Guinevere's mother had died long before Gwen was old enough to learn how to sew. The teaching of that skill had fallen to a kind woman next door. She learned the basics quickly, huge stitches shrinking into barely visible ones.
She was no noble woman to sit around embroidering all day, but the woman taught her some simple patterns. Her favorites were the ones for good luck that the woman taught her how to sew in small hidden places that they couldn't be seen at all.
"If they're seen, they won't work," she warned.
A week later, she was accused of bewitching the miller's son and carted away.
Her father sat her down and explained to her that the woman had done something very bad, and Gwen wasn't going to see her anymore and she shouldn't talk about her either.
"She never did anything odd while you were there, did she?" he asked, worried.
Sewing patterns weren't odd. Gwen shook her head and slipped away to finish mending her father's torn shirt and to sneak the pattern into the place on the neck hidden by the collar. She did it with tiny stitches and white thread.
Her father never noticed, but he did comment on the increase in customers that had started coming his way.
Gwen did all the sewing, of course. Her father worked in the smithy, her brother learned from him, and she stretched small meals as far as they would go and mended their worn clothes time and time again.
She'd been mending Elyan's spare shirt when he had his fight with their father and left in the night. He took the shirt with him.
Gwen sighed, because wasn't that just like Elyan, to leave with a shirt half done when another night would have seen it finished?
It was a hard winter that saw her join the palace as a cleaning maid. Lady Morgana went through her personal maids at a prodigious rate, so Gwen was assigned to clean her room until a new one was found.
A ripped dress before a feast was saved by Gwen's quick hands and earned her the favor of Lady Morgana and a quick promotion to lady's maid.
Whenever Gwen took that dress to be washed, she always rubbed her finger over the good luck charm she'd sewn without thinking onto the hem.
Gwen sewed the charms automatically by now, but she knew better than to think that they actually worked. They were just superstition, that was all.
She couldn't help but run her fingers over the tear that had so neatly ripped through the charm, over and over again, when Prince Arthur took her to see her father's body.
It would need to be mended, she thought wildly, and then she pressed her hand to her mouth to cover her sobs.
The first thing she did when she got Elyan home was sit him down for a meal in the house that finally seemed to lose the shadows of loneliness.
The second thing she did was make him take his shirt off so that she could mend all the little tears.
She gave him two charms this time. Better to be sure.
Gwen had been afraid at first when she saw Morgana using magic, but it turned to anger quickly.
It was angry tears that rolled down her face as she neatly ripped out the stitches to each and every good luck charm on Morgana's dresses, one by one.
No one was quite sure what to do with her once Morgana was gone, Elyan was a knight, and Arthur started kissing her in public.
She started spending a lot of time sewing. Any woman could sew, commoner, noble, or royal. What they sewed differed admittedly, but it was a nice compromise.
