Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir Page 0,16

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