Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir Page 0,35
was Floralinda’s danger. The chain around her neck had seen to that.
For a while the fairy was content, because she had the stuff that Floralinda had scraped for her from the salamander tongues, and did evil-smelling experiments all day and night. First she made a hideous gel which she rendered down to a horrible paste. Then she was wracked with indecision, until finally from that paste she rendered a large quantity of grey powder. There were so many explosions in this process that Cobweb temporarily sizzled off her eyebrows, but she was exultant.
“I can’t think of any other way to make it transportable,” she told Floralinda, “and this is the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m annoyed, because in powder form it will certainly be less incendiary when rehydrated; but it’s wonderfully adhesive. When I get back I will find a particular tree that has been rude to me, and shake some of this all over its roots, and pretend I am watering it when I am really reconstituting the mixture; then I will set it alight from a distance, and no matter what the forest fairies try to do it will burn like anything, and be much too sticky to scrape off. Then they might ask me (I will be feigning tears, as hadn’t I just been watering the blasted thing?) and I will say, ‘Oh dear, if only you knew anything about metastable emulsions’, and they’ll all be sorry.”
“It all sounds very useful, I’m sure; we could use it on a creature,” said Floralinda, relieved to learn that the smells might now be over, and believing ‘incendiary’ to mean a type of post-card.
How Cobweb laughed at the idea of wasting that powder on Floralinda!
And indeed, she was so jealous of it that she kept the powder with her at all times, in a fairy-sized haversack of peel, and only took it off to sleep.
After the experiment with the salamander gel, Cobweb grew dissatisfied again. Truth be told, the gel had been intended to blow the latch off the necklace, and in theory it would perform that office wonderfully. It would likely perform that office so wonderfully that it would take off Cobweb’s head with it. She was too pleased with the gel to admit that this compromised its overall success, but there was nothing for her now but to return to the Floralinda question.
Cobweb had always believed strongly in education, which she thought set her apart from other fairies. In truth, fairies are all very nosy, and want to find things out; they just don’t have the memory for books. Cobweb made Floralinda take down all the books and spread them out on the bed, and so long as Floralinda opened the covers she could turn the pages over herself. She did not receive much useful information about how to survive in such a situation, but she did come to know quite a lot about supply and demand.
In those chilly dark weeks—as the sun began to show its face less and less above the tops of those flame-coloured trees—Floralinda did not spend much time in her bed, despite the fact that she was told around three times an hour that she needed to keep her foot still. She was back to her old, drifting, restless ways, wanting to do three things at once, and hating to not move about. She winced and cried out whenever she put any weight on the foot. She had to get around using a system of chairs, and leaning on things, and pulling herself up onto other things, which made her arms very sore; but she kept on squeezing those pieces of brick, and she kept on practicing with the spear, though she had to do it sitting down, and quite often she tumbled herself over. She would lie on the cold rugs and cry, and the wind would rattle the windows, and Cobweb would mutter things like, “Supply-side economics,” and the dragon with the diamond-tipped scales would let out dreary bellows from time to time.
It took Floralinda a long time to get well in these conditions. Everything in the tower room felt filthy. It had been hard to sleep during Cobweb’s experiments, and it sometimes felt as though she could not sleep well even after they were done. Floralinda felt harmed by the strings of drying fishes, which no longer smelled as bad as they once had, but made her remember how they smelled when she looked at them, which was almost