Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower

by Tamsyn Muir

  It was a bread-knife, not a steak-knife; it did not do much more than leave scrapes. But this made the goblin smack Floralinda full in the face, and the shock of that blow scared her senseless, and she took the knife in both fists and thrust it as hard as she could into the goblin’s throat. It stuck fast. The goblin staggered away from her, long fingers clutching at the knife, gouts of grey and brackish blood squirting out onto her dress and her face; in affrighted pity—Floralinda had not taken any nursing classes—she seized the knife, and both goblin and Princess pulled it from the throat with a great sour arc of blood. The goblin lay flat, gasping and choking for breath, until with a moist gurgle it was still. Floralinda sat in her armchair and stared.

  How long she stared, she did not know; she must have sat until the sun was quite set. In the thin evening light the goblin seemed very small and fragile. She started to cry. The crying grew really awful, with deep pulling breaths that made her heart feel as though it might jump out her chest, and she had to pinch both her cheeks until she stopped.

  Floralinda dragged the goblin over to the window-sill—her hands bled terribly—and heaved it over the side. It was such a long way down that it seemed as though it would never land, though of course it did, and quite close to the golden sword. Floralinda was too high up to hear it go SPLAT, but she fancied that would have been the appropriate noise.

  She bathed her poor hands in water, and though it was a really hopeless case, she took off her gown and sponged where it was muddy with goblin blood. Her last memory was of wrapping her hands in silver gauze from the hangings. Floralinda was too exhausted to recall putting herself to bed, or weeping herself to sleep.

  Floralinda woke up with terribly swollen hands, with ugly red tooth-marks all over. They were so bad that she was obliged to pull off her little rings in a fright, as the fingers with rings on looked more purple than they should, and she was afraid that they would come off entirely, like lamb’s tails. It was agony to work the rings off. The room was quite sultry; she was a little feverish, and had to lie down with the flask of milk pressed against her forehead, to cool it. Her fingers were so thick and stiff that she could barely peel the orange, and of course she did not want to use the knife. She picked at the fruit without wanting it very much. What she really desired to do was to go back to bed and sleep and sleep, like the sleeping princess Briar Rose, who by all accounts had been very lucky. In the fairy-books, all Briar Rose had ever had to do was lie down the moment things got hot, and when she woke up everything had been done for her, which is a fairly universal dream.

  Floralinda still had the flask of milk and the flask of water, 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 like chittering (if you have ever heard two squirrels argue over a conker, you have heard this sound) and the goblins startled—at a third goblin, who had appeared from the opposite direction, and was now staring at Floralinda.

  Its two gluttonous fellows turned their heads to follow its gaze. The whites of their eyes shone in the darkness, thin rings around enormous black pupils. They both dropped their loaves.

  This time Floralinda knew when to run for her life. She took to her heels with three goblins behind her, squabbling away in their own guttural talk, hot in pursuit as she sped down the corridor and flew up the staircase. They were much quicker than she, but did not work well in narrow quarters together. She made it up to her room just as the two biggest goblins thrust the third out of the way, and they crashed very hard against her door as she slammed it shut in a trice. She turned its key and locked it, and all three banged and shrieked and clattered the handle.

  A light rain had started to fall outside, pattering on the windowsill. This was so welcome that Floralinda went with her injured hands and pinned the window-sash up as high as it could go, so that the cool wet breeze could circulate through the room. Before long the banging and shrieking and clattering ceased, and the sounds of wind and rain were all that was heard in the room. Eventually, the princess thought the goblins must have gone away, and went to check.

  But the goblins were possessed of dumb cunning, and in any case were not at all afraid of Floralinda. When she tremulously turned the key and
peeked out—they burst in on top of her!

  There were only two, as the third had grown impatient and trundled off. Floralinda ran to stand stupidly on the bed, like a girl faced with two rats; one goblin caught her by her long unbrushed butter-coloured curls and tugged, meaning to drag her to the floor as the first goblin had. She leapt from the bed in a fright, dragging it with her, screaming with the goblin’s hands stuck fast in her hair, and her scalp feeling as though it must depart from her head entirely; she wheeled about, blind with panic and pain, trying to tear the goblin from her head; she shouldered her burden to the window, slapping at it aimlessly until it let go and fell from the sill. This would not have accomplished much except that it fell from the sill outwards, which made it, a few seconds later, the second goblin to die very close to the shining sword.

  The other goblin—full of bread, and warier—turned and scampered back to the doorway, perhaps to go and call for more of its kind. In a panic Floralinda flew after it. She caught up with it just as it reached the head of the staircase down, and not knowing what else to do, she gave it a good push to the hunched shoulders with her foot. As she watched, it tumbled down each steep stair back to floor thirty-nine, which had the effect of breaking its neck.

  Princess Floralinda then had the presence of mind to turn the key before being sick. She also had the presence of mind to be sick in her chamber-pot rather than anywhere else, which would have added insult to injury. She was ill until she could not bring up anything else, just nasty-tasting froth; then she sat on her bed. Her heart beat fast, and her brain beat faster. The rain had turned from a nice light pattering sound to a thick pelter, and this heralded a storm. The room shook with a full basso profundo of thunder—a deep, throaty roll somewhere quite close—and though the rain splashed in over the sill to the floor, Floralinda did not pull down the sash, but stood at the window as the storm broke over the trees and the tower, and stared down guessing at what must be the remains of her fresh dead goblin and its less fresh colleague. She stared out the window; she stared at the sky, and the feverish purple clouds; she stared down at the ground until she couldn’t look any more, as it wasn’t very nice. If you have ever stood at a great height in the rain, with a storm breaking all around you in a very effervescent way, you will know that it is a good time for having Ideas, even if you are a princess.

  If Princess Floralinda had been the type of princess who got very still and pale when she was frightened, things would have happened differently. But she was the sort who shrieked and tried to run in three directions at once, which had exasperated everybody who had tried to teach her to keep a good seat on a horse. It was due to this, along with the Idea, that she unlocked the door and crept once again down the long steep flight of stairs to floor thirty-nine, bread-knife brandished woodenly before her, stepping over the dead goblin without much thought.

  She retraced her steps to the alcove where the goblins had been eating her bread. There were no goblins there now, but there were the loaves, a little shabby but recognisable. She pulled a chunk off the white to press into her mouth immediately, but then thought better of it. Instead, Floralinda crept back to her room, crumbling bits of both the white and the wheat—just in case the goblins had a preference—to form a trail behind her, though being fresh the bread didn’t crumb very easily. Both loaves refilled themselves in her hands as she tore pieces off them, so that by the time she was back in her room they were as fresh and as whole as they had ever been; and she did not lock her door, nor did she even close it. She made a path of bread all the way to her window, then strewed more around the sill, just in case. Then she stuffed both loaves safely down the back of her armchair in an unusual access of good sense, and she hid under her bed.

  The storm raged outside, and occasionally in through the window. Every so often there was a flash of lightning that lit up the whole room in hot white light, and then the answering peal of thunder to show how far away the storm was (each second counts for a mile; this is the truth, and you can check with a teacher). It did not die down after the sun set, but in fact got noisier. Floralinda’s plan came to fruition when two goblins crept into the room, very cautious, peering at their surroundings in the dark; though goblins have excellent night vision and a keen sense of smell, it was raining furiously and the fact that Floralinda had been sick earlier confused the scent. They did not seize on her beneath the bed, as they surely would have in better conditions. One goblin went to the window, conscientiously eating bread as it went: and from there she burst from her hiding-place, and pushed him out where the first two goblins had gone.

  The last goblin sprang. Floralinda grappled with it, and it bit her savagely as the other goblins had, with those powerful fingers wrapping around her forearms to keep her still. But Floralinda took Monarchic Positions on Economic Models and brought it hard down on the goblin’s head. She hit it over and over, her hands bleeding with each blow, until it fell down dazed. Then she took her pillow and smothered it; and then it went the same way as its three fellows, down into the dark and the rain.

  Princess Floralinda would later wonder at it. She would later be amazed at her need, and at how terrible a thing need was. It had all been dreadful; but she was beyond thought, which was also a blessing. She was running a temperature, she had re-opened all the sores on her hands, and she had her bread back. She ate of the white loaf until she was pretty sure it was sleep or be sick; so she lay down and slept as the preferable option.

  And that was how Floralinda triumphed over the thirty-ninth flight. She did it all independently, with a little help from her fever, and the long-windedness of economic textbooks.

  Floralinda slept for a very long time, though she had no way of measuring it. She woke to tiny sobs, each of which sounded like a delightful little bell being tinkled, or the tiniest trickle of a mountain stream.

  She opened her eyes very slowly, as she also woke up to find that almost every inch of her poor body felt tremendously battered and bruised, and her hands sore beyond reckoning. It was like the day after she had learned to trot on her pony, only a thousand times worse. Floralinda did not sit up, but lay there listening to the sound: it was so beautiful and it was so sad, with both feelings mixed, that tears sprang into her eyes.

  With a great deal of effort, she sat up. The storm had cleared, leaving only the tenderest of summer mornings, and a nice fresh smell to mask the sour illness one. The only sign that the tower had ever been rocked by thunder and lightning was a very sodden part of the rug where the storm had blown something through the window. On that sodden part, there was—a fairy!

  It really was a fairy, and it looked exactly the same as fairies did in all of Floralinda’s picture-books. Then again, it might have been a pixie: she wasn’t quite sure of the overlap. Both kinds were depicted as tiny, beautiful persons with brightly-coloured butterfly wings, and sure enough this was a tiny beautiful person small enough to be comfortable in Floralinda’s hand. But none of her picture-books had ever depicted such a sorry example of Fairyland, this one being wet through, and quite tatty, and worst of all—

  “Oh,” said Floralinda, moved to pity, having learned absolutely nothing about the veracity of children’s story-books, “oh, you poor thing!”

  Rather than butterfly wings, as illustrated, the fairy’s wings showed clearly as being rather like a cranefly or dragonfly’s, split into two pairs: long and transparent, with all the tiny veins showing through. The pair on the fairy’s rightmost side were fine, if a bit ragged, but the upper wing on the leftmost side had been torn to drooping shreds, and the lower wing was missing entirely.

  The fairy, or the pixie, ceased its beautiful sobs and looked up at Floralinda. In the early morning light it was the same colour as a delicate white rosebud, with green and blue lights like the veins inside a petal (if you have pulled apart a rose-petal you will know what I mean). It had a pretty, plaintive sort of face, very delicate, and scarcely bigger than one of Floralinda’s old dolls that she pretended not to still pla
y with. Everything about it had the air of an exceedingly well-done doll in a doll’s house, in fact, right down to the cunning thistledown skirts so wet through from the storm. The exquisitely tiny curls of hair had taken a wetting and, as they dried, stuck up like duck fluff. It is hard to describe the exact colour of that hair. It was a bit like what happens if you are very blonde and take a dip in the public swimming baths, and it takes on a greenish aphid tinge, from all the chemicals they use to keep the water clean.

  The fairy said, in a surprisingly piercing voice for its size:

  “Do you have a mother currently in hospital, and you’re feeling rather out of the way, and there are new little jackets everywhere, and your nurse isn’t paying you any attention, so you’ve run away from home to the bottom of the garden?”

  “Pardon?” said Princess Floralinda.

  The fairy repeated itself. Floralinda could answer in all honesty, No, not remotely; so the fairy pressed:

  “Have you disappointed your grandmother by telling her that you don’t believe in fairies; and now you’re having an awful dream that you’re only about as big as a daisy-stem?”

  Floralinda answered No again; and added that she was a princess, in case that helped the situation. The fairy mulled on that one for a while, and then said doubtfully, “Was I at your christening?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Floralinda cautiously. “My aunt had a baby at around the same time and there was an argument about who got to use the christening dress, so my mother said she felt she had to be gracious because she was the Queen, and in any case it was a frightful expense and family only.”