by Tamsyn Muir
The biting fishes were sunk into a neck-deep pool on flight thirty-two, and they presented a problem Princess Floralinda would not have been able to solve herself at that time. There were hundreds of them, each no bigger than her hand, so that when they all schooled and roiled together it looked like a mass of sequins thrashing in that brackish water; but after thinking about it carefully, and remembering the spider’s death, Cobweb suggested they toss in one of the giant rats that had been poisoned. The fish converged on that rat in a way that made Floralinda feel very grateful that she had not stepped into the water, and they stripped all the meat from that corpse. Twenty minutes later they had pretty much all of them floated to the top and died, and the ones who hadn’t eaten the rat tried to eat them, and it ended badly all round.
And it was so easy—a few hits—brief panic—and a dead rat!
Which meant Floralinda had quite a lot of fish to eat. She had to learn how to cut a fish’s head off (and weren’t those biting fish ugly!) and take out its guts, which she tossed off the side of the tower, much to the delight of the local animals (who had known better than to touch the rotting goblins, but enjoyed fish guts). They had poison in their systems, but Cobweb thought it would be fine, seeing as they had eaten so little; and indeed all that happened after eating was that Floralinda’s mouth went a bit numb. How ugly those fishes were; but how good white, flaky fish meat was, even if you had to peel it out of the fish-bones, and be careful that you didn’t swallow one. Floralinda ate some of them roasted, and ate some of them wrapped in orange-skins so that they tasted a bit like orange (though she wasn’t so fond of the taste of oranges any more) and some of them she ate on slices of sweet white bread. Cobweb even set up a little rack of sticks, and most of the fishes she dried into a kind of jerky in the thin afternoon light. Floralinda wasn’t at all sure she would like to eat this jerky, but Cobweb said she would want it later.
The season had dipped into autumn, and the trees in the distance started popping into their Hallowe’en clothes. They burst among the evergreens in every shade of yellow and orange, and scarlet and gold, which was all delightful to look at, but the tower was terribly hard to keep warm. The witch was not well-acquainted with insulation.
And Floralinda was in quite a silly mood, being young and confident, and feeling as though she had done a lot. Sometimes she sang, and sometimes she even danced, and in the mornings she would say, “Good morning, dear Cobweb! I wonder what’s on the next flight down?” and had quite forgotten to be frightened, or more importantly, cautious.
Whereas Cobweb knew not to hope too deeply, even if there was a particle in her brain that kept thinking about how nice it would be if they got all the way down to the bottom before the winter came, and how nice it would feel to have her ball-and-chain removed, and fly again. Sometimes when Floralinda was asleep she would try to work at the latch with the head of a needle, but that didn’t do the slightest bit of good. And she had great plans to try to make pliers, but didn’t quite have all the things she needed to make pliers—in fact at that point in the autumn she had a dead harpy, two dead rats and a lot of fishes that were going bad, but these were just beautiful distractions on the path of Freedom.
Cobweb had also not expected Floralinda to get that far, not exactly, and not so easily. Floralinda had gotten fatter on fish and songbird, and her regime of squeezing bricks was making her hands blistered and strong. She was also getting dirty, because she was growing so reluctant to take all her clothes off, and sponge.
By this stage, Cobweb had started trying to teach Floralinda other instructions, rather as you’d teach a dog who had managed ‘Sit.’ She was teaching Floralinda ‘Duck’, and also ‘Back up’, which are useful. Floralinda could hold one instruction in her head at a time, and had practiced thrusting with the spear so often that it came quite easily to her; but she did not know how to practice ‘Duck’, even if Cobweb sat flinging sparrow-bones at her.
The feathered serpent on flight thirty-one was what caused Cobweb to try to teach Floralinda ‘Duck’, for the feathered serpent could really fly (or at least glide from perch to perch, before it hung there and spat poison directly into one’s eyes at an alarming length, far farther than you or I could spit a cherry-stone). It flew right at Floralinda first thing, and Cobweb shouted, “Duck!” and Floralinda panicked and thrust her spear forward instead; and the serpent’s feathered tail struck her in the face, and she fell flat backwards. The feathered serpent wound itself around its perch, and directed a perfect stream of venom where Floralinda’s eyes had been, but weren’t any more, owing to her being flat on the ground. She had fallen over her spear, and thankfully had not fallen on Cobweb, who had the presence of mind to cling rather painfully to her neck. Floralinda watched as a beautiful puff of serpent-venom went overhead, right until Cobweb threw herself over her face, in case there were stray drops.
The feathered serpent couldn’t spit again in a hurry, so Cobweb urged Floralinda to her feet, and there was an awkward moment where Floralinda forgot how to thrust the spear, and battered the serpent with it instead, which did more damage to the spear than to the serpent. Then the serpent coiled around the point of the spear, and on Cobweb’s direction, Floralinda drove the spear into the wall. It is hard to say what killed the serpent, the blow or the venom, but either way it was dead.
And all Floralinda got was a rather startling black eye, which Cobweb told her to rest the flask of milk on, until it was less swollen.
Princess Floralinda had replaced all her anxiety with jubilation. It made perfect sense to her that she had done a terrible thing that felt awful, which had been what she had done to Cobweb, but that she had been rewarded for it by everything being comfortable afterwards; it is the seduction of doing the one very difficult thing, and feeling as though the difficulty and suffering meant that you were done—you had completed it—whatever it was, you did not have to do it again. This is how many people think about cleaning the house.
It was not as though life was perfect for Floralinda. Cobweb demanded she chop up the salamanders once they had cooled down, to get useful things from their insides: for salamanders have very thick, hard arteries and veins, to protect their organs from how hot the oxygenated blood is inside them, and Cobweb wanted these for her own purposes. Indeed Cobweb got quite silly with excitement over them, and over finding that the pouches of stuff inside each salamander were still filled with the things they secrete to keep their tongues both fiery and moist. Floralinda was set to scraping salamander tongues for a whole morning, and she had to do it without a word of complaint.
Floralinda was very obedient when it came to the fairy about most everything—except, that is, for the things that Cobweb really wanted; so she was often dirty and sore, seeing liquids that no princess ought to ever see, and the dreadful nudities of creatures without their skin on.
But she let herself indulge in wild flights of fancy about being back home for Christmas, and being made a fuss of, and seeing her mother and father, and everybody saying how brave she had been, and none of the parents of the twenty-four princes blaming her one bit,—which is how you can tell that Floralinda still didn’t have much imagination.
(The witch had been in an aquatic phase, as you shall see.)
It was on flight twenty-nine that Princess Floralinda came to grief. Six flights without any more incident than a black eye and a spear that wanted re-sharpening is too much to expect from a princess and a bottom-of-the-garden fairy. Anticipating misfortune had been so much on Cobweb’s mind that she was almost suffering from the lack of it; when Floralinda got hurt, it was almost a relief to her mind to find out what the trouble would be. It is safe to say that a part of Cobweb was also relieved that Floralinda was hurt, as she hated her; but she was unhappy that Floralinda was hurt, because her life depended on Floralinda; and she was happy that Floralinda was hurt, because Floralinda frightened her so much that she wanted Floralinda to have a good scare in turn, to try to teach her a lesson.
F
light thirty’s water-goat—or a Capricorn, if you have had a good education—would have given any prince a scare, seeing as he was six feet tall, with his goat part from the middle to the horns and a great blubbery walrus body from the other half down. The walrus body shook and the front part pawed the ground madly. And he gave Floralinda quite a scare to start with, because she stood close to the door of his flight and got him in his blubbery parts before she ran away, that being the easiest method, but it didn’t seem to affect him much. Cobweb said this was because the tail was chiefly fat, and probably wonderful for rendering, so they should keep it. Floralinda ignored this, being more worried about how to get the poison into the water-goat some other way. Thankfully, feeling his tail going numb, the water-goat turned around to investigate what was happening on Floralinda’s end; and she scratched him in the chest with the envenomed spear, and that was fine, although Floralinda refused to try to render the blubbery tail.
“This room is going to be impossible even to walk through in a week or so,” said Cobweb portentously. “Water-goats smell quite dreadful enough when they’re alive.”
“Oh, never mind that,” said Floralinda, almost gaily, “we might set him on fire and burn him up. Then he won’t smell at all, and he’ll be charcoal, and perhaps you could use the charcoal for something.”
And Cobweb looked at her pretty hard, as she was not trembling, or pale in the face, or even that daunted by her encounter with a monster, which was not at all like Princess Floralinda.
Then, of course, it all went wrong. Floralinda went into a room occupied by a hydra, which was quite a small hydra, being as the height of the room was ten feet only; but it had seven heads, and sat in a filthy fountain in the centre of flight twenty-nine, and screamed with seven tongues. A prince might have found the hydra difficult to kill without help, as the hydra’s trick is to re-grow a head the moment it is cut off; but Floralinda and Cobweb had a curtain-rail spear and a quantity of really quite good spider poison, and you can’t regrow anything from that. The heads all hissed, and Floralinda did a quite successful duck when Cobweb said to duck, and she thrust the spear with exuberant confidence at the hydra, and hit it; but skidded badly, and fell awkwardly on her foot, and ended up sprawled on the wet stones.
The hydra died quite indignantly, having expected different tactics and only prepared for what was expected, which was all to the good, but Floralinda found that her foot felt strange when she tried to stand up. At first it was numb; but by the time she made her way back up to flight forty (such a number of flights to walk back up now!) she was in awful pain.
It was a problem just getting out of her wet things and into bed, and she shivered and suffered the whole time. Cobweb looked it over, and wrapped up some ice in some of the silver gauze and applied it to the foot, which was getting quite red and swollen where she had hit it (the side, from the little toe down to her heel), and pronounced it probably not broken, but badly sprained instead.
“What is the difference?” gasped Floralinda, who had not ever experienced either.
“I don’t have to try to do anything about the bone, which is good, because I’m sure I don’t know how to,” said Cobweb, “but you are out of commission. I don’t know for how long, it depends on the sprain.”
“Do you think I will be able to get up tomorrow morning?”
“I think you will be able to get up tomorrow morning in a few weeks,” said Cobweb, cautiously. “You’re a fool, you know. That floor was slippery, and you should have been careful.”
Floralinda’s mouth trembled. Perhaps it was the fact that everything had been going so well, and had been going well in a way where she felt like she deserved her successes; she had been working so hard (or at least thought she had been working very hard—weren’t her hands sore, and wasn’t her back stiff, and wasn’t she tired all the time?) and now it was all put off. It wasn’t even as though she had been savaged by a monster, which would have attached some dignity to the pain. Any princess could slip and take a fall. It was her whole experience of skating.
She would not get back before Christmas, or at least, not long before Christmas, so nobody would have time to arrange presents except for very last-minute ones, like socks or things to put in the bath. She would not see her mother and father any time soon. Princess Floralinda sat back in the pillows, feeling white and totally crestfallen, and hot salt tears leaked out her eyes. She was so cold even wrapped up in the blankets, and her ankle burned from having the cold compress, and she felt utterly dismayed. The wind bumped against the tower windows, and sounded so desolate and lonely that she had to bite her tongue so as not to cry; and Cobweb looked at her with a queer expression that was mostly contemptuous (though such a lovely face for being contemptuous with!) but worse, somewhat nervous (and such a terrible face for being nervous with!).
A question entered her head. Questions now entered Floralinda’s head regularly, which made her very stressed. If she were asked by a survey what the worst part of the tower was, she would rank the food quite highly, and the loneliness highly too; but the very worst part would be the sheer anxiety of all the questions her brain now asked her.
She whispered this one now—
“Cobweb, dear; I’ve just wondered: where did you even get this ice?”
“I was going to say; we have bigger problems than your wretched foot to worry about, and you’ve picked the absolute worst time,” said Cobweb. “It’s snowing.”
You may find it funny to hear, with the goblins, and the monsters of all kinds, and the infection she had got in her hands (which, it must be said, was fairly light) and the princes getting crunched-up, that it was this time that Floralinda would later think of as the hardest.
The witch had not made her tower to be habitable from season to season, or at best it was a three-season tower and did not account for inclement weather. Witches do their best work in late spring and summer, when princes are most naturally inclined to go and look for mates. As the prince’s only natural predator, the witch had to work when the princes were thickest on the ground. There are only a very few accounts of princesses who stayed inside their towers for years and years, and those towers were custom-made for them, with hot and cold running water and more appropriate heating solutions. And besides, these were not simply princesses, but also daughters of witches, and daughters of witches have a high survival rate even if their partners have a very low rate of not falling into thorn bushes. Floralinda would never have been fostered by the witch in that way; the witch in our story thought that very old-fashioned, and indeed a bit distasteful for everyone concerned. Our witch had been interested in art and beauty, though Floralinda wasn’t to know it; art and beauty don’t heat houses.
It was not truly winter yet, just an early cold snap in autumn, and the snow only settled for a day. But it was cold as charity in that tower. The fire couldn’t go out, which saved Floralinda’s life (and therefore Cobweb’s), but she was only warm when she was next to it, as the way the room was made let all the heat escape. She was obliged to put on every stitch of clothing she had, the silk gown and all her petticoats and her blanket coat, and to sleep with them on too; and she was in frightful pain from her ankle, so that when she stood up she cried.
Cobweb the bottom-of-the-garden fairy did not feel the cold. Fairies don’t, as a rule. She was also not starved due to the witch’s spell, although she did not have much in the way of favourite foods; there was no earthly way to drink dewdrops from dear little ferns or bellflowers, nor any honey, nor strawberry-leaves. Floralinda did cry quite a lot, and Cobweb did have a supply of princess’s tears, but these were less and less palatable as time went by. She was forced to live on late-autumn sunshine and the taste of snow, which is a dull diet for any fairy. Her true danger was Floralinda’s danger. The chain around her neck had seen to that.
For a while the fairy was content, because she had the stuff that Floralinda had scraped for her from the salamander tongues, and did evil-smelling experiments all day an
d night. First she made a hideous gel which she rendered down to a horrible paste. Then she was wracked with indecision, until finally from that paste she rendered a large quantity of grey powder. There were so many explosions in this process that Cobweb temporarily sizzled off her eyebrows, but she was exultant.
“I can’t think of any other way to make it transportable,” she told Floralinda, “and this is the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m annoyed, because in powder form it will certainly be less incendiary when rehydrated; but it’s wonderfully adhesive. When I get back I will find a particular tree that has been rude to me, and shake some of this all over its roots, and pretend I am watering it when I am really reconstituting the mixture; then I will set it alight from a distance, and no matter what the forest fairies try to do it will burn like anything, and be much too sticky to scrape off. Then they might ask me (I will be feigning tears, as hadn’t I just been watering the blasted thing?) and I will say, ‘Oh dear, if only you knew anything about metastable emulsions’, and they’ll all be sorry.”
“It all sounds very useful, I’m sure; we could use it on a creature,” said Floralinda, relieved to learn that the smells might now be over, and believing ‘incendiary’ to mean a type of post-card.
