Chapter Text
sometimes paradise happens
too early and leaves us shuddering in its wake
I am glad I still exist glad for cats and moss
and Turkish indigo and yet to be light upon the earth
to be steel bent around an endless black to once again
be God’s own tuning fork and yet and yet
– Kaveh Akbar, “Unburnable the Cold is Flooding Our Lives”
Link takes his place across the carpet from Zelda as she prepares for her meditation: the furniture pushed to one side of the room, the carpet bare but for the two of them. Sitting on Zelda’s desk, one foot on the back of the upholstered chair, Impa watches. They’re in Zelda’s study in the royal quarters they all share atop Akkala Citadel, protected from prying eyes or ears by closed, curtained windows and Impa’s wards pasted to the walls.
“All right,” Zelda says, cross-legged, back straight, palms resting on her knees. “I am ready.”
Link nods, then makes a sound of confirmation when he realises her eyes are already closed. He’s sitting in the same position, and though he doesn’t need to shut his eyes, it stops him getting distracted by the room – the various documents pinned to walls, the piles of papers on the desk – or whatever face Impa’s making.
The meditation starts with breath. Zelda inhales deeply, exhales slowly. All Link has to do is not intrude: he matches her breaths, trying to be as quiet as possible.
He can’t help himself cracking an eyelid to see the three-triangled emblem on the back of her hand, glowing like gold-foil pressed on her fair skin.
Zelda maintains her even breaths, and he follows her.
“I see Link,” she says in a soft voice, eyes closed, “as usual.”
A light, she’s told him. Person-shaped. It’s unsettling, though–
“And I see the sword.”
–better than not being seen. The darkness-sealing sword hangs from the wall in the side-room he sleeps in, where he ensures it remains in pristine condition. It is separate to him in the eye of her divine power.
“Impa, you remain a quiet shadow.” She’ll be quirking her lips at that, pleased. It befits a Sheikah, she’d said the first time Zelda described her as such. “I see the four divine beasts, in their usual places.”
Vah Medoh, either circling above the village or perched on its rocky spire. Vah Ruta, overlooking the great reservoir lake. Vah Naboris, awaiting orders in the desert south of the Gerudo capital. Vah Rudania, visible from the citadel on a clear day, poised on the near-quietened volcano. In the last two months of frustration, one thing they’ve learnt is this: the old divinity in their names is not just appellation, but legibility – like the distant wellsprings of Sheikah power in Hateno and northern Akkala, and under the castle – though Zelda rails against the slow pace of her understanding.
“I see the Champions.” Link half-opens his eyes again, to find her face calm. “Mipha is in the centre of the Domain. Urbosa is in her capital. Revali is in Rito Village, and – Daruk is, mm, a little inside the mountain, on the lower southern flank. In a mineshaft, I must assume.” The remark is not the meditative statement she’s supposed to be making, but they’re making this all up as they go along, based on Impa’s knowledge of old Sheikah doctrine and part-remembered texts and the slim library Zelda has summoned across land-slipped roads and via Rito mail-carriers.
It will be better when they can go to Kakariko.
But this, too, is newly learnt: the ancient power that infused the Sheikah technology of the divine beasts has rubbed off on their pilots.
What’s he doing? Link wants to ask, but he knows enough of the answer from his letters: complaining that he’s not recovered from his injuries quickly enough. Zelda’s sight isn’t that specific, anyway.
“Now,” Zelda says, steady, “I will try to see the world.”
Her right hand turns palm-up, as if she’d hold all of Hyrule in it. The golden light glows through her skin. Link’s watching, too curious to stop himself, and nothing changes: no dimming of the light, no brightening. This is where it goes differently, or stops.
Zelda speaks in a murmur. “I see the continent. The earth of it. There are – layers, like sediment, but as if in writing, by a far more powerful hand than any person’s.” These are words she’s spoken before, more or less, but a discomfort seeps into him: not the cross-legged position, not after years of training that lets him maintain uncomfortable positions for hours if he’s called to, but something – under his bones. He forces himself not to flinch. Now he’s thinking in Zelda’s metaphors.
A slight movement draws his attention, and it’s Impa, slowly arcing her fingers from her side up to her face, where she signs close your eyes.
When he does, he sees only the darkness of his eyelids. He never sees, as Zelda does.
“I see the belly of the earth. It is red.” This isn’t entirely new, but– “I still cannot be sure what this is.” A faint hint of her frustration drifts into her voice. “It is hollow and written upon, all at once, and red, and might be magma, as Daruk has described, though – it hurts to look at.” She takes a deep breath. “It is hot. It is old.” Another breath, but Link knows she’s frowning now. “Is magma old? I thought it’s new, or old rock molten anew, so maybe it’s old, too.” A short, huffed sigh. “Maybe all my power lets me do now is confirm what Gorons already know about the formation of our world.” The golden light flares briefly and goes out, and when Link opens his eyes, it’s to the sight of Zelda’s glare directed at the wall. At herself.
After a silence, Impa swings her legs around and lands on the floor. “That red under-layer again. Is there anything else when you see it?”
“Rocks and layers.”
“Layers. ‘Written upon’ layers. What does that mean?”
“Like history. Like – like a manuscript, the older kind, on hide, when you scrape it clean and write a new text over it, but sometimes the old text is still visible.”
A palimpsest. In all his uneven education, the months Link spent silently guarding Zelda while she muttered to herself over piles of books and scrolls gave him the most eclectic part.
“But there is no sense of what it is! A palimpsest is a specific thing. Even if you cannot read it, you can see the edge of a letter and know it was once a word. This is–” Zelda looks down at her hand, scowling. “It is red. That is all.”
“You need to talk to Daruk about this magma idea,” Impa says, and Link nods. It sounds a lot more tangible than rocks-as-manuscripts. Though, he supposes, rocks are manuscripts to the Gorons, especially at the moment, when the air higher up Death Mountain is still hot enough to set paper (or people, if they’re not Gorons) alight.
“Yes,” Zelda agrees. “Let me go there immediately, with my power!” Before Impa can find a reply, Zelda folds forward, burying her face in her hands. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s not your fault, and I shouldn’t snap at you. You are both being so patient.”
Link looks at Impa and knows they’re still in agreement: this cannot continue.
Two months since sealing the Calamity, and while Link has long since regained his strength, and runs through drills near-daily – though he prefers Impa’s practises, and joins her at stealth and the short Sheikah kodachi – Zelda’s power evades her control.
Impa has murmured once or twice that she wishes she’d brought Purah with her, because her sister’s scientific mind matches Zelda’s more closely. The two work well together. Impa is more of a watcher – and fighter. Link, likewise. He finds the power impressive. It saved his life, and Mipha’s, and it sealed the Calamity, saving countless more people across the continent. It’s unsettling, though. At least Zelda’s not glowing gold anymore. Water doesn’t sizzle on her skin. But that’s half the problem: she used a lot of power sealing the Calamity, then healing him of malice-burns afterwards, and now it eludes her, though she says it dwells within her like an aquifer.
The other half of the problem is that they’re stuck in Akkala Citadel and the army leaders insist that the wet summer’s landslides pose too many dangers to let them out.
The landslides are true enough. The rest of what the army leaders are up to–
The reports Zelda reads concern waterlogged fields in central Hyrule, too wet at the wrong time of year for rice, though some people are planting anyway, praying for sun at the end of summer and a late frost. Zora and the Hylians of Goponga have shared advice for setting up fisheries and water-beds for faster growing vegetables, but it’s hard to start whole new industries in churned up land with a scattered, diminished population. All this and more. The army is out there, putting its organisational prowess to use across the kingdom.
Here, Zelda concentrates on what she can control, though her discontentment reminds Link too much of her prayers. What changed? Impa has asked her, when she laments about how clear it felt aboard Vah Ruta, and afterwards, so clear and so easy – but, as Zelda has said, was there not sufficient clarity when the earth shook at Lanayru Promenade and Revali landed in front of them, horrified by the first sight of the Calamity? When they teleported to the royal laboratory and saw the Guardians overrunning it, firing on Hylian soldiers? Vah Medoh, magenta-infected in the sky as the Calamity swirled around the castle? Knowing, she has said, that we were leaving them to die. She has tried to scientifically unpick the moment her powers awakened, but all she can surmise is, It seemed that the world would end. It doesn’t satisfy her. The world ended for hours before then.
“The goddess is unknowable,” Impa has offered, ever the even hand about a faith she holds dear.
“Evidently. Still.”
If Zelda has prayed since they sealed the Calamity, Link doesn’t know about it. He hasn’t.
With a sigh, Zelda stands. “It has been a long day.” A stack of reports, earlier. Link had been charged with reading and annotating the ones from a captain whose handwriting is indecipherable scrawl even to a princess who pores over ancient manuscripts for fun. Different styles of cucco-scratch. “We should relax tonight.”
A pronouncement, a request, a plea.
“Of course!” Impa says. “Link, the cards are under your bed.”
He nods and darts off to fetch them, ignoring the women’s low voices at his back and the rain petering out on the windows and his own gnawing wish to be – somewhere else. Anywhere, really.
In his room, he finds Impa’s game bag next to the small travel bag he packed – as Impa did, too – some weeks ago: the most vital possessions. Healing salves. Bandages. Hers contains ink and red paper for ward-writing, an amulet of Hylia for safe travel, a blanket, letters from Purah. His has a blanket and every letter from Revali that actually reached him, folded around the little gifts: a pressed swift violet, a pouch of powdered cold safflina mixed with ground salt, apparently a staple Rito seasoning. He’s dug that out a couple times to sprinkle on hardboiled eggs. It goes well with dried spicy pepper seeds, which he’s pilfered from the citadel’s kitchen.
Back in the study, Impa’s set out cushions and the second half of a rice wine bottle. Sheikah excavators digging up Vah Rudania in Ordorac Quarry to the north left some of their supplies in the citadel, somehow unfound and untouched by the soldiers in the years since. The three of them stay awake into the evening, playing a Sheikah card game that Impa’s definitely cheating at. The better puzzle is cheating back without her noticing.
“You’ll go to the stable tomorrow?” Zelda murmurs.
Link nods. It’s finally stopped raining.
“Good. I would like to read something pleasant.” She smiles at him. “Urbosa has promised me some old legends of the Seven.”
~
Here, Link is more at ease: slipping from the citadel under a clouded night sky. He knows the climb down, the rocks, the way to the nearest stable. He jogs past it. In grey pre-dawn light, he crests the hill above the ancient Sheikah shrine. Dawn finds him walking by the shore of Cephla Lake. A heron takes flight as he approaches its fishing perch and a few darners flit away, but otherwise he’s alone in the world. No darkness-sealing sword on his back (though he carries a common soldier’s blade, as fire-breath lizalfos still call the mountain habitat their home), no sash that marks him as belonging to the princess’ employ (left back in the citadel with the sword), only a light wind in his hair and the sun peering through white-and-grey clouds and the distant sound of birds. A hawk circles on the warm air over the Eldin foothills as Link rounds the lake’s northern shore. Stones crunch under his boots. He passes another of the lifeless ancient shrines, this one far less attended to with offerings. He reaches the climb up the grassy slope towards the stable with noon sun warm on his face and arms, as if it’s remembered to be summer.
Habit has him look for mushrooms, but he expects to find none: the people who fled the Calamity in this direction are still here, and they forage thoroughly. He sees one sunshroom at the base of a tree and leaves it. His position at the princess’ side ensures he doesn’t suffer the lack of food afflicting other parts of Hyrule. With the latest bout of rain, more sunshrooms are sure to follow. At the foot of a rocky slope, he sees another. Not a sunshroom, but a paler thing. Curious, he crouches at it. Small, flat-capped, faintly purple. In the shade cast by the rock it’s growing under, it almost looks like it’s glowing, yet its fat stems are nothing like a silent shroom’s spindly, skirted stalk. Strange.
He heads on to the stable. Some familiar faces: a one-legged man who sits out in the sun with his sheepdog, a pair of girls who talk a lot about lizards, the stable master standing out front, a hand raised to shield his eyes from the sun, watching a group of Gorons walk south up the road. The Gorons all carry construction gear. Link approaches him.
The stable master recognises Link and nods a greeting. “Road slipped down by the southern point of the lake,” he says. “Couple days ago.”
Link makes a mmm of agreement. Four days of nearly continuous rain. He’d slept poorly.
Though Zelda hides her aversion to it better, by the third night she’d asked to lie on the floor of his little windowless room. (He’d hardly let her sleep on the floor.)
“Dry today, so they’re off to see what they can do.” The man’s frowning. Without a road, he can’t get the few traders moving around the continent this summer, or the even scarcer travellers. “You’ve got some letters. The Champion’s already been by – he’s down at the landslip now.”
Nodding his thanks to the man, Link heads in to the stable’s front desk. The stable master’s partner, who handles more of the bookkeeping side of the business, is there with some mending in the meantime and opens the drawer for him, handing over the letters. Link thanks her and steps back outside.
Perching on a rock, he sees what they’ve been sent. A thick letter in Urbosa’s hand, addressed in Gerudo to My little bird – one of the phrases he now knows how to read in that language – and sealed shut. Daruk’s name is written in Hylian above it, perfunctorily. Another says sis in Hylian as well as hi Linky! hi Daruk! alongside stains from, he assumes, whatever workshop Purah has set up for herself in Kakariko. It’s light: a letter, not a package. She’s still not returned the slate. The third letter is addressed only to Link.
He opens it and finds a familiar litany of complaints: the continual tedium of flightlessness, the monotony of recovery exercises, the all-around repetitiveness of his days. In-between the grumbling, Revali lets novelty slip in. He’s been cleared to glide on the placid, unexciting updrafts around the village’s rocky spires, only a few times, like a fledgling, but it is good to finally be in the air again, even if Nino insists it is another week or two until I can fly any distance. Link runs his thumb down the side of the paper, smiling. Any distance. This far?
It’s good to imagine Revali in the air, flying, blue against the sky.
Whichever Rito’s delivering post to this stable isn’t currently here, so Link doesn’t need to write a reply immediately. He’s no good at letters. He never corresponded with anyone, growing up, and now he’s never sure what to write. The citadel is boring or – worse. He wants to see Revali. He wants to find out together what this is.
He tucks the letters in his tunic and decides to see the landslip for himself.
The route south takes him past the few other buildings out here besides the stable – a farrier, who must have an arrangement with the stable, and a carpenter, and if the people who live out here trap animals they probably sell the furs they don’t use on a piecemeal basis – and, amid the few still-standing trees further on, shelters set up for the people displaced from closer to central Hyrule. One person’s put up an illustrated sign – fry-bread, 5 rupees – and Link stops, thinking about it. An adolescent girl pipes up from a nearby log bench to say everyone’s at the slip. Looks like she’s been left at the camp with two infants, asleep on coats at her feet. Waving thanks, Link continues on.
The slip’s dramatic. Suddenly, the ground drops, stones and trees halfway down a churned-up muddy slope. Hylians and Gorons stand together at the top, in loud conversation with Gorons nearer the bottom. When Link gets closer, he sees that the earth crushed one of the buildings in the fishers’ hamlet at the edge of the lake.
“Keep behind the rope,” a Goron says, drawing Link’s attention to the rope strung between trees and stumps and sticks. Strips of bright yellow flutter from it at intervals. It’s well set-up. It’s a lot of earth. Some of the road remains, but not enough to reliably drive a wagon through, and he’d be worried about more of it going, in its current condition. He looks up at the sky. Sunny, still, but darker clouds on the horizon. Again.
The next thing he notices, on the southern side of the slip, is a group of soldiers talking to several Gorons. Daruk’s there, gesturing animatedly. Two of the soldiers look across the slip directly at Link. A citadel banner at the horses, of course. Of course. They’d want to see about this, and for entirely normal reasons, except that Link’s not wanted them to know he comes here and his father’s there, staring at him across the slip, before returning his attention to the Gorons.
Link toes the trampled grass at his feet and half-watches a young child peer down at the Gorons shouting about support girders and spades. A woman has her hand on the child’s shoulder, cautious, but looks at the earthworks with equal interest. Standing a little apart, two bent-backed old men discuss it all. What they’d do, Link thinks, almost smiling. When he looks back at the soldiers, two of them are walking around the edge of the slip towards him.
Here’s a thought: what if he goes not with them, not back the way he came, but instead runs down into the Trilby valley until – until what? He’s the princess’ personal guard. He can’t run into the mountains.
“Link,” says a soldier, one of his father’s lackeys. “Come back to the citadel with us. We’re nearly finished up here.”
So he nods and follows them.
It’s Daruk who greets him first. “Hey there, little guy!” the Goron says, clapping him on the shoulder – not enough to rattle his bones. Nor does he let go. “It’s good to see you. Everything all right?”
Link looks up at him and forces a smile. “Sure,” he says, and he’s seen Daruk’s cheery demeanour give way before, in far worse circumstances, so it’s strange to see it happen here.
“Well, ah.” Daruk lifts his hand and scratches one of the healed rifts on his back. “You give my regards to the tiny princess, yeah?”
“Mm.”
“Thank you, again, for your time, Champion Daruk,” his father says, taking Link’s arm just above the elbow with a grip hard enough it hurts. Link refuses to flinch. “We are grateful to you and all the Gorons here for whatever work you’ll be able to do in rebuilding or shoring up the road, and do be sure to reach the citadel if you require any Hylian manpower. With any luck, autumn will be drier.”
“Sure do hope so,” Daruk says, looking between the two of them with poorly concealed consternation, like he’s at the crux of a puzzle.
A poor moment for Link to realise it’s not, perhaps, been to his advantage to tell the Champions nothing of his family – but for Mipha, who met his father when they lived in the Domain, years ago – not even Revali, in part because he’s gleaned there’s no good story on the other side either, that Revali’s birth-parents are both dead and he has no close relations in the village, and in part because Link prefers not to think about his father where possible.
They ride back to the citadel, with Link mounted behind a lighter soldier who sits stiffly in the saddle. By the time they cross the great stone bridge, it’s raining again, only a light tat-tatter on the soldiers’ plate armour, but between the already sodden ground and fresh moisture, everyone traipses mud into the citadel’s first halls.
“With me,” Link’s father orders him, as the soldiers lead the horses away. Link supposes he could ignore the man and climb the stairs all the way to the royal quarters. As Hylian Champion and the princess’ personal guard, he’s not required to follow anyone’s commands except Zelda’s, but he didn’t spend the years before the Calamity pretending to be above the other soldiers and guards. He still needed to live alongside them all. Whatever new command structure the captains are devising, he feels reluctant to spit in its face.
He follows his father up to the office he’s commandeered, though he feels unsure what each step is leading to.
“Boots off, if you don’t mind,” his father says, now they’re in the nicer floors of the citadel, and they both leave their muddy footwear outside the office’s door.
Summer it might be, but the citadel’s thick stone walls keep it cold and damp, and there’s a low afternoon fire in the hearth. Link braces himself for some amount of shouting. How many years has it been? Instead, his father reaches into the folded front of Link’s tunic and tugs out the letters, and Link’s left floundering on the carpet as his father walks around to the other side of the desk and relaxes into his chair, tossing the letters onto the desk.
He takes up Urbosa’s letter. Turning it over and seeing the seal, he sets it aside. “This is what you’ve been doing. Playing courier for the princess.”
Obviously. Link says nothing.
The next letter he picks up is Revali’s, and Link starts forward, but his father snorts and leans back in his chair, unfolding it with an easy flick. “Please. This is not for her. The Rito Champion apparently has nothing at all to do but write to you.”
He – has read Revali’s other letters. The ones that never reached Link. He skims it while Link stands there, fixed in place by a fury he can’t do anything with, then tosses it down into the fire. The one from Purah to Impa follows it, not even worth his attention. Impa treasures those letters. Moans about her sister’s erratic spelling and inability to remain on subject, yes, and drinks in every detail of daily life in Kakariko, and takes them out and rereads them, sometimes, on slow evenings.
When it looks like he’s about to pick up Urbosa’s letter again, Link finally moves: he snatches the letter off the table, but his father’s fast, too, and has a hand firm around his wrist, holding him in place.
“You overstep.” A different man: an army captain, Cadell. He stands in the doorway, looking at Link’s father. “He is in the princess’ employ.”
“He sneaks around like a Sheikah.”
The captain lifts a shoulder. “He consorts with them, but it doesn’t change his position.”
“Please. He consorts with the Rito–”
“Enough. Let him be.”
But the grip at his wrist tightens, though Link tries to twist into it, to the weak point of his father’s overlapping fingers. “And have him stir up the young princess’ fears unnecessarily? There is a danger that she will disfavour us.”
“Is there?” The other man’s voice is desert-dry, flat, but he closes the door behind him.
“She is having him run out to the further stable, sending letters to the Gerudo and Sheikah. Here is the latest.” He plucks it from Link’s fingers, and all Link manages is a small sound of protest. This ground is moving too fast under his feet. “Have it translated and see what the Gerudo Chief advises our princess.”
Urbosa’s letters contain her own complaints about the pace of her broken leg’s recovery, but Zelda has shared enough of their contents for Link to know that Urbosa also offers political advice – probably not formally, as Chief, but as Zelda’s second mother, a distinction that is unlikely to matter in this room – as well as her own innocuous pieces of news. Poetry. Stories about the Seven.
“I am loath to read the princess’ personal letters.” Yet the captain takes it, frowning. “And him?”
“The road to the stable is collapsed. Perhaps he has trouble returning, and intends to stay there for the night.”
Link nearly says, But she’ll know I’m here. No. Let them lay bare their schemes. Maybe this’ll even be enough to spur Zelda into action, a thought that nearly makes Link wince – Zelda is no horse, only cautious in the unfamiliar landscape of post-Calamity life. Is this the right course? Link can’t tell.
“Perhaps,” the other man agrees, and his gaze barely lingers on Link. “We must all talk.”
“On that I agree.” Link knows that self-satisfied tone. His father’s got what he wants.
Link finds out what that is when his father takes him personally to a windowless store cupboard. Now is the time to act, though his head is a rushing river. He needs to fight this. He actually needs to fight his father, instead of what he’s always done: get out of his way. Soldiery, the sword, every step further from him, but not enough, apparently. Link twists in his grip, cursing his lack of boots, but he hesitates to do the harm he’d find easy enough against a moblin.
“You could do well from this, Link.” His father’s voice is close to his ear. “Think on it.”
He’s pushed into the room, and the door slams and locks shut, leaving Link alone in the dark with bedsheets and mats and crates of husks for stuffing pillows.
~
“I see,” Zelda says, and thanks the man, all the while willing her hands to remain still at her sides. Only when the door closes and she is in her bedchamber, where the sheets are still untidy from an early afternoon nap, does she say to ever-listening Impa, “He is in the citadel, in one of the lower floors.”
In all her trouble regrasping her power, the one steady light is Link. He is a lantern, some storeys under her feet.
“They’re moving.” Impa is motionless at the small door to the servant’s room where Link usually sleeps. “They intercepted him at the stable, then, or along the road. It’s possible they’ve read whatever letters he picked up.”
As long as they have not stolen the Sheikah slate – though Zelda suspects that Purah has got too deep into dismantling it, trying to understand its workings, and is reluctant to admit as such. Urbosa’s letters pose a problem. Stories about the Seven, yes. Politics. Poetry about sharpened steel. Gerudo verse has intricacies and sweeping stories, and Urbosa enjoys it all in the right setting – her palace, a roadside campfire – and, in her letters, lately, that setting is a weapon mount.
“Link and I discussed this,” Impa says in a low, serious voice.
“Yes, you have discussed a lot.” Even after Zelda chastised them, telling them to stop conspiring in her study while she tried to understand reports. “You want to take me to Kakariko. I suppose... this might be the time.” She admits that last in her own quieter voice, looking at the walls of this room with the realisation she must leave it, take a step from this months-long liminality and act.
“Tonight.”
“But–” But it is raining again. But Zelda is not confident she can move herself across the distance to whatever room Link is in, and then back to this room, or to a prearranged meeting point.
“We agreed that if one of us is compromised–”
“No!” she shouts. “No.” Not as loud. Wary of wayward ears. Nervous-handed, she tucks hair behind her ears. “Together, or – or not at all.” Not leaving him to–
Impa crosses the small carpet to her with the predatory intent of a Gerudo Canyon coyote, eyes fixed on her. “If they are willing to move against him, we must get you to a safer place. What have we all been feeling, ever since we got here?”
That it is a nest of vipers, but busy biting each other. Zelda knows that she should have acted when they started intercepting her letters, that she should – but too much of the future is uncertain. The citadel has offered stability. The castle lies in ruins. Link is here and Impa wants her to run away. Apparently he does, too. It is easy to believe of him.
It is a retainer’s strategy, and Zelda hates it.
“He knows this is the plan,” Impa says. “He’ll get out and join us in Kakariko.”
Behind her steady voice, Zelda hears her fear. Wind drives the rain into the window panes. Zelda shudders. This awful, wet summer. She could try.
She must.
Right there, she closes her eyes and thinks a light, thinks a thread, as if there is line between her and Link, a bright warp. He burns, as ever. Yet she cannot span it. She stands in her bedchamber with gold in her hands and screams at the wall.
Impa, at her back, bears two small bags. “If there is anything you want to take, princess. Now is the time.”
“Why won’t it just work when I need it to?”
“I don’t know.” Though Zelda expects her to continue with her ever-efficient preparations, Impa stays a moment at her side, a hand on her forearm. Impa does not say it, but Zelda thinks, in Kakariko, with the temple library’s texts. Many are too precious to be sent across Hyrule. In Kakariko, while Link is trapped here.
“I could simply demand they release him, Impa.”
“You could.” There is concern across her face as clear as her tattoo.
The history of Hyrule is long enough to be littered with betrayals. The women of the royal line bear a divine blessing, yet they are – and are surrounded by – mortals, with all the little evils that entails. Knives in the night. Knives in the bright sun of day, face-on. Zelda has no sisters and no daughter, and hopes that would safeguard her from the excesses of a steel-edged politics.
Hope is of little use.
Zelda packs up her journals, her letters – from Urbosa, from Mipha, the far fewer from Daruk (he is much more of a conversationalist) and Revali (he writes mainly to Link), the one or two from Purah – and supposes she ought to be glad that most of her sentimental possessions remain in the castle, if they survive at all. It renders this a quick task. Impa, in the meantime, lays out clothes for her to wear: trousers, a fine tunic, a dark cloak, rather than the dress she has spent most of the day in.
From her dressing table, Zelda takes up the gold circlet she found in the small chest of royal treasures stored atop the citadel. Her mother once wore it. Impa ties Zelda’s hair in one long braid and Zelda places the circlet over her brow. How regal.
Last, Zelda goes into Link’s room – the bed tidily made, the clothes-chest shut – and takes the sword that seals the darkness from its hook on the wall. Its winged guard and golden diamond gleam even in the dim light.
“One of us should have it in their keeping,” she says to Impa, who only nods. “I imagine he will want to take the most direct route out.”
“I’m sure of it.”
One final time, she looks around the royal quarters, and thinks: how impressive for so few walls to hold two months of fear. What will happen next? Every morning she has wanted this to become clearer, but every day she manages too little. No one told her how to rule a kingdom. Impa is a fine advisor, but only one woman, wise but young, while Link is very intelligent but turns that keen mind to wild birds and mushrooms as much as to people.
Whatever awaits her will be even less certain.
She closes her eyes, and Link is still a light in a lower level of the citadel. With bitterness lodged deep in her chest, she says, “We must go.”
The hour is late. Impa’s knowledge of every staircase and corridor in the citadel takes them to the stable, though not via the well-peopled hallways around whatever room they hold Link in. A pinch of Sheikah powder completes the path. As the stable hands lie asleep on the floor, Impa cedes control to Zelda, who is the better rider – through the gate, outside.
Rain beats against Zelda’s face, chills her hands on the reins, soaks her. At her back, Impa holds onto her waist. The horse’s canter is dangerously fast on the road’s wet stone but there is no time. The heavy rain, the night, it won’t last forever. It should be two horses. Zelda wipes her eyes clear of rain. At their left: a small shack-shelter, a traveller huddling from the deluge, looking up at them, light face a blur. Zelda urges the horse on, using skills Link taught her many months ago, but now Link is–
On, on. Weary and fast, passing the fork that would turn them to Zora’s Domain, to Mipha, turning instead towards the low lights of Goponga. The village has an inn with relay horses and postal Rito and communal kitchens, so Link has mentioned, an ideal staging point for any journey from the citadel.
Zelda brings the horse to a halt in front of the inn, picking out the upturned hoof and paired wings mounted in wood atop the door. Signs that Link described. Easing her tired body down from the saddle, after Impa, she leads the panting horse to a waiting stable hand. She tugs down her cloak’s hood, revealing the circlet, enough of a gesture at crown, royalty that the young woman’s eyes widen in the lantern-light and a senior hostelier is called for. The man emerges sleepily from the building as Zelda and Impa stand dripping in the shelter of the inn’s stable.
“Highness.” Sudden wakefulness.
Mustering her warmest smile, Zelda says, “I apologise for the condition of my horse, but I am in a hurry. I require a fresh horse, fast, for two.”
“Of course.” A gesture sets the young stable hand to her tasks. “That is not one of our horses. Should I have it returned to the citadel?”
“Ah.” Should he? Probably. Zelda cannot play out a single scenario in her mind.
“Yes, although there is no rush,” Impa says, stepping to Zelda’s side. “I expect they’ll be here before long.”
“I see.” Does he? “What message, if any, should I pass on to them?”
Again, Zelda’s mind is a blank surface. Impa speaks. “If it’s the soldiers, tell them the truth of our brief stopover. If it’s the Hylian Champion, he will already know where to go.”
The innkeeper nods. “Very well. Please, there is a communal hearth through here. Rest for a few moments while we prepare your horse.”
The interior space is basic, dirt-floored, with a hearth and a pot hanging above it, a stew simmering, which Impa says is for anyone to have a bowl of. Zelda finds herself uninterested, and though it is a wet night, it is too warm and humid here in the lowlands of Goponga to sit beside the flames. Impa ladles a generous portion for her own belly. A Hylian man dozes by one wall, prone on a dirty bedroll, while a russet-feathered Rito sits under a lantern’s light, preening. A Rito. The postal network. Zelda steps forward, saying, “Are you a postal–”
“No,” the Rito says, tired, annoyed.
“I’m sorry,” Zelda says weakly, not really sorry. “Would you take a message to Champion Revali? If you are returning to Rito Village.”
Those amber eyes narrow slightly, looking at Zelda more closely in an appraisal that she endures. “I can do that.”
Now real warmth floods her voice. “Thank you.” She falls to the nearest stool, tugging paper and writing set from the bag slung across her shoulder, then pauses, entirely unsure what to write – to Revali, of all of them.
Zelda dips her pen into the ink and writes, simply: For my safety, I have fled to Kakariko with Impa. I do not know if Link escaped. Tell the others. The citadel is not safe.
That is it. No more. Zelda folds the paper, heats her stick of wax at the edge of the fire and presses it to the page, impresses it with her seal. The Rito watches her.
“Set it on that stool, while the wax dries. I’ll see it to Revali.” Impa steps up, mouth still full of stew, to see if they can offer the Rito any money, but a wing is waved dismissively. “If it gives him something to do that’s not snapping at us, I’ll take it a hundred times. No one likes recovering from a wing injury, but you’d think he’s the first–”
Zelda winces. Impa says, “This isn’t going to improve his mood. Sorry.”
“Hm. Well, at least he can’t fly far yet. Maybe I’ll drop this in his roost and go to the desert.”
It is an image so absurd and so nearly funny that Zelda is astonished into laughter. It aches, in her chest. “Please tell him–” What. In those early days after sealing the Calamity, when they knew that Revali was badly injured and not, yet, that he would recover, Zelda refused to offer Link false comfort. No he will be well if it might be a lie. Zelda will not do it now, either. “I don’t know.”
“He’ll hear more from us,” Impa says.
Yes, that’s a better message than Zelda’s fear.
Impa squeezes her shoulder. “Sounds like our horse is ready. Are you?”
“Yes. Of course.” Not at all.
1
Listen up. This grave was never built to hold: the lid loosens like old cork, lets the air in. Every ancient bone stirs. You don’t tell a story like ours and expect it to stay still.