by Tamsyn Muir
She opened her mouth and sang, but of course to Floralinda and Cobweb it just sounded like underwater noise, like other people speaking when you have ducked your head in a pool. Her face was very wistful, and lovely in a different way to Cobweb’s. Cobweb had such dear features, but the siren had a thin, soulful mermaid sort of face, with her teeth like sapphires and her eyes so keen. The siren looked sorry for herself, which Floralinda sympathised with, being very sorry for herself too.
“I’m afraid I ought to kill you,” Floralinda said, though her voice sounded to herself like nothing much.
The siren opened her mouth again, and Floralinda said “Pardon?” before she realised that of course she couldn’t hear a reply; and the siren let her long seaweedy hair fall over her face, and looked sad. Floralinda kept her spear in front of her, but she advanced a few steps.
The siren stood, and Floralinda now summoned up the gumption to lock all her arm muscles in place, in preparation of a thrust; but the siren sort of undulated at her, with a very speaking look. It was very persuasive. Floralinda got quite muddled, and didn’t pay attention when Cobweb started pulling on a lock of her hair; she just looked at the siren, and thought that it might be nice to have someone else in the tower room to talk to. Of course they would all have to plug their ears all the time, but that might make her goal of loving Cobweb easier, and if the siren was at all warm she could use her to warm the bed. The siren approached very slowly, and very hesitantly, holding her hands up to show she did not mean Floralinda harm all the while. She moved past the envenomed tip and reached out her arm in the most caressing sort of way, and put her fingers—webbed fingers!—on the shaft of the spear, and stroked them over Floralinda’s fingertips.
Floralinda had not been touched by anyone but Cobweb, and Cobweb did not touch her caressingly, or pet her. The siren’s fingers were cool but not clammy, and she looked so deeply into Floralinda’s eyes that Floralinda was sure that the siren was trying to speak with them, and her heart got quite princessly and soft.
Then—thwip!—the siren leaned past her, and seized the plug of orange-pith that had been in Floralinda’s right ear!
And all at once she sang, and Floralinda staggered. The song hurt her: it hurt her heart, because all at once she knew that the siren was not evil at all, but imprisoned like she was, and beautiful; that the siren wanted to love her, and to be her friend, and to listen to all her problems, and to stroke Floralinda so sweetly again. It also hurt her brain, because sirens sing on a special sort of frequency like an opera-singer, one that makes you dizzy and fall over, upsetting your balance so that they can strangle you. Floralinda went down like a sack of potatoes, dropping the spear, and the siren went down with her, and put those webbed fingers around Floralinda’s throat.
Floralinda did not even quite understand that she was being strangled, which is also part of a siren’s technique. It was only Cobweb who saved her. Cobweb pulled out a bit of tapestry-needle, and she drove it into the back of the siren’s right hand; the siren thrust Cobweb away and stopped singing, which broke the spell she had laid over Floralinda. Floralinda’s ear was ringing, and she was confused; but she threw the siren off her, and looked around in a panic for Cobweb and the spear, and when she found the spear, she recklessly stabbed it into the siren’s side.
The siren opened her mouth again, but Floralinda stuck her finger in her ear, and dropped the spear, and looked around desperately for Cobweb. Cobweb was lying a little dazed on the ground, but was otherwise not badly hurt, apart from having been caught by a glancing blow from Floralinda’s rings as she fell. Floralinda picked her up, and by that time the siren was choking to death, and couldn’t sing anyway.
“What a fool I am,” Floralinda groaned,—which was perhaps the first time in history a princess had said anything like that.
“I have said that all along,” said Cobweb. “Why did you let her get so close? She very nearly had you; I can’t think why you dropped your guard.”
“I’m lonely,” said Floralinda falteringly, “and she looked so sweet, Cobweb, that’s all.”
And Cobweb was disgusted, and said she had grown soppier than ever, just when Cobweb had thought the opposite.
They burned the siren on the same pyre where they’d burned the rat; she smelled like seawater, and took a while to take and smoked when she did, like punky wood. And all along Floralinda sighed, and didn’t know why she felt so forlorn.
When she went to bed that night (covered by all her clothes and the rat-skin cloak) she looked hard in the darkness at Cobweb’s little fairy back. Her wings were lovely now, like little glass panelling, and she laid them in a sweet way across the gauze when she went to bed; sometimes they twitched as she slept. She was like a doll—but so much better than the best doll ever made, for all the little bumps of her spine showed through the skin when she curled up, and she was really alive. Floralinda reached out with her forefinger and gently pressed it to Cobweb’s warm back, right between her wings, and the slight hummocks of her pretty shoulderblades.
Cobweb woke up with a start. She was not nice about it, either, and said she didn’t like being poked, and clutched her sack of powder as though Floralinda had nefarious intentions about it, when Floralinda didn’t care a whit for the blessed stuff. “What are you doing?” the fairy said suspiciously. “If you’re killing me, you could at least do it to my face. If you are just poking me to be cruel, I will make a note to hate you even more. What are you about?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said poor guilty Floralinda.
Floralinda had not grown soppier. She was more determined than ever before to make her way down the tower; and she was finding that, although she had every advantage with the venom, she was starting to be able to win fights not merely because she got in the first strike and then ran away. Sometimes the creature would dodge—the wyvern, for example, which was a sort of diet dragon with no back legs and great bat’s wings, was enormously hard to get on a first strike. It beat its claws at Floralinda’s head and shoulders, and she was glad of the tough leather of the giant rat. She struck at it with the spear so that it was thrown to one side, and then she could drive the spear down, and right through the wyvern’s back; that was one of the tower’s creatures that was not merely killed by poison. Floralinda was quite amazed at it.
But she had cracked the spear in the process, and when she and Cobweb examined it, they found that it was really on its last legs; so they had to get down the second curtain-rail, and spend another day sharpening that one. But Floralinda knew what was wanted now, and was quite painstaking in sharpening the end with the broken bits of scraper, and in making sure the tip would not snap off.
So the redcap never knew what hit him. He was a sort of evil goblin, more intelligent than the other kind, and he had a heap of stones to throw at princes, and had sat the whole time on a pile of them waiting wickedly for one to come up the other way; but Floralinda and Cobweb burst in on him from behind, and Floralinda stabbed him with her spear in his shoulder, and he died quite startled by the whole scenario.
And the troll was a battle and a half! He stood twice as big as Floralinda, the colour of an old tree-trunk, naked except for a little loincloth, with simply enormous arms like an octopus and tusks like an elephant, so that he looked like one of those funny pictures you make up from parts of different creatures. He was angry, and he was not an animal. He wheeled out of the way of Floralinda’s spear, and she did not need Cobweb to tell her “Duck!” when he swiped at her with a hand that looked like a ham-hock; he staggered towards her, and she managed to make a long scratch down his arm.
But he was doughty, and took a long time to die. Floralinda was forced to run away from his blows, and try to drive him off with the spear-point, until she was pouring with sweat from exertion and all the chemicals that your body produces when it is running a foot-race. She did not think about how she was afraid, nor did she think about losing. The only thing she thought about was keeping that troll at bay until
the spider-venom got to him. He must have lasted a full thirty seconds longer than anything else in the tower had; but at last he got all stiff, and slumped to one side, and Floralinda finished him off without being told to.
They made a pyre for him, as they couldn’t skin his hide, or eat him, or use his teeth for anything.
Floralinda said—
“Do you think we need more poison, Cobweb, dear?”
But Cobweb looked troubled.
“I’m worrying the venom is starting to weaken,” she confessed, “it was warm when we took it from the spider, and you’re meant to freeze it first thing; I have kept the rest cool and out of the light, but I shall have to make stronger and stronger batches. If it is left for much longer it will likely expire, and not be much use at all.”
Once upon a time this would have made Floralinda so frightened that she would have run about, or sat down and cried, or taken to bed to try to think about it. But all she said was—
“Oh, fiddlesticks. We shall have to hurry.”
Just imagine a princess saying Fiddlesticks!
Flight Twenty-One
One morning Floralinda woke, shivering, to find that she couldn’t see out the window, for the wind was howling and a white blizzard had struck up outside the glass; and the next morning all the woods and all the grass around the bottom of the tower were covered in snow. You could no longer see the faint sparkle that Floralinda had assumed was the shining golden sword. There was certainly no sign of the goblins, which was probably a mercy. The water had frozen solid in the wash-stand, and took some warming by the fire to get liquid again; the trees that had once been gold and red were bare, and the evergreens were dusted all over with snow. Winter had finally come.
She now had a nice morning routine where she had her breakfast under the covers, and rubbed at her hands and her feet, testing to see whether her old sprained ankle was sore; it was often stiff with the cold, but didn’t give her any problems. Then she would warm herself up by running up and down the stairs, and squeeze rocks in front of the fire, and boil hot water to drink, in order to pretend that it was tea. Then she would get properly dressed and shoulder her spear, and go and see what was down the tower, and attack it.
None of them gave her much trouble, not even the cockatrice. Cobweb had been quite impressed by the flying eyes, and said that they had been very rare; after Floralinda was done with them they were a little rarer still.
Flight Seventeen
“I think I am becoming brave,” she said to Cobweb.
Cobweb wasn’t sure. “You’re still a terrible ninny, and you don’t like it when I tell you to eat the dried fish; if you were really brave, you would take the chain off my neck,” she added, cunningly.
This made Floralinda feel guilty, which made her feel annoyed.
“I think,” she said fretfully, “that you might say, ‘You are becoming brave, Floralinda, it was inside you all along’ or ‘Floralinda, how strong your hands are; you could open jars of all kinds now’ or something inspirational, to make me feel nice; but you always bring it back to the fact that I have imprisoned you, when I have often said I’m sorry. I’m sure I don’t want you to suffer, Cobweb, but you must know that I would not have got this far without you, because you’re clever and I’m still not. I’m not as stupid as I was, and I’m much less sensitive than I was; I can look at all kinds of awful things, and do them too, but you are the brains. I think you’re wonderful,” she finished humbly, and then ruined it with, “I don’t think you’re very nice, but I think you’re wonderful.”
“‘You are becoming brave, Floralinda; it was inside you all’—” Cobweb began, but Floralinda said despairingly, “It doesn’t count if I told you to say it.”
Cobweb told her to make up her mind.
There were now merely seventeen flights to go, and flight seventeen proved to be an important flight for Floralinda, because it had other human beings on it.
Cobweb had called the witch avant-garde, which isn’t quite true, because the witch had no intention of doing things simply to go against the mode; she had read modern theories, and understood that princes have all kinds of terrors, some of them psychological. It was very easy to put in a dragon to crunch them up, but more difficult to traumatise them, and she intended to blaze a trail that way. So she thought about what humans feared, and on flight seventeen, she put a group of murderers.
The murderers had been there the whole time Floralinda had been there. They made quite a racket at first, but Floralinda had not heard it above the roaring of the dragon and the crunching of the bones; and although you have been warned to not feel sorry for anything inside the tower, perhaps you can spare a thought to what it would have been like, to be stuck in an airless room with your only company some people who have nothing in common with you other than a career choice. In modern parlance we call this a convention, but in the tower it was very dark, and they had been kept alive through foul means, and their minds had not really survived. This meant they had not died of starvation, for they had forgotten what it is like to be hungry; but whoever they were before they were murderers had gone away. They did not mind the snow banking at the windows, or the puddles of melted slush collecting in the corners: they were beyond the cold, and the damp, and the dark.
When Floralinda, smiling, went down the stairs and found a group of men, what she thought of them she had not time to structure; what they thought of her we cannot say. She was struck stiff with horror by their appearance, and was mute with fear, because she was more afraid of grown-up men than she really had been of the cockatrice or the ogre.
One of them knocked the spear from her hands, another the lamp with the coal, and all the while they were screaming. Some of them had knives, although they held them in a manner that suggested they had forgotten what to do with them. They were talking the language of men who can no longer really talk, and making the demands of men who are beyond wants. So the witch had really gotten quite a lot for her money, because her murderers had transitioned into madmen; madmen to start with would have cost a lot more.
They tore at Floralinda’s hair and cloak; they wept. They fumbled with their knives. They spat in her face, and in each other’s. One had more speech than the others; he said—
“I’ll f---ing kill you; I’ll cut your f---ing throat.”
Two of the murderers were holding Floralinda, trying to pull her in opposite directions, as though they were dogs and she a juicy marrow-bone. She let herself become dead weight, and the two men, who were not sure of their footing, went down with her. They landed all together in an icy puddle of foetid slush which soaked Floralinda through. When she thrashed upwards, one of the men held her down by the hair. Another man, still standing, began kicking at her. The other men crowded around and began kicking at her too, and at the men on the ground as well: they did not distinguish.
Floralinda had curled up, with her arms over her head, which is a useful move if you are being kicked to death and do not want to watch. A light snow was falling, which was a curious weather condition, being indoors.
And Cobweb said, “Move.”
Floralinda surged through the scrum of kicking legs like a rugby-player. The falling snow was turning into curious, bad-smelling scum on her arms. Cobweb was howling in pain: as well she might, as she had seized the fallen coal and dropped it down the shirt-front of one of the men. The madman slapped at it, and seized it from his shirt, and it got mixed up with the snow, and the scum, and the men; and then they took.
For the snow had been Cobweb’s haversack of powder, and the damp and the wet were enough to swell it. The more the men beat at the flames the more they spread that wretched sticky gel around; and the gel had one purpose in life, and that was to burn.
Floralinda was not frightened of the scum on her hands. She did not have room to be frightened of anything. She seized her spear and faced the screaming knot of flaming madmen. One flailed close to her, and she hit him with the butt of the spear—he did not even
care; he was too much on fire. They clustered together as the smoke and flames multiplied, and fanned out when Floralinda slashed at them. When she had space she thrust again and again. One of the men caught the spear with his burning hands and held it fast, so she ran at him, and he backed into the wall and she got him in the thigh. Now her spear was spattered with burning gel where he had touched it, and she beat it out on the backs of two other men, and they did not seem to feel it.
The first man was still standing, and he said “F---,” again, and “F---,” and lurched at her, afire as any Guy; she stabbed him in the stomach.
Floralinda dropped her spear and listened to the sounds of the burning men asphyxiating. First she made sure that her spear was not burning any more—how well the merest smear of gel had burnt it!—and then she scraped her hands almost bloody against the wall, to clear the scum. Once they were clean she scooped up Cobweb, who was weeping, clutching her blistered hands.
She was crying so beautifully that Floralinda wept too, which Cobweb had banked on; Cobweb held her burnt hands to Floralinda’s tears immediately, and wrung them over her blisters. “H’m!” she said, surveying the effect critically; “mercy, these aren’t half as good as when you first cried. I had thought they mightn’t be.”
But Floralinda was not paying her very much attention. The scattered men around her had transitioned into corpses, most of them smouldering. She separated the ones that were from the ones that weren’t, so that the ones that weren’t didn’t burn up too. She got the coal safely back into the lamp using the butt-end of her spear.
