Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir Page 0,29

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