Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir Page 0,36

worse. It took a long time to dry clothes, and it was so cold that she had to get very brave to wash, and yearn all the time for a hot bath, when the best she could do was heat water on the hearth and use that to sponge with. It always felt so much colder after the hot-water sponge that she resented doing it.

Floralinda’s arms and hands were stiff every morning, so that she had to rub them carefully over the fire to get their feeling back; her foot ached, and was a horrible purple colour, and looked twice as big as the other foot; and sometimes she would try to make more wishes—

“Please, God, I wish You would make someone come and look for me,” but Cobweb chided her, saying:

“Your religious and fairy convictions are all mixed up. I do wish you wouldn’t; it makes my insides feel strange.”

Floralinda tried to remember what she had been told about general and specific wishes, and tried things like, “I wish it would be warmer,” and “I wish my foot would get better,” and “I wish I had a coat.”

Cobweb had been looking through the book on leatherwork imports, a book that considered its first duty to be the demolition of any interest the reader might have previously felt in domestic leatherwork. It had long, discursive chapters on the difficulty of curing hides and furs, and on the low quality of local leatherwork as opposed to leatherwork from any other nation; and she said—

“That is a more interesting and intelligent wish.”

And that is how Floralinda found herself hobbling downstairs, all the way down to flight thirty-three, to see the giant rats that they had not heaved into the pit of fishes. The tower had become so suddenly cold after they died that they had not yet really become nasty. Floralinda still gagged and shuddered, but she comforted herself with the idea that she had seen worse, and after all they were only giant rats. These were thoughts that would not have occurred to her in the summer.

Cobweb had neatly ripped out the appropriate pages of the domestic leatherworking book, and transferred her laboratories downstairs, and bullied Floralinda into carrying the empty brazier, and said—

“If you’re going to be no use for anything, we might as well try to keep you warm. It would be just like you to get sweaty and horrible squeezing those stupid rocks,” (when it had been Cobweb who told her to squeeze them!) “and catch pneumonia on top of everything else, which would be spiteful in the extreme. This rat is in better condition than the other, and we’re going to tan its hide. It kept the rat warm, so perhaps it will do the same for you.”

The rat’s fur was very thick and ugly, with great bristly rat-coloured hanks of hair that did not feel soft or inviting. Floralinda, who had always picked squirrel or ermine or mink from the furrier, did not really like the idea. When the fairy told her how the hide had to come off, she liked the idea even less, and felt faintly as though she were going to be ill; but she had not been ill since the first adventures in the tower, and if she was ill she was going to have to go upstairs again and get a new breakfast, and her foot did not feel up to it. So she kept her food down.

But it was a time. The worst part of the tanning was that you had to open up the rat, and then take everything inside the rat, out. It was like the worst Christmas stocking that ever was; and Floralinda was nervous about making the cuts, especially as Cobweb kept giving bullying advice that didn’t make much sense and was dreadful to hear, such as “Don’t pierce the organs,” and “Pull the ribs apart.” Also, the hide very firmly wanted to stay on the rat, and was recalcitrant in coming off. The rat not being freshly dead, and being cold, had slightly less rank insides than you might think: but the insides were still, alas, very rank. Floralinda sawed terribly with her knife even if Cobweb had gone to the trouble of giving it new edges, and shrieked when she had to lift things out of the rat, and made rather a mess of taking the skin off. By the end she was hot, and bothered, and very dirty, but she had a big