Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir Page 0,34
it was all put off. It wasn’t even as though she had been savaged by a monster, which would have attached some dignity to the pain. Any princess could slip and take a fall. It was her whole experience of skating.
She would not get back before Christmas, or at least, not long before Christmas, so nobody would have time to arrange presents except for very last-minute ones, like socks or things to put in the bath. She would not see her mother and father any time soon. Princess Floralinda sat back in the pillows, feeling white and totally crestfallen, and hot salt tears leaked out her eyes. She was so cold even wrapped up in the blankets, and her ankle burned from having the cold compress, and she felt utterly dismayed. The wind bumped against the tower windows, and sounded so desolate and lonely that she had to bite her tongue so as not to cry; and Cobweb looked at her with a queer expression that was mostly contemptuous (though such a lovely face for being contemptuous with!) but worse, somewhat nervous (and such a terrible face for being nervous with!).
A question entered her head. Questions now entered Floralinda’s head regularly, which made her very stressed. If she were asked by a survey what the worst part of the tower was, she would rank the food quite highly, and the loneliness highly too; but the very worst part would be the sheer anxiety of all the questions her brain now asked her.
She whispered this one now—
“Cobweb, dear; I’ve just wondered: where did you even get this ice?”
“I was going to say; we have bigger problems than your wretched foot to worry about, and you’ve picked the absolute worst time,” said Cobweb. “It’s snowing.”
You may find it funny to hear, with the goblins, and the monsters of all kinds, and the infection she had got in her hands (which, it must be said, was fairly light) and the princes getting crunched-up, that it was this time that Floralinda would later think of as the hardest.
The witch had not made her tower to be habitable from season to season, or at best it was a three-season tower and did not account for inclement weather. Witches do their best work in late spring and summer, when princes are most naturally inclined to go and look for mates. As the prince’s only natural predator, the witch had to work when the princes were thickest on the ground. There are only a very few accounts of princesses who stayed inside their towers for years and years, and those towers were custom-made for them, with hot and cold running water and more appropriate heating solutions. And besides, these were not simply princesses, but also daughters of witches, and daughters of witches have a high survival rate even if their partners have a very low rate of not falling into thorn bushes. Floralinda would never have been fostered by the witch in that way; the witch in our story thought that very old-fashioned, and indeed a bit distasteful for everyone concerned. Our witch had been interested in art and beauty, though Floralinda wasn’t to know it; art and beauty don’t heat houses.
It was not truly winter yet, just an early cold snap in autumn, and the snow only settled for a day. But it was cold as charity in that tower. The fire couldn’t go out, which saved Floralinda’s life (and therefore Cobweb’s), but she was only warm when she was next to it, as the way the room was made let all the heat escape. She was obliged to put on every stitch of clothing she had, the silk gown and all her petticoats and her blanket coat, and to sleep with them on too; and she was in frightful pain from her ankle, so that when she stood up she cried.
Cobweb the bottom-of-the-garden fairy did not feel the cold. Fairies don’t, as a rule. She was also not starved due to the witch’s spell, although she did not have much in the way of favourite foods; there was no earthly way to drink dewdrops from dear little ferns or bellflowers, nor any honey, nor strawberry-leaves. Floralinda did cry quite a lot, and Cobweb did have a supply of princess’s tears, but these were less and less palatable as time went by. She was forced to live on late-autumn sunshine and the taste of snow, which is a dull diet for any fairy. Her true danger