And so begins something of an epic. This was written for abbyleaf101. Clicking the review button will actually...well...there may be danger of explosion that is all I will say XD

When Arthur Pendragon was seven years old, he failed to walk the plank.

It was the height of summer, the sky was blue, the sun was burning, and his nursemaid couldn't quite cope with the heat. Arthur was dispatched to the courtyard to play, accompanied by his elder cousin and the strict instruction not to get up to any mischief.

Left to his own devices, Arthur would probably have been fine. He would have done what any other normal seven year old would; chased a chicken or two, tried to snaffle fruit from a market stall, or thrown a few stones at an unsuspecting horse. Unfortunately for him, his cousin Morgana had had other ideas.

Morgana had been nine years old that summer, but had already possessed the cunning and manipulative ability of a girl three times her age. She and Arthur had loitered in the hot courtyard, both feeling too lacklustre to even consider anything energetic. Arthur had been moody; he'd had a headache, and was slouched against the wall, kicking the occasional stone. Next to him, Morgana stood straight and tall, as if emphasising how much better behaved she was, and fluttered a fan across her face, chasing a non-existent breeze.

They'd remained in the courtyard for about an hour, getting increasingly hotter, and increasingly grumpier. It wasn't until Arthur aimed a particularly vicious kick at a stone, missed and hit the wall, that Morgana even deigned to speak to him. She interrupted the stream of profanities that no well bred little boy should even be aware of, and proposed a trip down to the river. Arthur was so surprised at her offering to take him anywhere, that he stopped cursing and hopping around and simply stared.

His cousin, it had appeared, did not like being stared at, because she folded her fan up, stabbed him in the eye, and demanded to know whether he was coming to the river, or whether she was leaving him behind. Arthur had, as he was later to use in his defence, raised the issue of not being allowed out of the castle unaccompanied, but it had become apparent that even at the tender age of nine Morgana knew exactly how to play him, because she looked him in the eye, gave rather a nasty smile and said,

'You chicken, Arthur Pendragon?'

And, well, after that, watching her flounce off across the courtyard, Arthur didn't really have any choice but to follow, did he?

The walk down to the river was uneventful in the extreme. It was quite tough going at times, but the woods were blissfully cool, and Arthur did have the pleasure of seeing Morgana's superior façade slip when she ripped the bottom of her dress on a particularly unfortunately placed branch. It was only when they reached the river that the trouble started.

That summer had been long and hot, perhaps even qualifying as a heat wave, and rain had been in scarce supply. As a result, the normally dangerous, fast-flowing river had slowed to a pathetic trickle that crept over the rocky river bed with a tinkling sound guaranteed to play havoc with those of weak bladder. The water was only about an inch deep, three inches at most, and Arthur hadn't been able to help but wonder exactly what it was that Morgana wanted to do. He soon found out.

Picking their way downstream, it hadn't been long before they had come across a fallen tree, wedged across the river at a spot where the water had, once upon time, obviously been very deep. Morgana had turned to Arthur and grinned in a most unladylike fashion.

'Time to walk the plank, Arthur Pendragon. Get to the other side of the river, and I'll do your prep for a month.'

Aside from wishing she'd stop using his full name in such a snide tone, Arthur's first response had been shock. And then disdain. How hard can it be, he'd thought, to walk across a tree? Sending what he hoped was a sneer in Morgana's direction he'd reached out and, using the great upturned roots as leverage, hauled himself onto the main trunk. He took a few steps out, still holding onto the roots with one hand, and then stopped. There was an unforeseen problem. Arthur had always had a slight wariness of heights. And balancing on a log, with nothing to hold onto, two metres above the ground had done a decent enough job of triggering his vertigo.

So he did the only sensible thing in the circumstances. He froze.

Arthur had remained stock still, unable to let go of the root and move out into space, for about five minutes. It was at this stage, that Morgana began to laugh.

'You are chicken!'

'I am not!' Arthur had called back desperately, somehow hoping she would just ignore the visual evidence and take his word for it. Unfortunately, Morgana had instead chosen to drop all of her ladylike posturing, and start skipping in a circle chanting 'Arthur is a chicken, Arthur is a chicken!'

Even at the tender age of seven, there had been nothing Arthur had detested more than being called a coward. The anger that rushed up inside him had unfrozen his limbs, and without thinking about it he had taken several swift steps out across the trunk, until he was almost halfway across the river. Morgana had gone quiet.

Arthur managed fine, the anger carrying him on, until he was about a foot from the opposite bank. It was at this point he made his biggest mistake. He looked down.

There was a terrifying moment, in which everything moved six times slower and with much more clarity than usual, and then the ground was suddenly much much closer than Arthur remembered. There was a thump and everything went black.

The exact details of the rescue mission were never made clear to Arthur. All he could remember was waking up in his chambers to a thumping headache and the news his nursemaid had been sacked. His father refused to renege on that decision, despite Arthur's protestation, and when the gash in his head had finally healed and he was allowed to return to his routine, there was someone new in her place.

His father had obviously not heard the real story of what had happened at the river, and Arthur knew enough of the code of conduct to keep his mouth shut about Morgana's part in the proceedings. He knew she felt guilty though, because when he received his first batch of prep since the accident, an essay on 'Myths and Legends: Their Place in our Society', a piece of parchment sporting that title had appeared on his bed later that day. This continued for a month, upon which Morgana obviously considered her debt paid, because Arthur had to start doing his own school work again.

The accident at the river had had no lasting effect on Arthur, merely leaving him with a slightly bitter taste in his mouth over the nursemaid, the notion that Morgana was not to be trusted, and a tiny jagged scar on his right temple.