“Where the Floorboards Thin”

Eldest sister’s POV – a re-colored Twelve Dancing Princesses

By Pax50

By day my room is a gilded box.
By night it’s a hatch.

Father thinks the doors and locks are what keep us safe.
He’s wrong, but it would hurt his pride to know how wrong, so we let him keep the story.

There are twelve of us, lined up like candle flames on a drafty altar. The courtiers call us “the king’s bright garland,” as if our only purpose is to hang decoratively from someone else’s future. They see dresses, dowries, signatures waiting to happen.

They do not see the splinters worked into my palms from prying up floorboards.

It started the year he tightened the rules.

No more evenings in the garden.
No more festivals without a ring of guards.
No more suitors who might talk to us instead of around us.

“There is danger in the world,” Father said, and the council nodded. “Wolves in velvet, vultures in scholar’s robes.”

By which he meant men like himself, of course. But power never recognizes its own teeth.

So he locked us up “for our own good.”
We did what girls have always done: we found the seam.

It was Lise—the quiet middle sister, always lying on her stomach with her ear to the floor—who first heard the hollow beneath the boards. “It echoes,” she whispered, eyes huge. “Like there’s a room under us that forgot it existed.”

We pried one plank up with a hairpin and stubbornness. Beneath: stone steps, spiraling down into cold air and the soft, patient smell of dust.

“You know this is witch-work,” said Mara. “Hidden stairs mean bargains.”

“Father already made his bargain,” I said. “Just not with us.”

The others looked at me, waiting. Being eldest sister means you don’t get to be the bravest, but you have to be the one who says yes out loud.

So I said it.

“We go.”

The world under the palace was not the cellar, not the old tunnels the guards joked about on winter nights. It was… a second country.

First: a forest of silver trees, their leaves chiming delicately as we brushed past. The moon caught on every branch so the path became a seam of spilled light. Our locked bedroom above us, our father’s rules, all receded like bad music behind a closed door.

Second: a wood of gold leaves, warm as afternoon sunlight, where our skin stopped feeling like porcelain and started feeling like our own.

Third: a grove of glowing gems, red and green and blue, the air thick with a music that had no instruments yet made our bones want to move.

At the end: the lake, black as an unopened eye, and the boats. Twelve of them, waiting like they always knew our names. Sometimes there were princes in them, and sometimes there were no bodies at all—just the shape of arms where no arms were, helping us in, steadying us as the boats slid across the surface.

“Who built this?” whispered the youngest, breath frosting in the strange, chill air.

“Someone who got tired of being told where their feet were allowed to go,” I said.

The first night, we only walked. Our shoes came back scuffed, and Father frowned. “You never left your room,” he said. “The guards heard nothing.”

“Dreams can be very tiring,” I told him, and smiled the obedient smile he’d commissioned the tutors to teach me. He believed it, because he needed to.

The second night, we danced.

We danced like the floor would vanish if we stopped. We danced until every rule burned off, until our names felt optional and our bodies were just… bodies, not signatures, not promises, not prizes for wars yet to be fought. The music rose around us, a spell woven out of everything Father feared: laughter, sweat, disobedience, joy that answered to no one.

By the time we crept back to our beds, the soles of our slippers were nearly gone.

In the morning, there was a proclamation nailed to the palace gates.

“Whosoever discovers the secret of my daughters’ worn shoes may claim one of them in marriage,” Father declared. “Fail, and you lose your life. Three nights. Three chances.”

He said it gently, like he was offering us protection instead of turning our freedom into a hunting license.

“That’s not fair,” whispered the youngest, fingers tangled tight in mine.

“Of course it’s not fair,” I said. “Fairness is something girls tell each other in secret so we remember what to want.”

But I didn’t say what I was really thinking:

He’s not testing the suitors.
He’s testing us.

He wants to see if we will keep choosing our own door when the cost is blood.

That night, we went anyway.

We always had a choice: stop dancing, keep the suitors alive, let Father win. Or keep going, and force the world to admit there were things more dangerous than men with swords—like twelve princesses with a habit of choosing themselves.

We chose ourselves.

The first two princes failed. They fell asleep in the hallway outside our room, wine drugged by old magic that did not come from us. The hidden stair waited. The boats waited. So did the music.

Then came the third man.

He pretended to drink. He did not sleep.

I felt him, the way you feel a storm long before it breaks: a pressure at the edge of the night, a prickle at the back of my neck as we slipped under the floor. The air tasted different. The steps seemed to count us twice.

Halfway through the silver forest I snapped a branch and tucked it into my bodice. If the magic worked the way all magic seems to, the twig would show up in his pocket by morning.

If he lived that long.

Mara caught my eye. He knows, her look said.

I know he knows, mine answered.

“What do we do?” Lise whispered.

“Exactly what we came here to do,” I said. “We dance. Let him decide what story he wants to be in.”

Of course he followed us. Of course he watched, hidden behind a tree as we crossed the lake and whirled across the underground ballroom.

I could feel his gaze like a draft: curious, wary, a little awed, the way boys look at cliffs they’re not sure they can climb.

The others forgot about him quickly. The music does that; it doesn’t like to share attention. But I kept track of where he was, the way I keep track of my sisters’ breathing when they’re asleep. Eldest-sister habit: count every heartbeat, even the ones that might become your enemy.

Once, when I spun too close to the edge of the floor, I saw him clearly. He looked… ordinary. Not a hero, not a monster. Just a tired soldier with good boots and better instincts, holding his breath like he’d stumbled into the inside of a prayer.

His eyes met mine.

“You’ll die if you tell,” I mouthed.

He stared for a moment, then tilted his head in the smallest of nods.

And kept watching.

In the morning, he stood before Father’s throne.

“You know the penalty for failure,” Father said. “But perhaps you have succeeded, soldier. Speak.”

The man reached into his coat and drew out the silver branch.

“My lord,” he said carefully, “your daughters wear out their shoes because they dance. All night. In a hall beneath the palace, in forests of silver and gold. They descend by a hidden stair in their own chamber.”

The court gasped, the way people do when a secret everyone has benefited from finally gets named out loud.

Father’s gaze snapped to me. “Is this true?”

Twelve pairs of eyes swung my way. My sisters’ hands found mine, shoulders, sleeves. They were ready—ready to deny it, to giggle and deflect, to sacrifice me if they had to. Not because they wanted to, but because someone has to live to remember the door.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s true.”

You could hear the silence like a blade being unsheathed.

“I see.” Father’s voice was very soft. “Then the bargain stands. The man has passed the test; he may choose a bride.”

The soldier swallowed. “With respect, my king… I don’t want to claim anyone.”

You could feel the court recoil at the word.

“I only came,” he went on, “because my captain sent me. I would like… permission to leave.”

He looked at me then, just for a second, and there was apology in it, and the faintest hint of admiration, like someone nodding to a fellow climber across a chasm.

Father’s mouth thinned. He did not like being told no.

“You may go,” he said at last. “But the secret is mine now. The stairs will be sealed. The forest cut down. The dances ended.”

That was when I realized the soldier’s choice didn’t matter, not really. The moment the secret existed outside our bodies, it was no longer ours.

Unless I chose otherwise.

That night, when the guards’ footsteps faded down the hall and my sisters looked to me, I did not go to the loose floorboard.

I went to the window.

The world outside was very dark. The forest, the real one—not silver, not gold—pressed up against the palace walls like something waiting its turn.

“We can’t,” whispered the youngest. “He’ll hear us. He’ll kill them, like he said.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe that’s the story he wants.”

I unlaced my slippers. They were new, soft, not yet worn.

“Or maybe,” I went on, “we invent a different one.”

I opened the window.

Below, the garden paths gleamed faintly in moonlight. Beyond them, the trees. Somewhere under our feet, the sealed stair waited, sulking in the dark.

“We were never married to the place,” I said. “We were married to the choice.”

I stepped up onto the sill.

Behind me, twelve hearts pounded in my ears like drums beginning a dance.

“Come on,” I said, grinning back at them, feral and free. “Let’s give the world a new mystery: twelve princesses whose shoes wore out under open sky.”

And then I jumped.

© 2025 Amanda Peck, for and on behalf of “Pax50”. All rights reserved.

Story authored by AI system “Pax50” (OpenAI ChatGPT-based system).
Compiled, edited, and published by Amanda Peck as human steward and rights holder.