Note: Jaunice, the Yellow Fairy's name, is from an Old French world for yellow. It is also associated with jealousy, which seemed to fit her, and with jaundice.
I should mention Maleficent's relationship with Aurora is more complex than it is in the show.
X
Two nights before, Maleficent watched as Rumplestiltskin—or Gold, as he was known in this world—created her mask. There was paper, of course. Paper that had yellowed and aged under the Dark One's touch. The ink on the many pieces—some of them had been cut from books, all had been written over in the Dark One's fine hand in languages she didn't know (assuming they were languages)—had faded as well. The strange markings looked like a fine web of wrinkles against the golden sheets.
"It's not a young mask," he told her, by way of explanation. He folded the sheets together deftly, adding other bits and pieces as he went. A scrap of oak leaf, pale as autumn sunlight, joined the fiery red of maple. Streaks of earth lined the eyes. Rumplestiltskin—Gold—inspected his work and nodded, satisfied. "It needs to remind you of what it is," he said. Pointing to the marks around the eyes, he added, "And you need to remember how the mask sees the world."
That was the heart of this spell, the advantage it had over simple transformation. It didn't trap the wearer. Rumplestiltskin, Maleficent thought, would turn to ashes anything that tried to do that to him. But, it tugged and reminded. It resisted—enough for the wearer to feel but not enough to stop you if you pushed against it—all the small choices that didn't fit the disguise.
Really, it was like a pair of stiletto heels and a ball gown. Those didn't keep you from running laps, turning cartwheels, or doing anything else you shouldn't at a ball (not that Maleficent hadn't loved some of the wild flights of fancy in the library's romance section, but those were written by people who had no idea how difficult it was to get in and out of a hooped skirt). They just made it very uncomfortable it you tried and might trip you up if you pushed it.
Although maybe she shouldn't use that comparison around Rumplestiltskin. He had his own mask to make, after all. Then again, she remembered some of his clothes from the Enchanted Forest. He knew all about tightly fitted leather and heels, not that he'd ever had any trouble prancing about like a madman in them, an advantage imps had over fallen fairies.
He handed Maleficent the finished mask and she put it on. She felt it against her skin, dry and stiff, the way the face of the woman she'd become should be. Rumplestiltskin smiled at his handiwork and produced a mirror. Maleficent looked back at a tall, lean ancient with a leathery face that must have spent decades being aged by long hikes through fair weather and foul—and who could still leave men half her age in the dust as she stomped on. Tough as old boots, Maleficent thought.
Looking through it, she saw the world in terms of leaves and roots, fruits and flowers. She could imagine walking over the ground thinking of whether soil was rich or poor, acid or base. She thought of whether it was too cold for the earthworms to be awake and crawling through it. Could the roots breathe or were they being choked in rocks and clay?
And the secrets those plants held, those mattered to her as well. She thought how nightshade could stop a heart or save it, how chamomile could settle a stomach and St. John's Wart could ward off the more interfering varieties of fairy.
All things she already knew. Plants and living things were part and parcel of a fairy's work. But, they were pushed to the forefront of her mind, and the paper seemed to have words mixed in as well. She thought of vascular plants and the peculiar reproductive ways of ferns in their haploid and diploid forms. . . .
Gold—it was easier, wearing the mask, to think of him as Gold—looked smug. "I cut a few corners from some very learned texts," he said. "Sold by the word, judging by their weight. The scholars here write more and say less than anyone I know. It ought to be enough to get you by. Just don't get too caught up in your own brilliance. It gives you the way a botanist speaks in this world and the way they think, but it will give you very little that you don't already know."
"I've heard scholars argue," Maleficent said. "A few tirades about university politics and I should be convincing enough. What about you?"
His grin turned wolfish. "Don't worry about me. Now, do you remember your name?"
"Professor Longneaux—isn't the name a bit obvious?"
"Not to most of the people here."
Most. Not all. The Dark One was never careless with words, but she didn't have any choice but to accept the name he'd given her. Since her most famous act was to curse a certain princess the day she was named, she was sure this was his idea of a private joke. But, he wouldn't take a risk for a joke. Or not just a joke. Not that it would help to ask what game he was playing. "Why Artemisia?" she asked instead.
"The obvious reason is that Artemis is the lady of woods and wild places, mistress of the moon and night, the great huntress. Not quite mistress of all botany or of all evil and a dragon, but close enough. The less obvious reasons . . . see if the mask helps you think of them."
Artemisia, it was an herb, another name for tarragon. Any fairy—and a good many mortals—could have told him that. But, it wasn't the only name it was known by. "Artemisia dracunculus. Dragonwort. But. . . ." Her brow furrowed. Part of this was a tale Maleficent remembered. But, part of this was something the professor knew. "Eurybia," she said, giving him the professor's knowledge. "A type of plant. They were once numbered among Artemisia but are now considered separate." Then she spoke as Maleficent. "There was a sea nymph of that name. 'Eurybia, who has a heart of flint within her.' She had three sons, Pallas, Perses, and—and Astraios." She glared at him. "That's not funny."
"No, but it is fitting. And masks should fit. It helps them stay on."
"What about you?"
"I intend to be very careful and not to be seen by the wrong eyes—or not when there's anything to see. Now, move along. The sooner you get to the pawn shop, the sooner we can convince Belle to start looking for your daughter. Whatever Blue did to her, I think being woken up by Belle might be a bit less frightening to a fairy than being woken up by Maleficent, don't you?"
Maleficent shrugged. "Perhaps I'll just show my daughter this face you've made me. She won't recognize it as a dragon." She ran a hand over her face. Strange, she could feel the skin, dry and wrinkled, but she also felt the thin, stiff folds of paper. "Perhaps I should test it first. I think I know who it might be amusing to chat with."
X
It was still too cold to plant, Aurora thought. The days weren't too bad, but the soil could freeze up at night. Aurora wouldn't be surprised if they had snow again before spring came. Or that's what she thought from the almanacs she'd read and what locals (people who had been here for the first curse) told her about the weather. Still, that didn't mean she couldn't start to break up the ground for her vegetable garden while her son, Philip, napped in his baby swing. It had been a gift to Aurora from Ella, a metal frame with a crank on the side that could be wound up to swing a sleeping child—or one you hoped would be sleeping—like a metronome.
"Trust me," Ella had said. "Some days, that swing will save your sanity."
Aurora, who had been under a sleeping spell for twenty-eight years to wake into a world devastated by the Evil Queen's curse and ravaged by monsters before angering another witch and being transformed into a monster herself, wasn't sure how much sanity she had left. But, she appreciated the gesture—and it did give little Philip a place to nap where she could keep an eye on him while working on a vegetable garden.
"Excuse me?"
Aurora looked up and saw a tall, thin woman standing at the edge of the yard. She had gray hair done up in a bun and deeply wrinkled skin. She looked about eighty or so. Aurora didn't know her, but their home was near the walking path that led to the Toll Bridge. She was used to people stopping to say hello or ask directions on their daily hikes. The woman certainly looked like a walker, Aurora thought. She wore faded, stained jeans and a tweed jacket that might be as old as she was. Her mud-splattered boots might be even older.
"Yes?' Aurora said, smiling pleasantly. "Can I help you?"
"I'm Professor Longneaux," the woman said. "A botanist. Or I am in this world. I was an herbalist back home. I was hoping you could help me. Are you Princess Aurora?"
"Please, just call me Aurora," Aurora wasn't sure how she felt about the customs of this land, but even Snow White and her husband avoided titles. Besides, this woman wasn't one of her subjects. "What can I do for you?"
"I've been cataloguing magical plants in the area," the woman said. She looked at the Aurora's vegetable plot. "Oh, are you planting a garden?"
"Just breaking up the ground," Aurora said. "Everyone tells me it's too early for planting."
"True enough," the professor said. "I expect we'll have at least one more frost before spring takes up permanent residence. What are you planting?"
"I haven't decided," Aurora said. "Turnips grow anywhere, and I was thinking of carrots."
"Hmm, carrots take a long time. Had you thought about tomatoes? They didn't grow back in your part of the Enchanted Forest, did they?"
"Tomatoes, they look like deadly nightshade, don't they? Are they poisonous?"
"Oh, they're perfectly safe and quite nutritious. The garden variety is quite easy to tell from nightshade, though the wild ones can be a bit trickier. . . ." They chatted about vegetables and gardening and the growing season in Maine. The professor knew odd stories about the land hereabouts, things that hadn't been in the almanac.
"New England's always had poor soil," she said told Aurora. She gave a little laugh. "Believe me, I had to study up on the dirt under towns like this the hard way. That's the way my teachers liked it. Glaciers dragged off most of the topsoil during the last ice age, along with the earthworms."
"Ice age? What's that?"
"Something a little like the spell the Ice Queen had up around the town, except they happen naturally. Don't let it worry you," Professor Longneaux said. "They come on gradually, over thousands of years. Right now, this world's in a warming trend, which is good for the growing season this far north. Just make sure you use plenty of fertilizer."
Aurora was about to ask when the professor thought would be a good time to plant, when Philip woke up, wanting to be fed. He wasn't going to wait for a growing season for his meal.
X
Maleficent had watched the little princess working away at her vegetable patch. She remembered Stefan breaking the ground for her kitchen garden back at their cottage. She'd been more careful about using magic in those days. Her fairy dust was gone, and she'd been uncertain about using other, more human magics. Of course, back then, she'd thought she should be careful about attracting Blue's notice—or her outrage. Much good it had done her. Clearing a piece of earth by hand had seemed a small enough price.
Was that when Stefan began to resent all he had given up? He was a prince and he was doing labor even a peasant might have resented. After all, most peasants had fields that had been cleared for generations. They didn't have to do battle with a forest just to win the right to a few turnips.
He had to have resented it, didn't he? Resent the price he was paying and the wife he paid it for. Surely, if he hadn't, the potion Jaunice, the Yellow Fairy, gave him wouldn't have been able to tear him away from her. Surely, their love had been stronger than that—at the beginning when everything seemed so right. It had to have been dying all along, and she just hadn't been able to see it.
Hadn't it?
He'd had the same determined look on his face back then she saw on his daughter now, attacking the earth as though he thought it might fight back, probably with a sword. At least, Aurora seemed to have some idea what she was doing. She might be expecting the ground to rise up against her but she seemed to understand the difference between a hoe and a broadsword.
It occurred to Maleficent that Aurora didn't need this garden, not the way they had. If she was doing this, it was because she wanted to.
Did that mean she was like her father? Or not?
Maleficent studied her. Aurora owed her hair to her mother, along with the shape of her face. Her eyes were blue, not her father's brown or her mother's hazel. Like Maleficent's.
Professor Longneaux, of course, knew all about a man named Mendel and the experiments he had done showing how peas inherited different traits. She knew scraps of how the same rules applied to people. A brown-eyed man and a hazel-eyed woman could have a blue eyed child. It was a simple matter of recessives versus dominants, a one-in-four chance if they had the right genes.
The fairy and the sorceress knew other rules. Memories, even ones buried with magic, could show in the form of a child. So could feelings.
It had to be the recessives.
Maleficent thought of her own daughter, Aurora's elder sister. She didn't even know what color Astrid's eyes were. They'd still been the milky blue of a newborn's when the fairies—when Jaunice—stole her.
She hoped it hurt when Rumplestiltskin killed that witch.
Though she had meant to test her mask—if anyone could see the dragon lurking behind the professor, it would surely be Stefan's daughter. But, now she realized what a stupid risk she was taking. This could accomplish nothing. Rumplestiltskin knew his craft. She should trust to that and keep going.
Instead, she called out to Aurora and began a conversation with her. Well, at least she proved the mask worked. Professor Longneaux could talk quite pleasantly about the dangers of frost and the poor soil while watching the princess, looking for familiar expressions, listening for one of Stefan's turns of phrase. Would Astrid, who had never known either of her parents, speak like this? Would she wipe away the sweat from her forehead as she tilted her head, listening to the person she talked to, the same way her father had? Would people comment on the resemblance between the fairy and the human, wondering at its cause?
Her thoughts were interrupted by the little prince waking up. Aurora went over and got him out of his swing. He fussed and cried while Aurora tried to calm him. "Can you get his bottle?" Aurora said. "It's in the side pocket of the diaper bag."
Maleficent got it out and, without Aurora noticing, cast a small spell to warm it. "Formula?" she asked.
Aurora looked embarrassed. Was she afraid Maleficent was judging her? Was she judging her? Many royals had wet nurses. Stefan certainly had. Was this so very different? "I'm afraid so," Aurora said, taking the bottle as Maleficent handed it to her. "The doctor was worried about me nursing. He said formula would be safer."
Maleficent's ears pricked. She looked Aurora over with her magical senses, her real eyes glittering for a moment behind the mask, looking for signs or illness or spells. "Nothing serious, I hope?"
"I was anemic after Philip was born. Doc said I'd been eating poorly when—when I was under that spell." That spell. She meant when Zelena had transformed her. And enslaved her. Because she'd tried to warn Snow White what Zelena was up to.
It was cowardly—or selfish, the way Stefan may have given in to selfishness when he forgot her—not to give that warning sooner. But, it had been brave to finally do it even when Aurora couldn't know how it would turn out for herself and her child. Many of the monsters Zelena had made had died attacking townsfolk.
Maleficent thought of Stefan, battling a garden patch as if it were something that could be slain. He would have been brave and foolish like that.
"Doc has me on some supplements," Aurora was saying. "But, he said it wasn't a good idea to nurse when I'd been malnourished. He wanted make sure Philip was getting enough nutrition, too."
Maleficent wondered how Zelena would have done against a dragon. Transformations didn't normally work on her. If Maleficent had been alive when Regina burned the curse that created this town, if Aurora had told her about Zelena before that hag got ahold of the Dark One's dagger, would things have been different?
Not that Stefan's daughter had any reason to confide in her. Not that she had any reason to expect Maleficent to protect her from an enemy or avenge her if she fell. Maleficent supposed she had a right to feel that way.
Although, if Zelena had killed Aurora, Maleficent was sure she could have come up with some reason to kill the witch. It was bad form to let other people kill your enemies before you'd gotten around to it.
And, if Regina hadn't like it, too bad. She should have taken care of her sister when she had the chance.
Maleficent looked at the little baby, putting dreams of vengeance out of her head. He was Philip, named for his father. Not Stefan. Which meant nothing. Maybe Aurora was already planning on naming her next child Stefan. Or Stefanie. Maleficent tried to imagine a princess named Stefanie but all she could picture was a child of this world, earbuds firmly planted and hair bleached a shade of blond anyone over eighteen would find appalling (was that her or the professor talking?). Not a child who would ever look for unicorns or watch the fireflies come to life over a meadow of flowers.
Not a child who would be transformed into a monster to fight for a witch. Not a child who would be trapped in a spell to sleep for a hundred years.
Maybe it wasn't such a bad name.
She thought all these things while looking at Aurora's baby. The princess noticed. "Would you like to hold him?" she asked.
Hold him. It had been years since Maleficent had held a baby. More years than Aurora had been alive. No. "Of course."
He was small and fit into her arms just the way Astrid had. He nuzzled close to her for warmth, sucking contentedly on his bottle, eyes closed. She wondered if they had found their true color yet and what it might be.
"He likes you," Aurora said watching him cuddle closer to her deadliest enemy.
"Nonsense," Maleficent said. "He just likes the bottle." She had an image of herself, vanishing in a ball of flame, taking Philip with her. She'd rename him, she thought. Astrid, Aurora . . . what was a good name for a boy in this world? A strong name, a king's name. If she called him Aragorn, he'd be teased without mercy. Arthur? That might fit. . . .
She shook her head, pushing the fantasy aside. This wasn't her child. This wasn't even Stefan's child. "You'd best take him back." She handed the baby back to his mother. He stirred for a moment, discontented at the change, before settling down again in his mother's arms.
Yes, this was better. Rumplestiltskin would cause her no end of trouble if he heard she was stealing infants. And, honestly, what would she do with the brat? He was probably spoiled beyond bearing already. Let the princess deal with him.
"You held him so naturally," Aurora said. "I'm always afraid of breaking him. Ella and Snow tell me I just need practice. Do you have children?"
For Stefan's daughter to ask her that so innocently. . . . "I did. I lost her."
Aurora looked stricken and held her son a little tighter. "Oh. I'm sorry."
"It was long ago. Before you were born. Our old world . . . wasn't always a safe place for children."
"I. . . ." the princess floundered, looking for something useful to say. "You said you hoped I could help you with something? Is there anything I can do for you?"
"What?" Maleficent remembered the excuse she's made when they began talking. "Oh. Yes. I told you I've been looking for magical plants and herbs. I'm making a list for Mrs. Gold and supplying her with ingredients where I can. I hope you don't mind me asking, but the thorns. The ones that surrounded your castle. Did any of them come to this world with you? Have you seen any of them?"
Something uneasy seemed to flash in the princess' eyes. Had she finally caught a glimpse of the dragon speaking to her? Or was it just the memory of the dragon's curse? "I—I think so," Aurora looked embarrassed. "It was one of the reasons Philip and I thought we should take this house. There's a great mass of the thorn bushes right down the hill." Aurora pointed down to where Maleficent knew the streambed ran, even though she couldn't see it from here. "We thought there might be a connection between this place and—and our home."
"I'm surprised you didn't tear out the thorns."
"We thought about it," Aurora said. Yes, even if this place was a bit of home transformed, Sleeping Beauty would hardly care for those weeds, would she? "But, we haven't gotten around to it. Besides, if they really are the ones from back home, they'll be hard to get rid of."
"There's always that. If you don't mind, I'll go have a look at them. I suppose it won't matter if I take a few samples?"
"Help yourself," Aurora said. "Just be careful where you plant them."
"Oh, I will." Not that it mattered. Those thorns took deep root where they were meant to but would wither and die anywhere else. Still, she stomped off down the hill, falling into the professor's firm, no nonsense strides.
Her phone buzzed. There was a text for her (sending letters by phone, this was as strange a world as Wonderland). It was brief and to the point.
Get over here. Belle found what you've been looking for.
X
Note: If anyone reading this has strong feelings about the breastfeeding/formula debate, I'll just point out that Aurora comes from a world where the question is wet nurse/mother/milk from a cow or goat and it's built up around different issues. Maleficent, who grew up around fairies who never even thought about it one way or the other, was surprised Aurora was doing something so typical of this world rather than one of the "traditional" alternatives from back home.