Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir Page 0,48

said they wouldn’t.

“I am a maiden; the unicorn oughtn’t to attack me,” said Floralinda.

Cobweb was not quite sure.

“‘Maiden’ has a lot of different possible connotations,” said Cobweb.

“I am a princess, no matter what you say,” said Floralinda.

“You have proved that they can be just as naughty as anyone,” said the fairy.

For a moment it looked as though Floralinda was going to lose her nerve; she sat on flight eleven sharpening the spear and the knife, and dousing both liberally in spider-venom, and in the end she thrust the knife into her belt and said—

“Watch if you like; but everyone says unicorns bow their heads for girls, and it’s been that way in all of my books, and they’re quite a holy creature, so I don’t see why I should have a problem.”

“A unicorn never met you,” said Cobweb.

And she was quite worried.

It was true that when Floralinda came into the unicorn’s room with her spear and her knife, with Cobweb sitting on the stairs peeking over, the unicorn did not look concerned. She went very fearlessly to the lovely, delicate creature, with its intelligent eyes and golden horn; she shook away her hood from her hair (it had gone without washing so long that it had come all the way around again, and her curls looked quite nice after all, although not as butter-coloured as they once had) and came to meet it. It pawed the ground a little, and Cobweb held her breath; and Floralinda—poor dumb Floralinda—put her spear down on the ground, to show the unicorn that she was just a girl, and she took a few hesitant steps toward it.

And the unicorn let her. It shivered, and it whickered, but it let Floralinda approach. It danced from one hoof to the other in a hesitant way, and Cobweb had to let out her breath so that she could hold another; it squealed a little when Floralinda touched its flank, and then stroked it all the way up to its lovely neck. The unicorn rolled its eyes, but then it bowed its head.

Cobweb exhaled. There was a twitch of the rat-skin coat, and a flash of metal; and then Floralinda plunged her knife deep into the unicorn’s neck.

She cut all the way down its throat as the unicorn foamed, and screamed, and knelt down; but it died quite quickly, and its horn became dull, and—as happens with unicorns—its body looked like nothing more than an old grey donkey. Floralinda was wiping her knife on the unicorn’s old grey flank, and when she turned back to see Cobweb’s expression, she said passionately—

“I hate horses; they always bite you, and then you fall off, and everyone says that it would have been fine if you had just been confident. I wasn’t about to let it change its mind.”

And Cobweb felt a little nauseous.

Flight Nine-Two

“Well—that is that, Cobweb, dear,” said Floralinda.

The poison had nearly given out by the time they got to the minotaur; but as it happens, Floralinda did not really need poison by the time she got to the minotaur, and had asked to save up the strongest batch for the first flight. Strong men would have quaked at the giant bat, and knights have died to basilisks; but the only flight that really gave Floralinda any problem was the worms, because she screamed.

She tried to smile, but it did not look quite right on Floralinda’s face any more. There were hard lines around the eyes and mouth that had first come there from pain, back when she had boiled her hands after the goblins; and then there were the little puckers from seeing things that people ought not to see. It was not that she did not smile any more, and it was not that she did not laugh—how she had laughed at the slime, before going and fetching a brazierful of flaming coals!—but it was a strange expression, like shoes she was still trying to break in.

And when she said, ‘That is that’ she did not sound quite as happy as she ought to have done. She sounded hungry, as though she had said, Pancakes; she also sounded strangely rueful. It was a beautiful evening when she said it: the snows had stopped falling quite so hard as in the early-winter blizzards, and the woods were deep and crisp and still instead.

“I will admit,” said Cobweb, “I didn’t think you could make it all the way down. In fact, I was pretty certain you couldn’t. The odds