Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir Page 0,43

princes have all kinds of terrors, some of them psychological. It was very easy to put in a dragon to crunch them up, but more difficult to traumatise them, and she intended to blaze a trail that way. So she thought about what humans feared, and on flight seventeen, she put a group of murderers.

The murderers had been there the whole time Floralinda had been there. They made quite a racket at first, but Floralinda had not heard it above the roaring of the dragon and the crunching of the bones; and although you have been warned to not feel sorry for anything inside the tower, perhaps you can spare a thought to what it would have been like, to be stuck in an airless room with your only company some people who have nothing in common with you other than a career choice. In modern parlance we call this a convention, but in the tower it was very dark, and they had been kept alive through foul means, and their minds had not really survived. This meant they had not died of starvation, for they had forgotten what it is like to be hungry; but whoever they were before they were murderers had gone away. They did not mind the snow banking at the windows, or the puddles of melted slush collecting in the corners: they were beyond the cold, and the damp, and the dark.

When Floralinda, smiling, went down the stairs and found a group of men, what she thought of them she had not time to structure; what they thought of her we cannot say. She was struck stiff with horror by their appearance, and was mute with fear, because she was more afraid of grown-up men than she really had been of the cockatrice or the ogre.

One of them knocked the spear from her hands, another the lamp with the coal, and all the while they were screaming. Some of them had knives, although they held them in a manner that suggested they had forgotten what to do with them. They were talking the language of men who can no longer really talk, and making the demands of men who are beyond wants. So the witch had really gotten quite a lot for her money, because her murderers had transitioned into madmen; madmen to start with would have cost a lot more.

They tore at Floralinda’s hair and cloak; they wept. They fumbled with their knives. They spat in her face, and in each other’s. One had more speech than the others; he said—

“I’ll f---ing kill you; I’ll cut your f---ing throat.”

Two of the murderers were holding Floralinda, trying to pull her in opposite directions, as though they were dogs and she a juicy marrow-bone. She let herself become dead weight, and the two men, who were not sure of their footing, went down with her. They landed all together in an icy puddle of foetid slush which soaked Floralinda through. When she thrashed upwards, one of the men held her down by the hair. Another man, still standing, began kicking at her. The other men crowded around and began kicking at her too, and at the men on the ground as well: they did not distinguish.

Floralinda had curled up, with her arms over her head, which is a useful move if you are being kicked to death and do not want to watch. A light snow was falling, which was a curious weather condition, being indoors.

And Cobweb said, “Move.”

Floralinda surged through the scrum of kicking legs like a rugby-player. The falling snow was turning into curious, bad-smelling scum on her arms. Cobweb was howling in pain: as well she might, as she had seized the fallen coal and dropped it down the shirt-front of one of the men. The madman slapped at it, and seized it from his shirt, and it got mixed up with the snow, and the scum, and the men; and then they took.

For the snow had been Cobweb’s haversack of powder, and the damp and the wet were enough to swell it. The more the men beat at the flames the more they spread that wretched sticky gel around; and the gel had one purpose in life, and that was to burn.

Floralinda was not frightened of the scum on her hands. She did not have room to be frightened of anything. She seized her spear and faced the screaming knot of flaming madmen. One flailed close to her, and she hit him