i am going to do this!

[anamuan]

i just need to pick a fandom! or pairing. (table # err, 5, i think, blatantly stolen from here.)

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015. Blackened

[anamuan]

She comes home with both eyes blackened and a bloody nose, but she's grinning through it, even as one of her eyes does its best to swell shut entirely. Morgana doesn't even protest when her father's castle physician makes up a horrifically foul-smelling cold compress out of leaves and mud and applies it directly to her face. She's eight, and the village boys will never say girls aren't good enough to play with them again.

Gwen doesn't meet her for another 6 years, when she's taken on at the castle to be Morgana's hand maiden. She doesn't really know what to expect, to be serving girl to a grand lady, even if the grand lady in question is about her own age and if she's been in and out of the castle with her father a few times a week for as far back as she can remember, helping take down orders or working the portable bellows or just to sneak inside the kitchen with her brother after making a delivery of horse shoes for the castle farriers.

Morgana is cold and distant and proper for all of ten minutes--as long as her governess is in the room lecturing Gwen about her new duties. She spends the entire lecture scrutinizing Gwen icily, as if weighing her significance in the universe, but as much as Gwen knows it's important that she measure up to her mistress's expectations, the governess is terrifying and kind of yelling at her for things she might hypothetically do in the future, and she can't quite tear her attention away from the finger wagging in her face.

Then the governess leaves with one last dark look over her shoulder, and Morgana breaks into a grin that's all mischief and says, "The King's getting a new gelding today. Do you want to sneak into the stable loft and watch them take it through its paces? We shouldn't get caught if we stay in the loft until after the afternoon feeding."

Looking back, Gwen's not sure if it's to her credit or to her shame that she didn't even hesitate before agreeing, and then helping Morgana into a much less fine shift than the velvet dress she'd been wearing. Creeping around barns was pretty definitely on the list of things she'd just been lectured not to do, much less aid and abet her mistress in doing.

The governess is only kept another three months after that, as soon as it was determined that Gwen had sufficient skill to brush a lady's hair as well as she could scrub a hearth and sufficient wits to be her lady's shadow at court events.