Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir Page 0,37

tattered piece of rat-skin. She had made slits down the thighs and the arms, and the rat’s thick neck, and for the first time understood how a human being might with concentration never want to eat again: she would just think of how the rat looked, and of how the rat looked outside of the rat.

Cobweb checked this horrible thing all over for holes, as Floralinda burned the bits in a fire, which made the fire smell unspeakable but got rid of them.

“Now comes the hard part,” said Cobweb.

Floralinda uttered a little scream, and lay flat on her back.

“Oh! Oh, whatever do you mean, that wasn’t the hard part? Oh, Cobweb, I can’t and I won’t. Every time I close my eyes I will see that rat in my head. I won’t ever have a nice dream again, now that I’ve done that to the rat, and seen things nobody but a cat or owl is meant to see. Nobody will ever think I am a good girl, and I don’t even believe I am, either. If you tell me there’s worse I shall faint.”

“You are an idiot and a hysteric besides,” said the fairy, but she seemed to be a little relieved that Floralinda still had some kick in her. “The hard part won’t come today, at least, you ninnyhammer. Right now we are going to drop this in the pool that the fishes were in, weighted with a rock; we’ve got to let it get a little bad so that the soft fleshy part scrapes off.”

Afterwards Floralinda hobbled upstairs, and sponged herself with hot water, and lay in bed with her foot in agony. Cobweb sat next to her with a Reader’s Digest, and even consented to read some parts out to Floralinda, though of course she was very grudging about it and did not do any interesting voices. Floralinda lay very still, as the moment she moved even a finger all the nice bubble of bodily warmth went away, and she was icy cold again, but she said—

“Cobweb, are you still angry with me?”

“Of course I am,” said the fairy, surprised. “I expect to be angry for about two more years.”

“I had thought perhaps you were feeling sorry for me instead,” ventured Floralinda, who saw herself as a very sorry object.

“I won’t stop hating you, so I would have to feel both, and that’s very dangerous for a fairy,” said Cobweb fervently. “There is nothing worse than hating someone and feeling sorry for them. I can’t feel sorry for you when you’re so stupid, and I like you even less when you’re clever. I disdain you, and occasionally you surprise me, which I don’t enjoy at all. I advise you to not like me either, which I’m sure you don’t. If you had, you would not have imprisoned me.”

“But Cobweb, that’s not true at all; I am trying to grow to love you, despite the fact that you are only beautiful and learned and not even a little bit nice,” said Floralinda.

“Will you free me, if you love me?”

Floralinda mulled it over, and said Probably, because love made you pure and good, always; and privately felt relieved that it was unlikely she would grow to love Cobweb before she made it to the bottom of the tower (or, indeed, ever). But she suggested that she could take Cobweb back with her to the palace, and introduce her to the family and to the servants, and that perhaps she could be a royal fairy rather than a bottom-of-the-garden one dealing with children who were innocent of the facts of life.

“Take me back with you!” said Cobweb. “Just fancy! What if they don’t want you?”

“Of course they will want me; I’m their Princess,” said Floralinda.

“You are a crook,” said Cobweb.

But when she shivered down in bed that night, with Cobweb curled up in her little nest close by, it was a question her mind kept chasing round and round, like the devil-bear had chased them; her family had a legal obligation to want her, as well as a moral obligation besides; even if she had workday hands, and even if her curls would never be the same again, she was still very much a princess on the inside. Just because the bread has gone stale and hard on the outside does not mean, if you cut through it, that there is not nice fresh bread within.

This should have told Cobweb something too, for princesses aren’t meant to doubt.

They soaked