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Spring was arriving in Camelot, finally, after the grey and icy winter in a grey and icy castle that had been her first few months there. No longer quite considered a child, Morgana spent much of her time being reminded of what was now ‘proper’ and biting her tongue so often she was surprised it was still in her mouth.
Learning to be a proper lady, it seemed, meant interminable hours stuck listening to the older ladies of the court as they embroidered and gossiped, snide comments sliding under the skin like needles. While being the king’s ward might have afforded her a number of privileges, these sessions were entirely outside the purview of Uther or indeed any man, and as such the ladies felt quite comfortable saying what they liked about her. About her untidy embroidery, and who must have taught her such uneven stitching and well, Vivienne never did have much time for these things, did she?
All said, of course, in such a carefully measured tone and in such carefully chosen words as to remain just ambiguous enough to pass for polite conversation. Morgana had her limits, and on this day she found herself storming - slowly, so as not to seem like she was, of course - from the room, finding her way to her chambers first time, for a change, anger swirling inside her like a storm.
In sheer temper she threw the embroidery hoop to the floor like a child, and wished dearly she had something to kick that wouldn’t break a toe. As often happens, the surge of emotion that had, not five minutes ago, been about that cow Tiffany and her little comments was rapidly gathering grievances as it rolled around her head, until she was quite furious with everything.
There was an almost-silent knock on the door and it creaked open to reveal Gwen, who had obviously not been expecting Morgana to be present, almost dropping the bucket she was carrying.
“My lady! I’m sorry, I thought you were –”
“Don’t call me that,” Morgana snapped.
“I – I apologise, is there something –”
“I hate it here,” Morgana burst out, surprising even herself. “And I don’t want to do stupid embroidery, I want to train like Arthur but the king won’t let me, and I don’t have any friends here, and I keep getting lost in the castle, and I’ve hardly even been to the lower town, and winter is so much longer here and I want to go home.”
Gwen’s eyes were very wide, and Morgana instantly felt bad. She had only known her a month, having been sent to Camelot with one of the old servants from home to help her settle in. But Esther was gone, back where Morgana herself wished she was, and Uther, in a slightly misguided moment of parental panic, had chosen someone who had never been a maidservant before, but was at least Morgana’s age.
Of course, Uther had likely been imagining the development of as sisterly a relationship as could be hoped for between the king’s ward and a commoner. What had happened instead, however, was whatever one would call all the blushing and nervous stomachs Morgana seemed plagued with whenever she was around Gwen. (Who was actually called Guinevere. Morgana had never met anyone who shortened their name before, and she found she rather liked it, and mourned that her own was so unsuitable for the task.)
She might not have been much good at the appropriate hobbies, but Morgana had been educated as much as any other young woman of noble birth, and generally took pride in her articulate speech and reason. Around Gwen, however, she had an unfortunate habit of stumbling over her sentences, saying entirely the wrong thing, and thoroughly embarrassing herself.
Gwen set down her bucket, spilling water over the sides and wincing. She wasn’t clumsy by any means, just inexperienced. Morgana didn’t mind. She bit her lip, as she often did before saying something she was unsure of.
“My lady, would,” – Morgana frowned – “Sorry, I mean, would you, um, like to go outside for a while?”
Morgana stared. “Not unless you want a guard or a knight to trail around after us,” she said with a sigh, adding moodily, “I could go wherever I pleased, at home.”
Gwen’s face took on a gentle, teasing smile. “Are you not familiar with sneaking out, then, my lady?”
Morgana didn’t bother to correct her this time. “What?”
“Well,” Gwen said, eyes flickering to the embroidery hoop on the ground. “You might have… left, but you were supposed to be with the ladies of the court all afternoon, yes?”
“Yes, but –”
“So no one else has to know that you are not.” Morgana raised an eyebrow. “You can borrow my cloak,” she said in a rush. “We’ll tuck your hair in, no one will even notice.” Morgana considered it, and Gwen seemed to take her silence for disapproval, visibly switching back to servant mode. “I mean, of course, only if you want to, I don’t wish to overstep, I just –” She fiddled nervously with her hair.
“No,” Morgana said, interrupting her. “I would – I would like that.”
Gwen beamed at her and immediately reached to unfasten the cloak she had been wearing to fetch water. Morgana stood dumbly while it was draped around her and smoothed at the shoulders, Gwen standing close enough that she could smell the lavender soap they used in the laundry. Her stomach did a silly little flip as Gwen looked up with a smile like a secret.
They sat in the meadow, Morgana still in the cloak. It was spring, but not as warm as Gwen made it look in nothing but her light dress. In the quiet, open air, Morgana felt she could breathe for the first time in weeks, no longer watched or observed.
Gwen was threading together daisies where she sat, lithe fingers gentle enough not to break the stalks as she went. Morgana watched closely.
“Can you – How do you do that?” she said.
Gwen looked up in surprise. “You’ve never…?”
Morgana was suddenly embarrassed, and looked down, picking at a long strand of grass. “I don’t know,” she said quickly. “Forget it, it’s fine.”
Gwen ignored her and shuffled over closer, head bent over the daisies between them as she showed her how to make a slit in the stalks and thread the next flower through. Morgana was even more embarrassed, once she saw how simple it was, but Gwen didn’t say anything, or laugh at her, calmly adding flowers to the steadily-growing chain.
Once a final daisy had been added and the circle closed, the crown-like chain sat lightly in Gwen’s hands. She held it up to Morgana, smiling.
“You want to – but you made it, it’s yours!”
Gwen laughed. “A gift, then, for my lady.” She placed it gently on Morgana’s hair.
Morgana never quite came around on embroidery, holding tight to both a grudge that anyone would pretend it to be a substitute for fighting, and a strong dislike for the ladies she was expected to do it with, who were even worse gossips than previously thought. Arthur had laughed at her just the day before, in his obnoxious fifteen-year-old way, and told her that one of the ladies had told one of ‘his’ knights that the king’s ward was going to have to find a husband that could sew.
She’d got her own back, of course, with a few unkind comments about his shoddy footwork and everyone letting him win, and they had needled each other until the king had politely requested they not act like children. Arthur brought out something cutting in her, the way she imagined siblings did. He wasn’t all bad, and could be quite awkwardly kind when no one was watching, but the arrogance was truly unbearable at times.
A consequence of being who he was, she supposed, completely unchecked and flattered everywhere he went. The more grown-up part of her saw more than the prickly sixteen-year-old part wanted to, and begrudgingly she knew that she wasn’t the only one scared and uncertain, however well he hid it under bravado and, frankly, bullying.
She was still thoroughly cross about the embroidery, though, and found herself complaining about it to Gwen yet again.
“Stupid, girly, thing,” she said, looking at her latest attempt with distaste.
Gwen frowned slightly, and Morgana fought the urge to reach out and smooth the little crinkle that formed between her eyebrows. “I’m rather good at it, actually. I embroider all my own dresses,” she said, a little coolly.
Morgana felt like a tool. She flushed. “Well, I didn’t mean the whole thing was stupid, obviously, it’s just not very – it’s just, um – I’m bad at it,” she finished lamely. “Your dress is very pretty,” she added, voice sounding a little odd and wondering if she was ever going to stop making a fool of herself and why it mattered so much.
“Thank you,” Gwen said primly, lips twitching. “Would you like me to help you?”
They sat cross-legged on the bed, facing each other. Morgana glared at her wonky stitches.
“See, I can’t even get them the same size, and I keep stabbing myself in the finger, or losing the thread, or –”
“My lady,” Gwen said, threading the needle and missing the warning glare Morgana sent her way. “It’s, um, not a race.”
“But the others go so fast,” Morgana said, aware that she sounded like a petulant child.
“Because they once went slow,” Gwen said without missing a beat. “Show me.”
Morgana accepted the needle and gloomily stabbed it through the material, yanking at the thread where it stuck. Gwen winced and lightly touched her wrist. “Slower.”
She sighed and poked the needle up again. “See, it always comes up in the wrong place, I never –”
“So try again,” Gwen said patiently. “You can try as many times as you want before you pull it through.”
Morgana was starting to feel a little silly. She held tighter on the needle. “You must think –”
“Everyone needs help sometimes, my lady, I –” Gwen hesitated. “My mother taught me.” It was the first piece of personal information she had shared.
Morgana fumbled the needle and held back a curse, glaring at the pattern. “Mine didn’t,” she said shortly.
After that, Morgana started to learn more about Gwen, and about Camelot through her. Gwen seemed so entwined with her town, sometimes. Morgana learned where Gwen had tripped her brother as a child, when he had broken an arm and she had been shouted at by her father for the first time, and where she liked to buy her coloured thread at the market.
She learned that Gwen was most comfortable in her father’s forge, the heat and banging not even making her flinch anymore. It was there that she also learned that Gwen had wanted to be a blacksmith herself, to make beautiful swords and armour and sturdy horseshoes, to protect everything around her the best way she knew how.
They visited her father, once, on the way back from the meadow, flowers still tucked into their hair. Tom embraced his daughter as though he hadn’t seen her in weeks rather than hours, kissing the top of her head. Morgana looked away and then back in time to see his eyes widen at the sight of her.
“My lady –” he began, and she shook her head.
“There’s really no –” but Gwen was already talking, quizzing her father about the upcoming batch of horseshoes and running a hand over the links of a newly-made chain hanging from the wall.
The heat in the little room was already starting to frizz the edges of the hair, and her eyes were bright as she told her father how she overheard that there would be a new knight, soon, who might need armour. She was beautiful like this, hands on her hips and gaze direct, not demurely to the floor as it was supposed to be in the castle, and Morgana sort of wanted to shake everyone who had decided they shouldn’t see Gwen’s eyes all the time.
She hadn’t really been listening, but apparently Gwen was done, as she plucked the flower from behind her own ear and set it behind her father’s with a grin, waving goodbye as they stepped out into the cool air.
“Why aren’t you…” Morgana trailed off, awkwardly pointing behind them in question.
Gwen gave a slightly tight smile and, with the first hint of bitterness Morgana had ever heard from her, said, “The town won’t buy from a girl. My brother will have to be the one, but I can still help out when I can.”
Morgana opened her mouth to ask.
“Elyan. He was supposed to be there today, actually, but he’s always off running around looking for – my father is far too – Anyway. I still help out. It’s enough,” she said briskly.
For the first time, Morgana contemplated the possibility of marrying Arthur without the reflexive surge of irritation that normally accompanied it. At least, she thought, if she was queen, she could build Gwen a forge and make her the royal blacksmith, and possibly arrest anyone who dared think less of her.
She sighed, and Gwen looked at her questioningly. She shook her head. “We should get back,” she said.
Morgana was trying not to be a child about it, she really was. But she missed her father. She missed her old room. Her horse. The way the sea air smelled from her window. Her friends, from when they were all children together.
Uther was trying. She knew that. But looking at Arthur, the man was barely father material as it was, and it had been clear since the moment she arrived that he had even less idea what to do with a teenage girl.
If she was older, if she was a boy, if she wasn’t the king’s damned ward (and oh, just being referred to like that felt like layers of her own self were being scraped away every time, no longer a person but an extension of the crown) then maybe she would just run away, make her own way home and face the consequences.
She threw her hairbrush down with a clatter and winced, embarrassed. She trailed her fingers along the dressing table to the tiny cup of forget-me-nots Gwen had left there that morning. She touched one of the little flowers gently, pale blue and fragile under her fingertips. Her hand trembled and she felt suddenly that she might crush them, or tear the petals from them, or sweep the whole lot off the table and smash the glass.
She turned away and went to the window, looking down at the courtyard and the town beyond. It still didn’t feel like hers, not really. The only thing in the whole of Camelot that felt right was – well. She shut down that avenue of thought before it could reach the end. She turned away from the window, too, feeling like a bird fluttering ineffectually around its cage. It was too close to dinner to leave the castle, and besides, Gwen was off doing laundry at this time and she had no desire to go alone.
Her most recent embroidery attempt sat discarded by her bed, and she picked it up, its flaws seeming to stand out in vivid colour. A swirl of disgust sat heavy in her stomach. How could they – how could Gwen – make such beautiful things so easily? What did her hands know that Morgana’s did not? What was inside her that Morgana lacked?
Did no one else have it, this – this well of rage in them, that threatened to overflow and destroy? All she was was homesick, but her emotions seemed to pitch and shudder like a ship in a storm and more than anything she was angry, angry at herself for being homesick in the first place, at every choice that had ever been taken from her, every secret kept.
She balled the handkerchief up in her fist and gasped as the needle, still attached and hidden somewhere in the folds, pierced her finger, blood spotting the white fabric. Her lower lip trembled, her throat suddenly tight. She was not going to cry about this. She wasn’t. She squashed down the little girl in her chest that suddenly, irrationally, just wanted her father to hold her the way he hadn’t in a long time.
The door opened, then, and Gwen walked in holding a pile of fresh sheets and one of Morgana’s casual dresses. She smiled brightly at her, moving to set the pile down and pausing, slowing as she registered the tightness in Morgana’s face, the brightness of her eyes.
“My lady?” she said cautiously, making her way across the room.
Wordlessly, Morgana removed the handkerchief to show the tiny pinprick, too distracted to be embarrassed at the thought that it was all she was upset about.
“Oh,” Gwen said simply, reaching for her forearm and steering them to sit down on the bed as she lifted Morgana’s hand up to inspect it.
Morgana swallowed down the lump in her throat and stared numbly at the hands cupping hers. Gwen’s hands were soft and callused in odd places, the knuckles slightly red. Morgana brought her other hand up to trace a finger over one of them, looking up in question.
“The hot water, from the laundry, my lady,” Gwen said quietly. Morgana, almost unconsciously, let her fingers drift to Gwen’s wrist, which turned easily in her hand. On the side of her thumb was an old scar, a patch of skin darker than the rest. Morgana ran her finger over it. “The forge,” Gwen said. A silvery line on her palm. “Elyan.” A broken nail, the soft exposed tip of her finger beneath it. “Scrubbing.”
Carefully, she took Morgana’s hand in her again, and the world, so recently spinning out of her control, was for a moment still and surely held. She wiped away the few drops of blood with the handkerchief and pressed it tight to the little puncture.
“If I wash it quickly, it –”
“Bloodstains would be an improvement,” Morgana said moodily, letting her wrist rest on her knee between them.
Gwen giggled. “You’re not that bad. You just… lack patience.” Morgana rolled her eyes, hyper-aware of every millimetre of skin against hers. Gwen shifted a little. “Are you – are you alright?” she said finally.
Morgana honestly wasn’t sure if anyone had asked her that the entire time she’d been in Camelot. The words stuck in her throat. She shrugged. “I miss home,” she said. “This isn’t – this isn’t home.” She risked a look up at Gwen’s eyes, praying she wouldn’t say something silly like ‘of course it is.’
“Home takes time, I think,” she said instead. “You must have more good memories here than you used to, now?”
Morgana thought about daisy chains and needles threaded first time, about pretending to shop for extravagant silks and strong, careful hands in her hair. Secret, silly laughter, and more information about the making of swords than she had ever cared to know. The colour of Gwen’s eyes in the sun, and the way she rambled without anyone to stop her – and Morgana almost never did, fool that she was.
Case in point, Gwen was still going, oblivious. “Not that you didn’t have good memories before, obviously, I just mean that’s sort of what home is, those things you want to come back to, isn’t it, but –”
“You,” Morgana’s mouth said entirely without her permission. Fuck. “I mean. All my good memories here are with you. I suppose.”
“Oh,” Gwen said, mouth falling open briefly before she smiled, a little flustered. “Well, it was already my home, it’s only right that I share.”
“You’re my best friend,” Morgana blurted, horrified that all her years studying poise and restraint had apparently gone down the drain in one day. “Oh gods, I’m sorry, you don’t have to –”
“My lady,” Gwen said, laughing. “You’re my best friend, too, of course.”
Morgana looked away and picked at her dress. “Then why,” – she hesitated, but figured of all the things she had said this was the least of them, to anyone but her – “Why do you call me that? We are equals, you are my friend, and surely you know that I am not much of a lady, not really,” she finished quietly, looking at the handkerchief around her finger then up at Gwen, who was smiling softly at her like she was missing something.
“Perhaps,” Gwen said, “It is not ‘lady’ that is the important part.”
Morgana felt her face heat and she looked away. Gwen squeezed her hand gently, and heart pounding, she let the fingers of her free one lace through Gwen’s, warm and dry. She looked up to see Gwen’s own face a little flushed, eyes bright and pleased.
Carefully, Gwen disentangled her hand and used it to lift the handkerchief away. The tiny tear had already stopped bleeding, just a red spot on her fingertip now. Gwen ran her thumb over it, then raised Morgana’s hand to her lips and pressed a kiss to her fingertips. Morgana stared.
Gwen’s eyes went wider. “Oh, um, obviously, if that’s not, we can just, I just thought – mmph,” she finished as Morgana darted forward and cut her off with the world’s shortest kiss, a minute press of lips to lips. She leaned back, searching Gwen’s eyes, mouth dry and heartbeat echoing in her whole body.
Slowly, Gwen let go of her hand and brought her own up to the side of Morgana’s head. She leant in.
Home, Morgana thought, dizzily. I could get used to this.