpent, the blow or the venom, but either way it was dead.

And all Floralinda got was a rather startling black eye, which Cobweb told her to rest the flask of milk on, until it was less swollen.

Princess Floralinda had replaced all her anxiety with jubilation. It made perfect sense to her that she had done a terrible thing that felt awful, which had been what she had done to Cobweb, but that she had been rewarded for it by everything being comfortable afterwards; it is the seduction of doing the one very difficult thing, and feeling as though the difficulty and suffering meant that you were done—you had completed it—whatever it was, you did not have to do it again. This is how many people think about cleaning the house.

It was not as though life was perfect for Floralinda. Cobweb demanded she chop up the salamanders once they had cooled down, to get useful things from their insides: for salamanders have very thick, hard arteries and veins, to protect their organs from how hot the oxygenated blood is inside them, and Cobweb wanted these for her own purposes. Indeed Cobweb got quite silly with excitement over them, and over finding that the pouches of stuff inside each salamander were still filled with the things they secrete to keep their tongues both fiery and moist. Floralinda was set to scraping salamander tongues for a whole morning, and she had to do it without a word of complaint.

Floralinda was very obedient when it came to the fairy about most everything—except, that is, for the things that Cobweb really wanted; so she was often dirty and sore, seeing liquids that no princess ought to ever see, and the dreadful nudities of creatures without their skin on.

But she let herself indulge in wild flights of fancy about being back home for Christmas, and being made a fuss of, and seeing her mother and father, and everybody saying how brave she had been, and none of the parents of the twenty-four princes blaming her one bit,—which is how you can tell that Floralinda still didn’t have much imagination.

(THE WITCH HAD BEEN in an aquatic phase, as you shall see.)

It was on flight twenty-nine that Princess Floralinda came to grief. Six flights without any more incident than a black eye and a spear that wanted re-sharpening is too much to expect from a princess and a bottom-of-the-garden fairy. Anticipating misfortune had been so much on Cobweb’s mind that she was almost suffering from the lack of it; when Floralinda got hurt, it was almost a relief to her mind to find out what the trouble would be. It is safe to say that a part of Cobweb was also relieved that Floralinda was hurt, as she hated her; but she was unhappy that Floralinda was hurt, because her life depended on Floralinda; and she was happy that Floralinda was hurt, because Floralinda frightened her so much that she wanted Floralinda to have a good scare in turn, to try to teach her a lesson.

Flight thirty’s water-goat—or a Capricorn, if you have had a good education—would have given any prince a scare, seeing as he was six feet tall, with his goat part from the middle to the horns and a great blubbery walrus body from the other half down. The walrus body shook and the front part pawed the ground madly. And he gave Floralinda quite a scare to start with, because she stood close to the door of his flight and got him in his blubbery parts before she ran away, that being the easiest method, but it didn’t seem to affect him much. Cobweb said this was because the tail was chiefly fat, and probably wonderful for rendering, so they should keep it. Floralinda ignored this, being more worried about how to get the poison into the water-goat some other way. Thankfully, feeling his tail going numb, the water-goat turned around to investigate what was happening on Floralinda’s end; and she scratched him in the chest with the envenomed spear, and that was fine, although Floralinda refused to try to render the blubbery tail.

“This room is going to be impossible even to walk through in a week or so,” said Cobweb portentously. “Water-goats smell quite dreadful enough when they’re alive.”

“Oh, never mind that,” said Floralinda, almost gaily, “we might set him on fire and burn him up. Then he won’t smell at all, and he’ll be charcoal, and perhaps you could use the charcoal for something.”

And Cobweb looked at her pretty hard, as she was not trembling, or pale in the face, or even that daunted by her encounter with a monster, which was not at all like Princess Floralinda.

Then, of course, it all went wrong. Floralinda went into a room occupied by a hydra, which was quite a small hydra, being as the height of the room was ten feet only; but it had seven heads, and sat in a filthy fountain in the centre of flight twenty-nine, and screamed with seven tongues. A prince might have found the hydra difficult to kill without help, as the hydra’s trick is to re-grow a head the moment it is cut off; but Floralinda and Cobweb had a curtain-rail spear and a quantity of really quite good spider poison, and you can’t regrow anything from that. The heads all hissed, and Floralinda did a quite successful duck when Cobweb said to duck, and she thrust the spear with exuberant confidence at the hydra, and hit it; but skidded badly, and fell awkwardly on her foot, and ended up sprawled on the wet stones.

The hydra died quite indignantly, having expected different tactics and only prepared for what was expected, which was all to the good, but Floralinda found that her foot felt strange when she tried to stand up. At first it was numb; but by the time she made her way back up to flight forty (such a number of flights to walk back up now!) she was in awful pain.

It was a problem just getting out of her wet things and into bed, and she shivered and suffered the whole time. Cobweb looked it over, and wrapped up some ice in some of the silver gauze and applied it to the foot, which was getting quite red and swollen where she had hit it (the side, from the little toe down to her heel), and pronounced it probably not broken, but badly sprained instead.

“What is the difference?” gasped Floralinda, who had not ever experienced either.

“I don’t have to try to do anything about the bone, which is good, because I’m sure I don’t know how to,” said Cobweb, “but you are out of commission. I don’t know for how long, it depends on the sprain.”

“Do you think I will be able to get up tomorrow morning?”

“I think you will be able to get up tomorrow morning in a few weeks,” said Cobweb, cautiously. “You’re a fool, you know. That floor was slippery, and you should have been careful.”

Floralinda’s mouth trembled. Perhaps it was the fact that everything had been going so well, and had been going well in a way where she felt like she deserved her successes; she had been working so hard (or at least thought she had been working very hard—weren’t her hands sore, and wasn’t her back stiff, and wasn’t she tired all the time?) and now it was all put off. It wasn’t even as though she had been savaged by a monster, which would have attached some dignity to the pain. Any princess could slip and take a fall. It was her whole experience of skating.

She would not get back before Christmas, or at least, not long before Christmas, so nobody would have time to arrange presents except for very last-minute ones, like socks or things to put in the bath. She would not see her mother and father any time soon. Princess Floralinda sat back in the pillows, feeling white and totally crestfallen, and hot salt tears leaked out her eyes. She was so cold even wrapped up in the blankets, and her ankle burned from having the cold compress, and she felt utterly dismayed. The wind bumped against the tower windows, and sounded so desolate and lonely that she had to bite her tongue so as not to cry; and Cobweb looked at her with a queer expression that was mostly contemptuous (though such a lovely face for being contemptuous with!) but worse, somewhat nervous (and such a terrible face for being nervous with!).

A question entered her head. Questions now entered Floralinda’s head regularly, which made her very stressed. If she were asked by a survey what the worst part of the tower was, she would rank the food quite highly, and the loneliness highly too; but the very worst part would be the sheer anxiety of all the questions her brain now asked her.

She whispered this one now—

“Cobweb, dear; I’ve just wondered: where did you even get this ice?”

“I was going to say; we have bigger problems than your wretched foot to worry about, and you’ve picked the absolute worst time,” said Cobweb. “It’s snowing.”

YOU MAY FIND it funny to hear, with the goblins, and the monsters of all kinds, and the infection she had got in her hands (which, it must be said, was fairly light) and the princes getting crunched-up, that it was this time that Floralinda would later think of as the hardest.

The witch had not made her tower to be habitable from season to season, or at best it was a three-season tower and did not account for inclement weather. Witches do their best work in late spring and summer, when princes are most naturally inclined to go and look for mates. As the prince’s only natural predator, the witch had to work when the princes were thickest on the ground. There are only a very few accounts of princesses who stayed inside their towers for years and years, and those towers were custom-made for them, with hot and cold running water and more appropriate heating solutions. And besides, these were not simply princesses, but also daughters of witches, and daughters of witches have a high survival rate even if their partners have a very low rate of not falling into thorn bushes. Floralinda would never have been fostered by the witch in that way; the witch in our story thought that very old-fashioned, and indeed a bit distasteful for everyone concerned. Our witch had been interested in art and beauty, though Floralinda wasn’t to know it; art and beauty don’t heat houses.

It was not truly winter yet, just an early cold snap in autumn, and the snow only settled for a day. But it was cold as charity in that tower. The fire couldn’t go out, which saved Floralinda’s life (and therefore Cobweb’s), but she was only warm when she was next to it, as the way the room was made let all the heat escape. She was obliged to put on every stitch of clothing she had, the silk gown and all her petticoats and her blanket coat, and to sleep with them on too; and she was in frightful pain from her ankle, so that when she stood up she cried.

Cobweb the bottom-of-the-garden fairy did not feel the cold. Fairies don’t, as a rule. She was also not starved due to the witch’s spell, although she did not have much in the way of favourite foods; there was no earthly way to drink dewdrops from dear little ferns or bellflowers, nor any honey, nor strawberry-leaves. Floralinda did cry quite a lot, and Cobweb did have a supply of princess’s tears, but these were less and less palatable as time went by. She was forced to live on late-autumn sunshine and the taste of snow, which is a dull diet for any fairy. Her true danger was Floralinda’s danger. The chain around her neck had seen to that.

For a while the fairy was content, because she had the stuff that Floralinda had scraped for her from the salamander tongues, and did evil-smelling experiments all day and night. First she made a hideous gel which she rendered down to a horrible paste. Then she was wracked with indecision, until finally from that paste she rendered a large quantity of grey powder. There were so many explosions in this process that Cobweb temporarily sizzled off her eyebrows, but she was exultant.

“I can’t think of any other way to make it transportable,” she told Floralinda, “and this is the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m annoyed, because in powder form it will certainly be less incendiary when rehydrated; but it’s wonderfully adhesive. When I get back I will find a particular tree that has been rude to me, and shake some of this all over its roots, and pretend I am watering it when I am really reconstituting the mixture; then I will set it alight from a distance, and no matter what the forest fairies try to do it will burn like anything, and be much too sticky to scrape off. Then they might ask me (I will be feigning tears, as hadn’t I just been watering the blasted thing?) and I will say, ‘Oh dear, if only you knew anything about metastable emulsions’, and they’ll all be sorry.”

“It all sounds very useful, I’m sure; we could use it on a creature,” said Floralinda, relieved to learn that the smells might now be over, and believing ‘incendiary’ to mean a type of post-card.

How Cobweb laughed at the idea of wasting that powder on Floralinda!

And indeed, she was so jealous of it that she kept the powder with her at all times, in a fairy-sized haversack of peel, and only took it off to sleep.

After the experiment with the salamander gel, Cobweb grew dissatisfied again. Truth be told, the gel had been intended to blow the latch off the necklace, and in theory it would perform that office wonderfully. It would likely perform that office so wonderfully that it would take off Cobweb’s head with it. She was too pleased with the gel to admit that this compromised its overall success, but there was nothing for her now but to return to the Floralinda question.

Cobweb had always believed strongly in education, which she thought set her apart from other fairies. In truth, fairies are all very nosy, and want to find things out; they just don’t have the memory for books. Cobweb made Floralinda take down all the books and spread them out on the bed, and so long as Floralinda opened the covers she could turn the pages over herself. She did not receive much useful information about how to survive in such a situation, but she did come to know quite a lot about supply and demand.

In those chilly dark weeks—as the sun began to show its face less and less above the tops of those flame-coloured trees—Floralinda did not spend much time in her bed, despite the fact that she was told around three times an hour that she needed to keep her foot still. She was back to her old, drifting, restless ways, wanting to do three things at once, and hating to not move about. She winced and cried out whenever she put any weight on the foot. She had to get around using a system of chairs, and leaning on things, and pulling herself up onto other things, which made her arms very sore; but she kept on squeezing those pieces of brick, and she kept on practicing with the spear, though she had to do it sitting down, and quite often she tumbled herself over. She would lie on the cold rugs and cry, and the wind would rattle the windows, and Cobweb would mutter things like, “Supply-side economics,” and the dragon with the diamond-tipped scales would let out dreary bellows from time to time.

It took Floralinda a long time to get well in these conditions. Everything in the tower room felt filthy. It had been hard to sleep during Cobweb’s experiments, and it sometimes felt as though she could not sleep well even after they were done. Floralinda felt harmed by the strings of drying fishes, which no longer smelled as bad as they once had, but made her remember how they smelled when she looked at them, which was almost worse. It took a long time to dry clothes, and it was so cold that she had to get very brave to wash, and yearn all the time for a hot bath, when the best she could do was heat water on the hearth and use that to sponge with. It always felt so much colder after the hot-water sponge that she resented doing it.

Floralinda’s arms and hands were stiff every morning, so that she had to rub them carefully over the fire to get their feeling back; her foot ached, and was a horrible purple colour, and looked twice as big as the other foot; and sometimes she would try to make more wishes—

“Please, God, I wish You would make someone come and look for me,” but Cobweb chided her, saying:

“Your religious and fairy convictions are all mixed up. I do wish you wouldn’t; it makes my insides feel strange.”

Floralinda tried to remember what she had been told about general and specific wishes, and tried things like, “I wish it would be warmer,” and “I wish my foot would get better,” and “I wish I had a coat.”

Cobweb had been looking through the book on leatherwork imports, a book that considered its first duty to be the demolition of any interest the reader might have previously felt in domestic leatherwork. It had long, discursive chapters on the difficulty of curing hides and furs, and on the low quality of local leatherwork as opposed to leatherwork from any other nation; and she said—

“That is a more interesting and intelligent wish.”

And that is how Floralinda found herself hobbling downstairs, all the way down to flight thirty-three, to see the giant rats that they had not heaved into the pit of fishes. The tower had become so suddenly cold after they died that they had not yet really become nasty. Floralinda still gagged and shuddered, but she comforted herself with the idea that she had seen worse, and after all they were only giant rats. These were thoughts that would not have occurred to her in the summer.

Cobweb had neatly ripped out the appropriate pages of the domestic leatherworking book, and transferred her laboratories downstairs, and bullied Floralinda into carrying the empty brazier, and said—

“If you’re going to be no use for anything, we might as well try to keep you warm. It would be just like you to get sweaty and horrible squeezing those stupid rocks,” (when it had been Cobweb who told her to squeeze them!) “and catch pneumonia on top of everything else, which would be spiteful in the extreme. This rat is in better condition than the other, and we’re going to tan its hide. It kept the rat warm, so perhaps it will do the same for you.”

The rat’s fur was very thick and ugly, with great bristly rat-coloured hanks of hair that did not feel soft or inviting. Floralinda, who had always picked squirrel or ermine or mink from the furrier, did not really like the idea. When the fairy told her how the hide had to come off, she liked the idea even less, and felt faintly as though she were going to be ill; but she had not been ill since the first adventures in the tower, and if she was ill she was going to have to go upstairs again and get a new breakfast, and her foot did not feel up to it. So she kept her food down.

But it was a time. The worst part of the tanning was that you had to open up the rat, and then take everything inside the rat, out. It was like the worst Christmas stocking that ever was; and Floralinda was nervous about making the cuts, especially as Cobweb kept giving bullying advice that didn’t make much sense and was dreadful to hear, such as “Don’t pierce the organs,” and “Pull the ribs apart.” Also, the hide very firmly wanted to stay on the rat, and was recalcitrant in coming off. The rat not being freshly dead, and being cold, had slightly less rank insides than you might think: but the insides were still, alas, very rank. Floralinda sawed terribly with her knife even if Cobweb had gone to the trouble of giving it new edges, and shrieked when she had to lift things out of the rat, and made rather a mess of taking the skin off. By the end she was hot, and bothered, and very dirty, but she had a big tattered piece of rat-skin. She had made slits down the thighs and the arms, and the rat’s thick neck, and for the first time understood how a human being might with concentration never want to eat again: she would just think of how the rat looked, and of how the rat looked outside of the rat.

Cobweb checked this horrible thing all over for holes, as Floralinda burned the bits in a fire, which made the fire smell unspeakable but got rid of them.

“Now comes the hard part,” said Cobweb.

Floralinda uttered a little scream, and lay flat on her back.

“Oh! Oh, whatever do you mean, that wasn’t the hard part? Oh, Cobweb, I can’t and I won’t. Every time I close my eyes I will see that rat in my head. I won’t ever have a nice dream again, now that I’ve done that to the rat, and seen things nobody but a cat or owl is meant to see. Nobody will ever think I am a good girl, and I don’t even believe I am, either. If you tell me there’s worse I shall faint.”

“You are an idiot and a hysteric besides,” said the fairy, but she seemed to be a little relieved that Floralinda still had some kick in her. “The hard part won’t come today, at least, you ninnyhammer. Right now we are going to drop this in the pool that the fishes were in, weighted with a rock; we’ve got to let it get a little bad so that the soft fleshy part scrapes off.”

Afterwards Floralinda hobbled upstairs, and sponged herself with hot water, and lay in bed with her foot in agony. Cobweb sat next to her with a Reader’s Digest, and even consented to read some parts out to Floralinda, though of course she was very grudging about it and did not do any interesting voices. Floralinda lay very still, as the moment she moved even a finger all the nice bubble of bodily warmth went away, and she was icy cold again, but she said—

“Cobweb, are you still angry with me?”

“Of course I am,” said the fairy, surprised. “I expect to be angry for about two more years.”

“I had thought perhaps you were feeling sorry for me instead,” ventured Floralinda, who saw herself as a very sorry object.

“I won’t stop hating you, so I would have to feel both, and that’s very dangerous for a fairy,” said Cobweb fervently. “There is nothing worse than hating someone and feeling sorry for them. I can’t feel sorry for you when you’re so stupid, and I like you even less when you’re clever. I disdain you, and occasionally you surprise me, which I don’t enjoy at all. I advise you to not like me either, which I’m sure you don’t. If you had, you would not have imprisoned me.”

“But Cobweb, that’s not true at all; I am trying to grow to love you, despite the fact that you are only beautiful and learned and not even a little bit nice,” said Floralinda.

“Will you free me, if you love me?”

Floralinda mulled it over, and said Probably, because love made you pure and good, always; and privately felt relieved that it was unlikely she would grow to love Cobweb before she made it to the bottom of the tower (or, indeed, ever). But she suggested that she could take Cobweb back with her to the palace, and introduce her to the family and to the servants, and that perhaps she could be a royal fairy rather than a bottom-of-the-garden one dealing with children who were innocent of the facts of life.

“Take me back with you!” said Cobweb. “Just fancy! What if they don’t want you?”

“Of course they will want me; I’m their Princess,” said Floralinda.

“You are a crook,” said Cobweb.

But when she shivered down in bed that night, with Cobweb curled up in her little nest close by, it was a question her mind kept chasing round and round, like the devil-bear had chased them; her family had a legal obligation to want her, as well as a moral obligation besides; even if she had workday hands, and even if her curls would never be the same again, she was still very much a princess on the inside. Just because the bread has gone stale and hard on the outside does not mean, if you cut through it, that there is not nice fresh bread within.

This should have told Cobweb something too, for princesses aren’t meant to doubt.

THEY SOAKED the rat skin for days, and then Floralinda was obliged to sit with it, and scrape all the inside membrane off, trying to be as careful as possible so that she didn’t push the scraper through the tough skin of the rat. They left the hair side on, and Floralinda made all kinds of wretched mistakes: sometimes she scraped too hard and sometimes too softly, and she did make more than one hole, and Cobweb scraped from the other end and scolded her. It is hard when your hard work is compared to the hard work of clever fairy hands, and Floralinda always hated being scolded; but between the two of them they got the wrong layer off.

Then came another horrible part, because the hide needed to be soaked again in something that would soften it. Floralinda would not have been able to do this part had she not already seen the rat’s insides, but Cobweb made her crack open the rat’s skull, and get out all its brains; they put the brains with some hot water and some of the oil that the salamanders had floated in (which contained goodness only knows what, but Cobweb had sieved it nicely) and put the rat’s hide in that muck, which at least meant they could get rid of the rest of the rat. Every time Floralinda saw its big naked tail—as long as two skipping-ropes, and as thick as your arm—she wanted to scream.

The hide was a pain; Cobweb said that they needed to keep it soft while it dried, so they took it upstairs and Floralinda was obliged to tug it, or pull it, or keep it stretched out like it was a crochet pattern, all the while impatiently waiting for her foot to get better. She could limp with it now, and was awfully afraid that she would limp forever; but Cobweb thought that the foot was on the mend, and made Floralinda exercise it even when it hurt terribly. By the time the hide was dry, and by the time Cobweb had smoked it over the fire, her foot only twinged.

The rat’s hide was not very beautiful, nor very successfully done, and it was heavy and smelled extraordinary. Floralinda cut up breadths of it to sew together—sweating all the while, for if her measurements did not add up, there was all their hard work gone—and ended up with a rather bizarre garment that had to fasten in the front with rough toggles, because she did not have any buttons. There had been quite enough to add a hood, though wearing the hood was difficult as she had over-measured, and it fell quite deeply over Floralinda’s face. It was quite snug, especially after she darned the holes, but its fragrance was that of a rat that had undergone a bad time.

“Perhaps the other creatures will think I am a rat,” said Floralinda sadly, “and accept me, and let me pass.”

“I suspect now they’ll just smell you coming,” said Cobweb.

FLORALINDA AND COBWEB returned to their tedious, back-breaking progress, and little by little Floralinda became happy again; but she was never really happy in the same way. She found that she could not become happy with all her old fancies, or by thinking about Christmas, or by singing; she had started to only become really happy in those moments when the spear was in her hands, gleaming wetly at the tip with the venom Cobweb had just applied, and feeling the rising excitement and dread of meeting whatever was on the next floor down. She could still become interested thinking of how wonderful it would be when she got right down to the bottom, but it had stopped making her quite happy, because those thoughts were always accompanied by doubts and questions now.

Sometimes she thought that the fairy looked at her in a queer, quizzical, half-doubtful way; but as she liked Cobweb’s lovely face and did not like Cobweb’s strident voice (she had told Cobweb that Cobweb ought to talk softly, being a girl; Cobweb had looked close to slapping her) she shut out the scolding and looked at the beauty instead. It had been so long since Floralinda had seen anything that was really beautiful, so long since anything had been clean, or easy, or warm. Cobweb had become like her first and oldest doll, the one where back in the palace she still kept it safely at the back of the doll’s-house, panicked lest anyone think it too rackety and throw it away. The loveliness of those painted eyes and lips still had the power to make the Floralinda of old feel calm, and so too did Cobweb’s, especially if you ignored everything coming out of the lips.

And it was easy now. When Floralinda came to the fishmen on flight twenty-eight—awful, squat little people, with troutlike heads and real gills, gibbering and bubbling—she simply stabbed at them in the doorway, knowing the doorway was the best place to be, because as she explained to Cobweb later, that meant they all had to come at her one at a time, and could pile up and die.

And Cobweb looked at her again.

THE KELPIE WAS HONESTLY VERY unthreatening, and Floralinda was not sure what the witch had been thinking. The will-o-wisps were more of a problem. Will-o-wisps don’t have any real bodies, but are malign lights that can burn you with a sort of fox-fire. Even this fox-fire is not their real weapon, for they are mostly at their best when they can drown you in a bog or swamp. Will-o-wisps have no hunger, and no blood to be poisoned with; but thankfully Cobweb had a quick talk in fairy language to them, and Floralinda led the group to an upstairs window, whereupon they flew out.

Cobweb sighed in envy.

“What did you tell them, dear?” said Floralinda.

“Oh, I said there was a swamp nearby, and that this wouldn’t get them in trouble with their union,” said Cobweb carelessly, “but I lied on both counts; I’m sure there’s not a swamp nearby, and they’ll die in the forest.”

Floralinda thought this was a bit cruel.

“If I cannot get away,” said the fairy, “I see no reason why some coarse will-o’-the-wisps ought to.”

“You are not very nice, Cobweb,” said Floralinda.

And Cobweb said:

“Fancy you saying that!”

ANOTHER SNOW CAME, and banked up on the window-sill. There were no more little birds, but quite a lot of fish stashed away, which had dried (or mostly dried) thanks to Cobweb’s efforts. It was dreadfully chewy, and tasted fishy in a way that was less like potted shrimps and more like the bottom of a filtration pond, but Floralinda was glad of the meat. She was quite hungry at this stage, what with it growing colder all the time, and with having to exercise so much. Her foot only throbbed occasionally, and she liked to run up and down the stairs of the flights, to get warm. She welcomed the saw-toothed crane, which she ended up roasting on the hearth fire as a replacement for a holiday turkey. She and Cobweb sat by the fire and warmed themselves, toasting orange segments on sticks.

The moment Cobweb saw the siren on flight twenty-five, though, she made Floralinda shut the door, and run back upstairs as quick as she could, which was quite quick now; her sprained ankle complained only a little.

“That is a siren,” said Cobweb. “Your witch was getting quite avant-garde. See here, we’ll have to plug our ears with pith to make ourselves deaf, or we’ll hear it singing.”

Floralinda wanted to know what would happen after that.

“I’m not actually sure; but something dreadful,” said Cobweb, who had not read her Odyssey.

So they stopped up their ears with pith, and Floralinda was obliged to keep Cobweb in the warm neck ruffle of the rat-skin coat; she could not say “Thrust” or “Duck”, but had promised to pull Floralinda’s hair for “Thrust”, and to poke her in the neck for “Duck”, and had looked quite pleased over the possibility. Floralinda opened the door to the flight where the siren was sitting, and found she didn’t quite know how to proceed, because the siren didn’t try to attack her, or any such other thing.

The siren looked like a beautiful lady from the waist up, and like a seafood platter from the waist down; she had long green hair and blue teeth and eyes like a shark’s, with nice diamond pupils. She was sitting on a sort of raised dais and had no weapons or anything else of that kind, just a comb that she had been using on her long hair. She had good hands for strangling, but she cringed back at the sight of Floralinda’s coat, and shuddered at the point of Floralinda’s spear. It was the first time anything on the flights had been afraid of her.

She opened her mouth and sang, but of course to Floralinda and Cobweb it just sounded like underwater noise, like other people speaking when you have ducked your head in a pool. Her face was very wistful, and lovely in a different way to Cobweb’s. Cobweb had such dear features, but the siren had a thin, soulful mermaid sort of face, with her teeth like sapphires and her eyes so keen. The siren looked sorry for herself, which Floralinda sympathised with, being very sorry for herself too.

“I’m afraid I ought to kill you,” Floralinda said, though her voice sounded to herself like nothing much.

The siren opened her mouth again, and Floralinda said “Pardon?” before she realised that of course she couldn’t hear a reply; and the siren let her long seaweedy hair fall over her face, and looked sad. Floralinda kept her spear in front of her, but she advanced a few steps.

The siren stood, and Floralinda now summoned up the gumption to lock all her arm muscles in place, in preparation of a thrust; but the siren sort of undulated at her, with a very speaking look. It was very persuasive. Floralinda got quite muddled, and didn’t pay attention when Cobweb started pulling on a lock of her hair; she just looked at the siren, and thought that it might be nice to have someone else in the tower room to talk to. Of course they would all have to plug their ears all the time, but that might make her goal of loving Cobweb easier, and if the siren was at all warm she could use her to warm the bed. The siren approached very slowly, and very hesitantly, holding her hands up to show she did not mean Floralinda harm all the while. She moved past the envenomed tip and reached out her arm in the most caressing sort of way, and put her fingers—webbed fingers!—on the shaft of the spear, and stroked them over Floralinda’s fingertips.

Floralinda had not been touched by anyone but Cobweb, and Cobweb did not touch her caressingly, or pet her. The siren’s fingers were cool but not clammy, and she looked so deeply into Floralinda’s eyes that Floralinda was sure that the siren was trying to speak with them, and her heart got quite princessly and soft.

Then—thwip!—the siren leaned past her, and seized the plug of orange-pith that had been in Floralinda’s right ear!

And all at once she sang, and Floralinda staggered. The song hurt her: it hurt her heart, because all at once she knew that the siren was not evil at all, but imprisoned like she was, and beautiful; that the siren wanted to love her, and to be her friend, and to listen to all her problems, and to stroke Floralinda so sweetly again. It also hurt her brain, because sirens sing on a special sort of frequency like an opera-singer, one that makes you dizzy and fall over, upsetting your balance so that they can strangle you. Floralinda went down like a sack of potatoes, dropping the spear, and the siren went down with her, and put those webbed fingers around Floralinda’s throat.

Floralinda did not even quite understand that she was being strangled, which is also part of a siren’s technique. It was only Cobweb who saved her. Cobweb pulled out a bit of tapestry-needle, and she drove it into the back of the siren’s right hand; the siren thrust Cobweb away and stopped singing, which broke the spell she had laid over Floralinda. Floralinda’s ear was ringing, and she was confused; but she threw the siren off her, and looked around in a panic for Cobweb and the spear, and when she found the spear, she recklessly stabbed it into the siren’s side.

The siren opened her mouth again, but Floralinda stuck her finger in her ear, and dropped the spear, and looked around desperately for Cobweb. Cobweb was lying a little dazed on the ground, but was otherwise not badly hurt, apart from having been caught by a glancing blow from Floralinda’s rings as she fell. Floralinda picked her up, and by that time the siren was choking to death, and couldn’t sing anyway.

“What a fool I am,” Floralinda groaned,—which was perhaps the first time in history a princess had said anything like that.

“I have said that all along,” said Cobweb. “Why did you let her get so close? She very nearly had you; I can’t think why you dropped your guard.”

“I’m lonely,” said Floralinda falteringly, “and she looked so sweet, Cobweb, that’s all.”

And Cobweb was disgusted, and said she had grown soppier than ever, just when Cobweb had thought the opposite.

They burned the siren on the same pyre where they’d burned the rat; she smelled like seawater, and took a while to take and smoked when she did, like punky wood. And all along Floralinda sighed, and didn’t know why she felt so forlorn.

When she went to bed that night (covered by all her clothes and the rat-skin cloak) she looked hard in the darkness at Cobweb’s little fairy back. Her wings were lovely now, like little glass panelling, and she laid them in a sweet way across the gauze when she went to bed; sometimes they twitched as she slept. She was like a doll—but so much better than the best doll ever made, for all the little bumps of her spine showed through the skin when she curled up, and she was really alive. Floralinda reached out with her forefinger and gently pressed it to Cobweb’s warm back, right between her wings, and the slight hummocks of her pretty shoulderblades.

Cobweb woke up with a start. She was not nice about it, either, and said she didn’t like being poked, and clutched her sack of powder as though Floralinda had nefarious intentions about it, when Floralinda didn’t care a whit for the blessed stuff. “What are you doing?” the fairy said suspiciously. “If you’re killing me, you could at least do it to my face. If you are just poking me to be cruel, I will make a note to hate you even more. What are you about?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said poor guilty Floralinda.

FLORALINDA HAD NOT GROWN SOPPIER. She was more determined than ever before to make her way down the tower; and she was finding that, although she had every advantage with the venom, she was starting to be able to win fights not merely because she got in the first strike and then ran away. Sometimes the creature would dodge—the wyvern, for example, which was a sort of diet dragon with no back legs and great bat’s wings, was enormously hard to get on a first strike. It beat its claws at Floralinda’s head and shoulders, and she was glad of the tough leather of the giant rat. She struck at it with the spear so that it was thrown to one side, and then she could drive the spear down, and right through the wyvern’s back; that was one of the tower’s creatures that was not merely killed by poison. Floralinda was quite amazed at it.

But she had cracked the spear in the process, and when she and Cobweb examined it, they found that it was really on its last legs; so they had to get down the second curtain-rail, and spend another day sharpening that one. But Floralinda knew what was wanted now, and was quite painstaking in sharpening the end with the broken bits of scraper, and in making sure the tip would not snap off.

So the redcap never knew what hit him. He was a sort of evil goblin, more intelligent than the other kind, and he had a heap of stones to throw at princes, and had sat the whole time on a pile of them waiting wickedly for one to come up the other way; but Floralinda and Cobweb burst in on him from behind, and Floralinda stabbed him with her spear in his shoulder, and he died quite startled by the whole scenario.

And the troll was a battle and a half! He stood twice as big as Floralinda, the colour of an old tree-trunk, naked except for a little loincloth, with simply enormous arms like an octopus and tusks like an elephant, so that he looked like one of those funny pictures you make up from parts of different creatures. He was angry, and he was not an animal. He wheeled out of the way of Floralinda’s spear, and she did not need Cobweb to tell her “Duck!” when he swiped at her with a hand that looked like a ham-hock; he staggered towards her, and she managed to make a long scratch down his arm.

But he was doughty, and took a long time to die. Floralinda was forced to run away from his blows, and try to drive him off with the spear-point, until she was pouring with sweat from exertion and all the chemicals that your body produces when it is running a foot-race. She did not think about how she was afraid, nor did she think about losing. The only thing she thought about was keeping that troll at bay until the spider-venom got to him. He must have lasted a full thirty seconds longer than anything else in the tower had; but at last he got all stiff, and slumped to one side, and Floralinda finished him off without being told to.

They made a pyre for him, as they couldn’t skin his hide, or eat him, or use his teeth for anything.

Floralinda said—

“Do you think we need more poison, Cobweb, dear?”

But Cobweb looked troubled.

“I’m worrying the venom is starting to weaken,” she confessed, “it was warm when we took it from the spider, and you’re meant to freeze it first thing; I have kept the rest cool and out of the light, but I shall have to make stronger and stronger batches. If it is left for much longer it will likely expire, and not be much use at all.”

Once upon a time this would have made Floralinda so frightened that she would have run about, or sat down and cried, or taken to bed to try to think about it. But all she said was—

“Oh, fiddlesticks. We shall have to hurry.”

Just imagine a princess saying Fiddlesticks!

Flight Twenty-One

ONE MORNING FLORALINDA WOKE, shivering, to find that she couldn’t see out the window, for the wind was howling and a white blizzard had struck up outside the glass; and the next morning all the woods and all the grass around the bottom of the tower were covered in snow. You could no longer see the faint sparkle that Floralinda had assumed was the shining golden sword. There was certainly no sign of the goblins, which was probably a mercy. The water had frozen solid in the wash-stand, and took some warming by the fire to get liquid again; the trees that had once been gold and red were bare, and the evergreens were dusted all over with snow. Winter had finally come.

She now had a nice morning routine where she had her breakfast under the covers, and rubbed at her hands and her feet, testing to see whether her old sprained ankle was sore; it was often stiff with the cold, but didn’t give her any problems. Then she would warm herself up by running up and down the stairs, and squeeze rocks in front of the fire, and boil hot water to drink, in order to pretend that it was tea. Then she would get properly dressed and shoulder her spear, and go and see what was down the tower, and attack it.

None of them gave her much trouble, not even the cockatrice. Cobweb had been quite impressed by the flying eyes, and said that they had been very rare; after Floralinda was done with them they were a little rarer still.

Flight Seventeen

“I THINK I AM BECOMING BRAVE,” she said to Cobweb.

Cobweb wasn’t sure. “You’re still a terrible ninny, and you don’t like it when I tell you to eat the dried fish; if you were really brave, you would take the chain off my neck,” she added, cunningly.

This made Floralinda feel guilty, which made her feel annoyed.

“I think,” she said fretfully, “that you might say, ‘You are becoming brave, Floralinda, it was inside you all along’ or ‘Floralinda, how strong your hands are; you could open jars of all kinds now’ or something inspirational, to make me feel nice; but you always bring it back to the fact that I have imprisoned you, when I have often said I’m sorry. I’m sure I don’t want you to suffer, Cobweb, but you must know that I would not have got this far without you, because you’re clever and I’m still not. I’m not as stupid as I was, and I’m much less sensitive than I was; I can look at all kinds of awful things, and do them too, but you are the brains. I think you’re wonderful,” she finished humbly, and then ruined it with, “I don’t think you’re very nice, but I think you’re wonderful.”

“‘You are becoming brave, Floralinda; it was inside you all’—” Cobweb began, but Floralinda said despairingly, “It doesn’t count if I told you to say it.”

Cobweb told her to make up her mind.

There were now merely seventeen flights to go, and flight seventeen proved to be an important flight for Floralinda, because it had other human beings on it.

Cobweb had called the witch avant-garde, which isn’t quite true, because the witch had no intention of doing things simply to go against the mode; she had read modern theories, and understood that princes have all kinds of terrors, some of them psychological. It was very easy to put in a dragon to crunch them up, but more difficult to traumatise them, and she intended to blaze a trail that way. So she thought about what humans feared, and on flight seventeen, she put a group of murderers.

The murderers had been there the whole time Floralinda had been there. They made quite a racket at first, but Floralinda had not heard it above the roaring of the dragon and the crunching of the bones; and although you have been warned to not feel sorry for anything inside the tower, perhaps you can spare a thought to what it would have been like, to be stuck in an airless room with your only company some people who have nothing in common with you other than a career choice. In modern parlance we call this a convention, but in the tower it was very dark, and they had been kept alive through foul means, and their minds had not really survived. This meant they had not died of starvation, for they had forgotten what it is like to be hungry; but whoever they were before they were murderers had gone away. They did not mind the snow banking at the windows, or the puddles of melted slush collecting in the corners: they were beyond the cold, and the damp, and the dark.

When Floralinda, smiling, went down the stairs and found a group of men, what she thought of them she had not time to structure; what they thought of her we cannot say. She was struck stiff with horror by their appearance, and was mute with fear, because she was more afraid of grown-up men than she really had been of the cockatrice or the ogre.

One of them knocked the spear from her hands, another the lamp with the coal, and all the while they were screaming. Some of them had knives, although they held them in a manner that suggested they had forgotten what to do with them. They were talking the language of men who can no longer really talk, and making the demands of men who are beyond wants. So the witch had really gotten quite a lot for her money, because her murderers had transitioned into madmen; madmen to start with would have cost a lot more.

They tore at Floralinda’s hair and cloak; they wept. They fumbled with their knives. They spat in her face, and in each other’s. One had more speech than the others; he said—

“I’ll f---ing kill you; I’ll cut your f---ing throat.”

Two of the murderers were holding Floralinda, trying to pull her in opposite directions, as though they were dogs and she a juicy marrow-bone. She let herself become dead weight, and the two men, who were not sure of their footing, went down with her. They landed all together in an icy puddle of foetid slush which soaked Floralinda through. When she thrashed upwards, one of the men held her down by the hair. Another man, still standing, began kicking at her. The other men crowded around and began kicking at her too, and at the men on the ground as well: they did not distinguish.

Floralinda had curled up, with her arms over her head, which is a useful move if you are being kicked to death and do not want to watch. A light snow was falling, which was a curious weather condition, being indoors.

And Cobweb said, “Move.”

Floralinda surged through the scrum of kicking legs like a rugby-player. The falling snow was turning into curious, bad-smelling scum on her arms. Cobweb was howling in pain: as well she might, as she had seized the fallen coal and dropped it down the shirt-front of one of the men. The madman slapped at it, and seized it from his shirt, and it got mixed up with the snow, and the scum, and the men; and then they took.

For the snow had been Cobweb’s haversack of powder, and the damp and the wet were enough to swell it. The more the men beat at the flames the more they spread that wretched sticky gel around; and the gel had one purpose in life, and that was to burn.

Floralinda was not frightened of the scum on her hands. She did not have room to be frightened of anything. She seized her spear and faced the screaming knot of flaming madmen. One flailed close to her, and she hit him with the butt of the spear—he did not even care; he was too much on fire. They clustered together as the smoke and flames multiplied, and fanned out when Floralinda slashed at them. When she had space she thrust again and again. One of the men caught the spear with his burning hands and held it fast, so she ran at him, and he backed into the wall and she got him in the thigh. Now her spear was spattered with burning gel where he had touched it, and she beat it out on the backs of two other men, and they did not seem to feel it.

The first man was still standing, and he said “F---,” again, and “F---,” and lurched at her, afire as any Guy; she stabbed him in the stomach.

Floralinda dropped her spear and listened to the sounds of the burning men asphyxiating. First she made sure that her spear was not burning any more—how well the merest smear of gel had burnt it!—and then she scraped her hands almost bloody against the wall, to clear the scum. Once they were clean she scooped up Cobweb, who was weeping, clutching her blistered hands.

She was crying so beautifully that Floralinda wept too, which Cobweb had banked on; Cobweb held her burnt hands to Floralinda’s tears immediately, and wrung them over her blisters. “H’m!” she said, surveying the effect critically; “mercy, these aren’t half as good as when you first cried. I had thought they mightn’t be.”

But Floralinda was not paying her very much attention. The scattered men around her had transitioned into corpses, most of them smouldering. She separated the ones that were from the ones that weren’t, so that the ones that weren’t didn’t burn up too. She got the coal safely back into the lamp using the butt-end of her spear.

“What is ‘f---’?” she said eventually.

Cobweb, although reluctant, explained that it was what you said chiefly when you were angry. She was disappointed in herself that she knew this, but when a bottom-of-the-garden fairy has spent enough time around overly knowing children, this was the result. You may rest assured that no child who ever uttered f--- was taken to Fairyland; however, you may also be sure that no child who uttered f--- needed to, anyway.

“How strange,” said Floralinda. “And they were so unhappy and scared. How strange; I should have been so frightened, if I had been a prince.”

Then she exhaled, and Cobweb was sure that now Floralinda would break; her eyes were starry, and her lower lip trembled, and she was transfixed.

But all she said was:

“Oh, Cobweb, just think—now I can have their clothes!”

No girl was ever so excited over clothes; no young lady, upon being gifted a catalogue and told to order what she liked, or being taken to a very fashionable boutique, was as delighted as Floralinda right then. The unburnt men were wearing trousers and one even had a canvas vest with buttons, which she gloated over. Some of the dead men were also more guttering than burning, having had less gel fall on them, or not being wet enough for it to make them into the veritable Roman candles the other men had become. Princess Floralinda stripped those unfortunate men naked except for their underthings, and finally put them in a pile with the burning men, which set them all afire cheaply; then she took their clothes upstairs to count them up, and also to boil the water so that she could give them a wash, as it was not quite nice to wear the clothes of dead men before you washed them. Most people would think that it was not quite nice to wear the clothes of dead men afterwards too, but Floralinda was quite beyond thinking that.

She was quite beyond thinking of anything; it took her a long time to think enough to say—

“Cobweb, you used up all your precious powder, to save me.”

For of course Cobweb had, and her little haversack was quite empty. This quite staggered Floralinda.

“It wasn’t as good as I thought it would be, so I don’t care,” said Cobweb carelessly (for whom it had been quite as good as she’d thought it, and cared more than anything). “But as long as I’m out of pocket, I shall take their knives.”

Cobweb admitted to herself that she was very pleased with the assortment of knives, as with any more sharpening the bread-knife was going to become a chop-stick. But that night she lay awake, angry with herself, and sorry about the powder, and very confused thinking about Floralinda, easing trousers off those smoking corpses.

“Perhaps you shall be home for Christmas,” Cobweb ventured; which she had never imagined ever coming true.

“I hope so,” said Floralinda sleepily, under a pile of trousers, shirts and a vest; “only I wish I could write ahead and tell nobody to get me gloves; I can’t possibly be my old size in them, so it would be a waste, and I would be obliged to give them away. I think everyone should give me chocolates instead. This year I won’t say, ‘Oh, chocolates, but I shouldn’t’ and only take one; I will say ‘Thank you very much’ and eat them all.”

At this heresy, Cobweb was more discomfited than ever.

Flight Sixteen-Fifteen-Fourteen

THE SPIDER VENOM, which had been losing potency ever since the siren, stopped being much use at all. Floralinda and Cobweb were obliged to keep re-coating the spear mid-battle with the hippogriff, which was a dangerous stunt. The paralytic had kept better than anything else. It made the monsters easier to kill, but meant that Floralinda had to do the nasty job of killing them herself once they were paralyzed. She found that this became a great deal easier after a while. There were places on the body—even bodies so varied as all the creatures in that tower!—more vulnerable than others, and if the creature had a heart or brain, that was a good spot to aim for. She put one of Cobweb’s sharp new knives to good purpose. Happily, it was more often the case that the paralytic made the animal choke on its tongue, and die; this happened with one of the lion’s heads, but did not happen to the other, and Cobweb ended up treating Floralinda’s leg when the lion got it with its claws.

“More ugly than fatal, I think,” said Floralinda that evening, trying to be cheerful, which is difficult when your thigh has claw-marks, and is being washed with hot water while you sit in a blanket and try to bear it. “Cobweb, dear, you are becoming a very good nurse; I do think you’re wasted on the children who don’t know anything, and living in bottoms of gardens.”

Cobweb loved being flattered, but simply remarked gloomily that princesses had constitutions most horses would die for.

“I wish that the chimaera had not been part-lion, part-goat and part-snake,” said Floralinda pensively, “because you can only really eat one of those parts. If it had been part-cow, part-chicken and part-deer, that would have been wonderful. Don’t you think?”

“Sometimes I think you are enjoying this,” said Cobweb.

“Don’t be so horrid,” said Floralinda.

Flight Thirteen-Twelve-Eleven

THE STRIX WAS a great silvery owl as big as a man, with a wicked beak and crimson eyes unlike any owl who lives in the forest. It was an ugly, malign brand of that obscure bird, and had sat thinking vicious thoughts for all of late summer and autumn too. When Floralinda came down to flight eleven, it hid in a corner and closed its eyes, and for a moment she thought that the flight was empty.

“Perhaps whatever was in here has gone away,” she said wistfully; “I do wish more of them had done the useful thing and jumped out a window, or eaten themselves.”

“Be careful, and be cautious,” warned Cobweb, without even bothering to correct Floralinda on whether or not something could eat itself. “I don’t halfway like this; something’s in here with us.”

Floralinda held the lamp up higher. The eyes of the Strix flamed open, and she was dazzled by the flame, so for a moment she did not know what she was looking at. Then the Strix exploded out of its corner with a great flap of its grey wings—it extended its wicked talons out before it, striped yellow and black like a wasp—and Floralinda threw herself bodily out of the way. All that running up and down stairs had not been for naught. She rolled over and over on the cold stones of flight eleven, Cobweb rolling with her. Floralinda raised her spear up before her as the Strix swept down on her, trying to keep it at a distance, and the Strix hopped back and forth as Floralinda threatened it with that venomous spear-tip. It could see that the weapon was wet, and it was an intelligent creature, and thought that it was better safe than sorry.

This was Floralinda’s chance to press an attack. She got to her feet with Cobweb clinging to her rat-hide hood, not thinking of the fairy at all; she was only thinking about the beak and the talons and the staring scarlet eyes. The Strix snapped its beak at Floralinda; Floralinda jabbed with the spear—and quick as a wink, the Strix stretched out

And

Ate

Up

Cobweb!

The fairy was only able to utter one little shriek before she disappeared into that terrible beak, gold chains and rings and all. (It sounded a little bit like ‘F---!’ but could not have been; or perhaps it was the beginnings of ‘Floralinda’, but it could not have been that either.)

It was at that moment Floralinda stopped being a princess altogether.

She took the butt of her spear in one hand, and held on to the middle breadth of her spear with the other, so that it was very rigid. Floralinda ran screaming at the Strix, which beat its wings (golloping its fairy meal all the while) and hopped backwards. It buffeted Floralinda with one wing, and Floralinda staggered backwards, head ringing with the blow. Then the Strix launched itself into the air, and pounced on Floralinda talons-first—have you ever seen an owl dive on a mouse?—but she held her ground, and she thrust her poisoned spear so deep into the Strix’s belly that it went in right up to her hands.

Then Floralinda took the knife from her new belt, and she slashed at the Strix, which was still feebly flapping about. She clamped her strong hands around its beak and snapped its head back, and she sawed at its throat until it sprayed noxious blood over her face. She kept pulling and sawing; she knew what she was looking for, because she had been forced to do it with the rat. She got on top of that dying bird and sawed and gutted until she found the awful tubes behind its windpipe. And there was a bulge (for peristalsis takes quite a long time when you are a very long owl), and when she peeled open that bulge—saturated with blood—there was Cobweb.

She was curled up in a little ball, and blue in the face and red in the arms, rather than being her normal beautiful flower-petal self. Floralinda took her out gently and wept great, hysterical sobs, and tried to cry on her as much as possible, for she did not know what to do other than that. It was not as though Cobweb had been bitten in half, for owls like to do their chewing backwards; but she was such a tiny crammed tangle, and Floralinda did not like to try to untangle her. She sat on the stones, covered in all kinds of terrible liquids, and held Cobweb to her chest, and cried.

Cobweb opened her eyes, for she had fainted from fright. When she saw Floralinda weeping she closed her eyes again, obviously considering discretion the better part of valour; but Cobweb was not very good at play-acting.

When Floralinda saw Cobweb starting to stretch out, and that her chest was moving with each breath, she stopped crying and whispered—

“Oh, dearest, I truly thought you were dead.”

“I’m not; just humiliated,” said Cobweb faintly.

And Floralinda did not say any more.

She brought Cobweb back up to the fortieth flight instead, and was very tender with her, but also very preoccupied. She cleaned the Strix’s blood off herself when she realised that she was leaving sooty red fingerprints everywhere, and she warmed the cauldron of water so that Cobweb could bathe in it, and get all of the dreadful owl-spit off. The snow was falling down softly outside as Cobweb sat in the water with her smock off, careful not to get her wings wet, washing her hair; and every so often saying things like “Eugh,” and “Pfaugh” as she found more traces of owl saliva. Her greeny-gold hair went entirely green from the water, and the rings from her chain lay heavy at the bottom of the bowl. Floralinda turned away, and watched the snow fall; and it was soft and deadly silent.

“I will be covered in bruises tomorrow,” said Cobweb.

And Floralinda said nothing.

“There are only ten flights left, and I’m sure Christmas is still quite far away,” said Cobweb.

Floralinda still said nothing.

Cobweb said peevishly, “I wish you’d talk! I was just eaten up by an owl and on my way to being digested, and you just sit there, and look stupid.”

“I am thinking about five thoughts at once,” said Floralinda, “and my head aches.”

“That’s five more thoughts than you are capable of thinking, let’s be honest,” said the fairy.

Floralinda said faintly—

“Cobweb, it’s happened; I knew it had happened, when I saw you being swallowed by that owl.”

Cobweb sighed, and sank down into the bowl of hot water, which Floralinda had squeezed a little bit of orange into, to make it more aromatic. Unfortunately she, much like Floralinda, had grown thoroughly sick of oranges, and wished for any other sort of fruit, such as apple, or mango, or banana.

“I know, but I didn’t expect you to be clever enough to notice,” said Cobweb. She looked at her arm, where there was still a rough patch from the owl’s digestive tracts, despite having been cried on lavishly. “It is true. All of the Princess has leaked out of you somehow. I didn’t think it was possible, but there you have it; you oughtn’t to mind it anyway in my opinion. At times I think that a great deal of the bottom-of-the-garden has leaked out of me, but given that I never enjoyed the idea in the first place, it doesn’t grieve me so much. It is just irritating when you really do give something the old-school try, and put in the effort, and you’re still not good at it. I am just relieved that I can’t stop being a fairy; that’s not mutable, whereas princesses are meant to change into queens and stepmothers and things, so you’re much more in danger of that type of overhaul—”

Cobweb found herself taken from her bath and lifted up in Floralinda’s hands. Floralinda had the expression on which meant she had not been attending, or at least not attending very closely. She looked at Cobweb with eyes as blue and as empty and as hard as the sea.

“I love you; that’s what’s happened, not any of the other things you’re talking about,” she said. “I’ve always tried to, but now I do; I saw you slip down that owl’s throat and I knew. And it isn’t nice at all; it’s dreadful; like all the times I was ever ill, all at once.”

Cobweb was ecstatic, because she did not understand about mortal love. Most long-lived fairy things don’t. Every so often something in that category becomes interested in the idea, but it has never ever produced a desirable result.

“Then you are going to let me go,” said the fairy, and clapped her hands. “Oh, finally! If I never see a ring again it will be too soon.”

Floralinda put Cobweb down on the bed and put her hands to the clasp of the fine golden chain. She reached out with her thumbnail, but it was slippery, and besides she hadn’t much of a thumbnail any more; so she took a breath and dried the chain, and then she put her thumb to the catch again.

Cobweb held her breath; but nothing happened, so she was obliged to let the breath out.

“I can’t,” Floralinda said, finally. “I thought I could,—but I can’t.”

For once Cobweb did not know what to think. Floralinda took her hands away, and folded them helplessly in her lap.

“Do you love me, Cobweb,” she said pitifully, “even a little?”

“What does love feel like?” said Cobweb.

“Like you want to be ill, but can’t be, but know you might well be quite soon, so you can’t get comfortable at all,” said Floralinda.

“Then I don’t think you love me one bit; that sounds like a classic case of indigestion,” said Cobweb.

But Floralinda could not explain. She just went to bed sadder than she had ever been, sadder than since she had come to the tower, and sadder than any princess has ever been capable of being either: an ugly, dreadful sadness that real princesses cannot experience.

Flight Ten

FLORALINDA WOULDN’T LET Cobweb come with her to the tenth flight, not after she had nearly been made into a sort of massive owl pellet. Cobweb was a little annoyed about this, for both had peeked in, and seen that flight ten contained a unicorn.

Unicorns are very beautiful, but not like how they are in the storybooks; they have the graceful bodies of horses but goat-like cloven hooves, and snow-white tufts on their legs, and wise and shining beards. Their horn looks like an auger shell such as you’d find at the beach, but of course much longer and prettier, and golden in colour: a sort of mother-of-pearl gold with rainbows shining in it, and as sharp as an icicle. From a chemistry point of view, Cobweb was dying to get her hands on that horn; but Floralinda said they wouldn’t.

“I am a maiden; the unicorn oughtn’t to attack me,” said Floralinda.

Cobweb was not quite sure.

“‘Maiden’ has a lot of different possible connotations,” said Cobweb.

“I am a princess, no matter what you say,” said Floralinda.

“You have proved that they can be just as naughty as anyone,” said the fairy.

For a moment it looked as though Floralinda was going to lose her nerve; she sat on flight eleven sharpening the spear and the knife, and dousing both liberally in spider-venom, and in the end she thrust the knife into her belt and said—

“Watch if you like; but everyone says unicorns bow their heads for girls, and it’s been that way in all of my books, and they’re quite a holy creature, so I don’t see why I should have a problem.”

“A unicorn never met you,” said Cobweb.

And she was quite worried.

It was true that when Floralinda came into the unicorn’s room with her spear and her knife, with Cobweb sitting on the stairs peeking over, the unicorn did not look concerned. She went very fearlessly to the lovely, delicate creature, with its intelligent eyes and golden horn; she shook away her hood from her hair (it had gone without washing so long that it had come all the way around again, and her curls looked quite nice after all, although not as butter-coloured as they once had) and came to meet it. It pawed the ground a little, and Cobweb held her breath; and Floralinda—poor dumb Floralinda—put her spear down on the ground, to show the unicorn that she was just a girl, and she took a few hesitant steps toward it.

And the unicorn let her. It shivered, and it whickered, but it let Floralinda approach. It danced from one hoof to the other in a hesitant way, and Cobweb had to let out her breath so that she could hold another; it squealed a little when Floralinda touched its flank, and then stroked it all the way up to its lovely neck. The unicorn rolled its eyes, but then it bowed its head.

Cobweb exhaled. There was a twitch of the rat-skin coat, and a flash of metal; and then Floralinda plunged her knife deep into the unicorn’s neck.

She cut all the way down its throat as the unicorn foamed, and screamed, and knelt down; but it died quite quickly, and its horn became dull, and—as happens with unicorns—its body looked like nothing more than an old grey donkey. Floralinda was wiping her knife on the unicorn’s old grey flank, and when she turned back to see Cobweb’s expression, she said passionately—

“I hate horses; they always bite you, and then you fall off, and everyone says that it would have been fine if you had just been confident. I wasn’t about to let it change its mind.”

And Cobweb felt a little nauseous.

Flight Nine-Two

“WELL—THAT IS THAT, COBWEB, DEAR,” said Floralinda.

The poison had nearly given out by the time they got to the minotaur; but as it happens, Floralinda did not really need poison by the time she got to the minotaur, and had asked to save up the strongest batch for the first flight. Strong men would have quaked at the giant bat, and knights have died to basilisks; but the only flight that really gave Floralinda any problem was the worms, because she screamed.

She tried to smile, but it did not look quite right on Floralinda’s face any more. There were hard lines around the eyes and mouth that had first come there from pain, back when she had boiled her hands after the goblins; and then there were the little puckers from seeing things that people ought not to see. It was not that she did not smile any more, and it was not that she did not laugh—how she had laughed at the slime, before going and fetching a brazierful of flaming coals!—but it was a strange expression, like shoes she was still trying to break in.

And when she said, ‘That is that’ she did not sound quite as happy as she ought to have done. She sounded hungry, as though she had said, Pancakes; she also sounded strangely rueful. It was a beautiful evening when she said it: the snows had stopped falling quite so hard as in the early-winter blizzards, and the woods were deep and crisp and still instead.

“I will admit,” said Cobweb, “I didn’t think you could make it all the way down. In fact, I was pretty certain you couldn’t. The odds were against you.”

They lapsed into silence, until the fairy said—

“You must listen to me.”

And Floralinda raised her head to listen.

“The dragon will be different,” said the fairy. “You’re handy with that spear now, and a mild paralytic helps. You’re fit and quick, too; and you have practiced thinking the only thoughts that are worthwhile in a battle. But you are not a prince. I don’t really know what you are now, but it’s princes who battle dragons; even then, most of the princes have been crunched up. There is every chance that you are going to get crunched up tomorrow too, which will be very disappointing, but I hope you think, ‘Oh, well, I did my best’ before you are eaten all the way.”

“I don’t think I will be able to think that,” said Floralinda honestly. “I think I would be cross instead, and hope that I choked the dragon, and give it a good few kicks going down its tubes; I was thinking about filling my pockets with the rest of the poison, just in case.”

“That’s wonderfully vindictive,” said Cobweb.

“Yes, it makes me feel horrid; but you see, Cobweb, I truly mean to beat it; I know the princes all died, but I’m different.”

“How?” said the fairy.

Floralinda puzzled this over, and in the end said—

“Don’t you see that I want it much more than they do; they didn’t want anything except me, and they didn’t even know me. Or the golden sword, which sounds like it would only be good for melting down.”

There was not much even Cobweb could say to that, but Cobweb had not quite made her point, and she said again—

“Well, wanting something is all well and good, but I think you’re going to die tomorrow.”

“It’s not fair to die right before Christmas,” said Floralinda, “it ruins it for everybody, and most of all yourself.”

Cobweb said, “Let me go.”

And it was very silent at the top of that tower, inamongst all the dried fishes (nearly gone) and the hearth with the cauldron, and Floralinda’s rat-hide cloak sitting horribly on the bed, looking uneven and alive, and the wash-stand, and the ruined curtains, and the enormous collection of pith, and the wheaten loaf and the white, and the flask of milk, and the flask of water, and the f---ing orange.

“You can think for yourself,” said Cobweb. “You can fight for yourself. I’ve no idea what advice I would give about the dragon; I think you ought to make a run for the exit and get out that way.”

“I’d call that cheating,” said Floralinda.

“No, listen to me; it’s a dragon, and you are a—whatever you are, I’m sure I don’t know. I have come this far with you, and I don’t want to go any farther. Take the chain off my neck, and perhaps I’ll even stay with you.”

“No, you won’t,” said Floralinda.

“No, I won’t,” agreed Cobweb, “I will fly out of here the first thing, just in case you try to catch me in a net, and if I ever see you again I’ll kill you. But you should let me go, unless you mean to kill me with you. Also, if I have these rings on for much longer I’ll get scoliosis.”

Big tears filled those blue eyes. They dripped down Floralinda’s cheeks, and made her look a little bit like the girl that Cobweb had first seen lying back in the bed, ashen-faced, and not clever enough to know that she was going to die. That was Floralinda’s main fault, thought Cobweb; she was so silly that she did not even know when to give up.

“I know,” she said falteringly, “only—only—”

“I’ve done what I said I would do; I’ve gotten you down here with all the cleverness you needed; I was even a girl for you, though frankly, I don’t think there’s much to recommend it, and I worry that the whole experience has given me a complex,” said Cobweb.

“Yes, I know, dear, it does that; only—”

“Let me go, Floralinda!” cried Cobweb.

It was the first time that Cobweb had ever said her name.

Floralinda screwed her eyes shut and gave a low, choky cry. She reached over, and all at once she furiously thumbed the awful stuck latch on her golden chain; and it went flick, and suddenly the weight was removed from Cobweb’s neck. Both the fairy and the girl looked at each other; Cobweb’s hands flew up to her throat, wonderingly, and her wings beat hard like hummingbird’s wings, and she took to the air.

“Oh,” she said, “oh!”

And:

“I hope the dragon annihilates you!”

And Cobweb flew towards the fire, and sprang up the chimney like a piece of paper, and was gone.

Floralinda lay herself back on the bed and pulled the rat-skin cloak over her. The fire crackled in the hearth, and she stared up at the ceiling. She knew that she had done a good thing—or if not a good thing, something she ought to have done a long time ago, in response to something she never should have done at all. The worst part about trying to make good a sin is that it does not make the sin any less ugly. She was sorry she had kidnapped Cobweb. She was sorry that she had let Cobweb go. She was sorry for everything.

And then she wiped her eyes.

“I don’t know why I’m waiting,” she said.

Floralinda picked up her spear.

Flight One

IT WAS a lovely winter’s morning when the witch came back to the tower. The snow was in sparkling diamond drifts all along the tower’s base, and the air smelled like pine needles and the cold. She was aggravated by the mess at the base, though thankfully she could not see how messy it really was beneath the snow-fall. It was a heap of bones and goodness only knows what, sticking out, looking rather like a kitchen-midden. It was all very close to the golden sword and made the whole thing look shabby.

“If one goes to the trouble of setting up an aesthetic,” she remarked, “it is really too bad when other people come and have their own say-so. This isn’t commentary. This is simply offensive.”

When she went into the tower, she was more aghast than ever, and she said—

“You!”

For there was Floralinda, steaming gently in the winter’s morning, covered in dragon’s blood. Her arms and legs were cut all over, and her hair was sizzled, and her lips were split. There was also a dead dragon, as well as a pile of well-sucked prince bones.

The witch was not struck by the prince bones. In her line of business, she had seen so many prince bones that she could be said to be a connoisseur. She was surprised by the dead dragon, which was already hardening into a dead diamond mass, and she was shocked by Floralinda.

“Yes,” said Floralinda, timidly.

The witch thought hard.

“Why, didn’t the prince like you?”

“He didn’t come,” said Floralinda, “or at least, I mean, lots came, but they didn’t manage it; and you never came back. It’s not that I expected you to, but I thought you might check in on me.”

“I only check when the thing’s over and done with,” said the witch, “it’s amateur hour, to look at it before it’s done; only I did think that it was taking pretty long. I was interested when I felt the dragon go, and then the rest of the tower triggered as completed, and here we are. It’s not an artistic failure, even if it is an economic one,” she added bracingly. “If you make the perfect mouse-trap, you had better hope for the perfect mouse,” and she laughed, and seemed put out that Floralinda did not laugh with her.

Floralinda said:

“Why have you come back now?”

“Well, to start fresh,” said the witch. “It’s a bit early, but I might as well start re-springing the thing. Well! well! you did do a number on it, young lady! I’m rather sore about that dragon you just killed, you know. Those were real diamond scales and teeth.”

“I know,” said Floralinda, and she smiled, faintly.

The witch said, “Perhaps this calls for a return to the basics. There’s nothing so appealing as a timeless classic: I’ll stagger things this time, and put the hardest ones up at the top, so that the prince feels as though he’s getting more competent each time. Zone of proximal development, you know. I don’t suppose you’d like to get back up there at the top?” she added, and she winked jovially.

Floralinda looked at her.

“Would you want me?” she said.

The witch looked at the curls that should have been butter-coloured, and were stained a rather less pleasant strawberry colour, owing to the blood. She looked at the eyes that had once been as blue as sapphires and were now hard like sapphires too. She looked at the rat-skin cape, and at the broken spear on the ground; she looked at the chapped, calloused hands.

“Not particularly,” she said. “I hope that doesn’t hurt your feelings. I always speak my mind. What if I gave you a job instead?”

“A job?” said Floralinda.

“Yes,” said the witch, who had been thinking. “Never mind about the classics. Let’s take this thing further. I can see now that the only danger in art is being unwilling to go the whole hog. I want you right there, on the first flight; that’s going to get bums on seats. You at the bottom; princess up the top; how’s that for modernism, eh?”

“But I am a princess—or at least, a girl,” said Floralinda stupidly; but she could not stop the question creeping in around those edges, nor the tinge of panic.

The witch despaired only momentarily at mortal ignorance.

“How could you be either of those things?” she said, as kindly as she could. “You’re a monster—a rare and magnificent monster; perhaps even unique.”

There was a fluttering from the doorway, and Floralinda went white as a sheet. A common-or-garden fairy landed on her shoulder, and then looked as though it regretted the decision, when it saw all the blood. It wiped its hands onto its front, but moonbeams aren’t absorbent, so this was not very effective.

“Not one more word,” said the fairy to the witch. “Let’s talk numbers and practicalities.”

“Who are you meant to be?” the witch asked.

“Her agent. I haven’t read all those books for nothing,” said the fairy.

They talked numbers and practicalities for a while, and came to a deal that seemed to please both sides, although the witch thought that haggling with an auteur on the verge of genius was unkind. Once they had sealed the deal, the witch went and checked through all the prince bones, wanting to be thorough; she was so taken with her new ideas that she whistled with her teeth, and did not pay much attention to the quiet conversation happening behind her—

“Oh, Cobweb, darling!”

“I’m simply not fit for anything else but this,” said the fairy grudgingly. “My career was over years ago. Don’t mistake me: I expect to be angry for about five more years, at this rate.”

“But—you came back!”

“Yes,” said the fairy. “You see, I feel absolutely ill; I feel as though I could be sick at any minute, but I don’t know when.”

Floralinda burst into tears.

Flight Forty

IT WAS early spring when she arrived. Tiny crocuses and little daffodils had sprung up in patches of white and yellow and purple among the trees, and great carpets of bluebells had decorated all the grass around the place where the golden sword was set. Floralinda stood before the sword, breathing in the nice spring air, then drew it.

It took a long time to go up every single staircase to the top. The golden sword was heavy; she preferred the balance of a nice spear, and in any case the sword was a bit—ostentatious, when it came down to it. She noticed with relief that there was a huge venomous spider in residence, though she was a bit startled at its bigness: it was about as large as four beds, scuttling to and fro.

When she got up to the top of the tower she knocked on the door. There were noises from within that sounded as though somebody was crying; they stopped in a hurry. After another rap, the door finally opened.

The princess had wiped her face quickly, but the tears were still visible at the corners of her eyes. They were astonishingly lovely eyes, like jet; she had long straight sheets of ebony hair, like midnight, and a silk dress.

She looked at Floralinda.

“Have—have you come to rescue me?” she gasped.

Floralinda proffered her the golden sword. The princess was very well brought up, so she took it, even though her delicate wrists bowed under the weight.

“Oh no; this is for you,” Floralinda said. “You see, I want a f---ing challenge.”

And Floralinda ran all the way back down and stationed herself, waiting.

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Table of Contents

Copyright

Title Page

Part One

Flight Forty

Flight Thirty-Nine

Flight Thirty-Nine Redux

Flight Forty Again

Flight Thirty-Nine

Flight Thirty-Eight

Flight Thirty-Eight Spider

Flight Thirty-Seven

Flight Thirty-Six

Flight Forty Cobweb

Full Page Image

Flight Forty Tower

Flight Thirty-Five

Flight Thirty-Four

Flight Thirty-One

Flight Thirty

Flight Forty

Flight Thirty-Two

Flight Twenty-Eight

Flight Twenty-Eight-Seven

Flight Twenty-Six-Five

Flight Twenty-Four-Three-Two

Flight Twenty-One

Flight Seventeen

Flight Sixteen-Fifteen-Fourteen

Flight Thirteen-Twelve-Eleven

Flight Ten

Flight Nine-Two

Flight One

Flight Forty

Flight One

About Us