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The problem started, as usual, with the three fairies.
Okay, perhaps it was unfair of him to blame the three little multicolored buggers on this particular occasion, but Diaval had evidence that they were the scourge of his entire lifetime.
It was just that they were completely — hilariously — incapable of doing their jobs. He’d laugh if it wasn’t just utterly depressing.
He was a raven and he knew how to better take care of a human child than three fairies, and that just seemed all sorts of backward.
Maleficent and Diaval spent their days wandering the distance between the Moors and the Cottage. Sometimes Maleficent sent him to keep an eye on Stefan, but at night, Diaval returned to the little child and gave her the care she would have otherwise received from any halfway adequate caretaker.
But that did not prevent Maleficent from having her own bit of fun at the faerie’s expense.
Once she’d frozen all the water at the bottom of their wash buckets so when one of them upturned the bucket over their heads, having no magic to keep themselves clean, a slab of ice fell out.
Usually it hit them right on their empty heads.
But this time, in particular, was the most, well, malevolent.
From out on their seat on an old Moors tree that had somehow made it’s way this far north near the cottage, Maleficent twiddled her long pale fingers and summoned a storm inside the cottage.
Diaval would have raised concern for the hatchling, but before he could even open his mouth, he noticed that the storm was only on the lower level. He knew very well that toddler Aurora was in her crib on the second floor.
Ever a happy little hatchling, ever a smile on her pretty face.
But Maleficent blew a storm with her lips and weaved little trails of golden magic with her fingers, and eventually the screams of terror could be heard floating over the hillside.
When she was done laughing, Maleficent turned to him with that golden glint in her eye. “Oh come on,” she said. “That’s funny.”
Diaval didn’t laugh. He crossed his arms and asked, “Mistress?”
“Hmm?” Maleficent said. She paid him no mind, but looked back at the cottage.
Diaval paused, uneasy. “There’s something I need to know.”
He couldn’t reconcile the two Maleficents that he knew of: even as a raven he had heard of the Protector of the Moors, and he assumed that that Maleficent had been the one that he had made his bargain with.
But this Maleficent, the one that placed curses on human nestlings, that was a different story entirely.
“Really?” Maleficent said, finally looking at him with an appraising eye. “And what is that?”
He tilted his head toward the cottage and nodded his human’s head just a bit, like a raven might do with his beak. “When are you planning on revoking the curse?”
Maleficent’s eyes darkened. “Who said I was planning on revoking it?”
It was a very similar tone to the one she had used with Stefan and his Queen, but Diaval knew enough of Maleficent to know that her full anger had not been awoken— it might have been from teasing the faeries.
But Diaval tilted his head, a knowing look on his face. “Mistress.”
The frown on Maleficent’s red-rose lips deepened even further, and she turned her head away from him.
But Diaval wasn’t done quite yet. “May I speak freely?”
Maleficent cut him off immediately. “No.”
He saw the movement in her hand before she had really even moved, so when Maleficent raised her hand to touch two fingers to his nose to shift him, he was quick enough to catch her and prevent her from doing it.
Oh no, Diaval thought, seeing the dangerous glint in her eye. This wasn’t ‘you are irritating me you insipid little bird, Diaval’. This was ‘I will make you beg for the curtesy of death, Stefan’.
Diaval swallowed, suddenly terrified, suddenly afraid that he’d spend the rest of his short raven’s life as something unpleasant to be eaten by something even more unpleasant.
But he swallowed that fear, because for once, he had something to use his human’s mouth for. “Anytime you don’t like what I have to say, you change me.”
And then he was a bird, because apparently catching the sleeve of her robe had not been enough.
He squawked indignantly and flapped his wings.
“What a brilliant observation,” Maleficent said.
The next few days, Diaval spent flying between Maleficent and Stefan’s castle. It was even more boring than usual, considering that all Stefan did these days was speak quietly with his council.
He told Maleficent this, at the lake by the Moors some nights after tormenting the faeries.
She shifted him a bit more gently than she usually did, letting him hover for a moment before sinking into his human-half. “Well?”
“Nothing of import, Mistress,” he said, brushing down his coat and his pants. Flying and not being able to preen afterwards was a nasty business. “The King is setting up sentries around the castle, and gathering more soldiers.”
Maleficent’s thorn wall would keep out all but the largest of armies, but still. The knowledge that at the very least plans were being made was important enough to think on.
“I see,” Maleficent said. “I must say I am surprised. I thought Stefan would have more anger to spit out.”
“Mistress?” Diaval asked, confused.
The words he didn’t say were: surely you don’t want another war.
But Maleficent just stared at the lake, in her own world. Diaval was left to wonder at her designs, and which version of Maleficent was the ruling half now. Was it the one that saved him? Or the one that tortured faeries?
Were they even different from one another?
But for a few moments it appeared that Maleficent had forgot that he was even present, so he cautiously asked, “Mistress?”
“It is late, Diaval,” Maleficent said finally. “I have no more need of you until the morning, you may go.”
Diaval nodded and gave a slight bow. “Goodnight, Mistress.”
She stepped toward him with two fingers of her right hand raised, ready to shift him.
“If you wouldn’t mind,” Diaval said quickly, not moving to grab her hand again. “But I’d like to spend the night in this form, if it so please you.”
Maleficent’s hand paused mid-flick, staring at him as if she could see through him. “Very well,” she said, after a long breath of silence.
And that was that. Maleficent turned and left, presumably to go to the place that she slept at night that Diaval did not know where it was or how to get to it, and he was left standing alone next to the lake.
But he looked forward to the peace he might get at night as a man. He was tiring of the ravens and even the crows, though he shouldn't care what they think, bickering angrily with each other when he came near in his raven form.
He circled the edge of the lake, staying where he could always see the water. No one bothered him, not even the birds.
Magic had shifted him from raven to man, and back again, but what was he? Was he a raven that just happened to spend part of his time as a man, or was he a man that had just started out as a raven?
Was he some sort of man-bird-thing, or just a shapeshifter in general?
“Why,” Diaval complained, dropping a sky stone back to the water. “Man-problems are too big and raven problems are too small.”
But even as he said it, a fox and two of her young pups scampered across his path.
His human form was lanky and huge, compared to a raven. Heavens, even his voice seemed strange clawing out of a human’s throat, but the fox sensed him.
She stopped in her tracks, her young pups hid behind her legs. She turned her head toward him, lifting one ear and then the other.
Diaval froze.
Yes, fine, foxes were not quite dogs and therefore he did not harbor the same hatred for them just out of principle— he’d fought off the urge to kick a dog once or twice. But still, they were cousins, even distant cousins.
So Diaval froze, same as the fox. When she turned her head, so did he.
She sniffed her tiny nose in his direction.
“What,” Diaval asked. “Never seen a raven-man before?”
The fox sneezed at him, shaking her head.
She had been frightened of him, before, by her stance and the way that she seemed ready to run at any moment, or turn and protect her pups, but now he was being ignored, not worth her time.
And it irritated him how often that was happening lately. Ravens were never ignored, not if they didn’t feel like it.
“Well, go on,” Diaval said. “Shoo.”
Her smallest pup lingered while she moved on, and chirped at him before scampering off.
He heard them long after they disappeared.
Even foxes didn’t know what to do with him, and they were supposed to be oh-so-clever. There was no hope for him.
“I don’t know what I am, either,” said Diaval to the empty trees. “Though to be fair, I don’t know what much of anything is, anymore.”
The trees had no wisdom to offer him.