[The Moors — Days 136-142]
[DIAVAL]
He'd been watching people his whole life, which was to say he'd been watching from perches his whole life, which was the most honest form of watching — the overhead angle, the removed vantage, the view that showed you what people did when they thought no one who mattered was looking.
Maleficent reached across and took food from Nathan's plate.
This was not the first time. It had been the third time this week that he'd observed and the second time it had been something she clearly wanted rather than something she'd taken on principle. She ate it with the distracted ease of someone who hadn't made a decision, just acted, which was — for Maleficent, who made every decision — significant.
Nathan watched her do it and said nothing and kept eating.
Diaval, in raven form on the branch above their shared meal spot, rotated his head forty-five degrees and filed this under the situation has progressed.
He waited until Nathan was on patrol. Found him on the western circuit, landed on a fence post at shoulder height.
"You're good for her," he said.
Nathan kept walking. "You've changed your position on that."
"I wasn't certain before. I am now." He hopped to the next post, keeping pace. "I wasn't certain because I didn't know what you wanted. People who don't know what they want are the dangerous kind, in my experience."
"What do you think I want now?"
Diaval considered. "Her. Specifically. Not the version of her that's useful or powerful or anything she could provide. Her." He stopped on the post. "I've watched her be reduced to what she could offer before. I know what that looks like."
Nathan stopped walking. Turned to face him. "Yes."
"Good." Diaval ruffled his feathers, the avian equivalent of a settled conclusion. "She laughs. Actually laughs. I haven't seen that since before—" He stopped. The before that he meant didn't need specification. "Since before the wall."
Nathan was quiet for a moment. "Diaval."
"Yes."
"Thank you. For telling me."
Diaval launched from the post without ceremony. Some conversations ended better before they became something longer.
---
[NATHAN]
[Day 139 — Above the Moors]
She'd been flying east when he came up from the southern patrol, and he'd adjusted his vector without discussing it and they'd been flying together for twenty minutes before she'd started doing the thing with the altitude.
Not dramatic. Just the specific aerobatic movement of someone testing the space between two objects in motion — banking a degree closer on the turn, cutting the arc slightly tighter, exploring the physics of proximity in the way that people who could fly explored things that ground-bound people explored differently.
He matched her angles. Kept the three feet. She cut inside it on the next bank — two feet, then a foot and a half, the distance between their wingtips and his shoulder measurable in inches.
He reached across and took her hand.
Mid-flight, twenty feet above the Moors, their fingers lacing without either of them breaking the glide. The aerodynamics of it were slightly absurd — she was winged and he was gravity-suspended and the physics of hand-holding while airborne were not designed for — and it worked anyway, the two of them adjusting unconsciously to the new shared center.
She looked at him sideways. The expression that arrived when something surprised her in a way she decided to permit.
He looked back.
They held the contact through two full turns above the meadow, and then she released — not pulling away, releasing, the distinction she was making with every touch now — and banked north.
He followed.
---
[Day 142 — The Grove]
She stole from his plate again at breakfast. He stole from hers in retaliation, which produced a look that started as offense and ended as something considerably warmer.
"You didn't ask," she said.
"You never ask."
"I'm the ruler of this realm."
"And I'm the person who fixed your oak trees." He ate the berry he'd taken from her plate — something the eastern grove produced in the later season, dark and sweet. "Good."
Her expression did the involuntary movement. "Those are my berries."
"These are our berries. The tree is technically grateful to both of us."
She took three from his plate in response. He watched her eat them with the expression of someone conducting a principled objection.
The grove was quiet around them. The flowers did their morning brightness, slower than evening, the pulse of something waking up. A wallerbog ambled through the far side without acknowledging either of them, which was the wallerbog's version of minding its business.
Maleficent was sitting closer than she had two weeks ago. The gradual reduction in the three feet had been so incremental that he couldn't have pointed to the day it changed — only that it had, and that the current default was something nearer to eighteen inches, and that she'd made no comment about it.
Her shoulder was against his arm. Contact through two layers, consistent.
"Diaval asked me about you," she said.
"When?"
"This morning. Before you arrived." She looked at the flowers. "He wanted to know if you were staying."
"What did you tell him?"
"That wasn't for me to answer." She paused. "He said you'd already told him yes." The corner of her mouth. "He said he wanted to hear it from a source he trusted."
"And you're a trusted source?"
"I'm the most trusted source in the Moors." Without heat. Factual. "I told him that based on available evidence the answer was yes."
"Based on available evidence," he said.
"It was diplomatic."
"It was also accurate."
She looked at him. "Yes. It was."
The wallerbog reappeared at the grove's northern entrance, decided the situation was acceptable, and continued through without incident.
---
[Day 142 — Late Evening]
The landing was a standard one — he came down from the northern patrol and she was below him, already descended, on the flat stone at the meadow's edge that had been their starting and ending point for months.
He came down close. Closer than patrol protocol required. The landing brought him near enough that the air between their faces was inches, not feet — the angle of descent, the momentum of it, an arrival that was honest about its intention.
She didn't step back.
The smile that crossed her face was the private one. Small. Not managed.
Then she turned and walked toward the grove.
He stood on the stone and let the warm air move around him and thought about the particular mathematics of not yet and how the distance it described had been shrinking for months in increments so steady they constituted a direction.
The direction was clear.
He went after her.
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