It dogged her heels all the way upstairs—thrust itself inside her room before she could slam the door shut—and she slapped at its slavering face, rather ineffectually, as she was not a girl inclined to slap. The goblin bit her hand. Had it been a larger beast, this might have been the last Floralinda ever saw of her hand, but goblin teeth are rather like the spikes one finds on the mallet Cook keeps for preparing meat: sharp, most certainly, and quite unpleasant, but with little ability to rip or splinter. Floralinda snatched her hand back with a cry and unwisely slapped the goblin with the other hand, which it seized and bit in turn. This was really a form of cruel play for the goblin, like a cat with a butterfly. The only reason it had not called its fellows was because it knew an easy kill and did not want to share.
When she pulled the other hand free of its jaws, bitten red and bloody, it seized her leg out from beneath her and toppled her to the floor. Here Fate, who had previously been at other appointments with regards to Princess Floralinda, took pity. Floralinda grasped blindly for any handhold as she fell, and upset the little table with the flask of milk and the flask of water, and clattered the bread-knife down with all the rest. Somehow in her terror she got hold of the knife and slashed at the goblin.
It was a bread-knife, not a steak-knife; it did not do much more than leave scrapes. But this made the goblin smack Floralinda full in the face, and the shock of that blow scared her senseless, and she took the knife in both fists and thrust it as hard as she could into the goblin’s throat. It stuck fast. The goblin staggered away from her, long fingers clutching at the knife, gouts of grey and brackish blood squirting out onto her dress and her face; in affrighted pity—Floralinda had not taken any nursing classes—she seized the knife, and both goblin and Princess pulled it from the throat with a great sour arc of blood. The goblin lay flat, gasping and choking for breath, until with a moist gurgle it was still. Floralinda sat in her armchair and stared.
How long she stared, she did not know; she must have sat until the sun was quite set. In the thin evening light the goblin seemed very small and fragile. She started to cry. The crying grew really awful, with deep pulling breaths that made her heart feel as though it might jump out her chest, and she had to pinch both her cheeks until she stopped.
Floralinda dragged the goblin over to the window-sill—her hands bled terribly—and heaved it over the side. It was such a long way down that it seemed as though it would never land, though of course it did, and quite close to the golden sword. Floralinda was too high up to hear it go SPLAT, but she fancied that would have been the appropriate noise.
She bathed her poor hands in water, and though it was a really hopeless case, she took off her gown and sponged where it was muddy with goblin blood. Her last memory was of wrapping her hands in silver gauze from the hangings. Floralinda was too exhausted to recall putting herself to bed, or weeping herself to sleep.
Floralinda woke up with terribly swollen hands, with ugly red tooth-marks all over. They were so bad that she was obliged to pull off her little rings in a fright, as the fingers with rings on looked more purple than they should, and she was afraid that they would come off entirely, like lamb’s tails. It was agony to work the rings off. The room was quite sultry; she was a little feverish, and had to lie down with the flask of milk pressed against her forehead, to cool it. Her fingers were so thick and stiff that she could barely peel the orange, and of course she did not want to use the knife. She picked at the fruit without wanting it very much. What she really desired to do was to go back to bed and sleep and sleep, like the sleeping princess Briar Rose, who by all accounts had been very lucky. In the fairy-books, all Briar Rose had ever had to do was lie down the moment things got hot, and when she woke up everything had been done for her, which is a fairly universal dream.
Floralinda still had the flask of milk and the flask of water, an orange and a dirty knife, but she no longer had the loaf of nice white bread or the loaf of wheat. The white she mourned as she liked white bread better, but she knew vaguely that wheaten was more wholesome, with nutritious parts like the angiosperm. She also had an alarming amount of scabs and some wounds that weren’t closing over, but that bled whenever she moved her hands in the wrong way.
In the mild delirium of fever, it seemed to her really too awful that she had lost both loaves for the privilege of getting bitten very badly by a goblin, and then having to watch that goblin die, and then having to roll the same out of a window; it wasn’t remotely fair. For a princess who had previously thought of bread as the foodstuff you had to butter thinly and dutifully chew before you could concentrate on the nicer parts of the meal and then a pudding, Floralinda became quite obsessed with her lost loaves.
It was also true that although one might survive on an orange, milk, water and two kinds of bread, milk and oranges by themselves do not sustain a grown person. Floralinda woke the next fretful day with her hands just as sore and her stomach in anguish from oranges. The sky had grown a deep purple, and even from forty flights up the forest smelled like wet, waiting loam. It was stuffy and close in her room. Even after pressing the flask of cold milk to her temples, Floralinda’s head was still very hot, and ached; she longed for bread.
The thick, foggy air, like standing in someone else’s breath, refused to give way to rain. Floralinda’s head pounded. Her hands were really terribly sore. The mad longing for bread had become a fear of hunger. The more she seemed to think about it, the worse it got. This fear of starvation replaced the fear of what lay on the floor below, or at least started to convince her that a quick trip—the quickest of trips downwards, to retrieve that lost bread, wasn’t frightful at all, especially when the alternative option was dying of hunger. (Floralinda did not know how long it took one to die of hunger, and had reckoned it at about a day, notwithstanding the presence of milk and oranges.) She dressed herself in the gown that had not really dried out all the way, and found her bruised and broken hands turning the key once more within the lock.
Princess Floralinda crept very stealthily down those stairs, and went at a snail’s pace along that greasy hallway. It was empty. She stalled at each imagined scrape and each perceived breath, until she came to where the hallway widened into the room with the brazier, where she had found her first goblin.
There was no more goblin to be found—but no loaf, either. She was deranged with disappointment and relief and a secondary infection. If she had come this far, mightn’t she go a little farther? The room had two other hallways running off it—one that she thought must have gone around the tower’s edge, and one straight toward the centre—and she picked the one that led to the centre, which was lit by crackling, bad-smelling torches. It brought her to a small room which was altogether empty, but for a heavy trapdoor in the floor with an iron ring. Her hands were too sore to pull it, and even had they been whole Floralinda did not know if it would move for her. And so she stood there, hesitating, torn between fear of hunger and fear of being bitten very badly.
Snuffling, scuffling sounds drew her attention, and made the decision for her. With a certain fever-derived lightheadedness she hurried back to the first room, lit up sooty orange in the glow of those everlasting braziers; and when she peeked down the final corridor, the one that seemed to lead off around the tower, there in a little alcove sat two goblins, each one eating a loaf.