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"You're the evil that's in the world," Aurora choked out, already backing away. "It's you."
She was grabbing blindly at her skirts, turning to run. Someone must have lined Maleficent's throat with cast-off claws - they caught at her breath and tore it. But she drew a deep breath regardless, and before Aurora vanished between the trees, she said, "Wait," with all the command she could summon as the Moors' Guardian.
"I didn't tell you about the curse," she said, letting her voice ring through the clearing, "because it will not come to pass. It's true I laid it on you long ago, but I also pledged to make it right. You need not fear it."
You need not fear me. But she had already come close enough to lying, and that was enough.
Aurora stared at her, her eyes shining with tears. Maleficent returned her gaze calmly and coldly. She did not want to beg, Believe.
Then Aurora gave a jerk of her head, a half-nod. "I am going now," she said. "My aunts are taking me back to my father." Of course they were - too early. Maleficent suspected that it was not so much forgetfulness as it was that they didn't want to be around to be blamed when, as they guessed, the curse would take hold. But it didn't matter now.
"Farewell, then, Aurora," she said, and Aurora winced to hear her name instead of 'Beastie'. But she could no longer claim to be the girl's Fairy Godmother, or hide behind endearments.
"Farewell." And then she was gone, her head bowed, not looking back.
Diaval came diving down, and she turned him into a man with a flick of her hand.
"Is she hurt?"
"Only in heart," said Maleficent. Yes, Aurora had one of those. "The pixies prattled."
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her I removed the curse," Maleficent said.
She waited for a flurry of outraged human cawing. Instead, Diaval looked at her sidelong, considering her with a compassion that itched.
"She'll have something to hope for, today," he said softly. Oh. Oh, of course, he thought she'd said that so that Aurora's last waking day would be a happy one, and she would spend it looking forward to a future that was out of reach. And perhaps her confidence, and the pixies' assurances, would have given Stefan hope as well - and when that hope was dashed Aurora would not be around to see his anger. Yes, if she'd planned it that way, it would have been a good plan.
"Yes, she will," Maleficent said. "And tomorrow, and the next day."
Now his full gaze. "What?"
"I meant it, Diaval," Maleficent said, impatiently, as if he hadn't seen her after her last attempt to undo what she had done.
"You broke the curse?"
"I found a way to abate it."
"What did you do?"
She gave him a look for that.
"A foolish question. Think, Diaval. Is there anything I could say that you would not consider worth its price?"
Despite the glare, and the deflection, he looked as though he was deciding whether or not to dare another question. Maleficent put a stop to it. "Tonight, she will sleep, and tomorrow, she will wake up. And so on, and so on. The usual pattern. If you wish, tonight, you can go to the castle and watch over her. In an unfamiliar place, I'm sure she'd appreciate a friend nearby." She did not think Aurora would blame Diaval for her Fairy Godmother's betrayal.
"I... I'd like that."
"Then go." She waved him back into his wings, and turned. She had a great deal to do before nightfall.
She would need all her strength, because it was her own full strength she stood against, vested in Aurora's curse, and the last time she had tried it, she had failed. But she had learned from her failure.
The mistake had been in trying to undo what had been done. Oh, sometimes she could accomplish that, for small things; it was how a great deal of healing worked, in the Moors. In her arrogance, she had thought she could do it again. But reversal was a very great magic in any case, and in trying to use it on a great thing, she had exceeded her own power.
The answer was not to remove the curse, but to change it. It could be softened. And it could be shared.
And so as the sun began to near the horizon, Maleficent closed her eyes and pointed her staff unerringly towards Aurora.
"The curse I made, I now amend. It shall not fall upon the princess on the eve of her sixteenth year. She will sleep a cursed sleep when I myself sleep.
"And not before."
She felt it work. Her staff glowed through her closed eyelids, and she opened them as the light faded, the green turning into amber and winking out as the sun set below the horizon.
I will keep you from my curse, my Beastie. Though you need not know it, I will keep watch.
It only had to hold until true love's kiss shattered the the curse, according to its original terms. She had believed, and now feared, that there was no such thing, but others' belief mattered. Aurora could make anyone love her; Maleficent was proof of that.
She had dreamed of mortals' love, and regretted it, but she had power that mortals only dreamed of, still. What was impossible for a mortal was simple for her. She would keep her vigil for all Aurora's lifetime, if she had to.
Diaval did not return that night, nor the next day. She understood that he would have wanted to see it for himself when Aurora woke safely. He would have wanted to reassure himself that Aurora and Stefan had reunited on good terms. He had no more reason than Maleficent had to expect kindness in the human kingdom, even if he had more sentimental ideas than she did about the natural feelings between children and parents.
He arrived back late in the following night. She, of course, was awake. She listened for a long time without interruption as he described the court and the king's reaction to Aurora's return.
"I don't think he thinks it's over," Diaval said.
She let her eyebrows climb. "But the princess is safely sixteen, and all has happened as it was planned. What more does he fear?"
"I don't know," Diaval said, slowly, "except that he's a man who jumps at shadows, these last years, and whether or not there's something in the shadows seems of little matter."
"Hm," said Maleficent, grimly pleased, and only a little worried. Let Stefan frighten himself to death, without her hand in it. Aurora would be troubled, but it would pass.
"What about the boy?" she asked. "Did he arrive at the castle?" She had a great deal of hope pinned on him.
Days and nights turned into each other, over and over, an hourglass spinning through nothingness, and she watched it all.
It took very little power to hold herself back from sleep. Each charm of alertness cost her only a little more. Aurora's peril - if not Aurora herself! - should be long gone by the time the cost grew too much to pay.
When she had first hit upon this solution, she had considered it coldly. On the one horn, Aurora did not deserve this curse, and she, Maleficent, did not wish to see it fall on her. On the other horn, to avert it would drain her strength and her magic slowly and surely. Instead of having strength to offer the Moors, she would have to draw from it, keeping up the appearance of power against attack but having none of its substance should the attack come. It had been rash to lay the curse, but to ameliorate it might be even more rash. From the moment she could use it, she had known that her magic was not hers alone, but to be used for all. And so she had told herself that the cost was too high. Much as she wished to, she must not save Aurora if it meant leaving the Moors vulnerable.
And then Aurora had come to her and accused her of doing exactly what she had done, and she could not choose as the Moors' Guardian, but as Maleficent. She could no more take back the justified betrayal in Aurora's eyes than she could lift the curse the way she had tried the first time. But - and it was a purely selfish choice, wanting to restore Aurora's faith - she could act to save her.
Stefan, at any rate, remained distracted.
For the first two months after Aurora had returned, he had turned the castle into a great iron trap. His knights were not permitted to leave - he had them guarding the castle doors and patrolling its corridors, telling them all that he expected Maleficent to appear out of thin air.
They were bored, Diaval reported, and openly rebellious. Maleficent, who knew very well how she would have felt if Aurora had arrived at a castle in good order, with a mellowed king, who would win her over with love and good sense, allowed herself satisfaction over the state of affairs. And, too, there was benefit for Aurora in meeting and becoming known by not merely her father's closest knights but also all the rest who were now gathered and employed, unnecessarily, in the defense of his castle.
And Phillip was pinned up in there with her. Love flourished in adversity, didn't it? Diaval reported that Philip and Aurora were only increasing in fondness for each other. Yes, all of this would do nicely, as long as Aurora was safe, and she had Diaval to keep an eye on her.
She said nothing to stop Diaval when he brought Aurora flowers from the Moors to cheer her up amid the tension, and remind her of a life beyond the politicking and paranoia. And when he came back one day with a lock of Aurora's hair, she took a strand for herself.
Only a strand.
Even Stefan could not wait forever. When Maleficent's attack failed to materialise, his knights gradually persuaded him to relax the schedule of patrols. Phillip, to Maleficent's annoyance, departed for his own kingdom, though he promised to return. "Not even a farewell kiss?" she asked Diaval.
"These things happen in their own time," he said, shrugging. She could hardly rebuke him for stating what was self-evident.
He also reported that Aurora had asked to visit the Moors, and been denied. "Foolish," Maleficent said. "The Moors will still be here when she's grown. If she keeps running back to us, she'll strain the mortals' trust." And their trust was a flimsy thing.
It was better this way. Perhaps, after another year had passed, she could learn to tamp down the hope that Aurora had forgiven her.
The years had a different shape now that Aurora was gone and now that she was always awake. She had never kept regular waking hours, so the Moors were not strange to her in either the night or the day, but she had more time to see things she had neglected and to take the pulse of her realm by walking across it. Her people were coming to learn that when they asked her for help, now, most often, she would give the help of her hands rather than the help of her magic. If those hands shook, sometimes, it was that she was unaccustomed to the work.
Other boys - and girls - ventured into the magical kingdom now and then, and when they amused her, she tried to intrigue them with tales of a beautiful princess just beyond the border. She didn't have the magic to spare to spirit them sleeping across her lands, so sometimes she encouraged the more mischievous of her people to chase them with mud and sticks and tricks. Humans were easier to herd than her own folk.
It also meant she didn't have to confront the disappointment of their return; they generally found a different route for their journeys.
She carried mouse-pixies across rivers, and planted new sprite-trees in their ancestors' shade. She summoned food and solved quarrels, and was glad that in the earlier years of her authority she had taught the creatures of the Moors that she had at least as much bite as she had bark. And she had plenty of bark, and not just in the days she spent with the oldest trees, the fairy-oaks and birches and willows and pines.
Trees didn't sleep. It helped. But they made the time slide around her, days slipping past like the air.
This was only the beginning of the watch. Still, it would be a long, long time before she failed.
She scowled at Diaval when he brought her stories that showed Aurora was growing too. Growing, and in response to challenge: a human castle was not always easy to navigate. (Maleficent supposed she would have had managed it, if she had ever cared to.) In indirect reply to what he told her, Maleficent gave Diaval stories to take back - 'remember when the goblin in the root cave took over the one next door' and 'remember when you met the feathery ones and you didn't think they liked you' and she gave him something before he asked for it: an enchanted necklace to wear around his neck so that a touch of his claw would turn him from raven to man, and a touch of his hand would turn him back to raven.
She wondered - idly, but not carelessly - when it was that a piece of magic like that had seemed trivial compared to the amount that streamed through her every day.
It came to a head entirely unexpectedly: Aurora found Maleficent's wings.
For a score of years, for more, she had felt them as an ache in her back and a distant yearning - she had longed for them as much as they, evidently, had longed for her.
She had never dreamed that Stefan would have left them whole and merely imprisoned. She thought he had known enough about their kind to salt, bless, and burn them. She had thought that the tug she felt was merely a stray feather or two that he had failed to burn, or nubs of bone that had not burned all the way through.
Mortality was a more fluid thing for fairies than for mortals, as they did not have souls that sped away from the body and left it to rot when enough damage was done. The trimmings of fingernails were dead things when they had grown from mortals, but those of fairies still held the memory of life. It was quite possible for a fairy to be cut in half and still live. Though an uncomfortable existence, to be sure.
And it was possible to choose to let the spark that dwelt in each part scatter on its way. Maleficent's wings, although severed, had been a part of herself until she chose to let them go.
She had kept the connection alive in herself not because she had truly dreamed of flying again, but because she had wanted the loss to live. She had wanted to stoke that hate in herself, in case she was ever in danger of relaxing her enmity.
And yet, also, she had hoped, and that had hurt, too. The curse she had laid on Aurora had been a mirror of that hope. She had imagined Stefan watching his daughter sleep until she died, raging that she was so beautiful and vital and peaceful, so close to life, so close to him - and yet forever out of reach, her presence more a memory than a truth.
And then Stefan's baby had grown into the Beastie, and the Beastie had granted her a wish she could have made only in a dream.
She was splashing under a waterfall - it woke you up, cold water and the cold's vitality - and she surfaced, and looked up. The wings came back to her hurtling through a clear sky, and the feeling when they joined her back was not a feeling there were words for. She had thought that, with the years of phantom pain she clung to wilfully, she had kept the memory of what her wings felt like unfurling from her back. She was wrong.
Oh, to rise on her own power, and not merely as the passenger of conjured winds! She struck the air with victory drum-beats, and twisted, and dived, and pulled herself up from the dive, and her wings ached but it was a real ache, not an echo. Before she ran together again into one self she felt her own joy and then her wings' echo of that joy, and then they were the same. She climbed to the top of the waterfall, and then followed the water down and in, and when she broke the surface this time she beat up straight up again, up and up and UP until the whole Moors unfolded below her, and she could hide the whole waterfall from her own view with only a fingernail. Oh, Beastie, I wish you could have seen this. And then she flew so far as to leave the thought behind.
In retrospect, the amended curse had made her complacent: with her own state tied to Aurora's, if Aurora was hurt, she would know. So she was surprised and abashed when, the following night, Diaval came to her and reported on everything that had happened following the freeing of her wings:
Stefan was in a sickbed and under guard, and there was talk of crowning Aurora queen.
Stefan had seen the wings escape and had erupted into a fit of rage. He had gone to attack Aurora - but Aurora had been nearly a year at the castle, and Maleficent had spoken truly when she had promised Aurora would win hearts. Stefan's knights, even those who were once loyal, had been patient with his increasingly erratic whims, but they defended the princess. A fight had broken out, and the king was injured. Perhaps mortally.
"I hope she wasn't too upset," Maleficent said.
Diaval gave her an odd look.
"She put a stop to it," he said. "Crying out and about to come between them. And they listened to her, and then they realised that they'd raised hands against their king, though he's been a madman now longer than he's been a king, I'd say. And so they realised they'd better make it all proper, so they started to talk about how he's not fit, and if he gets up from that bed again I'd be very surprised, I'll tell you that."
She felt like someone tidying up an old mess of belongings, considering her feelings. She had thought she had loved Stefan once, and then she had thought she had hated him, and maybe neither was true, because now all she felt was irritation. Why had she cared about his schemes? It did not amuse her now to think of his ravings. Not if he'd directed them at Aurora.
Why had she let Aurora go back to him? She should have found a way to keep Aurora in the Moors forever. That was what she had wanted - to live with Maleficent. Never mind, Maleficent told herself, that Aurora had never known she could belong to the human world.
She turned her thoughts to the present.
"Do you think she is safe?"
"Aye," he said, and she told herself she was content.
She pretended not to notice when Diaval gathered up herbs and potions to take to Aurora for her father. She must have asked him for them, and Diaval must have assumed Maleficent would forbid it. In fact, she only thought it was a waste. Stefan, conscious and cognizant, would not entrust himself to any cantrip of the Moors; Stefan beyond cognizance was probably beyond their help.
He died a month later, and all she felt was a little sympathy for Aurora. She did not blame Aurora for having tried to love her father; Aurora loved everyone, and had never been taught not to. Look at Maleficent herself.
The knights and retainers danced around Aurora. It made Maleficent cross; she knew very well that a kiss to gain a crown was not true love, and if Aurora wasn't careful, she might end up married to one of these upstarts, which, as she understood it, cut down the possibility of other kisses. But Diaval had told her that Philip had written, and was due back in the spring. And meanwhile, Aurora had delayed her own coronation, and her courtship.
"She told them that she would not be crowned until she had visited the Moors again," Diaval reported.
"Oh, clever Beastie," Maleficent said, pleased. "I suppose they didn't like that."
"They like it little more than Stefan did," he agreed. "But she is firm."
It worked to prevent her from having to choose a consort until the snows melted and Phillip returned to the kingdom.
Finally. Surely if he was returning after all this time, his feelings and hers had only grown through parting - if Maleficent's own feelings were any indication. Surely, despite the politics she was learning, despite how her father had let her down, Aurora still believed in true love and could experience such a thing as she believed it was. Surely the prince and the princess would kiss at last, and it would be over.
She could end her vigil, and turn her care entirely back to the Moors, and that would be that - the painful story that had begun with another boy and another girl would be done, with a happy ending.
At least for Aurora.
And Maleficent would no longer need to resort to such measures as flying to wake herself when her magic ebbed - climbing the sky half drowsy, and diving, and trusting self-preservation to wake her, so that she need not spend power.
When Philip left a second time, she was mostly baffled.
"What happened?" she demanded of Diaval.
"It's not meant to be," he said. "But I think she wants to tell you herself, when she comes."
"Oh!" Maleficent said, the most undignified sound she'd allowed herself to make in some years. "I thought that was a bluff, to pacify her knights."
He shook his head. "Our Aurora is cunning, but not so cunning as that; she bargains with truth."
He wasn't looking at her, but she thought she detected a smile anyway. "If you want to know why it didn't work out with Philip, you can ask her yourself."
Impertinent bird.
The procession approached the Moors a month after Aurora's eighteenth birthday. That age had been both a sticking point and a catalyst: Aurora's advisers had argued that they would not permit her to do something so dangerous while she was yet nominally under their guardianship, and Aurora had countered that she could not be crowned queen as a child, either. But she was old enough now to lead, rather than being led, and the way she led was the Moors.
Once, Maleficent would have parted the thorn-wall as easily as sweeping away dust, but now she husbanded her magic. She had spent several days coaxing trees apart from each other to form a narrow avenue. Pointedly narrow: two might walk abreast, but it was not a path for a cavalcade.
She stood in the meadow beyond the Moors, flanked by two of her knights of briars and roots, and met the party there.
"Princess Aurora," she greeted her.
"Maleficent." Her name on Aurora's tongue still felt strange; it was only the second time she'd heard it. How much of the bitterness from then coated it now?
"You are welcome here, but your company is not."
"I know," Aurora said. A knight at her side, old enough to be her father, shifted in protest.
"I will not harm your princess," Maleficent said. She waited for further arguments, but it seemed they had largely been thrashed out ahead of time. With unhappy faces, the knights allowed Aurora to dismount and walk forward alone. Maleficent left her own knights behind to bar the way. Diaval, in raven form, watched over them too from the thorn trees.
They walked through the meadow and the trees together, two rulers of their realms (in name if not in crown). Aurora was silent, and Maleficent was not eager to break the silence first. In truth, she was looking forward to seeing Aurora's face when they emerged from the trees and the Moors that Aurora loved spread out before her view.
So she was surprised when after many measured steps, Aurora glanced back to check that her escort was out of sight beyond the thorn wall, and then turned to Maleficent with a beaming smile.
"Your wings! They're more beautiful even than I imagined. Oh, oh, I'm so happy to see you with them!"
Maleficent blinked. Yes. She owed another debt, beyond the one she paid for with open eyes. "Thank you for my wings, Aurora. I cannot tell you how much they mean to me."
"You don't need to tell me," Aurora said fiercely. "You did tell me."
Maleficent had a strange, absurd wish that Aurora had not had to see Maleficent's wings as Stefan's trophy - even if that meant she had never found them at all. Not because of the indignity of Aurora seeing a part of Maleficent torn off and discarded. But because the sight would have given Aurora pain.
"May I touch them?"
"Yes."
They had stopped in the path she had made, which was mostly mud; the scent of dirt and rain and growth blanketed them, all ordinary and unmagical except for the thorn trees. And Maleficent herself.
Aurora reached her hand out, and Maleficent closed her eyes as Aurora's fingers trailed a primary. She couldn't help shifting a little; she forced herself to still.
... She opened her eyes and was not immediately sure how much time had passed. No, Aurora's gaze was still abstracted, not puzzled, her hand had barely moved - it had been a moment. But sleep was growing bolder where it lay in wait for her, lately.
"Come and see the Moors again," she said. Aurora nodded, bright and happy as if she'd never been betrayed.
"Tell me of the human kingdom," she said, after what seemed like half the Moors' inhabitants had come to be presented to Aurora, as if she were at least as much their guardian as Maleficent was. "I met that boy, Philip, on his travels towards his kingdom. What was his original errand?"
"Ah," Aurora said, and Maleficent rebuked herself for bringing sadness to Aurora's face - then again, she was not quite as sad as might have been feared. "His father sent him to arrange trade, and in the end, I told him that the trade he wanted was not possible."
"Oh?"
"His kingdom sent the iron," Aurora explained. "It made sense to me once I learned. How could the Moors flourish next to an iron-rich kingdom? So he had to send for it from far away." She frowned. "It was already a thing they argued over, my father and his knights. So much iron, so much work done, and then you didn't attack -" she looked apologetically at Maleficent, whose face was impassive - "and it seemed like a bad bargain. And then I found out what Stefan traded in return."
Maleficent waited.
"Tree roots and branches," Aurora said, "from the thorn wall. Every time Stefan's men attacked, they brought back a harvest of thorn-wood from your wall. And first, they cursed that there was life left in it, and they feared it because of how it resisted burning, and then they realised that it could profit them. They sold it to the northern kingdoms, like Philip's kingdom, because they could burn a log from your thorn-trees for days and weeks before the fire would go out."
Oh.
She had made the thorn-trees to withstand; she had given them little knowledge of their own pain. So of course, when branches and roots had been cut down, the connection would linger. And mere fire was not enough to blight faery, not at first. So the humans had burned faery wood until its powers had been exhausted. And it was Aurora who had put a stop to it, not Maleficent.
"Thank you," Maleficent said. "Thank you, Beastie."
The name startled Aurora; her eyes widened, and Maleficent held her breath. Then she glanced away - there were thoughts surely too awkward for either of them to express.
Aurora said, "Maleficent, would you take me flying?"
So she was still Maleficent, then. Well, Aurora had grown beyond need of a fairy godmother.
"Yes."
She had boasted of her wings to Aurora, once. She made the entire flight a boast. She carried Aurora slowly and steadily over the Moors so that Aurora could exclaim over each tree and stream and cave and grove that she remembered, in a slow spiral, and then, when they were far enough from the borders that not even the keenest-eyed human knight would spot them in the sky, she rose, holding Aurora tightly as much to keep her warm as safe. "I can see it all," Aurora said, glorious in her own wonder, and Maleficent laughed with pride and shared joy.
Maleficent unwrapped an arm to point. "Do you remember..."
"Yes," Aurora said, quick and eager, and named the things she remembered until she ran out of breath.
She sighed, a sound almost lost to the wind, and Maleficent decided that that was probably enough for now.
"Do you trust me?" she asked without thinking, and then could have bitten off her own tongue. She didn't know how she'd dared to ask the question, and indeed she'd only meant it about the flight, and the tricks she could show Aurora - there was no way to answer and confront in an utterance everything Aurora might feel about her childhood and the illusion it had turned out to be; the curse and its legacy; her position in the world and what Maleficent meant in relation to that position.
"Yes."
Maleficent dived, her heart in her mouth, the wind stinging salt in her eyes, and Aurora screamed in delight.
They landed gently.
"Thank you," Aurora said, shining with happiness, and Maleficent had to turn away. She changed the subject.
"You told your people that there was something here in the Moors that you came to regain," she said. She had been curious. "Truly, was there a thing you sought, or was that merely the best reason you could expect them to accept?"
"Yes," Aurora said, smiling at her, and - oh. Maleficent realised she had not changed the subject at all. "Maleficent, it's you." And Maleficent had not moved very far away at all - not far enough - because before she could react, Aurora had crossed to her and kissed her.
And she could barely react then, either. She was so tired. Her eyes were closing. No! Why now? Why was her strength failing, in front of the very reminder of why it must not fail? She couldn't sleep, but that was what her will said only, and the world opposed her.
"Maleficent?"
But she was no longer there.
She woke with gritty eyes and immediate grief; there was no merciful moment before remembering why she should not have slept. She had thought she would be able to keep the spell up for years, and she had barely managed two. She felt her magic flowing strongly in her - but she was helpless now to break the curse. There would not be a third time.
"Maleficent?"
Her eyes flew open.
Aurora stood in front of her, flanked by Diaval and several of the Moors' denizens. Concerned, but not frightened. Smiling.
Both of them, awake.
True love's kiss.
"Oh, Beastie," she said. "I'm so glad to see you."
Aurora beamed at her. "Diaval told me what you did to keep off the curse," she said.
Maleficent scowled fiercely. "Before you kissed me?" Diaval flinched back.
"No, after," Aurora said. "I was worried about you. I broke the curse, didn't I?"
There was no tug of magic linking her and Aurora, and she could feel none of her own magic still lingering on the princess. "You did. Well done."
Aurora opened her mouth again, and Maleficent pointedly held up a hand, looking around at their substantial audience. "We will talk more of this anon."
Diaval was smirking. He had always taken her rebukes far too lightly.
She was not sure a private conversation with Aurora would be any more comfortable than a public one - especially with Aurora's hand in hers as she led her aside.
Aurora took the lead in the conversation, too.
"I've missed the Moors so much," she said.
"Ah," Maleficent said. "The mudfights. Thistlewit coming to drag you off home."
"Yes," Aurora said, undeterred. "But also Diaval. And you. I love you."
"Beastie..."
"People find it easy to like me," Aurora said. "That's part of what you did, didn't you? When I was a baby. One of my gifts. And I know you care about me. You always did."
Even when I didn't know it myself.
"I was so hurt because I thought you must have cared so little for me, to lie to me like that, and trick me. Then I realised it wasn't because of how you felt about me at all."
Maleficent waited for the next line in the catalogue of her wrongs, and the next. It had been a long time coming.
It didn't come. "But... Maleficent, do you love me?"
"I cursed you," Maleficent said.
"Yes," Aurora said. "You did. That matters, but not as much as this. Do you love me?"
"Of course I do," Maleficent said, and knew that she spoke of true love, and that she would not stop loving this impossible, bright, brave girl until she closed her eyes for the very last time.
Which would be a very long time from now and not - happily - at the end of their present kiss, which had followed on from the words I do.
And this kiss, unlike the last one, was not the end of anything. It was only the beginning.