A Katarina Vacation Arc

Katarina gazed upon the completely empty buffet table and nodded in satisfaction to herself. It was tough, since as usual people kept neglecting the food, but she'd worked hard and not a scrap of delicious food had been wasted. She'd left the cakes of her cousin Marie though.

Ah, she was going to have to do a lot of sword practice tomorrow if she didn't want to get fat.

Huh, this was probably the first time she'd ever stayed so late during a party. Even when her parents held parties at home she was encourage to go to sleep early. Truth be told, Katarina was actually feeling pretty sleepy. But her mother had asked her to stay up and mingle, and that's what she'd done! It had been the first time ever she'd gotten any kind of quest from her mother that could possibly raise affection points, and she was not going to let it slide! Maybe if mother liked her enough she'd stop lecturing her so much!

Nearby, Cousin Marie was sitting at the buffet table on a chair she'd dragged over, her high-heeled shoes cast aside as she flexed her toes in relief. "Ah, finally!" she said. "My toes are free!" Her silvery twintails trailed down her back as she reached for one of the remaining cakes, careful not to get any of it on her filmy blue dress. "The party is over! Let the feast begin!" A servant picked up the discarded heels as another picked up the other cakes. "Come, Cousin Katarina! Let us all enjoy ourselves together!"

Marie left Katarina to a sitting room, where she found her other cousins, all but Watson sitting with bare feet and high heels discarded, rubbing their feet. Apparently Katarina had missed some food, because everyone was munching from plates set on the coffee table. Eh, they were eating now? But the party was over and the food was likely cold and dry! Ugh, why do nobles mistreat food so!?

Matthew stood up, her bare feet peeking out from under her purple dress. "Cousin Katarina! Sit down, sit down. I'll help you take your shoes off. Ah, you must be in agony, you've been standing and walking around all night!"

"Oh thanks, cousin!" Katarina said. "It's a real pain to loosen them while wearing skirts."

"No problem," Matthew said. "Just sit down and I'll get your heels of and…"

Katarina, having just sat, was waiting for the feeling of someone pulling at the footwear on her feet. When none came, she said, "Cousin Matthew? Is something wrong?"

"Katarina, why are you wearing boots?!" Matthew demanded, sounding aghast.

"Eh?!"

"Wait, she's been wearing boots?"

"She hasn't been in heels?"

"Katarina, you traitor! We were all supposed to suffer in heels together!"

Katarina blinked as she was assaulted on all sides by the exclamations of offended female cousins. "Eh? But heels are so tight and uncomfortable! I always feel like I'm going to trip and break my ankle. Boots feel much nicer, have more padding, and are always broken in because I wear them every day. I've been wearing them to parties for years. After all, people can't see under your skirt anyway…"

She glanced down. All her cousins skirts were just short enough to show off their feet, even if not their ankles.

She glanced up higher. For some reason, Matthew, Olga, Marie, Adella and Iosefka were all giving her betrayed looks and… Cousin Watson, why are you opening that window and jumping out onto the ledge outside?

"Katarina, you traitor/dummy/I hate you!"

EHHHHH?! What did she do?! Why does everyone hate her now?

Mili said, rubbing her feet as she celebrated the end of a successful party with her sisters and sister-in-laws. Her heels had been cast aside, and she was soaking her feet in water. Over the years, she'd gotten better at having her feet fitted and breaking in her shoes, but that didn't stop them from hurting at the end of a party. The other all sat with bare feet, digging their toes into the carpet, and Mili had to wonder how hardened they were, that they weren't a mess of pain like she was.

The door to the sitting room they were banged open, and Mili blinked as something she had never, ever expected to see came rushing in: her daughter Katarina in tears. "Mother!" Katarina cried, rushing towards her. "Help! All my cousins hate me!"

Mili suddenly found herself with a lapful of crying Katarina as her daughter, her strange, bright, radiant daughter who had laughed off falling from trees, dropping sacks of manure on her toes, being put into a coma by dark magic, getting kidnapped, and other, much more painful things, shed tears and wailed, begging her mother for help and seeking her comfort.

For a moment, Mili was a child, a girl, a teenager, a young woman again, crying into her mother or one of her sibling's laps as the painful whispers and harsh words people had spoken behind her back where she could hear had torn at her too deeply to bear. Despite all the frustrations of raising such an unconventional daughter, of fearing scandal and ridicule, the one thing she had stopped fearing was ever seeing Katarina in the same state. She didn't care what people said to her, and over time people had changed their words as they became wrapped up in the web of strangeness that was her daughter.

Cold anger and fiery rage came over her, and for a moment she wasn't Mili, but the Duchess Millidiana Claes, one of the most powerful women in Sorcier, and she would have BLOODY, VIOLENT, EPIC VENGEANCE UPON THOSE WHO HAD MADE HER DAUGHTER CRY! She didn't care they were the children of her brothers and sisters, didn't care they were family, didn't care they had all been sweet, proper young women, THEY HAD MADE HER LITTLE GIRL CRY WHEN SHE HAD NEVER CRIED BEFORE! She wanted to grab one of the many decorative but fully functional weapons from the walls and march there like some kind of mad dark spirit intending to make her own mound of corpses, and lay waste around her by the strength of her arms and the force of her fury…

But that would mean leaving her little girl to cry alone.

And her mother, and her father, and her brother, and her sisters had never left her to cry alone.

"There, there Katarina," she said awkwardly, trying to recall how her family had held her during those times of pain. Was she doing this right? Was she supposed to put a hand on Katarina's back or her head? Oh, she hoped she wasn't making this worse, this doesn't seem like it was as comforting as mother's touch had been all those years ago. "I'm… sure your cousins don't hate you?" She looked to her sisters and in-law beseechingly, but they looked as lost as she.

"They do!" Katarina wailed. "They said they hated me and called me a dummy and a traitor! I know I am, but I don't know what a DID! I know I wasn't doing anything evil and villainess-y, but I guess I must have because THEY ALL HATE ME NOW! Cousin Watson even jumped out the window because he didn't want to be in the same room as me!"

"He what?" Mili said, startled at this last. It was the only thing she could grab on to from her daughter litany of outlandishness.

"Oh dear," Henriette said. "Watson only does that when the girls are upset about something and he doesn't want to be involved."

"My son has such good survival instincts," Sheryl said proudly.

Mili tried to think about this logically. It was Katarina, so surely some sort of misunderstanding was involved. Hating Katarina was a impossible as… as… something truly impossible! "Katarina dear, tell me what happened. I'm sure you did nothing wrong, but tell me what happened. Please dear?"

"I don't know!" Katarina cried. "Everyone was just all sitting and eating with their shoes off, and then Mashu offered to help me take of my shoes, and then I sat down, and then suddenly everyone was saying how they hated me and how I was a traitor! I don't want to be a traitor! I don't want to go into exile and never see my friends again! I don't want them to hate me!"

Mili stared, trying to work out what the misunderstanding was. Why had her nieces reacted like that? Surely their feet hadn't hurt so much from wearing heels that they would take it out on someone as blameless as Katarina.

Leona, for some reason, was staring downwards. "Katarina dear," she said, "are you wearing boots?"

Katarina sniffed, and nodded of speaking. Mili realize Katarina was deeply upset. She never overlooked the opportunity to speak and–

Wait.

Boots.

Mili remembered finding out from the maids that Katarina had started to refuse to wear proper heels to parties, complaining they were too painful, and started wearing her boots instead. It was one of the many times her will had not overcome her daughters. Ordering her to where heels had merely resulted in her friends sneaking in boots for her which she had changed into at whatever party she was attending. Eventually, Mili had just given up, had Katarina's made skirts long to hide the improper, unflattering footwear and prayed the prince never wondered what sort of soles was stepping on his toes.

She thought back to the party, on all her nieces wearing fashionable, proper heels, of the little winces and careful steps that told her they were in pain, that they still needed to learn how to properly wear their heels…

For a moment, she sat back and imagined how they must feel to learn their cousin had sidestepped that pain all women shared, just by wearing boots.

The fury died, leaving only the urge to shake her nieces by their necks for making her little girl cry. Mili had long since overcome whatever petty envy she had of her daughter having comfortable footwear.

She opened her mouth to say something, some words of comfort to assure her little girl her cousins didn't really hate her, they were just upset… and paused. Lying there, under the sofa Leona was sitting on, as a boot. Even as she watched, she saw Leona's foot nudge it deeper under the sofa…

"Oh dear," Henriette was saying, frowning and rubbing her feet. Her heels were lying next to her on the carpet. "While I don't condone what the children said, I can certainly understand why they felt that way. You mustn't take what they said personally, Katarina. It was the feet talking. I'm sure that by tomorrow, they'll have realized how wrong they were to take their frustrations out on you, and–"

"Henriette," Mili said, improperly interrupting someone for what seemed the first time in her life, "were you the one who taught and advised our nieces on their choice of party footwear and proper podiatric fashion growing up?"

Henriette blinked at the interruption, but seemed more surprised than offended. "Yes," she said. "All the girls, really. I believe Leona and the others were always busy, and they said I was the most fashionable." She said this with the air of one deliberately not mentioning she knew when she was being foisted on by family.

"Fashionable," Mili said, eyes narrowing as she looked from sofa to sofa. "Yes, I suppose that's the easiest way to explain why you're the only one not wearing boots under their skirts."

Leona, Sheryl, Viola and Eileen all winced.

"Mili…" Leona began.

"If you'll excuse me, sisters," Mili said. "I have an upset daughter to comfort. I would suggest finding a way to avoid that problem yourselves."

"I had a son," Henriette said.

Getting Katarina to her feet was relatively easy. Distraught as she was, she was a helpful, cooperative child, mindful of the people around her even when she was upset. Mili took her daughter to her own room, because her mother never made her sleep alone when she was upset, and had the servants fetch her daughter's comfortable, vegetarian sleepwear. She had Katarina lay her head on Mili's lap, and explained about heels and how they hurt, and how it was something women all women went through, and why her cousins might have been a bit upset on finding out Katarina didn't have that problem, and that she did nothing wrong and that her cousins were just upset and didn't hate her, and this wouldn't lead to her getting exiled and never seeing her friends again.

Eventually, Katarina fell asleep. It was the sleep of the pained but hopeful, and Mili wiped the tear tracks from her daughter's face. This wasn't the first time Katarina had cried. Indeed, in some ways she cried very easily, but she was usually upset on behalf of someone else. But this was probably the time Katarina had cried for her own pain.

The next day, Mili awoke not to the sun but to Katarina's calf landing on her face just before it was pulled off because Katarina had rolled off the bed.

When they went down to breakfast, something that Katarina actually had to be talked into doing instead of staying in her room and packing for exile– her daughter had a truly unhealthy fixation of being exiled– it was to be greeted by a whole wall of crying Adeth and Romani nieces all apologizing and begging for Katarina's forgiveness.

"I'M SORRY!" and similar variations of a theme were the music of the morning as various cousins tried to take back what they had said the night before as Katarina yelled over them, begging them not to hate her and that she was sorry.

The girls were reconciled by midmorning, and they celebrated this reconciliation and new closeness by going off to shop for comfortable boots and dresses with long skirts.

They left behind a bunch of gloomy mothers as every girl not named Katarina coldly snubbed their female progenitor.

"They saw the boots under the sofa," Henriette explained over midmorning tea. "Out nieces are many things, but slow isn't one of them."

"That's what you get for letting your daughters wear heels when you don't," Mili said, trying not to be too smug as she, Sheryl and Henriette watched in amusement.

"WAH!" Leona said cried. "Mili! Help! My daughters all hate me!"

Mili had to wonder if she was comforting her sister sarcastically as Leona began to cry into her lap…