[The Moors and Castle — Days 159-162]
[DIAVAL]
He'd known before they did. Before either of them would have admitted it.
That was the advantage of sixteen years — you learned a person from the outside in, learned their tells and their language and the specific way their body communicated what their face managed. He'd known when Maleficent stopped finding Nathan's questions irritating. He'd known when she'd started arriving at places she knew he'd be. He'd known when she'd learned the mushroom brew location and begun appearing before he did and pretending she hadn't planned it.
The morning after Day 158, he'd flown over the grove at dawn and seen them both there, and that had been that.
He waited until Nathan was alone on the eastern patrol. Found a good perch on the fence post.
"She's trusted you," Diaval said, "with something she swore she'd never give anyone again."
Nathan didn't look surprised that he knew. "Yes."
"I want to be clear." Diaval held the post with both feet, the grip of someone making a point with their posture. "I supported this. I told her, months ago, that you were staying. I used that word deliberately, in her presence, when she needed to hear it." He met Nathan's eyes. "If you make me regret that, I will make your life extremely uncomfortable. I have a great many forms available to me and I know exactly which ones you find unsettling."
Nathan held his gaze. "You won't have reason."
"I know." Diaval settled his feathers. "I'm saying it anyway."
"Fair."
He launched from the post. Turned back once. "She smiled this morning. When she thought I wasn't watching. The kind she's always had but stopped using." He adjusted his wings. "I haven't seen that since before everything. I'm glad it's back."
He flew east before Nathan could respond to that.
---
[AURORA]
[Day 159]
She'd found them in the meadow.
Not doing anything that required privacy — they were standing at the border line, looking at the open ground where the ceremony platform was being constructed, and the only remarkable thing was the distance between them, which was approximately the distance between two people who had stopped maintaining their usual careful gap and were standing as close as people stood when they'd stopped tracking the distance at all.
His hand was at the small of her back.
Not dramatically. The contact of someone who'd placed their hand there without making a decision about it, the automatic reach of someone whose body had rearranged its geography around another person.
Aurora stopped walking approximately twenty feet away.
She looked at Maleficent's face — the full profile, the way the morning light caught the planes of it. The expression there was the open one. The one she'd been learning to read over months of careful observation. The one that meant something internal had settled rather than braced.
The sound she made was not entirely dignified.
Maleficent turned. Saw her. The expression shifted to something between resignation and — Aurora looked closer — something that was not displeased by being seen.
"FINALLY," Aurora said.
She crossed the meadow at speed. Wrapped both arms around Maleficent first, which produced a sharp intake of breath and then the full return embrace, wings and arms, the hold she'd always been held in. Then she turned and hugged Nathan, who received it with the steady competence of someone who'd learned to accept Aurora's enthusiasm without losing his footing.
"I've been waiting," Aurora said into his shoulder, "for months—"
"Aurora."
"Months, Nathan—"
"I know." She could hear the laugh in his voice. "We know."
Maleficent's voice from behind her: "You're being somewhat theatrical."
"I'm being exactly appropriately theatrical." She pulled back. Looked at both of them. "You're together."
A pause. They looked at each other — the brief, private exchange of two people confirming something to each other through a third party's words.
"Yes," Nathan said.
"Good." She clasped her hands together. "Now I need both of you in the planning room in an hour, we're finalizing the ceremony order and I need Maleficent's approval on the Moors delegation's positioning because Harwick and I disagree on the—"
"One moment," Maleficent said.
"I just need—"
"Aurora." The voice that stopped arguments. "One. Moment."
Aurora stopped. Looked. Maleficent's expression was the one she wore for things she was about to say that she didn't say often.
"I want you happy," Maleficent said. "You deserve every good thing this life gives you." She glanced at Nathan — brief, the acknowledgment between people who understood each other. "I'm glad you asked. I'm glad we're all here."
Aurora's eyes did the thing they did when she'd already decided not to cry and was now reconsidering.
"Planning room," Maleficent said. "One hour."
Aurora went.
---
[NATHAN]
[Day 160 — Planning Room]
The meeting had forty-five minutes of productive work and then arrived at the question of the seating arrangement for court members who had expressed private reservations about the Moors integration, at which point Maleficent's hand found his under the table.
Not in the grip they used in the evenings. The casual, functional contact of someone who'd decided that table surfaces were now legitimate territory. Her fingers between his, resting, while her other hand gestured at the diagram Harwick had prepared.
"The eastern section," she said, "should accommodate the tree walkers. Their root systems require soil access — the stone platform isn't suitable."
Harwick made a note. "We could extend the moss overlay—"
"That works."
Nathan watched Harwick's quill move across the parchment. Across the table, Aurora's quill had paused. Her eyes were down at the page but the pen wasn't moving. Her mouth was doing the thing where it was attempting not to produce an expression.
He kept his face entirely neutral.
Maleficent continued discussing the tree walker accommodation. Her thumb moved once across his knuckles, below the table line, the movement of someone who'd forgotten they were moving and then decided not to stop.
Harwick didn't notice. He was drawing diagrams.
Aurora's pen remained still for approximately forty seconds, then resumed at speed, with the quality of someone writing very productively so that they had an excuse for looking at the page.
---
[Day 162 — The Moors]
The whispers in the castle had reached him through Sergeant Aldric, who'd delivered a supply report and then added, with the particular care of a man who'd decided transparency was the right approach: "There's talk, sir. About you and the—" He'd stopped. Looked for the word. "The Mistress."
"I know," Nathan said.
"Some of it's—" Aldric's face had done a series of things. "I want you to know that the men who came through the distribution work have a different opinion than the court officials. The men who were in the barracks that first night."
"I appreciate that."
"Yes, sir."
The court officials' opinions would settle or they wouldn't. He'd chosen a long time ago — before he'd had anything concrete to choose — that what happened in the Moors was what mattered, and the Moors had an unambiguous response to the situation.
The wallerbogs knew. They'd adjusted their patrol escort pattern to include both of them simultaneously, which was the wallerbog equivalent of a formal acknowledgment. The tree spirits had produced a new growth ring on the blighted oak he'd healed, which the Verdant Communion translated as something like good, stable, continues correctly. The water fairies had gifted both of them a river stone each — matched, the stones, from the same source.
He was walking the evening circuit when Maleficent landed beside him. From the air, which meant she'd been above and had descended rather than meeting him at the path. The choice of the aerial arrival.
"The court is talking," she said.
"I know."
"There were three formal inquiries to Harwick about the—" She paused, selecting the precise word. "—the appropriateness of the arrangement."
"What did Harwick tell them?"
"That my personal life was within the sovereign scope of the Moors and that the queen had expressed support and that he had forty-seven items on his current agenda and was they requesting to be added as the forty-eighth."
Nathan looked at her. "You like Harwick."
"He's efficient." She walked beside him. "The inquiries will continue."
"Yes."
"They won't stop." She said it neutrally. "There will always be people who find this—" She gestured, encompassing both of them. "—objectionable. For various reasons, most of which are their own problem."
"I know."
"I want you to know that I know." She looked at the treeline. "I spent a long time managing what other people found objectionable. I don't intend to do that again."
"No."
"I'm not—" She stopped. Started again. "I never thought I'd have this again. Someone who chooses me. Not what I can do or what I protect or what they need from me." A beat. "Just me."
He reached across and took her hand. The motion he'd been making for weeks now, automatic.
"I'll keep choosing you," he said. "Every day, for whatever days there are."
She looked at him. The open expression — the unmanaged face, the face she'd started showing him so consistently that its absence would have alarmed him.
"That's a significant commitment for someone who woke up in an unknown forest without a plan," she said.
"I had a plan."
"You did not have a plan."
"I had a direction." He adjusted his grip on her hand. "The plan emerged."
Her wings shifted — the motion of contentment, the adjustment of something that had found its configuration. They walked the evening circuit together, the Moors breathing around them, the former border line visible in the distance where construction had begun on the ceremony platform.
Above the treeline, a raven circled once and flew south. Diaval, probably, heading toward the castle with the day's last report. Doing his work, the way he always did, with the quiet competence of someone who'd chosen his commitments and kept them.
The flowers along the path pulsed in the evening register.
Nathan knew this path — had walked it hundreds of times, had learned its stones and its roots and its particular quality at every hour of the day. Had walked it alone for months and had walked it beside her and the difference between those two walks was the difference between most things that mattered.
She was beside him.
He was exactly where he wanted to be, and for once, without reservation, so was she.
23:53
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