Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir Page 0,1
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