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The first winter was the worst.
The pain was still new, ever-present. She had closed her wounds, but her magic could only do so much. There was only so much that could be healed over missing limbs, burned and twisted as the wounds were. She could make things grow, make things whole, but not this. Not something bone-deep.
As winter set in and frost dusted the world, the cold, too, settled in her bones. She hadn't realized how much she'd relied on her feathers for warmth. She'd often held her wings like a cloak when she was cold, covering her shoulders and brushing against her arms. Her feathers, though most were long and tough to meet the wind, were soft and downy where her wings met her body. She could not remember a day when her back had been cold. Her wings had kept out the worst of the wind. Without them, she was left bare and naked and vulnerable.
She took to wearing heavier clothing where once she had worn loose dresses. Furs, leathers, layered robes. They were a poor replacement for the heft and warmth of her wings. She did not suppose the difference would improve much with warmer weather. She would still miss the weight.
One day, she found herself wandering the wood. The world was frozen, frost crisping every blade of grass and gleaming one very stone. The crystalline ponds and creeks were rimed over, still as a dead thing's heart. No one crossed her path. Many of the Folk were hibernating, taking refuge in the cold in a tangle of roots or a bed of dry flowers, waiting to rise with next year's sprouts and a brighter angle of sunlight, but that was far from the only reason for her solitude. Her people avoided her, these days. She did not blame them.
Her scars burned in the cold that day. Walking hurt, the skin and muscle on her back stretching and pulling against itself with every step, but sitting still let the cold build its nest inside her, so she limped through her withered, frostbitten kingdom.
She shivered, the movement sending another bolt of pain across her back. She clenched her teeth and cursed herself for showing the expression. The ache was constant. She would grow used to it. Perhaps it would fade.
She didn't expect that it would.
There was little news of her enemies. Stefan's kingdom was bound by winter, doors tight shut; they made no further move against the Moors, and their own activity had slowed to nothing. Diaval had nothing to report. Maleficent had nothing to fight.
Days like this, she found it hard to care. She was patient. One day she would avenge herself. But that desire, too, had dulled to an ache.
She would find her rage again, perhaps, in the spring. Right now she was cold and tired.
Suddenly she gasped and crumpled as muscles spasmed along her back, twitching like maggots in a corpse. Everything from her shoulders to lower back was aflame, sharp and twisting with agony. She gasped aloud and clamped her teeth shut to keep it from turning into a sob, claws scratching for purchase in the frozen ground. To her horror, she found hot tears dripping from her eyes and into the frost.
She cursed Stefan, herself, the cold. She'd been a fool to go out walking. She should have known it would get this bad. She ought to have stayed in her nest, lined with mosses and old feathers, even if those old feathers (all she had left of herself) sometimes made her want to burn the world down. Let the cold take her, let her curl up and wither like the husk of an insect. The cold was better than this kind of stomach-lurching anguish.
For long moments she lay there, gasping for breath, half-prone and half-kneeling with her arms braced against a root. Eventually, though who could say after how long, the blinding pain faded to something she could think through. Absently, she realized that she'd dropped her staff. With a trembling hand, she reached out to grasp it. Haltingly, lurching like a revenant, she used it to pull herself to her feet. Another bolt of pain lanced through the stumps of her wings and she shuddered but remained standing.
She wasn't certain she could make it back to her cave in this state, but she could make it back to the glade. She had hidden places in the great standing stone where she kept things, stores of medicine for when she had no strength left for healing magic. She could rest on her throne, and…she supposed someone would find her. The thought gave her pause: She did not want pity. But it was better than weeping here on the ground.
Slowly, she limped back to the glade. The cold was cruel, prickling at her scars like a stone knife, though at least the wind had some mercy and did not blow. Still, she ought to make a fur cloak for when it did. Perhaps, when she regained her strength, she might find a dead wolf somewhere in the wood.
It was by luck alone that she did not slip on the roots and stones that formed a footbridge across the water and into the glade. As she reached her place, a raven sailed through the still, crisp air to perch on the gnarled roots that made her dead throne. She winced as she settled creakily onto it. For a moment she resented that Diaval should see her like this: Tottering and aching like a crone, when she should have been in her prime! She knew better than to think that he would say anything of it, but the witness was humiliating. Her face burned with more than cold.
He tilted his head at her, his black eyes large and shining. Did he worry for her? The thought made her head rush with a sickening fever. She could not stomach pity.
She did not change him. She did not wish to speak.
He croaked at her, but she only waved him away. In two flaps, he took off and glided away. Her posture relaxed even as something hollow gnawed at her gut.
Her scars ached. Her back ached. Her head ached. She passed some amount of time in a fog of pain, knowing she should do something about it—hadn't she come here to fetch medicine?—but too tired to stand again.
Diaval returned to his perch beside her, something grasped in his beak. He waited for her response; recieving none, he hopped from foot to foot, then cawed faintly through whatever it was he was holding. Finally, he gently set it in her lap.
She stared at it blankly for a moment before registering it as a small, tightly-woven basket of vines and bark, filled with water. It must have taken an awkward angle to hold it in one's beak. She reached for it. It sloshed slightly, but the few drops of spilled water didn't seep through her hide dress. She lifted the cup and drank quickly, relief spreading through her. The pain didn't abate—how could it?—but she felt slightly less violently awful.
Diaval was a good bird, she reflected. Faithful, charming. Sometimes she wanted to hate him for those beautiful black wings, but she couldn't quite bring herself to. She held too much hatred for men to spare any for birds.
He stared at her expectantly as if he wanted to say something. She rolled her eyes and turned away.
Either satisfied or finished with her, the raven hopped to the ground and began to turn over small stones, searching for a meal of his own. Still, he did not leave the glade. The tapping of his beak and scratching of his claws in the frosty ground was enough to break the icy silence as she breathed through the pain and cold.