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Once there was a young woman who couldn’t move her tentacles. Her father was influential, and, more importantly, rich. But that hadn’t helped her situation at all. It had broken him when her older sister had run away with the man of her choosing, a kind man, a handsome man, but a poor man. He'd grown cold and bitter, pretending that the elder girl didn’t exist, and treating his younger daughter with a mixture of extreme scorn and overbearing nastiness. She learned to fear him, especially on the nights her mother sighed and stared at old pictures of her and her sister when she was very small. He grew angry on those nights, and she knew what happened when she was shooed away as they began to argue. Her only solace was in the help; while none were ever truly kind to her, they at least had to pay attention to her. Until the accident, when nobody at all was allowed to touch her.
To this day, nobody of that house will honestly say how the accident occurred. She didn’t really know herself. She was only twelve years old, a tiny young thing, when perhaps she said the wrong thing to her father. Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe she honestly fell into the rock formation. But, like a good girl, she said nothing and questioned nothing. She merely accepted that she’d never walk on her own again. Her father got her a wheeled chair, a method of conveyance she began to abhor. It was uncomfortable, and it marked her as different. Not different as in an exciting and new and different pattern, or different as in a beautiful, vaguely foreign sort of different; no, this was the different that made her something less than a person. She was a doll, a pale green doll, a toy to be pushed around and set on a bench to look at and admire. But as she aged, her beauty began to fade. She became gaunt, sharp, angular. She didn’t eat enough, and she was beginning to look like her father, with his shrewd eyes. She’d never been a great beauty, true, but now there wasn’t a soul who would compare her to the daughters of the other great houses. And as her beauty faded, so did her hope of ever escaping her father’s tyrrany. But, after years of lonely misery, and as her father began to speak of sending her away to a home for the invalid to combat the family’s rising shame at having an unmarried daughter her age living at home, the courier arrived with a note, and her fortunes began to change. She’d never heard of the family, for they lived far south, in warmer waters. She’d never heard of the son’s exploits, his dreams, his hopes… she didn’t know a thing about the man who might possibly be interested in her. At first, she was highly suspicious, and she had every right to be. Why on earth would such a rich family be interested in her, a cripple? For once, she was in the same mind as her father. But after much investigation on his part into the potential husband’s dealings, the arrangement was decidably legitimate, and, seemingly, quite advantageous for both families. Her husband, aside from having a crippled wife, would have stock in her father’s dominion over the cold waters, while her family got her off their hands and had shares in the southern shipping lanes, or whatever it was the boy’s family did. And then came the requests.

Portraits. Hours and hours of portraits. Watercolors, oils, pastels. It seemed her future husband was some sort of obsessive; why he would want to know in such great detail what she looked like from every angle made absolutely no sense. However, her father and mother, thrilled by the very proposition of marriage, said nothing, only continued to pay to have her portrait made over and over again. Each of the portraits was different; different styles, different angles, different poses, different hairdos. However, from one portrait to the next, one detail remained the same. The girl was seated on a sofa, a divan, a swing, but never her wheeled chair. She’d been hidden from society so long, said her father, nobody would remember that this was the crippled girl from all that long time ago. She disagreed; the boy marrying her had a right to know, and so she commissioned one herself. It was small, and rather poorly done, in her opinion. Still, it was cheap. She supposed she got what she paid for. It was an image of her in profile, against a pale blue sea, her blue hair gathered partially in a bun. It was no different from any other portrait, other than the poorer quality… and the fact that it prominently displayed her wheeled chair.



She sent it in a package containing a pair of fine gloves she’d embroidered; a gift, she’d told the courier, to her future fiancée, to showcase her talents. Of course, the courier opened the package; of course, he saw a pair of delicate cerulean gloves nestled in artfully arranged sea lettuce. And of course he didn’t lift them to discover the tiny picture underneath. Weeks went by, with no further news. Her father fretted over missing couriers and roared over negligent potential in-laws. Finally, the last message arrived, and the girl watched as her father opened and read it with bated breath. Would the portrait be returned in there with furious words, calling him out on his trickery and deceit? However, there were no incensed, rage-fueled tirades, and there were no tender words or no romantic sentiments in the letter. Just a date, an address, the place where the boy’s family’s chauffeur would collect her, and a diamond the size of a cuttlefish’s eye. Needless to say, her family, for once, was very impressed. She, however, was not. What on earth, after seeing the truth for themselves, would make them still want her? She couldn’t really imagine any pity; they were a great house just as any of the great houses were. Cold. Her father told her time and time again as he admired the ring that overpowered his daughter’s slender hand, that this was the best thing she’d ever done. Finding Kujaku was a blessing, he'd said, and she understood when she met him. True, the princeling was greedy, spoiled, possessive, and vain; in short, a younger and better-looking version of her own father. But he was young! She rarely heard of these marriages being arranged with any man close to the girl’s own age. And maybe he’d come to love her; he seemed cordial enough during their wedding. But the main difference was that he wasn't, as all the sons of the great houses seemed to be, cruel.

Or so she'd thought.

At first, she thought she was his sister- the female who shared Kujaku's tones. It made sense; he was cold to her, ignoring her in public, while she vied for his attention. Sickening, really. But then she'd seen the children and realized that this was no sister; this was his… concubine? Was that the word? His mistress? Either way, she was the mother of the two children she knew that she would always pretend were hers. The male, she had no hope for. He would be just like his father, just like her father, just like every young man of privilege. He'd be the heartbreak of his future wife, just like his father was the heartbreak of hers. Her tentacular paralysis didn’t matter; she’d be expected to perform few, if any… wifely duties, other than hanging on his arm and hosting meals. A wheeled chair or litter could easily be explained as the demand of her delicate health, and if she could stand to make a toast, that was all that would matter. The family cared nothing about her personality; nothing about her as a person. She understood that the boy’s father’s choice wasn’t for a good wife; it was for an acceptable biological mother.

She’d been picked for her skin color and nothing more, so that when it came time to send the little girl off to parts untold, they could at least pretend she was true nobility.

Was it any wonder she grew bitter? The concubine suffered greatly from her conflicted feelings; at times, the newly-made wife wanted to reach out to her, share in her fate of being cast aside like an old glove. But then she remembered that if the girl hadn’t screwed up and come back for her husband, she wouldn’t be in this position. She’d be in a home someplace, a home with broken women like her, a home where perhaps she could actually live in her current state and have a real life, and as she thought of this, she lashed out with sharp words at the poor woman. She was triply cursed. Kujaku was a curse. His mistress was a curse. And his spoiled, pampered son was a curse. But his daughter… well, damned if she’d let the little girl go through what she’d gone through. Arranged marriages were hell no matter who you married. The least she could do was imply that her father in some way cared about her. She found the little girl in a small parlor off the dining room, playing with a pair of exquisite little figures. “Emilie,” she called, more coldly than she would have liked. “What are you playing with?

“Dolls, Miss,” the little girl said, manipulating the figures in a pantomime dance. She watched silently as the princess led them through a rough approximation of a waltz, then a tango. The woman wheeled the chair closer and bent down to look at the dolls as they spun in the air.

“What kind of dolls? I used to play with dolls when I was young, you know.” She asked in an awkward voice. You could tell she was trying to be friendly, but she really didn’t quite know how. The little girl stopped the dance, then put her dolls down in her lap and stared at them as she spoke.

“Well…” the girl said timidly, in a voice hauntingly young and tainted by the dominance of a hand that didn’t understand her, “this is the prince, and this is the maid. And the prince loves the maid and the maid loves the prince. They grew up together, see. But the prince can’t marry the maid because his mama’s been kidnapped, and so he has to marry a cold witch for a while. But the maid knows that one day, the prince will get his mama back, send the witch up to the icebergs, and marry the maid and they’ll all be happy. But until then, she has to be… sat… satis… satisfried with one more dance and she can make that dance last forever. So this is their last dance.” Taking a deep breath, the little girl looked up at the woman in the wheelchair, the woman who looked like she could be her mother. Her mama had told her not to talk to her daddy’s wife, but the green lady looked so sad. “It’s a sad story, isn’t it, Miss?”

The bride of the prince felt her eyes burn. At first, she thought it was anger. How dare that little harlot call her a witch and ever assume she’d be a member of the great house! But… she knew it wasn’t rage. It was sadness. It was a deep depression at the entrapment of all the women in this house. They were sisters in bondage, whether they liked it or not. Why should she care who he loved? It was too late for her, and it was too late for Orin, but it wasn’t too late for the little girl. She had to help her somehow… she just had to. But what could she do? She was trapped in a cage, a beautiful cage, but still a cage. They all were.

And there was no way out.