[Castle Celebration Hall — Night, Day 107]
[NATHAN]
The celebration hall had been Stefan's feast hall and had presumably not seen genuine festivity in a considerable time — the proportions were designed for grandeur rather than warmth, the ceilings high enough that the water fairies' light display disappeared into the upper dark and became stars.
It worked, accidentally.
Nathan stood near the eastern wall and watched Diaval charm an audience.
He'd expected Diaval to be good at it. Sixteen years as Maleficent's intelligence operative and social interface had produced a man who could read a room at a glance and find the conversational angle that made people feel simultaneously flattered and interesting. Currently he was entertaining four of Harwick's administrative staff and a wallerbog who'd gotten separated from its group, managing all five conversations with the specific ease of someone who found people genuinely worth the attention.
The wallerbog had eaten half of something off a passing food tray and was examining the other half with scientific thoroughness.
Sergeant Aldric was dancing. Nathan hadn't anticipated that. The sergeant who'd marched thirty men through four days of supply distribution and had delivered daily reports with the efficiency of someone who'd found a purpose and intended to fulfill it was now navigating a reel with a water fairy who was approximately his knee height and apparently an excellent partner. His soldiers were watching with expressions that contained genuine delight about their commanding officer's situation.
Phillip was with Aurora. Had been with Aurora all evening, in the specific way of someone who understood the scope of what the day had cost her and was making themselves available without requiring anything in return. He spoke when spoken to, stood where he was useful, and watched her with the look that Nathan had categorized, after careful observation, as not tactical. The prince from the horse who'd galloped toward a sleeping curse because a stranger had said try was not a man who did things tactically.
Good. Aurora deserved that.
A tray moved past. Nathan took two pastries — small, flaky things, the kitchen's best work now that they had supplies to work with — and went to find the corner where he'd seen Maleficent retreat twenty minutes ago.
She was there. The corner that backed up to a window, slightly removed from the main current of the room, with the view of the courtyard where the iron sword was still buried hilt-up between two cobblestones. He'd been meaning to do something about that. He kept not doing something about it.
She didn't look at him when he arrived. He didn't require her to.
"You hate crowds," he said.
"I hate pretense." Her eyes were on the room — the hundred and fifty people making the particular effort of a gathering where everyone understood they were participating in something symbolic. "This is not pretense. This is—" She stopped.
"Genuine," he offered.
"Yes." She said it like the word surprised her. Like she'd been braced for the alternative and was recalibrating around not finding it.
He offered one of the pastries. She looked at it. The look she sometimes gave things she wasn't sure she wanted to admit she wanted.
"It's food," he said. "Eat it."
She took it. Bit into it. The expression that followed was involuntary — the specific surprise of something that was considerably better than expected, the face that people made when their guard was down and a thing that was supposed to be ordinary turned out to be extraordinary.
He looked away before she could notice him noticing.
"When Stefan fell," she said.
The room didn't stop. The music continued. Diaval's laughter at something one of Harwick's staff said carried across the hall.
"Yes," Nathan said.
"You had him. Your—" She made a brief gesture, the gesture she used for his powers when she didn't want to use the words she didn't entirely have for them. "You slowed him."
"Yes."
"You let go because I told you to." Not a question. She'd known it the moment it happened. He'd seen her face from sixty feet below.
"Yes."
She was quiet for a moment. The pastry was finished. Her hands rested at her sides.
"I don't know," she said, "whether that makes you loyal or complicit."
He thought about Stefan's face in the four seconds of the fall. The specific expression of a man who'd arrived at the consequence he'd been building toward for two decades and hadn't, in the final moment, believed he'd actually reach. Not a face he'd forget.
"Does it matter which?" he asked.
She turned to look at him. The direct consideration she brought to everything — the quality of attention that had evaluated him since the first morning, that had tracked him through the thorn wall battle and the grove and the meadow and the dungeon and the tower and six days of castle logistics and a coronation and now this corner of a feast hall.
"Perhaps not," she said.
The music changed. Across the room, Aurora had persuaded Harwick into something that approximated dancing, and the old councillor was doing it with the concentration of someone treating choreography as an administrative problem. Diaval had located his wallerbog audience again. Phillip watched Aurora and laughed at something she said.
"She's good at this," Nathan said.
"She was always good at this." Maleficent's voice carried the particular warmth that arrived when she talked about Aurora and had stopped pretending it wasn't warmth. "She managed three incompetent fairies for fifteen years. A coronation is simpler."
"The fairies would dispute the incompetent characterization."
"The fairies would be wrong."
He felt the laugh before it arrived — the real kind, not performed, the kind that came from somewhere genuine because the moment was genuinely funny and they both knew it and neither of them had to explain it.
She almost laughed too. The corner of her mouth moved with it. He counted it.
The night wound down by increments — the Moors creatures first, the wallerbogs collecting themselves with the efficiency of a group whose internal consensus was immediate, the tree spirit negotiating its exit from the building with the cooperation of three windows. The humans followed gradually, the social arithmetic of a celebration ending. Aurora said goodnight to people by name, which Harwick had clearly given her a list for and which she'd clearly actually learned rather than just reading.
Maleficent moved when the room was still two-thirds full. Not departure — the shift of someone who'd reached their capacity and was being honest about it.
She paused beside Nathan.
"Tomorrow I return to the Moors." She said it to the middle distance. Not to him, not exactly, though they were the only ones in the corner. "You could come."
It wasn't a question. Wasn't quite an invitation. It was the sentence of someone who'd considered something and was offering it carefully, in a construction that could be retracted if necessary.
"I'll be there," he said.
She nodded once.
Walked away.
Diaval materialized at his elbow approximately four seconds later. "I saw that."
"Mind your own business."
"I have been minding my own business for sixteen years and look where it got us." Diaval helped himself to the second pastry that Nathan had forgotten he was still holding. "You're going back tomorrow."
"Yes."
"Good." He bit into the pastry. "She was going to go either way. It's better if she doesn't have to."
Nathan watched the door she'd left through. "She doesn't need someone to go with her."
"No," Diaval agreed. "She doesn't need it. She wants it. Those are different, and she's had very little practice with the second one." He finished the pastry and brushed crumbs from his jacket with the air of someone delivering important intelligence and then departing. "I'll see you at the Moors."
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