by Tamsyn Muir
How Cobweb laughed at the idea of wasting that powder on Floralinda!
And indeed, she was so jealous of it that she kept the powder with her at all times, in a fairy-sized haversack of peel, and only took it off to sleep.
After the experiment with the salamander gel, Cobweb grew dissatisfied again. Truth be told, the gel had been intended to blow the latch off the necklace, and in theory it would perform that office wonderfully. It would likely perform that office so wonderfully that it would take off Cobweb’s head with it. She was too pleased with the gel to admit that this compromised its overall success, but there was nothing for her now but to return to the Floralinda question.
Cobweb had always believed strongly in education, which she thought set her apart from other fairies. In truth, fairies are all very nosy, and want to find things out; they just don’t have the memory for books. Cobweb made Floralinda take down all the books and spread them out on the bed, and so long as Floralinda opened the covers she could turn the pages over herself. She did not receive much useful information about how to survive in such a situation, but she did come to know quite a lot about supply and demand.
In those chilly dark weeks—as the sun began to show its face less and less above the tops of those flame-coloured trees—Floralinda did not spend much time in her bed, despite the fact that she was told around three times an hour that she needed to keep her foot still. She was back to her old, drifting, restless ways, wanting to do three things at once, and hating to not move about. She winced and cried out whenever she put any weight on the foot. She had to get around using a system of chairs, and leaning on things, and pulling herself up onto other things, which made her arms very sore; but she kept on squeezing those pieces of brick, and she kept on practicing with the spear, though she had to do it sitting down, and quite often she tumbled herself over. She would lie on the cold rugs and cry, and the wind would rattle the windows, and Cobweb would mutter things like, “Supply-side economics,” and the dragon with the diamond-tipped scales would let out dreary bellows from time to time.
It took Floralinda a long time to get well in these conditions. Everything in the tower room felt filthy. It had been hard to sleep during Cobweb’s experiments, and it sometimes felt as though she could not sleep well even after they were done. Floralinda felt harmed by the strings of drying fishes, which no longer smelled as bad as they once had, but made her remember how they smelled when she looked at them, which was almost worse. It took a long time to dry clothes, and it was so cold that she had to get very brave to wash, and yearn all the time for a hot bath, when the best she could do was heat water on the hearth and use that to sponge with. It always felt so much colder after the hot-water sponge that she resented doing it.
Floralinda’s arms and hands were stiff every morning, so that she had to rub them carefully over the fire to get their feeling back; her foot ached, and was a horrible purple colour, and looked twice as big as the other foot; and sometimes she would try to make more wishes—
“Please, God, I wish You would make someone come and look for me,” but Cobweb chided her, saying:
“Your religious and fairy convictions are all mixed up. I do wish you wouldn’t; it makes my insides feel strange.”
Floralinda tried to remember what she had been told about general and specific wishes, and tried things like, “I wish it would be warmer,” and “I wish my foot would get better,” and “I wish I had a coat.”
Cobweb had been looking through the book on leatherwork imports, a book that considered its first duty to be the demolition of any interest the reader might have previously felt in domestic leatherwork. It had long, discursive chapters on the difficulty of curing hides and furs, and on the low quality of local leatherwork as opposed to leatherwork from any other nation; and she said—
“That is a more interesting and intelligent wish.”
And that is how Floralinda found herself hobbling downstairs, all the way down to flight thirty-three, to see the giant rats that they had not heaved into the pit of fishes. The tower had become so suddenly cold after they died that they had not yet really become nasty. Floralinda still gagged and shuddered, but she comforted herself with the idea that she had seen worse, and after all they were only giant rats. These were thoughts that would not have occurred to her in the summer.
Cobweb had neatly ripped out the appropriate pages of the domestic leatherworking book, and transferred her laboratories downstairs, and bullied Floralinda into carrying the empty brazier, and said—
“If you’re going to be no use for anything, we might as well try to keep you warm. It would be just like you to get sweaty and horrible squeezing those stupid rocks,” (when it had been Cobweb who told her to squeeze them!) “and catch pneumonia on top of everything else, which would be spiteful in the extreme. This rat is in better condition than the other, and we’re going to tan its hide. It kept the rat warm, so perhaps it will do the same for you.”
The rat’s fur was very thick and ugly, with great bristly rat-coloured hanks of hair that did not feel soft or inviting. Floralinda, who had always picked squirrel or ermine or mink from the furrier, did not really like the idea. When the fairy told her how the hide had to come off, she liked the idea even less, and felt faintly as though she were going to be ill; but she had not been ill since the first adventures in the tower, and if she was ill she was going to have to go upstairs again and get a new breakfast, and her foot did not feel up to it. So she kept her food down.
But it was a time. The worst part of the tanning was that you had to open up the rat, and then take everything inside the rat, out. It was like the worst Christmas stocking that ever was; and Floralinda was nervous about making the cuts, especially as Cobweb kept giving bullying advice that didn’t make much sense and was dreadful to hear, such as “Don’t pierce the organs,” and “Pull the ribs apart.” Also, the hide very firmly wanted to stay on the rat, and was recalcitrant in coming off. The rat not being freshly dead, and being cold, had slightly less rank insides than you might think: but the insides were still, alas, very rank. Floralinda sawed terribly with her knife even if Cobweb had gone to the trouble of giving it new edges, and shrieked when she had to lift things out of the rat, and made rather a mess of taking the skin off. By the end she was hot, and bothered, and very dirty, but she had a big tattered piece of rat-skin. She had made slits down the thighs and the arms, and the rat’s thick neck, and for the first time understood how a human being might with concentration never want to eat again: she would just think of how the rat looked, and of how the rat looked outside of the rat.
Cobweb checked this horrible thing all over for holes, as Floralinda burned the bits in a fire, which made the fire smell unspeakable but got rid of them.
“Now comes the hard part,” said Cobweb.
Floralinda uttered a little scream, and lay flat on her back.
“Oh! Oh, whatever do you mean, that wasn’t the hard part? Oh, Cobweb, I can’t and I won’t. Every time I close my eyes I will see that rat in my head. I won’t ever have a nice dream again, now that I’ve done that to the rat, and seen things nobody but a cat or owl is meant to see. Nobody will ever think I am a good girl, and I don’t even believe I am, either. If you tell me there’s worse I shall faint.”
“You are an idiot and a hysteric besides,” said the fairy, but she seemed to be a little relieved that Floralinda still had some kick in her. “The hard part won’t come today, at least, you ninnyhammer. Right now we are going to drop this in the pool that the fishes were in, weighted with a rock; we’ve got to let it get a little bad so that the soft fleshy part scrapes off.”
Afterwards Floralinda hobbled upstairs, and sponged herself with hot water, and lay in bed with her foot in agony. Cobweb sat next to her with a Reader’s Digest, and even consented to read some parts out to Floralinda, though of course she was very grudging about it and did not do any interesting voices. Floralinda lay very still, as the moment she moved even a finger all the nice bu
bble of bodily warmth went away, and she was icy cold again, but she said—
“Cobweb, are you still angry with me?”
“Of course I am,” said the fairy, surprised. “I expect to be angry for about two more years.”
“I had thought perhaps you were feeling sorry for me instead,” ventured Floralinda, who saw herself as a very sorry object.
“I won’t stop hating you, so I would have to feel both, and that’s very dangerous for a fairy,” said Cobweb fervently. “There is nothing worse than hating someone and feeling sorry for them. I can’t feel sorry for you when you’re so stupid, and I like you even less when you’re clever. I disdain you, and occasionally you surprise me, which I don’t enjoy at all. I advise you to not like me either, which I’m sure you don’t. If you had, you would not have imprisoned me.”
“But Cobweb, that’s not true at all; I am trying to grow to love you, despite the fact that you are only beautiful and learned and not even a little bit nice,” said Floralinda.
“Will you free me, if you love me?”
Floralinda mulled it over, and said Probably, because love made you pure and good, always; and privately felt relieved that it was unlikely she would grow to love Cobweb before she made it to the bottom of the tower (or, indeed, ever). But she suggested that she could take Cobweb back with her to the palace, and introduce her to the family and to the servants, and that perhaps she could be a royal fairy rather than a bottom-of-the-garden one dealing with children who were innocent of the facts of life.
“Take me back with you!” said Cobweb. “Just fancy! What if they don’t want you?”
“Of course they will want me; I’m their Princess,” said Floralinda.
“You are a crook,” said Cobweb.
But when she shivered down in bed that night, with Cobweb curled up in her little nest close by, it was a question her mind kept chasing round and round, like the devil-bear had chased them; her family had a legal obligation to want her, as well as a moral obligation besides; even if she had workday hands, and even if her curls would never be the same again, she was still very much a princess on the inside. Just because the bread has gone stale and hard on the outside does not mean, if you cut through it, that there is not nice fresh bread within.
This should have told Cobweb something too, for princesses aren’t meant to doubt.
They soaked the rat skin for days, and then Floralinda was obliged to sit with it, and scrape all the inside membrane off, trying to be as careful as possible so that she didn’t push the scraper through the tough skin of the rat. They left the hair side on, and Floralinda made all kinds of wretched mistakes: sometimes she scraped too hard and sometimes too softly, and she did make more than one hole, and Cobweb scraped from the other end and scolded her. It is hard when your hard work is compared to the hard work of clever fairy hands, and Floralinda always hated being scolded; but between the two of them they got the wrong layer off.
Then came another horrible part, because the hide needed to be soaked again in something that would soften it. Floralinda would not have been able to do this part had she not already seen the rat’s insides, but Cobweb made her crack open the rat’s skull, and get out all its brains; they put the brains with some hot water and some of the oil that the salamanders had floated in (which contained goodness only knows what, but Cobweb had sieved it nicely) and put the rat’s hide in that muck, which at least meant they could get rid of the rest of the rat. Every time Floralinda saw its big naked tail—as long as two skipping-ropes, and as thick as your arm—she wanted to scream.
The hide was a pain; Cobweb said that they needed to keep it soft while it dried, so they took it upstairs and Floralinda was obliged to tug it, or pull it, or keep it stretched out like it was a crochet pattern, all the while impatiently waiting for her foot to get better. She could limp with it now, and was awfully afraid that she would limp forever; but Cobweb thought that the foot was on the mend, and made Floralinda exercise it even when it hurt terribly. By the time the hide was dry, and by the time Cobweb had smoked it over the fire, her foot only twinged.
The rat’s hide was not very beautiful, nor very successfully done, and it was heavy and smelled extraordinary. Floralinda cut up breadths of it to sew together—sweating all the while, for if her measurements did not add up, there was all their hard work gone—and ended up with a rather bizarre garment that had to fasten in the front with rough toggles, because she did not have any buttons. There had been quite enough to add a hood, though wearing the hood was difficult as she had over-measured, and it fell quite deeply over Floralinda’s face. It was quite snug, especially after she darned the holes, but its fragrance was that of a rat that had undergone a bad time.
“Perhaps the other creatures will think I am a rat,” said Floralinda sadly, “and accept me, and let me pass.”
“I suspect now they’ll just smell you coming,” said Cobweb.
Floralinda and Cobweb returned to their tedious, back-breaking progress, and little by little Floralinda became happy again; but she was never really happy in the same way. She found that she could not become happy with all her old fancies, or by thinking about Christmas, or by singing; she had started to only become really happy in those moments when the spear was in her hands, gleaming wetly at the tip with the venom Cobweb had just applied, and feeling the rising excitement and dread of meeting whatever was on the next floor down. She could still become interested thinking of how wonderful it would be when she got right down to the bottom, but it had stopped making her quite happy, because those thoughts were always accompanied by doubts and questions now.
Sometimes she thought that the fairy looked at her in a queer, quizzical, half-doubtful way; but as she liked Cobweb’s lovely face and did not like Cobweb’s strident voice (she had told Cobweb that Cobweb ought to talk softly, being a girl; Cobweb had looked close to slapping her) she shut out the scolding and looked at the beauty instead. It had been so long since Floralinda had seen anything that was really beautiful, so long since anything had been clean, or easy, or warm. Cobweb had become like her first and oldest doll, the one where back in the palace she still kept it safely at the back of the doll’s-house, panicked lest anyone think it too rackety and throw it away. The loveliness of those painted eyes and lips still had the power to make the Floralinda of old feel calm, and so too did Cobweb’s, especially if you ignored everything coming out of the lips.
And it was easy now. When Floralinda came to the fishmen on flight twenty-eight—awful, squat little people, with troutlike heads and real gills, gibbering and bubbling—she simply stabbed at them in the doorway, knowing the doorway was the best place to be, because as she explained to Cobweb later, that meant they all had to come at her one at a time, and could pile up and die.
And Cobweb looked at her again.
The Kelpie was honestly very unthreatening, and Floralinda was not sure what the witch had been thinking. The will-o-wisps were more of a problem. Will-o-wisps don’t have any real bodies, but are malign lights that can burn you with a sort of fox-fire. Even this fox-fire is not their real weapon, for they are mostly at their best when they can drown you in a bog or swamp. Will-o-wisps have no hunger, and no blood to be poisoned with; but thankfully Cobweb had a quick talk in fairy language to them, and Floralinda led the group to an upstairs window, whereupon they flew out.
Cobweb sighed in envy.
“What did you tell them, dear?” said Floralinda.
“Oh, I said there was a swamp nearby, and that this wouldn’t get them in trouble with their union,” said Cobweb carelessly, “but I lied on both counts; I’m sure there’s not a swamp nearby, and they’ll die in the forest.”
Floralinda thought this was a bit cruel.
“If I cannot get away,” said the fairy, “I see no reason why some coarse will-o’-the-wisps ought to.”
“You are not very nice, Cobweb,” said Floralinda.
And Cobweb said:
“Fancy you saying that!”
The moment Cobweb saw the siren on flight twenty-five, though, she made Floralinda shut the door, and run back upstairs as quick as she could, which was quite quick now; her sprained ankle complained only a little.
“That is a siren,” said Cobweb. “Your witch was getting quite avant-garde. See here, we’ll have to plug our ears with pith to make ourselves deaf, or we’ll hear it singing.”
Floralinda wanted to know what would happen after that.
“I’m not actually sure; but something dreadful,” said Cobweb, who had not read her Odyssey.
So they stopped up their ears with pith, and Floralinda was obliged to keep Cobweb in the warm neck ruffle of the rat-skin coat; she could not say “Thrust” or “Duck”, but had promised to pull Floralinda’s hair for “Thrust”, and to poke her in the neck for “Duck”, and had looked quite pleased over the possibility. Floralinda opened the door to the flight where the siren was sitting, and found she didn’t quite know how to proceed, because the siren didn’t try to attack her, or any such other thing.
The siren looked like a beautiful lady from the waist up, and like a seafood platter from the waist down; she had long green hair and blue teeth and eyes like a shark’s, with nice diamond pupils. She was sitting on a sort of raised dais and had no weapons or anything else of that kind, just a comb that she had been using on her long hair. She had good hands for strangling, but she cringed back at the sight of Floralinda’s coat, and shuddered at the point of Floralinda’s spear. It was the first time anything on the flights had been afraid of her.