There are no doors in her tower.

The princess lives in an unbroken stone circle, twice as wide as she is tall. There are three floors of it, with ladders between them, and if she ties them end to end, she can brush her hands against the roof, and imagine that she is touching the sky.

The sky is what she misses most, except on those days where a quiet aching for the lake sneaks up in her heart. On quiet afternoons she can hear the calls of ducks over the wind. If she closes her eyes, she can still see those dreamlike days she spent with the prince on the lakeside, touching and laughing and loving. Those memories make her punishment bearable.

There is no one living in the tower save herself. Her father had promised her two handmaidens to attend to her during her imprisonment, but the princess refused their company. She sorely misses the sound of human voices, but she does not regret her decision. This punishment is hers and hers alone, and she would never subject any other to it.

The tower was built to break her spirit. It may break her yet, but for now, it is not an unbearable life. She is lonely, yes, but she lives comfortably. On the highest floor is a feather bed, as soft as the one she had in the castle, and an entire shelf full of her personal belongings. On the lowest there is nothing but barrels full of food and water. The food and drink stored there is meant to last the entire seven years of her sentence, but in just two years, the princess is not certain that it all will keep as long as it was intended. For now, all she can do is carefully ration herself until the seven years are up or, by some miracle, she is freed.

At first, she dared to hope that her prince would come to rescue her. Surely the valiant Prince Siegfried would not leave his one true love to be locked away for seven long years? But weeks trickled away into months, and it became clear that he was not coming for her. The princess could not say what kept him away, but away he stayed.

She does not want to doubt his love for her. It would be foolish, truthfully, to doubt the love of Prince Siegfried. Born white-haired and golden-eyed, it has long been rumored that there is a spell upon him. The nature of the spell varies with every telling: they say that he cannot tell a lie, that he is innocent of all sins, that he is doomed to be loved by all who lay their eyes upon him. But even if none of that were true, the princess knows that Siegfried is good-hearted and just. He would never profess his love to her if he did not truly love her.

But with every passing day, worry grows in her heart. Perhaps her prince had grown weary of her affections. Perhaps her prince had found another that he loved more. Perhaps her prince had realized that she, the graceless princess of an inconsequential kingdom, is not worthy of his love.

The doubt is so loud in her head that she does not notice the quietness that spreads over the land. Once, she could hear the creaking of carts and the laughter of playing children, even through the thick walls of her tower. But slowly a silence sinks over her kingdom, and she does not even realize it until all at once, the silence is broken.

At first, the sound is just a soft rushing, like the falling of water. It sounds almost peaceful.

She hears the clanking of armor and swords next. It is not a single soldier, but a vast army of them.

Then there is the screaming. Blood-curling shrieks, young and old, echoing over the hills. And then there is the pounding, human fists mere feet away from her head, beating against the stone of her tower.

A voice cries out, high and desperate: Princess Tutu, Princess Tutu, you must get out.


Tutu is not her real name. Or rather, Tutu is not the name that was assigned to her on the occasion of her birth. Her Christian name is a long and frivolous thing—really three names all tied up together—and is only ever used by foreigners and scribes. As a small child, she rechristened herself "Tutu," a butchered abbreviation of her given name, and so she is known throughout the kingdom.

The last person to speak her name before now was her father. He stood on the outside of her tower, watching solemnly as she was bricked into her prison, and announced to her, "Now we will see what you are made of, Princess Tutu."

She is still rather sullen about that. Not just his words—those bother her as well, of course—but the whole situation of her imprisonment.

When Prince Siegfried asked for her hand in marriage, there should have been no reason for her father to refuse it. Her prince was heir to a kingdom far larger and wealthier than her own, and was host to one of the largest and strongest armies on the continent. Even if she had not loved him so dearly, the princess would have been pleased to be married to him. By every measure, it was a favorable match.

Yet, her father did indeed refuse the offer. Against all reason, he sent the prince away, and forbade her from going after. "That is not your fate," he told her. "You must marry another."

But the princess vowed that she would marry none but Prince Siegfried. Most fathers would have ignored her vow and forced her into marriage regardless, but her father did not. Instead, he vowed in turn that she would suffer seven years locked away in a tower, and when she emerged, he would have her marry the man he had chosen for her.

The princess thought that this was a foolish plan. Seven years might be enough to make her regret her vow, but five years hence she will no longer be a young woman. Whoever her father had intended her for will surely have wed another. Her father's plan could accomplish nothing but inflict pain upon her.

Perhaps that was all he desired. The princess is not inclined to bouts of anger, but when these sorts of thoughts weigh heavily in her mind, it edges her mood closer to it.

She has simmered alone in her tower for two long years. And in all that time, for all her pondering and pouting, she had never considered whether there might be some other reason for her father's decision. She had never thought what politics might be affecting her kingdom that she was not privy to, or if more had motivated her father than mere spite.

She had never even considered that her kingdom might be in danger while she was locked away.


Silence returns to her tower in a great rush. That, she thinks, is even more ominous than the screaming. The outside world has become an eerie quiet, a dreadful stillness that sits heavy in her stomach.

She does not mark whether it has been minutes or hours since the silence began, only that this is the length of time it takes her to rouse herself from her frozen shock. The princess steadies herself with a deep breath, then busies herself with the only conceivable thing she could do at this point: searching for an escape.

At first she walks a circle around her tower, her fingers tracing along the stone walls, digging along the grooves between the bricks. She finds none that is any looser than any other, and so she turns next to the meager supplies that she was given when she was first locked into the tower.

She has a small drawer full of kitchen utensils that were left to her, and from them she selects a long, thin bread knife, which seemed most suitable to her purposes. She picks a large brick on the northern side of the tower, and with a grimace, she begins to work the stone loose from the wall.

All night, she chips away at the mortar, until she can no longer hold her eyes open, and is forced to abandon her escape for slumber. Come morning again, she forgoes food and returns to her work. With agonizing slowness, she bores away at the walls up her prison until, finally, finally, the stone comes loose.

Her heart is skittering in her chest when the brick falls out of the wall, and she finally feels the cool breeze of outside air on her hand. The princess holds her breath and presses her face to the gap, and takes in her first sight of the outside world. It's evening outside, the sky dyed purple-blue and the trees rustling in the wind and wildflowers growing tall in the grass. It's beautiful.

The princess drinks in the sight for long moments, as though it might disappear if she looks away. Then she hardens her heart and returns to her task. She again raises her blunted knife and chips away at the next stone, and then another, stopping only to sleep. It takes her a week, but finally she opens a hole wide enough that she can climb through, tearing her skirts on the jagged edges as she forces her way out.

She does not delight in the softness of the grass beneath her feet, or the vastness of the sky over her head. The joy swelling in her heart is abruptly interrupted, replaced instead with the insistent gnawing of fear and anger deep in her stomach. She sees now what she could not from the confines of her tower: the city razed, the corpses of her people littering the ground, the stream running red with their blood.

For a moment, she wishes she could retreat back into the safety of her tower.