been simply ruined by modern society. Children are so knowing right now. I wanted to be the fairy who put the underneaths of mushrooms on, or made buttercups able to reflect whether or not you liked butter, or something chemical and practical; but they said the industry was saturated, so here I am, at exactly the wrong time professionally; and I’m sure to get into a most dreadful bother, and nobody ever trusts me.”
At this point it stamped its little foot and started crying again, which was quite nice, as its voice was not so pretty as its little weeping sounds.
“But perhaps you could help me escape,” said Floralinda feebly, who had a pounding headache, and was feeling rather the worse for wear. “I am so tired of being in this tower. The dragon yells at all hours, and there were a great many princes but none of them did very much, and I’ve had very bad times with goblins, and I’m—so—lonely.”
Not having known how lonely she had been, Floralinda began to cry herself. It was not the great hysterical yowls of before, but an exhausted kind of lying-back-to-cry where the tears squeezed out of her eyelids. At this the fairy stopped its crying, displayed the first flicker of interest, and dragged itself over to her—finding it could not fly on one wing, it made a sort of hop-skip-jump attempt, and nimbly climbed up the remaining panels of silver gauze.
“Are you truly a princess?” it said.
“My mother is a queen and my father is a king,” said Floralinda sadly, “and what’s more, they’re even married to each other.”
“It’s just that the tears of a real princess can be very useful,” said the fairy, with the attitude of someone aware that they could be being rude. “Apart from being pearls if she’s good and frogs if she’s bad, I mean; they’ve got properties I understand to be solvent and even medically valuable. Of course I’m only an amateur.”
And—though Princess Floralinda was a bit outraged—the fairy reached forward, and took some of her tears, and applied them neatly to the broken wing. At the briefest application of princess tears, all the glass-like chambers of the wing seemed to run together, as if they had been held close to a flame, and the ripped-up parts were made whole again; but the lower part which had been ripped off did not grow back.
“Well,” said the fairy practically, “that’s something; perhaps if you could cry something other than tears of loneliness, it would be even better. Could you cry for a broken heart, do you think?”
Princess Floralinda thought she could not cry for a broken heart, certainly not on command. But the fairy had become a bit friendlier, and up close was certainly so pretty that it was hard to be angry. Such beautiful little features—such cunning little pointed ears and nails on each finger and toe—such eyes, iridescent, like the chips of opal in her grandmother’s rings. It said, “Then could I prevail upon you to carry me down to the bottom, or to lower me down on a string?”
As there was nothing in the room that could be lowered down any further than two or three flights at best, and as the difficulty of getting to the bottom was the problem whole and entire, Floralinda supposed not.
“There’s nothing for it,” the fairy said. “I shall have to wait to bathe in the light of the full moon, and we’ve just had one, so it will take weeks. The wing will grow back then, and by that point you will be gone, so at least I’ll have full use of the tower.”
A great hope seized Floralinda.
“Oh,” she gasped, “oh, do you really think that I will be gone?”
“Naturally, yes,” said the fairy. “Those are goblin bites on your hands, aren’t they? They’re quite infected. Goblins are filthy. You’ll be dead in a week.”
At Floralinda’s new bout of tears, the fairy said a bit diffidently, “Cheer up; you might die earlier.”
“Oh, please,” managed Floralinda, “please, I really don’t want to die; it would break my mother’s heart, and there would be such a fuss over the funeral, and I wouldn’t even be there in the coffin, and my aunts would say dreadful things—oh, please! Don’t you have any fairy magic that could make me well, or couldn’t you take me to Fairyland, or call the birds and beasts to help us?”
The fairy didn’t think much of that idea; it didn’t seem to rate birds or