Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir Page 0,18

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