It is dreadful to think that a prince has been crunched up by a dragon all in the name of rescuing you; but when fully twenty-four princes are crunched up by a dragon while trying to rescue you, it is another thing altogether. Princess Floralinda was deeply embarrassed. But by the time she had gathered up the courage required to stand on the balcony and say things like, “Oh, please don’t,” or, “Could somebody send for a ladder instead,”—the princes stopped coming, and she never got a chance to say them.
For if one prince being crunched up by a dragon is inspirational, twenty-four princes being crunched up by a dragon is cautionary. By the time Floralinda had become used to feather pillows and had read all of Monarchic Positions, which was easily over eight hundred pages in small type, and had grown sick of milk and wheaten loaf and white, and oranges, the princes had dried up. She had waited quite as patiently and meekly as any Griselda, and perhaps it had been a good thing that she had never emerged to greet her saviours, because her petticoats were extremely tired and her butter-coloured curls were growing limp.
This was not the only issue, though it was the most distressing. Once the princes stopped coming, something had begun to make an appalling noise. A low, bubbling howl sounded continually from the first floor of the tower, rattling through each rock and stair before it abruptly stopped. Then it would begin again, and every so often after that, and each time the noise grew more maddened and plaintive. Floralinda thought it must be the dragon with the diamond scales.
During the day, it made her feel very pensive. When it came at night, she began to feel afraid. It made all the other sounds of the night-time strange and unfriendly, in the way that an ordinary conversation, heard through a wall, can sound not like language at all; and at times it sounded as though it were happening right outside her door. Floralinda went to the door and turned the big, heavy key, and opened it just a crack, to hear: there was a flight of stairs, and down the stairs was a very empty, gnawing sort of darkness. The silence in that staircase was complete.
But then there came a scraping sound—like a cat wanting to be let in—far off, but not too far off; and having spent all her courage, Floralinda pulled the door closed and locked it all in a hurry. She did not sleep easy that night on the feather pillows or the musty sheets.
The discovery of the diary came as a total surprise. She had looked nearly everywhere, but not in the first place she should have looked, which was down the back of the armchair. If you have ever tried to find a good hiding-place in a sitting room, you would have known to check there; but Floralinda, it must be said, suffered a little too much from being good. The diary had been forced nearly to the bottom of the seat, which was her only excuse.
Its contents were written in a pretty, careful hand much like Floralinda’s own pretty, careful hand. The first pages after the fly-leaf were nothing but charts—Floralinda puzzled over these; afterwards, a series of tallymarks. The diary part started a few pages after this, and at first the entries were disappointingly nondescript, such as “Day twenty-two: cluster of godwits flying south” and on “day twenty-nine,” a sketch of a great many points on a grid. On day thirty—
A prince has come. I saw him quite plainly and waved to him from the balcony (Shocking! thought Floralinda) and his man held the destrier. I thought I saw the sword glint in the sunshine.
And at the end of the page: Now it is sunset and he has not yet come out.
Day thirty-two—
He did not come out.
Day thirty-three—
He did not come out. The sword glimmers at the gate. Why does it shine still, with such cheer?
Floralinda pored over the pages until there was really no daylight to read by, hastening past entries such as “I sicken of oranges,” and squinted her way to “Day seventy,”—
I was mistaken. The stars here are so different from my stars that I might be at the end of the earth. The prince will not come out. I am killed by bread. The golden sword at the gate has no heart. Each night the diamond-encrusted dragon howls its head off and nobody will shut it up, will nobody hear and come to shut it up
And then the entries stopped being dated; and the last entry read—
He did not come out. I shall go out the window. Remember me to my parents as their loving Princess Mellarose, good-bye.
Floralinda’s heart beat quite fast, and she had to lie down for a while.
The witch had said that the flight below Floralinda was filled with goblins. The princess had never met a goblin, not even in a zoo, and could not accurately describe one. In her stories they had appeared to steal thimbles and lead pixies or fairies astray, and had never been illustrated as very large. In those days of interrupted sleep, lying awake in the grey darkness before dawn, she came to the idea that they might be bargained with. And if they might be bargained with, who knew but that the rest of the creatures might be bypassed somehow? This idea cheered her up so much that she scrambled around before there was really any light to see by, taking inventory of the whole room, trying to catalogue things that a goblin might like.
She had a pretty locket on a fine gold chain, one that had a complicated latch of old heavy gold that took quite a lot of pressure to release, which meant it wasn’t a good prospect in case she couldn’t get the latch off. She had two ruby rings (one ruby being of inferior quality), and a ring set with silver pearl, which her mother had always let her wear at parties because she had said it wasn’t worth much. She had a silk dress—really not at its best—and two magical loaves, a flask of milk and a flask of water, and the everpresent orange. She had a number of important, boring books and hangings of silver gauze. This seemed enough to offer even a very avaricious goblin.
Floralinda picked over these things and decided to try her luck with the loaves. The witch had said goblins, plural; a bread loaf might be pulled in half, and in any case it would then regrow, which could impress goblins in any plurality. At first she contemplated keeping one loaf behind, but decided that was greedy. She wrapped both loaves up and turned the key in the door. It made a loud, affronted scrape when she turned it, which seemed to rasp all the way down that silent staircase. The morning light from the window did not really penetrate that greedy dark. Princess Floralinda gathered her courage, took a breath, and started downwards.
The staircase was almost pitch black despite the spitting brazier at the bottom, which revealed a dark, musty passage onwards. This passage was of narrow stone, slippery and damp, filled with a fetid smell. Floralinda’s hands trembled on the greasy walls, which she did not want to touch, but she was frightened about the footing: it seemed as though at any moment her feet might shoot out beneath her, like taking a step on an icy surface with your skates still on. The sooty orange glow of the light hurried her steps, until she perceived that at the end of the hall, limned by another spluttering brazier, was her first goblin.
It was large—much larger than the pictures. It came up to about her knee, and was hunched and mottled grey. The bristling teeth and slime of the mouth shone clearly in the firelight, and it was naked. The big, black pupils seemed to take up most of the eyes, and they rolled madly in the light of the brazier. It looked transfixed. Floralinda said in an unused voice, “I am a princess, and will reward you—” before it went for her.
Its hunched back and purblind stare belied its quickness, as it was on her in a trice. She was knocked to the ground and became paralytic with fear and disappointment, and then merely with fear as the goblin’s long fingers came for her throat (she did not know that goblins are stranglers, and their teeth are just for chewing gristle and all the worst parts that you never want from the roast). Floralinda pressed the parcel of loaves at its face in a panic, but it was obvious that the goblin did not care for loaves either white or wheaten; it smacked the bread away. This meant it had parted company enough with Floralinda that she was able to kick out at the creature, and scrabble on grazed knees back down the corridor, shooting forward down that greased-up space like a lost bar of soap. The goblin scrambled after her, then chased her up the stairs.