She stepped out of the shadows and walked across the grass, her wings like a cloak spread behind her. She pointed her index finger at Phillip, the nail clawlike in the moonlight. Magic sparked green around her hands. “You disobeyed me, little prince.”

Aurora sucked in a breath in surprise. “Godmother! What are you doing here?”

“Interrupting him before he makes a terrible mistake,” Maleficent said.

Aurora moved between her and the prince, looking mutinous. “Stop trying to frighten Phillip! What mistake could you possibly mean?”

Maleficent found herself powerless to answer. She couldn’t reveal to Aurora she’d overheard his confessions of love; that was the exact thing she didn’t want her to know.

“He does not have my permission to be here in the Moors,” she said instead. “I have warned him already and do not like disobedience.”

“He wished to speak with me,” Aurora said. “And he’s my friend. And he doesn’t need your permission so long as he has mine, since you made me the queen here.”

Maleficent ignored that, too angry to be reasonable. “If his mistake is coming here, yours is to trust so easily. What do you know of him?”

“I never intended to harm Aurora,” Phillip said, “or anyone in the Moors. I would swear to it, on my life.”

“Rash words.” They were a temptation spread out before her like a banquet. Curse him, she thought. Make his promise a living thing. Curse him so that if he causes Aurora the slightest pain, he will feel it three times over. Curse him so that if he raises a hand to a faerie, he will drop dead on the spot.

“Stop looking at him like that!” Aurora was trembling with rage. Aurora, who hated to get angry. The last time she had shouted at Maleficent, it was because she’d discovered how many secrets were being kept from her. She’d discovered that Maleficent wasn’t her protector, wasn’t her godmother, but her enemy.

Maleficent never wanted to be thought of as her enemy again.

She took a breath and then another, letting the green magic fade away from her fingers.

No, she would find another way.

“Perhaps it would behoove me to get to know Phillip a little better,” she said, although she could barely bring herself to look at him with anything other than hostility. But it was Aurora who needed to know him better, to see through his deceptions. And perhaps there was a way to trick the prince into behaving like the person he doubtless was back in Ulstead. “Come dine here in the Moors with us, tomorrow evening. Before Aurora’s festival and your departure.”

“It would be a pleasure,” Prince Phillip said, as though the invitation were a perfectly normal one and not a gauntlet of challenge thrown down between them.