Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir Page 0,42

troll at bay until the spider-venom got to him. He must have lasted a full thirty seconds longer than anything else in the tower had; but at last he got all stiff, and slumped to one side, and Floralinda finished him off without being told to.

They made a pyre for him, as they couldn’t skin his hide, or eat him, or use his teeth for anything.

Floralinda said—

“Do you think we need more poison, Cobweb, dear?”

But Cobweb looked troubled.

“I’m worrying the venom is starting to weaken,” she confessed, “it was warm when we took it from the spider, and you’re meant to freeze it first thing; I have kept the rest cool and out of the light, but I shall have to make stronger and stronger batches. If it is left for much longer it will likely expire, and not be much use at all.”

Once upon a time this would have made Floralinda so frightened that she would have run about, or sat down and cried, or taken to bed to try to think about it. But all she said was—

“Oh, fiddlesticks. We shall have to hurry.”

Just imagine a princess saying Fiddlesticks!

Flight Twenty-One

One morning Floralinda woke, shivering, to find that she couldn’t see out the window, for the wind was howling and a white blizzard had struck up outside the glass; and the next morning all the woods and all the grass around the bottom of the tower were covered in snow. You could no longer see the faint sparkle that Floralinda had assumed was the shining golden sword. There was certainly no sign of the goblins, which was probably a mercy. The water had frozen solid in the wash-stand, and took some warming by the fire to get liquid again; the trees that had once been gold and red were bare, and the evergreens were dusted all over with snow. Winter had finally come.

She now had a nice morning routine where she had her breakfast under the covers, and rubbed at her hands and her feet, testing to see whether her old sprained ankle was sore; it was often stiff with the cold, but didn’t give her any problems. Then she would warm herself up by running up and down the stairs, and squeeze rocks in front of the fire, and boil hot water to drink, in order to pretend that it was tea. Then she would get properly dressed and shoulder her spear, and go and see what was down the tower, and attack it.

None of them gave her much trouble, not even the cockatrice. Cobweb had been quite impressed by the flying eyes, and said that they had been very rare; after Floralinda was done with them they were a little rarer still.

Flight Seventeen

“I think I am becoming brave,” she said to Cobweb.

Cobweb wasn’t sure. “You’re still a terrible ninny, and you don’t like it when I tell you to eat the dried fish; if you were really brave, you would take the chain off my neck,” she added, cunningly.

This made Floralinda feel guilty, which made her feel annoyed.

“I think,” she said fretfully, “that you might say, ‘You are becoming brave, Floralinda, it was inside you all along’ or ‘Floralinda, how strong your hands are; you could open jars of all kinds now’ or something inspirational, to make me feel nice; but you always bring it back to the fact that I have imprisoned you, when I have often said I’m sorry. I’m sure I don’t want you to suffer, Cobweb, but you must know that I would not have got this far without you, because you’re clever and I’m still not. I’m not as stupid as I was, and I’m much less sensitive than I was; I can look at all kinds of awful things, and do them too, but you are the brains. I think you’re wonderful,” she finished humbly, and then ruined it with, “I don’t think you’re very nice, but I think you’re wonderful.”

“‘You are becoming brave, Floralinda; it was inside you all’—” Cobweb began, but Floralinda said despairingly, “It doesn’t count if I told you to say it.”

Cobweb told her to make up her mind.

There were now merely seventeen flights to go, and flight seventeen proved to be an important flight for Floralinda, because it had other human beings on it.

Cobweb had called the witch avant-garde, which isn’t quite true, because the witch had no intention of doing things simply to go against the mode; she had read modern theories, and understood that