Rags And Riches (Part1?)

She got up from the rags she spent the night on, busily watching her environment. The candles weren’t lit yet, which meant that she was the first one to be up and going. She had to light up the dark halls she called her home.
Many times now had she studied the building. Her home – and that of every other servant – was down where she slept, in the cold and dark underground complex. A place which the young and maybe inexperienced King would not use unless it was for prisoners or the common peasants.
She picked up the rags and threw them to the other dirty clothes. It was Mary’s turn to wash them, though everyone knew Mary was… special, and thus no one really expected her to get anything done.
“I can’t do this dirty work. I am a princess, I should be in my castle!”, Mary’s shrill voice echoed in her head. Everyone wanted to be royalty, everyone dreamt of being a prince or a princess. She however thought that maybe it wasn’t all lies and insanity what Mary spoke of. Maybe there was truth in what she said, maybe she was kidnapped by pirates and sold as a slave, maybe her mother gave her away, maybe she had been robbed while her family was fleeing the war and thus ended up here, maybe, maybe, so many maybes!
But she couldn’t know for sure, and neither could Mary.
Maybe Mary made everything up or maybe she was insane after all.
She twitched as a drop of water interrupted her train of thought.
When in thought, she always wasted so much time, even though she had better things to do. Brighten up these halls, for example, wake the others up and try to please the King, hoping that at the end of the day she would still be alive. What a horrid thought.
Yes, she may be living in a palace, but that did not mean anything to her. She was just a maid, a slave almost, who the young King could do with whatever he wanted. She, as much as anyone else, was his toy and their sole purpose was to entertain.
So long as she got some money and food, she would do it.
And the Lord knows, it wasn’t much she got.
But she didn’t complain. Nobody complained. If somebody complained they would get executed in a horrible and embarrassing manner, leaving no good memories of that person.
After she had done the tasks she set out to do, she reached the kitchen, where a servant was already preparing breakfast. He was an elf and as she came to inspect him more closely, she could have sworn they had already talked before before, though she was not entirely sure. Dark, brownish hair with a collar covering up his neck. She wasn’t able to see his eyes closely, but she could see a faint glimmer of hazel green in his eyes.
They nodded to each other and in silence she began to help; peeling and boiling eggs, baking bread, cooking meat.  
Oh, the King loved meat. One meal without some meat and somebody would lose his head.
She wouldn’t say people were afraid of their King, but they definitely weren’t fond of him either. Which she thought was rather understandable.
She sighed. With increasingly more ingredients on the wooden plate she had lost focus on what to cut and cut her finger.
“You there, laddie! What’ve ya got?! My, that a bloody finger?”
She tried not to pay any attention to the man in the apron who just entered the door to the kitchen, but she failed. His thick face was already covered in sweat and grease, even though everyone just woke up, making it very hard not to look at that shiny head of his. He was the largest man she had ever seen, he even had breasts that were bigger than any of the maids. Yet she could not help but sometimes spy on people like him, for someday she might find out something worth a few Xinars. That’s why she knew that he absolutely loved going to the brothel and when he thought that nobody watched him, he ate like a fat, ugly pig that hadn’t eaten in a day.
You know what they say: You are what you eat.
Still, she wouldn’t have minded him at all had he at least been friendly. But everything coming out of his mouth sounded so much like vomit in her ears, she couldn’t even make out the one time he actually did throw up.
Nervously she tried to prevent as much blood from dripping as possible. She wanted to rush somewhere she could clean and treat it, but the fat pig was blocking the only entrance.
“My, my, lass. Am I in the way? Nah, am not in the way, am I now? What are you waiting for you incompetent maid?! Clean up the mess you made!”
She wanted to kill him. It was never the bad ones who got executed. All the bad ones where in high places and had a privilege to be bad.
Power always comes with responsibility, but there were many who were incapable of being responsible or getting people who are responsible.
Maybe if someone who had actually worked for once in his lifetime got a lead role, things would be better. Maybe she wanted to be the one.
She clenched her fists, struggling to control the anger that began to rise in her, but just as she was out of options, the pig finally moved, giving her an opening to run down the stairs to the complex to get bandages, some rags to clean up the blood and a fresh bucket of water.
Being a maid was something she never wished for. She could have been a beggar for all she cared, but a maid out of all the things she could have been was the worst. No freedom, no chance of promotion, not even able to speak your mind.
The wet bandage cooled her finger. It was a deeper cut than she had thought, yet she had to go back. She secured the bandage with a little pin and headed for the kitchen.
“You insolent knife ear!” The pig's voice made its way down, startling her good. She knew he was in no friendly mood today, she had experienced it on herself before. Yet that wasn’t enough; the pig sought another victim – and it found one.