sunk into a neck-deep pool on flight thirty-two, and they presented a problem Princess Floralinda would not have been able to solve herself at that time. There were hundreds of them, each no bigger than her hand, so that when they all schooled and roiled together it looked like a mass of sequins thrashing in that brackish water; but after thinking about it carefully, and remembering the spider’s death, Cobweb suggested they toss in one of the giant rats that had been poisoned. The fish converged on that rat in a way that made Floralinda feel very grateful that she had not stepped into the water, and they stripped all the meat from that corpse. Twenty minutes later they had pretty much all of them floated to the top and died, and the ones who hadn’t eaten the rat tried to eat them, and it ended badly all round.
And it was so easy—a few hits—brief panic—and a dead rat!
Which meant Floralinda had quite a lot of fish to eat. She had to learn how to cut a fish’s head off (and weren’t those biting fish ugly!) and take out its guts, which she tossed off the side of the tower, much to the delight of the local animals (who had known better than to touch the rotting goblins, but enjoyed fish guts). They had poison in their systems, but Cobweb thought it would be fine, seeing as they had eaten so little; and indeed all that happened after eating was that Floralinda’s mouth went a bit numb. How ugly those fishes were; but how good white, flaky fish meat was, even if you had to peel it out of the fish-bones, and be careful that you didn’t swallow one. Floralinda ate some of them roasted, and ate some of them wrapped in orange-skins so that they tasted a bit like orange (though she wasn’t so fond of the taste of oranges any more) and some of them she ate on slices of sweet white bread. Cobweb even set up a little rack of sticks, and most of the fishes she dried into a kind of jerky in the thin afternoon light. Floralinda wasn’t at all sure she would like to eat this jerky, but Cobweb said she would want it later.
The season had dipped into autumn, and the trees in the distance started popping into their Hallowe’en clothes. They burst among the evergreens in every shade of yellow and orange, and scarlet and gold, which was all delightful to look at, but the tower was terribly hard to keep warm. The witch was not well-acquainted with insulation.
And Floralinda was in quite a silly mood, being young and confident, and feeling as though she had done a lot. Sometimes she sang, and sometimes she even danced, and in the mornings she would say, “Good morning, dear Cobweb! I wonder what’s on the next flight down?” and had quite forgotten to be frightened, or more importantly, cautious.
Whereas Cobweb knew not to hope too deeply, even if there was a particle in her brain that kept thinking about how nice it would be if they got all the way down to the bottom before the winter came, and how nice it would feel to have her ball-and-chain removed, and fly again. Sometimes when Floralinda was asleep she would try to work at the latch with the head of a needle, but that didn’t do the slightest bit of good. And she had great plans to try to make pliers, but didn’t quite have all the things she needed to make pliers—in fact at that point in the autumn she had a dead harpy, two dead rats and a lot of fishes that were going bad, but these were just beautiful distractions on the path of Freedom.
Cobweb had also not expected Floralinda to get that far, not exactly, and not so easily. Floralinda had gotten fatter on fish and songbird, and her regime of squeezing bricks was making her hands blistered and strong. She was also getting dirty, because she was growing so reluctant to take all her clothes off, and sponge.
By this stage, Cobweb had started trying to teach Floralinda other instructions, rather as you’d teach a dog who had managed ‘Sit.’ She was teaching Floralinda ‘Duck’, and also ‘Back up’, which are useful. Floralinda could hold one instruction in her head at a time, and had practiced thrusting with the spear so often that it came quite easily to her; but she