Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir Page 0,41

the siren on the same pyre where they’d burned the rat; she smelled like seawater, and took a while to take and smoked when she did, like punky wood. And all along Floralinda sighed, and didn’t know why she felt so forlorn.

When she went to bed that night (covered by all her clothes and the rat-skin cloak) she looked hard in the darkness at Cobweb’s little fairy back. Her wings were lovely now, like little glass panelling, and she laid them in a sweet way across the gauze when she went to bed; sometimes they twitched as she slept. She was like a doll—but so much better than the best doll ever made, for all the little bumps of her spine showed through the skin when she curled up, and she was really alive. Floralinda reached out with her forefinger and gently pressed it to Cobweb’s warm back, right between her wings, and the slight hummocks of her pretty shoulderblades.

Cobweb woke up with a start. She was not nice about it, either, and said she didn’t like being poked, and clutched her sack of powder as though Floralinda had nefarious intentions about it, when Floralinda didn’t care a whit for the blessed stuff. “What are you doing?” the fairy said suspiciously. “If you’re killing me, you could at least do it to my face. If you are just poking me to be cruel, I will make a note to hate you even more. What are you about?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said poor guilty Floralinda.

Floralinda had not grown soppier. She was more determined than ever before to make her way down the tower; and she was finding that, although she had every advantage with the venom, she was starting to be able to win fights not merely because she got in the first strike and then ran away. Sometimes the creature would dodge—the wyvern, for example, which was a sort of diet dragon with no back legs and great bat’s wings, was enormously hard to get on a first strike. It beat its claws at Floralinda’s head and shoulders, and she was glad of the tough leather of the giant rat. She struck at it with the spear so that it was thrown to one side, and then she could drive the spear down, and right through the wyvern’s back; that was one of the tower’s creatures that was not merely killed by poison. Floralinda was quite amazed at it.

But she had cracked the spear in the process, and when she and Cobweb examined it, they found that it was really on its last legs; so they had to get down the second curtain-rail, and spend another day sharpening that one. But Floralinda knew what was wanted now, and was quite painstaking in sharpening the end with the broken bits of scraper, and in making sure the tip would not snap off.

So the redcap never knew what hit him. He was a sort of evil goblin, more intelligent than the other kind, and he had a heap of stones to throw at princes, and had sat the whole time on a pile of them waiting wickedly for one to come up the other way; but Floralinda and Cobweb burst in on him from behind, and Floralinda stabbed him with her spear in his shoulder, and he died quite startled by the whole scenario.

And the troll was a battle and a half! He stood twice as big as Floralinda, the colour of an old tree-trunk, naked except for a little loincloth, with simply enormous arms like an octopus and tusks like an elephant, so that he looked like one of those funny pictures you make up from parts of different creatures. He was angry, and he was not an animal. He wheeled out of the way of Floralinda’s spear, and she did not need Cobweb to tell her “Duck!” when he swiped at her with a hand that looked like a ham-hock; he staggered towards her, and she managed to make a long scratch down his arm.

But he was doughty, and took a long time to die. Floralinda was forced to run away from his blows, and try to drive him off with the spear-point, until she was pouring with sweat from exertion and all the chemicals that your body produces when it is running a foot-race. She did not think about how she was afraid, nor did she think about losing. The only thing she thought about was keeping that