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He loved her from the first moment they met, though perhaps it didn’t seem like love at the time.
Diaval didn’t know why he did what he did, why he swore undying fealty. No raven had ever made such a deal before, for faerie or mortal both. But there had never been a Maleficent before, so perhaps his raven’s curiosity got the better of him.
Still, the moment they struck their deal, he felt something. Perhaps not love, perhaps not respect that was owed a faerie. It wasn’t fear, either, because most ravens would scatter with fear. But he didn’t. He stayed.
Maybe the wrong kind of love, he thought. At the right kind of time.
Being human was different, much different, much more complex than being a bird. Birds were simple things when he was a human, but also safer things: he was much safer as a bird than as a human. And switching between black feather wings and long limbs that didn’t obey him was never a pleasant experience. And at first the changes bothered him, especially the way that Maleficent liked to shock him into changes when he’s in the middle of a sentence or mid-step, or to pull him into his human form when he flits through tree branches that he suddenly couldn’t fit through.
Ravens mate for life, you know.
And as a human or as a raven, he did her bidding, because ravens, of all the birds, take debts the most seriously.
Because owls are useless layabouts that never keep their word and hummingbirds are just downright annoying.
As Stefan was crowned and as Stefan took his royal bride and as Stefan’s royal bride grew big with a child, Diaval flit back and forth across the two kingdoms and delivered his news.
He watched, warily, as this strange creature who helped make him got darker and darker, and his only hope was that he could see where he’s flying when she gets to the darkest bit.
“His men build walls, Mistress,” Diaval told Maleficent. “Thick with metal thorns meant to keep out anything that flies.”
He fidgeted. Ten fingers were very strange when you were used to feathers.
“Thorns,” Maleficent pondered. “A curious thing.”
“What is, Mistress?” Diaval asked.
When she turned to meet his gaze, there was a strange green glint in her eye. Diaval wanted to shift back into a raven, but he didn’t stumble.
But Maleficent smiled. “You did well, Diaval. Thank you.”
He didn’t know what he should be thanked for, but he had the sneaking suspicion that she wasn’t about to share her thoughts with him.
So Maleficent called up thorns from beneath the ground, made walls that were just as strong as the ones built by King Henry, and let their walls protect the Moors and its people.
And Diaval watched from the sky, better than any scout in a Watchtower.
Maleficent walked the perimeter almost nightly. Some nights she preferred to walk alone and let him circle overhead, other nights she called him down and magiked him into his human body. Every time it felt a bit easier, every time it felt less like a large stone dropping from his throat to his gut.
He watched with fear tingling down his raven’s spine as she put the fear of the Moors into this little mortal king and his subjects and unleashed a curse to end all curses.
But Diaval continued to serve, because Diaval was a raven, and ravens keep their word.
As the years passed, Diaval took to doing more than just delivering messages. He took to caring after the little hatchling Aurora for himself, because the pixies certainly weren’t doing it. Not because his mistress asked, but because hatchlings should never cry out so much when no one will listen.
“Diaval,” Maleficent called, in a better mood than she had been. It might have been because she had yet again tortured the pixies, but he’d never say it aloud. “You certainly took your time.”
With a tap of her fingers against his wing he sunk into his human form. “It is a long way from here to the cottage, Mistress,” he said.
She didn’t appear to be buying his story, and part of him didn’t want to say that he took extra care with keeping Aurora warm during the winter chill. Up in the attic of that cottage, the air was even colder.
“Just doing as you asked, Mistress,” he said instead. “Hatchlings get cold during the winter, too.”
Maleficent narrowed her eyes, but after a moment of silence she let it slide. Perhaps it was because not weeks ago, the little hatchling had grabbed Maleficent by the horns and had not been afraid, or perhaps the snow that littered the ground made Maleficent just as cold as he was. But, either way, together they walked the length of the lake of the thorn-infested Moor.
“Diaval,” Maleficent asked, months later.
“Yes, Mistress?” He changed and perched on a root above where she rested with her horns carefully propped up in a way that protected her neck.
Maleficent went quiet in a way that he was both familiar with and in a way that set him on edge. It was true that she was prone to bouts of silent contemplation, but not usually when she summoned him and magicked him into a different form. After a long moment, “Did you have children, Diaval?”
The question threw him off. There was something strange in his chest that made his heart burn. “No, Mistress,” he swallowed instead. “I had not yet found a mate.”
She turned a spring flower over in her hand. “Are mates important things to ravens?”
He swallowed again. “For a raven, they are the most important thing.”
The years continued to pass: as Aurora grew, some of the rigidness seemed to leak out of Maleficent. Diaval watched as she gently turned the child back towards the cottage whenever she strayed, caught her from plummeting off a cliff when she fell— with no small amount of squawking from him. Diaval carefully considered why Maleficent could be cruel to others, but always used a gentle hand on him. He didn’t know what it meant in non-bird terms, but you never turned your back on a being that straightened that one tricky wayward feather.
Ravens prided themselves on being honest creatures, you know. Despite their awful reputation and their unfortunate association with the crows. Each and every time some baker’s boy hissed crow at him, some part of Diaval wished he could turn on his own command, as his human form was bigger than the baker’s boy.
He was not a crow, and he told Maleficent as much. “But I’m not a crow, mistress,” he reminded her.
“Are you not?” she asked mildly, plucking a berry out of her hand for her tongue.
His human nose scrunched up. “Heavens, no, crows are by their very nature untrustworthy. And they have ugly nests.”
“I should like to see that,” Maleficent said. “A nest that a raven would call ugly must be a thing indeed.”
Everyone knew Ravens had the best nests. It’s like the knowledge that water was wet and fire was hot and you never built your nest low enough so that the wolves could steal your eggs, it just simply was.
For the next week or so he would pick up twigs and stones, in his human form or any other form and carried them back and line his pockets with them. By Maleficent’s magic, they stayed there when he shifted.
Aurora grew bigger even still, and chased him around a table as they played. She left her window open in the cottage when it was warm enough, and he enjoyed being able to hear her sing, even if she was human.
He endured almost a week of judgmental looks from Maleficent for that.
Diaval started to notice changes: the magic of Maleficent that first turned him human had long been set inside his very bones, but even as a raven, he could still feel the parts inside him that longed to remain human.
It was horrid, being between the sky and the ground.
When he was human he longed to fly, and when he was a raven he longed to be able to speak, and not have it come out as a squawk.
But his gait became less awkward, and his skin didn’t itch so much. He found that it was easier to remain as a human for longer periods of time.
It got even better when Aurora started visiting the Moors.
“Little Diaval,” said Maleficent one morning. “You aren’t still angry at me, are you?”
He was, because his feathers still smelled like angry dog, and angry dog was not a smell a raven was supposed to smell like. Sitting up on a branch, he turned his head away and huffed as well as a bird could huff. Maleficent snapped her fingers and his human body plummeted out of the tree and fell into the creek just below. He sighed, bottom half submerged in water. “Was that fun, too, Mistress?”
A smile pulled at Maleficent’s red lips. “Oh, I’d suppose so.”
He shook his head and shook his very human shoulders as he would have as a raven, and stood up out of the creek. Today it was water, yesterday it had been the mud, even if his clothing was magically maintained, his feathers were getting ruffled.
In an actual sense and a metaphorical one.
But Maleficent was the happiest he’d ever seen, which was something else entirely. It’d been so long since he’d seen her smile. It was toothy and real and not the smile she gave to frighten small little hatchlings. Aurora smiled like sunlight, but Maleficent smiled like something else, but something just as bright.
He didn’t know what it was, but it was something.
He chose, rather than was told, to take one last flight over Stefan’s castle. Aurora’s birthday was drawing near, and with it, Diaval’s anxiety. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, but he heard the smiths working well into the morning.
On what, he didn’t know. The fires burned too hot for him to get close.
But when he returned, everything was wrong. Maleficent paced on the cliff above the Moors, and didn’t shift him when he appeared. He had to flap obnoxiously in her path until she flicked him into his human form. “Mistress?”
“The curse,” Maleficent said, with a wild look. “It won’t reverse. I tried. I tried everything I knew how, and it just won’t let go of that little beastie.”
“You,” Diaval started. “You tried to reverse the curse?”
“Yes!” Maleficent said. “I tried to undo it, I made a mistake, I shouldn’t have, we don’t have time—”
He held out a hand to take her wrist. Gently, patiently, he waited. This was what mortals did to calm, wasn’t it, physical affection? He didn’t know, but he assumed it was like Maleficent stroking his wing. “What can I do?”
For once, she looked unsure. “Stand watch over Aurora,” she said. “Tomorrow she is to go and tell the pixies that she intends to live here. Perhaps if we can keep her out of Stefan’s castle and away from the spindles—”
He didn’t need to hear the rest of what he said. He plummeted off the cliff they had been standing on and let his wings carry him towards the cottage.
But Aurora was nowhere to be found. The cottage stood empty, the insides turned out, flour dusted across the floor. Not only was Aurora gone, but the pixies were as well.
He flew in large, searching circles, looking for anything. He asked the frogs in the marsh if they had seen anything, and the lone deer in the trees, he looked for hints of pixie magic. He circled around King Stefan’s castle but could hear nothing but the hammer of smiths against metal and the panic of men. By the time he felt himself being called by Maleficent it was almost sunset, and he’d wasted almost the entire day.
But when he arrived, Maleficent was not alone. She stood in a clearing with a rider laying atop his horse.
Maleficent. Maleficent with the unconscious prince.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Maleficent said to him as he hovered.
He squawked indignantly.
She turned to look up at him and said, “I need a horse.”
And by nature ravens and horses don’t particularly have the best relationship. It’s not as bad as ravens and dogs, and certainly not as bad as ravens and cats. But a horse is very different from a human, and at least he was used to his human form.
A horse was as fast as he could fly with his wings, which he may have enjoyed.
He’d never admit it. Ever. He’d die from embarrassment first.
“Faster, Diaval,” Maleficent urged.
If he’d been human he would have told her to just make him something very big with wings instead of having to navigate rocky road, but the best he could get was snorting through his nose.
He ran as fast as he could take them. It wasn’t fast enough. When they reached Stefan’s castle Maleficent was off his back and shifted him with her magic faster than he could fully stop his horses’ legs.
“This isn’t your fight, Diaval,” Maleficent said, bitterly.
“Oh, of course it isn’t,” he bit, angry. “‘I need you, Diaval’, ‘I can’t do this without you, Diaval’,” he mocked.
He stomped his very human foot and marched after her into the castle, because his mistress was his mistress and if anyone was going to pluck her eyes out with a raven’s beak, it was going to be him.
“I can hear you,” she said from ahead of him.
He really hated faeries.
As they made their way through the castle, Maleficent went first while Diaval guided the young prince. It was a shame that it was more difficult to turn a human into something else than it was to turn something else into a human, because his life would have been made infinitely better had he been able to tuck the prince inside his pocket.
But, alas, he was just a raven with a human’s shell half the time.
They hid behind a curtain as the young prince found sleeping Aurora, waited patiently for True Love’s Kiss. Diaval was sure that it would work, that it must work, because Maleficent had never smiled before Aurora started spending time in the Moors.
But it didn’t work.
Diaval swallowed the stone in his throat, but he couldn’t help but remember taking care of Aurora almost from her first minute, from her first breath. Raven hatchlings fell from the nest all the time, but it was never the end. The world went on, even if the hatchling didn’t.
Somehow he doubted that Maleficent would go on if her hatchling didn’t.
But then Maleficent bent and kissed Aurora on her temple after murmuring some words that his human ears couldn’t hear, and she awoke. Wetness gathered in his eyes that he ignored. Ravens didn’t know what tears were, and he was still, somehow, a raven.
He shifted back into his smaller form to fly ahead of them and keep watch, because it felt more useful than trailing behind them.
He lost some time as a Dragon. He remembered the net crashing down upon his mistress, he remembered screaming with his bird’s lungs, helpless and unable to do anything more than irritate unfortunate knights. And then he remembered magic and being big.
Big was hard. Big was very hard.
And the first thing he did was bash his head on the ceiling, there had been that, too.
Oh and also the fire coming out of his throat.
But really he lost the time between the fire-breathing and smashing and Maleficent later picking him up as a raven and healing his wounds, tucking him so that he could perch on her shoulder and sleep. Because being a dragon was hard.
But fun, he’d like to do it again. Maybe with less spears?
When Diaval did wake, it must have been days later. He was in his human form and his arms had new scars on them, after what he suspected must have been some strong healing.
He limped over to the creek that Aurora had flung mud at the faeries in, and looked at his human appearance. The scars were not the first he’d ever had, and he suspected they wouldn’t be the last.
“Diaval,” Maleficent called. “You certainly took your time.”
She’d said the same thing years ago, he thought fondly. He could hear her, but not see her. Looking around, he said, “Just doing what you asked, Mistress.”
He stood up from the riverbank and looked up just as she landed.
“Wings,” he said, dumbly.
He could vaguely, very vaguely, remember wings. He’d known she’d once had them, and that she needed someone who could fly, but. He’d never imagined that her wings would be as beautiful as they were.
“Oh, these,” Maleficent complained. “I don’t remember them being so fussy.”
There was something different about his Mistress, and it had nothing to do with the wings re-attached to her shoulders. They were dark, not quite as dark as his, the color of tree bark and end-of-autumn leaves. Diaval had a strange urge to put his hands through them.
Which was odd. That was not an urge for a raven to have, even in a human form. But he did.
When they had first met, Maleficent had dressed differently. More natural, not as dark, not as severe. Now it seemed to be an odd combination of both. Dark clothing, but she had unwrapped her horns and with it her hair.
It made her look decades younger.
But her wings were filthy, as if they hadn’t been cleaned in years. And from what little Aurora had said, that was a very real possibility. Diaval swallowed, “Here, mistress.”
He gestured to the tree roots, and limped over to where he might sit down and Maleficent could sit in front of him. He alone knew what disturbed feathers would feel like, it was an itch that wouldn’t be scratched, and Maleficent looked like she desperately needed them clean.
He was a servant, after all.
It took some patience, but she obliged him. He started with the smallest feathers underneath the largest, and Maleficent relaxed by leaps and bounds the moment he did. He asked quietly. “The king?”
“Dead,” Maleficent said, just as quiet.
He assumed that Aurora would be nearby.
At her answer, however, he didn’t say anything. He just kept his hands busy, going slow, being gentle with every feather and smoothing them out when he was done.
“Aren’t you going to ask?”
He shrugged. “Does it matter to anyone but you?”
She smiled, pleased. “No,” she said. “No, it does not.”
There had once been a time when he’d thought it strange, his position in life. He was a raven occasionally turned human, though for many years he spent more time with feet and thumbs than he had with wings. His only hatchling was a human child that had charmed her way into the Moors.
The person that he pledged his life to now had wings of her own again; she might not even have need of him any longer.
And that hurt far more than he had expected.
“I’m sorry I kept you all those years,” Maleficent whispered while his hands worked. “You were lonely, I could tell.”
Preening was easy as a raven, but with his stick human fingers he had to be extra careful. “It wasn’t so bad,” he allowed, his face dark with concentration. “I enjoyed being that dragon, I’d like to do that again.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Maleficent smile.
“Are you going to leave?” she asked after a time.
He scrunched his nose. What were the chances that Maleficent would turn him into something unpleasant if he just dumped her into the creek beside them and let these wings clean themselves? Proportionally they were much bigger than his were when he was a raven. It was going to take hours. “I wasn’t planning on it, Mistress.”
She turned her head away. Diaval couldn’t see the expression she wore. Was it irritated? Hopeful? He didn’t know. “You could, you know,” she finally said, in an offhanded way. “Leave. You served me moderately well, I would release you if you asked it of me.”
His fingers stilled in her feathers. They bristled at the loss of his touch, in a way that Diaval knew Maleficent must feel in her very spine. Wings worked like that.
His debt was paid. He could go. He could return to his hunting grounds in the north and try to find what might remain of his family.
But he looked at Aurora across the lake, and at the way that Maleficent wouldn’t actually turn to look at him. He could no more leave than he could rip his own wings off. “And if I’d like to stay?”
Maleficent did turn toward him then, pulling her wings out of his hands. He wished he could have the strength to look her in the eye, but he knew they were probably glinting gold. And if he saw that gold, he would be lost. “Why?”
He pulled what appeared to be a spider’s web carefully from a wayward feather and tucked said feather into place with all the others. “It’s a raven thing,” he said, trying for serious but falling miserably into sarcasm. “Very serious Raven’s business.”
“Ah,” Maleficent said, turning away from him again so that he could have access to more of her wingspan to clean. “That mate business again, I see. Indeed, that’s very serious. You should get to that immediately.”
“Heavens, no,” Diaval said automatically, with a frown, going back to pulling a twig out from where it was tangled with a feather. “Ravens mate for life, didn’t you know? Why on earth would I need to go looking for another one.”
He froze.