Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir Page 0,5
an orange and a dirty knife, but she no longer had the loaf of nice white bread or the loaf of wheat. The white she mourned as she liked white bread better, but she knew vaguely that wheaten was more wholesome, with nutritious parts like the angiosperm. She also had an alarming amount of scabs and some wounds that weren’t closing over, but that bled whenever she moved her hands in the wrong way.
In the mild delirium of fever, it seemed to her really too awful that she had lost both loaves for the privilege of getting bitten very badly by a goblin, and then having to watch that goblin die, and then having to roll the same out of a window; it wasn’t remotely fair. For a princess who had previously thought of bread as the foodstuff you had to butter thinly and dutifully chew before you could concentrate on the nicer parts of the meal and then a pudding, Floralinda became quite obsessed with her lost loaves.
It was also true that although one might survive on an orange, milk, water and two kinds of bread, milk and oranges by themselves do not sustain a grown person. Floralinda woke the next fretful day with her hands just as sore and her stomach in anguish from oranges. The sky had grown a deep purple, and even from forty flights up the forest smelled like wet, waiting loam. It was stuffy and close in her room. Even after pressing the flask of cold milk to her temples, Floralinda’s head was still very hot, and ached; she longed for bread.
The thick, foggy air, like standing in someone else’s breath, refused to give way to rain. Floralinda’s head pounded. Her hands were really terribly sore. The mad longing for bread had become a fear of hunger. The more she seemed to think about it, the worse it got. This fear of starvation replaced the fear of what lay on the floor below, or at least started to convince her that a quick trip—the quickest of trips downwards, to retrieve that lost bread, wasn’t frightful at all, especially when the alternative option was dying of hunger. (Floralinda did not know how long it took one to die of hunger, and had reckoned it at about a day, notwithstanding the presence of milk and oranges.) She dressed herself in the gown that had not really dried out all the way, and found her bruised and broken hands turning the key once more within the lock.
Princess Floralinda crept very stealthily down those stairs, and went at a snail’s pace along that greasy hallway. It was empty. She stalled at each imagined scrape and each perceived breath, until she came to where the hallway widened into the room with the brazier, where she had found her first goblin.
There was no more goblin to be found—but no loaf, either. She was deranged with disappointment and relief and a secondary infection. If she had come this far, mightn’t she go a little farther? The room had two other hallways running off it—one that she thought must have gone around the tower’s edge, and one straight toward the centre—and she picked the one that led to the centre, which was lit by crackling, bad-smelling torches. It brought her to a small room which was altogether empty, but for a heavy trapdoor in the floor with an iron ring. Her hands were too sore to pull it, and even had they been whole Floralinda did not know if it would move for her. And so she stood there, hesitating, torn between fear of hunger and fear of being bitten very badly.
Snuffling, scuffling sounds drew her attention, and made the decision for her. With a certain fever-derived lightheadedness she hurried back to the first room, lit up sooty orange in the glow of those everlasting braziers; and when she peeked down the final corridor, the one that seemed to lead off around the tower, there in a little alcove sat two goblins, each one eating a loaf.
They were so bloated as to be nearly spherical, and awash with breadcrumbs. They must have been eating bread, and doing nothing else, for quite some time. Compared to the pitiful thing that had died with its grey teeth bared to her ceiling, Floralinda was transfixed again by how big these goblins seemed, how grimy and verminous and grey. There was another noise from further off down the corridor, and something that sounded a great deal