[The Moors — Days 119-125]
[DIAVAL]
The wound healed the way Nathan healed in general — stubbornly, competently, without asking for attention. By day three he was running light patrol on the western circuit, which Diaval considered premature and which Maleficent had responded to by appearing at the border path and walking beside him for the entire two-hour circuit without comment, which was not something she had done before.
Diaval watched from the high oak and catalogued it.
By day five, Nathan had resumed full duties. By day six, Maleficent had restructured her own schedule such that her evening grove time now began approximately when Nathan's patrol circuit ended, which was either coincidence or not, and Diaval had served Maleficent for sixteen years and had a well-developed sense of which category various things fell into.
He waited until Day 121, when Nathan was sitting outside his hollow cleaning mud off his boots with the focused attention of a man who had decided that boot maintenance was a reasonable thing to think about, and sat beside him.
"She's different," Diaval said.
Nathan worked the mud loose from the left heel without looking up. "I'd noticed."
"She smiles. Occasionally. When you're not watching."
Nathan's hands slowed. A brief pause, then resumed their work. "You're sure about that."
"Sixteen years." Diaval spread his hands. "I know every expression she makes. I know the difference between managing politeness and actual contentment. I know—" He stopped, because this was actually quite personal and he was not, despite evidence to the contrary, without discretion. "I know what she looked like before you arrived. And I know what she looks like now."
Nathan set down the boot. Looked at the treeline. "What does she look like now?"
Diaval thought about how to say it accurately. "Like someone who's stopped bracing for what's coming and started noticing what's here." He stood, because he'd delivered what he'd come to deliver and lingering would reduce the impact. "I thought you should know."
He left before Nathan could respond. Some things were better received without the pressure of an immediate audience.
---
[NATHAN]
Day 122. The side wound was a thin line of new skin, slightly pinkerthan the surrounding tissue, the territory of healed rather than healing. He pressed two fingers against it in the morning — the clinical habit, the assessment — and found no tenderness, no heat. Done.
The first flight after a wound was always a reckoning. Not because flying stressed the injury specifically but because the body kept accounts, and the body's account of iron blade in the side was not yet fully balanced. He'd learned this from the shoulder graze from the soldier's spear months ago, and he'd learned it again from the first rib he'd cracked in the hospital fire before he died, though that one had resolved itself in the transition rather than requiring recovery.
He went up at midmorning, slow, the Gravity Dominion engaging with the familiar pull and resistance, and found his altitude over the eastern meadow with the wound-cautious deliberateness of someone not pushing past what was currently available.
Maleficent was already in the air.
Not patrolling — he'd seen her patrol and this wasn't it. She was moving in wide circles over the meadow at a height that let the wind work, the wing geometry she used when she was flying for the thing itself rather than for a destination. It was the kind of flying he'd first watched her do from a distance two years ago, from the cliff edge, the silhouette against the open sky that had made him understand the wings were something beyond transportation.
She saw him. Adjusted course.
He didn't analyze it. Just matched her altitude and let the current carry him sideways toward the point where their paths would intersect.
She slowed when he reached it. He slowed to match. They flew south together, the meadow below and the treeline ahead, at the speed where the wind was present but not demanding.
She didn't speak. He didn't either. The silence had its own language by now, the vocabulary they'd built across two years of patrol circuits and grove evenings and the particular quiet that arrived when two people had stopped needing to fill space to justify their presence.
She banked left. He followed — not because he was following, because that was the direction the landscape opened in, the broad swathe of the Moors' central territory where the flowers were densest and the magic ran closest to the surface. She knew this. He suspected she'd picked the direction on purpose.
They spiraled upward together. Her wings in the full spread, his gravity working the rising air column, and the sky was enormous and clear and the Moors below was every shade of green at once.
At the apex, she leveled.
Looked at him.
He looked back.
She turned east and began the long descent back toward the grove, and he descended beside her, and when the ground arrived they landed twelve feet apart and walked the rest of the way to the grove in the comfortable quiet that was its own kind of answer to questions neither of them was asking yet.
---
[MALEFICENT]
[The Grove — Day 124, Evening]
Aurora had asked about him.
Not directly — Aurora never asked about things directly when she suspected the direct approach would produce defensive responses. She'd been doing it since childhood, the roundabout inquiry wrapped in something else, the question tucked into another question.
"Godmother, is Nathan recovered?"
"Yes."
"He must be glad to be patrolling again. He gets restless." A pause. "You both do, I think. You're alike that way."
And then, before Maleficent could address or deflect that observation: "What is he to you? Exactly. I've been trying to understand."
Maleficent had considered several responses. Had selected the one that was accurate.
"There is no 'us,'" she'd said. "Not yet."
Aurora's expression had done something complicated and gratified and she'd had the sense to move on to another topic immediately, which was evidence of the diplomatic instinct she'd been developing.
Not yet.
Maleficent turned the two words over in the grove's evening light. She'd said them without deliberate planning. They'd arrived the way true things arrived — from somewhere below the level of construction, the honest inventory speaking before the managed response could intervene.
Not yet implied eventually. That was what Aurora had heard. That was what Aurora had been too careful to remark on further.
Nathan's footsteps at the grove entrance. She'd been hearing them for months — knew the cadence of them, the sound of his specific weight on Moors moss.
"Aurora asked about you," she said.
He settled on his stone. "Diaval mentioned she'd been curious."
"I told her there's no 'us.'" She looked at the flowers. "Not yet."
The grove held. Nathan didn't move.
"What did she say?" he asked.
"Nothing. She understood what yet meant."
"Do you?"
The question was direct without being a demand. He had a gift for that — asking things that could be declined and making it clear they could be declined.
She looked at him. The particular care of someone who'd been assessing him for two years and had arrived at different conclusions than the ones she'd started with. "I know what it means. I said it deliberately."
"All right," he said.
Two words. No leverage applied. He filed the information and let it exist without requiring her to add to it, which was — she had learned to recognize this — one of the more difficult things people could do for other people, and he did it as a matter of course.
The flowers pulsed. The owl called from the eastern wood, the three-noted Moors variety that she'd heard every night for decades and found, tonight, inexplicably comforting.
"Aurora asked what you are to me," she said.
"What did you tell her?"
"That I was still determining that." She paused. "It wasn't the full answer."
"What's the full answer?"
She looked at the flowers for another moment. Then at him. "I think you know it."
He held her gaze. "I know what I'd like it to be."
"Yes," she said. "I know."
The grove darkened around them in increments as the evening deepened. Above them, the stars appeared one by one in the order they always appeared, the same sequence she'd watched alone for sixteen years from this same stone in this same grove, and the grove was different now and the same and whatever was changing was changing in a direction she had decided, quietly, she was willing to walk in.
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