by Tamsyn Muir
In the early afternoon she slept a little, woken only when the diamond-tipped dragon decided to roar. At dinnertime Cobweb made her steep her hands again, until Floralinda was beginning to feel less like princess and more like a soup-bone.
This dreadful process went on for days. On the third day, Floralinda felt a great deal worse, and could barely leave the bed that morning, and couldn’t at all that night, although Cobweb chivvied her unmercifully to do. She ran such a fever that the bedclothes were wet through. But on the fourth day Floralinda began to feel better, and to want more of the milk, and more of the bread.
On the fifth morning she was quite cheerful. The holes in her hands were still scabby, and her bruises had gone bright yellow; but the swelling in her hands was not half so bad, and there was no greenish tinge. It must be said that the fairy Cobweb, who had amassed quite a large amount of pith by this point, was quite disappointed.
“We must count it a success,” it said bracingly.
Princess Floralinda, sitting up to eat her breakfast (wheaten bread in milk, for nourishment) enjoyed the breeze coming through the tower window, and the fresh sunlight, and the bed-linen set to dry in it, even if that had forced her to take off the valance and sit on the slats of the bed. Princesses are also not often just glad to be alive; they don’t notice it. She should have still been very unhappy about her situation. And of course she was; only she was so relieved that she was not going to succumb to the goblins after all, even if they had managed to give her a raging case of proto-septicaemia.
She was sitting in her petticoats and spooning mush to her mouth, and she thought about a thought that had been slowly rolling around in her head, which was also quite a feat for some princesses—
“Cobweb,” she said, “did you say that you were in trouble, back in Fairyland?”
“No,” said Cobweb instantly.
But Floralinda was not so stupid as all that, and thought about it as hard as she possibly could, over her bread and milk.
“But I heard you say it—quite distinctly.”
Cobweb hedged, “Are you certain? Everyone knows princesses hear all sorts of things. Talking horse’s heads and flights of swans, and so on.”
But Floralinda said Yes; so Cobweb wiped its hands clean of orange-juice, and smiled at her, contriving to appear quite sweet, with its greeny-golden curls looking like coloured spun sugar in the morning light, and its skin looking more like the creamy heart of a lily than ever. But Cobweb, for having all of the beauty a fairy might have, was not actually very good at smiling. A smile on Cobweb’s face always looked a bit like last season’s hat on this season’s gown; it spoiled the whole effect.
“It’s true,” it said heavily, dropping the attempt at once. “I am in trouble already. They say I am not good at being a bottom-of-the-garden fairy, and that if I don’t keep my nose clean I’ll have to give it up and do something menial, like paint black bibs on boy sparrows, or put the hairs on traveller’s joy. Paint sparrows! It’s not my fault I’m so progressive.”
“But Cobweb,” said Floralinda, “what did you do?”
The fairy sighed, and it was not a very penitent sigh, but a sigh that remembered something beautiful, and was sorry not to see it again.
“I learned how to make things burn,” said Cobweb, dreamily.
Being a naturally tidy girl, once she felt better Princess Floralinda set to making the tower spick-and-span; it would be dreadful if a prince managed to get up all thirty-nine flights—though he would now find flight thirty-nine rather easy—only to think her some kind of slattern. She cleaned everything with hot water, and washed her hair with orange-peels, and made sure there was no trace anywhere of her having been ill; and though Cobweb complained terribly, and wasn’t a bit of help, Floralinda’s heart felt lighter at flapping her silk gown out and getting it completely dry. The silk gown was a perfect fright now; it used to be that Floralinda felt the need to retire a dress if it had a snag or if the lace had touched on a nail, but this gown was now all of Floralinda’s wardrobe, and there was no thought of retiring it. Having hot water made things a great deal easier, but washing everything in plain hot water made everything dry a bit stiff, and washing everything in orange-water made everything dry a bit stiff and smelling like oranges and tinged yellow on top of that.
Wishing to be altogether tidy, Floralinda addressed the issue of the now extremely dead goblin at the bottom of the stairs. Having ascertained bravely that there were no more goblins left, she also addressed the issue of the trapdoor she had found earlier, which lifted with surprising ease. If she had known what flight thirty-eight contained, she might never have tried it at all.
It opened on to a ladder, and a great empty dark space that she did not want to investigate without a candle; and then, faced with the nasty corpse of the goblin, Floralinda did something very silly and not very far-thinking. She did not want to drag the goblin back upstairs and get any mess on the floor she had scrubbed, and so she heaved the thing down that black space instead. She regretted it the moment she did it, thinking, ‘Oh, but I shall step in it later, if I ever go down there!’; but then she stopped thinking about it very hard, given that she had also recently learned how to make toast, and wanted some.
What Floralinda did not know was that flight thirty-eight was a large empty space that contained a giant spider. She did not know that it was the type of spider who was not above eating dead prey, especially as it was giant and greedy; she now knew a little of goblins being filthy, but did not know that the blood of a goblin was tremendously foul too. Thankfully, neither did the spider. It gorged itself and became deathly ill, which is a moral lesson for spiders everywhere, as Floralinda unknowing went upstairs and heated slices of wheaten bread and slices of white over her ever-burning fire.
That was, inadvertently, the end of flight thirty-eight, which Floralinda had solved by dint of being at once too houseproud and too prone to cut corners when it came to rubbish removal.
Otherwise, it would have proved very difficult. The witch thought no spider was worth it unless it was exceedingly venomous.
“I think you ought to tell me your long-term plan,” said Cobweb.
“I was about to say the same thing,” said Princess Floralinda.
It was early in the morning in the tower, and summer was starting to take its leave, it having been quite late in the season when poor Floralinda was locked up anyway. They had enjoyed some truly beautiful golden days of good weather, but now it was becoming chilly o’nights, and this made the princess very pensive again. The fortieth flight had not become really homely and indeed was shabbier than ever now that Floralinda had taken up long residence, but it was familiar, and she tried to keep it tidy, and she only wore her gown when she really needed to feel like a princess. It was difficult to feel like a princess when she saw the puckered white parts on her hands, and even more difficult to feel like a princess when Cobweb bossed her about. Every so often when she felt particularly wretched she put on the gown and her rings and combed her long golden hair, which still shone beautifully in the sunlight, but had a tiny bald patch where the goblin had ripped out a piece. Floralinda could feel it with her finger.
But that morning she sat on the bed in her petticoats with the blanket about her shoulders, dipping bread into some milk she had warmed up, as Cobweb sat in a single sunbeam and looked picturesque, and she continued:
“I have hit upon a plan that I think is quite clever, Cobweb—really quite clever; so please don’t criticise it before you hear the end.” (Cobweb did this a lot.) “But before I start, I would like to say: It is getting colder.”
“Yes,” said Cobweb.
“Would it be worth my while to wish for clothes, do you think?”
“As none of your other wishes have come true, no,” said Cobweb, “especially since I am not a haberdasher. I’m a full-time bottom-of-the-garden fairy and an amateur chemist. Do please try to keep that straight in your head.”
“Something will come alo
ng somehow,” said Floralinda, “but until then, I am obliged to be in my petticoat, and I have noticed that your clothes have never recovered, and are falling off.”
For this was so, the clothes having been rose-petals and spider-silk, the latter of which was famous for strength but not much for modesty.
“I think we ought to make some clothes,” Floralinda said, “for us both; I had the idea this morning, but then I had a truly terrible thought, because, Cobweb—are you a boy—or a girl?”
The fairy looked at Floralinda as though she had taken leave of her senses, but since Cobweb looked at Floralinda this way about sixteen times an hour, this did not make her quake as it had done in the beginning. At any rate, Cobweb had such a beautiful face for being contemptuous with that it was difficult to keep one’s feelings straight. Even when it screwed its face up in horrified thought, as it did right then, the effect was very nice.
“Must I be either? It sounds tedious.”
“I thought all fairies were girls; there’s always a fairy-queen; but then again, there’s Robin Goodfellow. Oh dear, how confusing!”
“If the fairy-queen chose to be a girl, then that is her particular cross to bear,” said Cobweb. “I don’t see why I should put myself out.”
“But you see, I wouldn’t know what to do about clothes, so do decide,” said Floralinda.
Cobweb mulled it over.
“Whichever one is superior,” they said eventually. “I have no interest in trading down, so please give me the one that is better to have.”
“Oh, but it doesn’t work that way at all,” protested Floralinda, at the same time suffering a guilty pang that she was not really communicating all the facts. “There’s advantages and disadvantages to both. Boys seem to have lots of good times, but they’re often obliged to be killed; girls don’t have as many good times, I believe, but they have lovely hair.”
“Then I really don’t have a preference, and indeed I don’t care,” said Cobweb, picking minute pieces of pith out of its fingernails.
“Well,” said the princess eagerly, setting down her bread and leaning in, “would you mind terribly being a girl fairy? I’ve always hated dressing boy dolls, and I don’t like sewing hems on trousers. I also think it would be more polite, because there’s only this room and I’ve had to get dressed and undressed already. I really don’t think it would be altogether nice if you were a boy fairy the whole time. At first I thought you might be a boy fairy, because I didn’t like you very much; but now that I like you a bit better, I’d prefer if you were a girl,” she finished.
“Then I will be a girl, though I really can’t say that I’m interested,” said Cobweb, who had just entered herself into a bondage that she had very little idea about, which was perhaps quite cruel on Floralinda’s part. “But I don’t care for made clothes. When the time comes I’ll dress in some of the full moon’s beams, which have the benefit of being attractive as well as cheap.”
“That does sound sweet, but it’s too far away; it’s not polite of you to go naked now,” said Floralinda, promptly proving the difficulties of Eve. “But you haven’t heard my plan, and I’m quite proud of it. Dear little Cobweb” (you see attitudes change immediately), “the witch has put a different dreadful creature on each level of the tower.”
“So you’ve told me,” said the fairy. “I frankly wish they’d all go hang together. I’ve never heard such bellows as from the dragon with the diamond scales. Some creatures think they can do exactly as they like.”
“But don’t you see,” said Floralinda, growing quite excited, “it has now been ages since the witch made this tower, and surely none of them have been fed, because the goblins were so excited to see my loaves? All I have to do is wait until they die of starvation, which I’m sure some of them have done already, and then I can simply go downstairs and leave. The dragon has probably survived due to all those princes, but there haven’t been any in simply forever.”
This had been quite a difficult idea for Princess Floralinda to come up with, which was why it was really wretched when the fairy looked up at her and said, “Why, you fool! Nobody needs to eat in here.”
“What?” said Floralinda.
“There’s a spell on the whole tower,” said Cobweb. “Nothing here will ever die from not having enough food. The witch would have been bankrupted with feeding you all otherwise.”
“But I’ve been so hungry,” said Floralinda, falteringly.
“That’s the problem with spells like these,” said the fairy. “A dumb animal gets hungry, but it won’t know it’s meant to be dead, so it’ll just carry on looking for food ad infinitum. Human beings know that if they don’t eat they’ll starve, and so eventually they’ll convince themselves they’re starving and die when they don’t have to, all due to instinct. I expect that’s why the witch gave you the food, now that I think about it. A princess is not exactly the type of person with a great deal of mental fortitude. I had assumed that she was filling you up as a side-bet in case this tower wheeze didn’t work; but I never heard of a witch who’d fatten up a princess rather than a good stupid child. You’re mostly hair and eyes…Good grief! You really didn’t know? I would have experimented, first thing, and not eaten for a week, to see if I died.”
“But the goblins ate up everything,” pleaded Floralinda, and Cobweb said: “Goblins eat as a hobby. Dear, dear! You really know nothing about anything.”
At which point the princess became very disheartened, so much so that Cobweb said grudgingly, “It wouldn’t have been the stupidest plan, if not for that. But it wouldn’t have worked all the way down anyhow. Dragons, for instance, merely hibernate when there is a scarcity of food, and don’t die for centuries.”
“But now I shall never get out,” said Floralinda, in tears, “there is no solution to my problem that isn’t a prince, and I’m all out of princes, and I don’t want to jump out the window and die. This is the worst conundrum I ever heard of.”
This was always a good tack to take with Cobweb. The fairy loved to think about solutions of all kinds: either the ones to riddles or cross-words, or the type of thing you got in a pan once you boiled it too much. She stretched out languorously in her sunbeam (though now that she was a girl, Floralinda thought Cobweb ought to look as though she were enjoying herself a bit less) and said—
“Then you need to travel down, and get rid of the monsters, and go out through the front door.”
“But that’s impossible,” said Princess Floralinda.
“You got rid of five goblins well enough,” continued Cobweb, “which, mathematically speaking, means you have already defeated more than zero monsters; and given the enormous leap from zero to a whole number—why, the distance between zero and something is much greater than the distance between one and a million; don’t let a mathematician tell you otherwise.”
The Princess put aside her bowl of mush and wrapped the blanket around herself, to think. The gears in her golden head turned in ways they had never been taught to turn, and had they been able to make a sound, they would have sounded like the squeaking wheels on a very rusty bicycle.
“I could tame the beasts with kindness, and ask them to let me pass,” she said.
“You have a very short memory,” said Cobweb, who had been apprised of the goblin episode.
“I could send smoke-signals from the balcony, spelling out H-E-L-P,” she said.
But she had to admit that she didn’t know any smoke-signals to spell out HELP; and Cobweb quite cruelly suggested that everyone already knew where she was, and was just trying not to think about it, and maybe playing beautiful music if the dragon got very loud.
The gears in Floralinda’s head were squeakier than ever.
“I once left the plug in the plug-hole in the nursery sink, and the tap running, and they had to replace all the carpets,” she said. “Mightn’t I put the water flask at the top of the stairs, and let it pour out, and flood everything? The beasts might try to escape themselves, if I got them da
mp, and they might even drown.”
Cobweb sucked her breath through her teeth like the man who comes to fix your plumbing and asks you what kind of cowboy put that in.
“That’s a much more interesting idea than any you’ve had thus far,” said the fairy, “but the tower isn’t watertight, and anyway it would take a much longer time than you think. You might as well just tip the flask out the balcony and wait for the earth around the tower to become so soggy that the foundations sink.”
“What would happen then?” said Floralinda, eagerly.
“The tower might come down altogether, and smash at the bottom,” said Cobweb.
Floralinda didn’t like that idea much; so she thought again and said, “I might throw bread down to the base of the tower until it piles up, and jump off into it, and land safely.”
“That’s also interesting, but quite stupid,” said Cobweb. “Keep going.”
“That’s four ideas; I’m quite out,” said Floralinda. “Dear Cobweb, you are so clever. Don’t you have any?”
The fairy preened in her sunbeam. She was also very susceptible to flattery and thought quite a lot of herself, which Floralinda also did not think was quite appropriate now that she was a girl. But Cobweb was clever, and knew all sorts of things Floralinda didn’t know, and was pretty besides; she supposed that some girls simply had all the luck.
“I can’t have ideas until I have all the facts,” said Cobweb. “I don’t even know what kinds of beasts the witch has put in the tower. The dragon and the goblin were the only confirmed ones. The rest of the tower could be filled with gorgons, or rattlesnakes, or goodness knows what. Mark my words, it’s them you ought to be thinking about. Jumping out the window is nonsense; it would take you years to get the bread thick enough and high enough, and then you’d probably just jump into a pile of stale bread and drown. You’re the type. Why can’t you do what you’ve done so far, and try to fight the things?”
