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