[Maleficent's Grove — Evening, Day 118]
[MALEFICENT]
She'd tended wounds before.
Diaval, twice — once from a hawk that hadn't recognized him in transition, once from a soldier's arrow during one of Stefan's early probes. The tree spirits occasionally, when the iron incursions had been at their worst. She was not unfamiliar with the practical work of injury.
This was different and she was aware that it was different and she was managing that awareness by being extremely precise about the practical work.
The wound was a four-inch cut along the lower left side, shallow enough that the muscle beneath was intact, deep enough to need pressure and proper closure. The iron blade had left the edges slightly inflamed — not badly, he wasn't fae, the iron didn't have the same catastrophic effect on him that it had on her kind — but iron in any wound was a particular complication.
She had the materials. The grove maintained a stock of what was needed — not because she'd anticipated this specific situation but because the Moors regularly produced situations that needed attention and she'd learned to keep what was useful.
Nathan sat with his back against the stone at the grove's center and let her work without attempting to direct the process, which she appreciated. He watched her hands rather than the wound, which she was also aware of.
"The poacher had professional equipment," he said.
"I know. Diaval will track where he came from."
"The net was iron-mesh. Specific make." He paused as she pressed a compress against the wound. "Belmore."
She looked up. "You're certain?"
"The net's construction matched the eastern market's suppliers. Belmore has interests there. He's been quiet since the coronation — too quiet, in the specific way of someone who's decided to try a different approach." His jaw set. Not from pain. The expression of someone who'd been monitoring a variable and had just watched it move. "He's testing the borders. Seeing if Aurora's decrees have enforcement."
"They will now." She returned to the wound. The inflammation at the edges was responding to the salve she'd applied — the Moors equivalent of what she understood Nathan called antiseptic, derived from the bark of the silver-root tree. "Hold still."
"I'm holding still."
"You're talking. Talking moves the ribcage."
He was quiet for approximately forty seconds. She worked the closure with the care she brought to things that mattered, which was the same care she brought to most things but applied with a different awareness here.
He was warm. That was the thing she kept registering — the warmth of him as she worked, the particular warmth of a living person who was sitting very still because she'd told him to, who had a wound she was treating and whose face was doing the particular management of someone carrying more physical discomfort than they were performing.
"It's not serious," he said.
"I know it's not serious. Be quiet."
"You're doing the careful thing you do when you're—"
"Nathan."
He was quiet again.
She finished the closure. Pressed a bandage flat against the wound with both hands, applying the firm consistent pressure that was needed. Her hands were steady. She'd made them steady. The shaking had been on the border, when she'd landed and seen him against the tree with his hand pressed to his side and the blood already dark against his fingers, and that was behind her now.
The grove's bioluminescence was in its evening register — warmer than midday, slower, the rhythm of things settling rather than things beginning.
"You felt it," he said.
She kept her hands where they were. "Yes."
"From the grove. Miles away." He wasn't pressing. He was asking the question that needed asking, in the register that wasn't demanding an answer, just opening the door for one. "What does that mean?"
She looked at her hands, at his side, at the bandage holding the closure she'd made. "I don't know. Something has—" She stopped. Started again. "Something has formed. Between us. I don't know what to call it. I don't know if it has a name in any language I speak."
"Does it need one?"
She looked at him.
He reached up — slowly, carefully, giving her every opportunity to move away — and put his hands over hers. Both of them. His green-stained palms, the permanent mark of the Verdant Communion, covering her hands where they rested against his side.
She didn't move away.
"I know what I want it to mean," he said. Quietly. Not looking away. "I've known for a while. But you're not ready, and ready matters more than what I want. So I won't push." His hands pressed gently over hers. "I'll be here. Whatever form here takes. For as long as—" He stopped. Started again more simply: "For as long."
She looked at their hands. His over hers. The specific weight of it.
He was not the first person to have told her he would stay. Stefan had implied permanence and had been lying. The pixies had promised care and had been incompetent. Diaval had been true, but Diaval's loyalty was the loyalty of service, of a bond she'd created, and it carried a different kind of weight.
This was offered without obligation. Without the structural necessity of it. He'd arrived in her Moors for reasons she'd never fully untangled and had remained for reasons that had nothing to do with necessity and everything to do with choice.
"And if I'm never ready," she said.
"Then I'll still be here."
She looked at his face. The direct, considered patience of him — the quality that had frustrated her in the early months, when she'd been trying to find the angle of his wanting, the thing he was working toward, and had kept failing to locate it because what he was working toward was simply being present.
She exhaled. Long and slow, the tension in her shoulders releasing in increments. Her hands were still under his. She didn't pull them away.
"You're impossible," she said.
"I try." A pause. "Is that a real smile or a polite one?"
She became aware of her own expression. "Real."
"Good." His thumbs moved, slightly — the smallest possible movement, the gesture of someone checking whether contact was acceptable before expanding it. "How is the other side? My right side?"
"Uninjured."
"Good to know."
She carefully extracted her hands from under his — not pulling away, just repositioning, the clinical completion of what she'd come here to do — and began packing away the materials she'd used. Her hands moved through the familiar motions. The grove settled around them, the flowers dimming toward their deepest evening blue.
He was asleep within the hour.
She hadn't expected that. He'd been sitting upright, alert, and then the wound and the blood loss and the evening and the warmth of the grove had done what they did, and she'd looked over and found him unconscious against the stone with his breathing slow and even.
She considered moving him. There was a more comfortable configuration he could achieve if she adjusted the angle.
She considered leaving. The grove was hers. He would wake and make his way back to his hollow without any assistance.
She did neither.
She took the blanket from the grove's storage ledge — the one she'd put there four months ago during a cold spell and had never removed — and laid it over him with the careful deliberateness of someone performing an action they'd decided to commit to rather than vacillate about.
Then she sat on her stone and watched the flowers pulse and listened to him breathe and did not examine her own reasons until much later, when the stars had shifted and she finally returned to her own hollow, and by then the examining felt less urgent than it had.
He would be covered when he woke.
That was what mattered.
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