If you recognize this from other websites, you are absolutely correct, I'm crossposting. I hope everyone finding this for the first time enjoys it!


La Belle Dame Sans Merci

She is beautiful. She is so lovely that the limbs of the trees themselves seem to bend towards her, reaching to brush her golden hair. She is so lovely that the sunlight falls on her like hot longing tears, that the flowers yearn upwards to be crushed under her feet.

When Maleficent discovers her in the forest beyond the borders of the kingdom, all the breath goes out of her for a terrible moment. The girl is standing at the bank of a river, black with mud up to her ankles and red up to her knuckles with sweet berries, and in the wake of her all-annihilating loveliness Maleficent feels horrifically mortal. The queen of darkness pulls back deeper into her familiar shadows, watching the girl as barely more than a pair of slitted eyes from the underbrush.

The three meddlers gifted her with beauty in her royal crib, Maleficent is fully aware. She had thought she was prepared for it, but the reality—it is almost too much to bear. The girl has all the grace of a fairy, and all the glittering ephemeral magnetism of a mortal. To a creature of cool fire and storm and darkness like Maleficent, the effect is as devastating as it is exotic.

There is an army waiting for the snap of her fingers, but Maleficent does not call them. This is only a question of beauty, she thinks to herself, and fading mortal beauty at that. It will lose its shimmer quickly, like all baubles do. One merely need handle a sapphire for a moment before losing interest in its predictable shine.

She dissolves and reforms out of the shadows, making herself the guise of a human woman—a noblewoman perhaps, in rich traveling clothes. A cloak and surcoat, a wimple. She examines her hands, white now, and her skirts, the dim grey of storm clouds. This should do.

"Young lady," she calls, stepping through the brush and onto the opposite bank, "young lady, could you spare a moment for an unfortunate traveler?"

The girl startles, raspberries tumbling from between her sticky hands. "Oh," she gasps. Her visible fear both mollifies and puzzles Maleficent. She is only a woman, to the naked eye. There ought not to be anything fey left in her appearance.

"Young lady," she says, shifting closer, "are you well?"

"Oh, yes, Madame," the girl says. Her hands are twisting the handle of her straw basket. "Quite well—thank you. It's just that—I'm afraid I'm not supposed to talk to strangers."

Of course, Maleficent thinks sourly. If she had been running around the towns these last sixteen years, it wouldn't have taken the better part of two decades to locate her.

"Perhaps," Maleficent says, delicately, "an exception could be made for a humble misfortunate such as myself…?"

The girl bites her lovely pink lip. Her muddy toes push divots into the soft earth. "Of course," she says. "These woods must be awfully confusing for a gentle lady. And—" she adds, peering up to search the sky, "night is coming soon. You must be very frightened."

Maleficent bristles against the supposition that anything in these woods might be half as terrible as she. But she is playing a mortal, she remembers just in time. To mortals, apparently nearly every thing is fearful.

The girl takes the hem of her skirt and tucks it into her bodice, making a swoop and puff of cloth that bares her dimpled knees, without the slightest apparent concern for who might see them. She sets her basket down on the bank and steps into the water, holding her hands out to Maleficent. The water is clear and fast and shallow, barely lapping over the swell of the girl's shapely calf.

"What are you doing?" Maleficent asks.

The girl stretches her hands out further, sticky red fingers glinting in the sunlight that breaks down over the bend of the river. "The nearest village is back the way I came from," she says, "so you'll need to cross the river."

It takes perhaps a moment longer than it should for Maleficent to remember that a human woman would not be able to step across the top of the water, which was what she had been just about to do. The girl, noticing her hesitation, smiles encouragingly.

"Your fine clothes shouldn't be subjected to so much water," she says. "I'll carry you across, it's no trouble."

"You?" Maleficent says, eyeing the girl's willowy limbs. This princess is going to carry her?

"I think I am stronger than you suspect," the girl says, with a glint of mischief in her eye. "I carry the flour from the village to the cottage by myself, and I chop the firewood as well. Gentle lady, you might be surprised by what it takes to live alone in these woods."

"You live alone, do you?" Maleficent says, glancing between the rapid water and the girl's waiting arms.

"With my three aunts," she answers easily. "They're very kind women, but a bit difficult sometimes."

Maleficent thinks of pearls tumbling from the mouths of peasant women, of golden sandals and enchanted slippers. The self-styled mistress of evil, goblin queen, lady of darkness, is not by any means an agent of chaos. There is an order to these thing, between disguised fairies and secret princesses, between acts of kindness and acts of retribution. Aurora's father invited disaster by snubbing one fairy. With her gentleness, his daughter has invited something else entirely.

Hesitantly, Maleficent takes her hand and allows herself to be pulled into the arms of the princess, who hefts her with a soft grunt and then grins. It is very strange. Maleficent swings her own, now sticky, hand around the back of the girl's neck and grasps her shoulder, feeling small and delicate in a way she never expected to. Her traveling cloak trails the water below them, along with one corner of Aurora's skirt that has come loose from the knot, leaving a tracery of ripples in its wake.

No one has ever dared to hold the lady of darkness like this before. It would be laughable. She is not the kind of fairy that goes genteelly hawking with a retinue of ladies, or dances in lavish halls deep into the night. She is not that kind of fairy at all. But the powerful arms underneath her carry a soft echo of what it might be like to leave her staff in the tower of her castle and come down to a world of easy smiles and gentle comforts. All of that perfumed world is held inside of this girl, who chops firewood and carries flour and wades into rivers with her skirts around her thighs.

The water splashes around them. The girl slides carefully through it, and although Maleficent is braced for her to stumble, she never does.

"See?" the girl says, "Nothing to fear."

Maleficent looks up into her heart-shaped face, watches the quirk of her pretty dark brows. The sun seems dim in comparison, as if it is setting just to make room in the sky for her.

At last they arrive at the far side. The girl kneels on the embankment and allows Maleficent to climb free, steadying one hand on the surprisingly sturdy shoulder. She takes up her basket again and seems to be looking Maleficent over, lips pursed. She reaches out and pinches the corners of Maleficent's wimple, tugging it just so.

"There," she says, setting her hands on her hips. It seems a strangely maternal gesture, for someone who has never known her own mother.

"Thank you," says Maleficent, who is too much a fairy to let a selfless deed go unremarked upon. "One good turn deserves another, I suppose. Is there anything I can do for you, my girl?"

"Rose, please," the girl says, dipping into a curtsy that would no doubt look more graceful with the remaining folds of her skirt unbunched. "Briar Rose."

If Maleficent didn't already know her birth name, she would be a bit miffed. Trust those goody goodies to outfit the girl with the protection of a false name. As it is, she still finds herself displeased at the revelation. Had they even told the girl what her Christian name had been? To deny a creature the knowledge of its own name was a cruel thing. Even the birds and the stones knew their names. Maleficent is herself no stranger to all manner of cruelties, but this one—it sits heavily on her, unreasonably distressing.

"You needn't give me anything, Madame," Briar Rose says, as she untucks the wet hems of her skirt.

"But you must want something," Maleficent insists, catching the girl's chin with one finger. "It matters not what. Gold? Jewels? A handsome young man to be yours?"

All things, of course, which could easily be made hers with the simple revelation of a lineage kept overlong. It benefitted Maleficent well enough to send her home to her impotent parents. She had always planned to take her vengeance in the full watch of the kingdom.

Briar Rose turns a shade of red that manages to look as endearing as it does silly, as she tucks her head into the shawl at her cheek. "A young man? My aunts would never allow that," she says, but with a wistfulness that belies some secret dreams.

Something curls in Maleficent's belly, like a serpent in the seas. The princess and her dashing knight, her long awaited betrothed—the idea sours everything it touches.

"Riches, then," Maleficent says, glad to leave the prospect of husbands behind. "Lovely dresses? Golden rings?"

Briar Rose laughs. "Oh no," she says, "what would I do with those? I have enough to get by."

Maleficent brushes dust from her silk sleeves, her lips thinner even than usual. "What then?" she says. The longer she stands here, talking with the girl, the more heavily the future weighs on her. There is a spindle in the castle still, bricked up behind a forgotten wall. It is the last spindle in the kingdom. With every second that passes, the spindle grows sharper in her mind.

Briar Rose plucks a berry from her basket and offers it to her companion, another unasked gesture of kindness. Humans who eat fruit from a fairy's hand are doomed to serve fairy until the Day of Judgment. Maleficent regards the thing in the girl's hand, and wonders if fairies who eat the fruit of a human's hand are likewise entrapped.

She accepts the berry and crushes it between her teeth, popping the multitude of tiny seeds concealed there. It is not as sweet as the fruit of her homeland, but the clear pleasure on Briar Rose's face as she swallows it fills Maleficent with all the heat and ripeness of fruits picked underneath a sunless sky.

"I guess what I would like," Briar Rose says, licking her fingertips, "is for you to tell me your name."

All at once, cold rage sweeps through Maleficent. Has she been taken for a fool by this fragile mortal insect? Had the girl known the whole time what manner of woman she was carrying? What else could she mean but to discover the most carefully kept secret of a fairy's life?

The girl's eyes fly wide open, her heel skating back over the leaves of the forest floor. "Oh, Madame," she says, "I don't mean any disrespect by it! Of course you don't have to tell me if you don't want to. I only meant to—I had hoped I might call you a friend." She pulls her shawl tighter around herself, eyes fixed on the ground. "If I've upset you, please, think no more of it. I've never—I've never had a friend before, I must be ignorant."

Slowly, the cold fire in Maleficent's chest dies down to ash and collapses. No, she couldn't have known what she was asking. If she had known what she was talking to, she would never have remained at the river. She would have run. Surely her aunts must have warned her as much.

"No," the fairy says, after a moment, "I offered you whatever your heart desired. If you would like to know my name, I can provide it easily enough."

Briar Rose sags, relief plain on her features.

"I have a secret name," Maleficent tells her, "and I have a common name. One you may call me by, the other you must never speak. Do you understand?"

The girl nods. She's leaning closer, coming up off her heels in her eagerness to hear.

The forest seems to hold its breath. Maleficent steps forward and cups the curve of the girl's jaw in one hand, bringing her lips down to the pink shell of an ear. She can almost smell the heat that comes up off the fragile human flesh, a body which burns its brief life out like a roaring fire.

She whispers one name, and then the other. Briar Rose sighs gently at the sound.

"Maleficent," she says, her eyes bright. "I'm so happy to meet you."

The brightness of her eyes, the perfect earnestness of her voice—Maleficent has never experienced anything quite like the confluence of sensations that make up Briar Rose. She has spent the last fifteen years brooding in the stormy tower of her castle, thinking of little else but the indignity king Stephan had done her. In the span of less than an hour, she has experienced more disparate emotions than nearly two decades previously have afforded her.

"Will you walk with me?" Briar Rose asks her. "It is getting late, and it's such a long way. You could be much more lost than you are even now."

If there was a point to this venture—perhaps to prove what a disposable pawn the lost princess was, against the greater scheme of Maleficent's wounded pride—it has long been lost in the tumult of the girl's unexpected kindness. There is no point in trudging through these woods like a dreary mortal. It could only serve to further muddle Maleficent's mind.

"Don't you need to be going home?" Maleficent asks.

"I can still make it back by dark, if I lead you to the road. My aunts say the roads can be dangerous for a woman alone, but I've never had any trouble with them, so I don't see why you would."

"If you insist," Maleficent says, not quite understanding why she says it.

Briar Rose takes her hand, naively ignorant of the proper respect owed by an apparent peasant woman to an apparent noble woman, and leads her down the grassy path. Of course they are both royalty in their own ways—this is why Maleficent allows the touch to stand, and nothing else.

"I hope," Briar Rose says, her fingers squeezing tight, "that you might allow me to call you a friend, after all."

The bells of the white flowers that grow along the path swing delicately in the wake of their passage. A web of loose golden hair is tangled over the girl's heavy locks, mussed from the leaves she ducks between, as bright in the sun as a halo. It comes over Maleficent in a slow wave, the realization that the princess's loveliness is not that of the common sapphire. It is the loveliness of the sun coming over the canopy of the forest, a thing in constant motion, never quite the same one day to another.

And Maleficent realizes how it is that fairies come to covet human beings.