#run into the next triforce holder on the fucking road
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She has no throne. Girls without thrones should not have knights, but hers won’t go. Princess Zelda – the girl who killed Calamity – would love to fade into legend, but Link’s bought a house, he’s fighting off monsters, and he’s selling giant horses to strangely familiar Gerudo men. She’ll never have any peace now. (ao3)
(chapter one) (chapter two) (chapter three) (chapter four) (chapter five)
(chapter six) (chapter seven) (chapter eight)
“I can do that.”
Zelda – presently in a meditative state, fingers looping rhythmically through her hair, twin hair clips between her teeth – blinks up at Draga. The sun is high in the boughs of the trees, thin beams of yellow laying down mottled light on the grass by the road. They’d stopped briefly along the road east from Tabantha Stable to eat and re-organize their things a bit – Link having gotten distracted during the morning and made a haphazard job of a few saddle bags. Draga, who is responsible for most of the distracting, kneels beside her, slinging his rucksack to the ground. He nods to her hands halfway through the beginnings of a single golden braid.
“Oh, no I’ve got it,” she says, smiling. “It’s just a braid.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“Excuse me?”
“Hylian isn’t my first language, but I think you understood me.”
Link, tacking the horses by the road, snorts audibly. Zelda glares at him but try as she might – his smile lopsided and newly familiar – she can’t maintain her glare. So, she glares at Draga. He looks impatient, like she should just smack him or let do it already. So, she hands him her clips and hair band and turns so she’s facing away from him. He immediately draws a finger through the braid she’s managed thus far and unravels the lot.
“Not up to your standard?” she chimes.
“No.”
For that, she does smack him.
“If I had a mirror…” Zelda mutters.
“It would still look like a Hylian did the job,” Draga says calmly, around the clips between his teeth.
“You are trying to pick a fight? Or are you just missing having enough hair to do anything with?”
Draga, already parting her front-right region of hair into workable sections, says, “Rude.”
“You’re rude. Don’t make fun of my hair.”
Draga ignores her. Focused on the task at hand. He moves carefully along the side of her head, starting with three parts and twining them deftly down, adding consecutive segments of hair as he goes (very quickly she must admit) around the back of her head. She fiddles with a wrinkle in her pant leg.
“So you’re sure about this? You don’t mind? I mean, I know we discussed this at length over the last few days and… and I know we all agreed it’s the most logical course of action and I know you said that you don’t mind, but I feel like you should know that at any time you may change your mind and we can find some other method. I could refocus my efforts on lost Sheikah knowledge. There may be vast magi-tech archives yet untapped in the shrines. Or the Beasts even. You saw Medoh at the Rito Village. We could go back there if you –”
“Hold this,” he says, taking her hand and pinching her fingers around the middle of a finished braid. Then he starts on the other half of her hair and… Zelda’s isn’t quite sure what he’s doing exactly. She can feel that he’s leaving some sections loose, then gathering them up again later with a sequential foresight that she does not really apply to hair styles.
“So?”
“I said that I’m fine with it.”
“But it’s forbidden for you… right?”
“No, I said only elders were permitted on the mountain.” Draga removes a clip from between his teeth and applies it to a part of her hair. “For generations, my family has guarded the Statue of the Eighth Heroine and preserved it from everyone. Foreigners and Gerudo alike. This mandate was passed down to my tribe, supposedly, by Nabooru herself. It is the oldest undisturbed archive of written Gerudo history dating back to the Naboorian Age. It will pre-date the Twilit Calamity and the Bandit Age.” She can feel him shake his head. “I don’t believe we will find a better place to begin our search.”
“You’re sure you’re okay with it?”
“Zelda, there are no elders left in my tribe, so it would fall to me anyway.” He finishes off another braid. “Besides, you’re the maiden-form Goddess. Who else could be worthier to tread sacred ground?” A beat. “Also, Link already paraglided down the mountain and took pictures of the exterior. So, it’s hardly that unbroachable.”
From the road, Link calls, “I said I’m sorry!”
“You’re a godless heathen.”
“I’m the Goddess’s chosen Hero?”
“A regular sort of heathen then.”
“I didn’t know!”
Draga coils the finished ropes of Zelda’s hair in a neat whorl at the top right-hand side of head, giving the mirrored spiraled braids an asymmetric weight. Draga pins the coils in place with practiced engineering and Zelda touches the finished work, admiring the complicated craftsmanship, fingers picking out the soft track and curve of her braids like a road coiling inward. She turns.
“Thank you, Draga.”
He’s still kneeling there, one arm braced against his knee. Even though she’s seated on a stump, he’s taller than her while kneeling, looking down into her face with an expression just short of worried.
“It could have nothing about the Goddess Mark. It may be a waste of time.”
“That would be fine. I like history for the sake of it.”
“You’re certain Hyrule Castle is of no use?”
Zelda nods. “Yes. Even before the Calamity, most records were lost in the fall of the Magi-Technical Golden Age.” Zelda gestures helplessly. “Our oldest texts only barely describe the events of the Twilit Calamity and before that, there are anecdotal accounts of an ancient hero who moved through Time itself. No record of his actions exist because, it’s said, he existed in a non-linear state. Stopping Ganon before his rise and after.”
Link says nothing. Reacts not at all to the descriptions of his previous lives.
“Prior to that, there’s only… myth and fairytale. So there is nothing in those catacombs worth returning for. Not if our aim is to know more about why the Goddess Mark has appeared now. Why it’s expanded its touch to you.”
“What do you know of it?”
“Theology and historical theory. We know the Goddess Mark is tied to Hylia and the creation myth of Hyrule – the Golden Goddesses who left the world in the hands of Hylia. But that’s it. Scholars of the age have only said that the Mark symbolizes the godhead, three in one – Din, Farore, and Nayru. The heart of the world. The balance that maintains existence. It appears in most Hyrulian symbolism. Hardly compelling factual account. Not like Naboorian hieroglyphs.” She sighs, almost romantically. “Such a record would be so… unromantic in its chronicle of the past. Vital. I have to admit, I’m selfishly curious to know what’s on that mountain for my own sake.”
Draga gives her a crooked smile. “Well, thank the hero Nabooru. It was she who mandated a record of Gerudo history be made written.”
“Why did she do that?”
“Hard to say. Nabooru was an ancient figure to my people, I have a theory. When the Great Chieftains brought the Gerudo out from the Sea of Sand and laid us at the shores of Hyrule… that was the moment our oral traditions began to die. Such things do not survive when you must change to survive a new world. She knew it then and committed great efforts to laying down physical records of our history. This is how we know we were different before we found Hyrule.”
Zelda smiles. “Well, for what it’s worth, I’m glad your people did find Hyrule. We would be poorer for it had they not come.”
“Yes, I guess history would look very different.”
Link catches the tail end of the conversation then, walking up to tap her shoulder.
He signs, ‘We should go. I want to be past the Scab Lands before nightfall.’
“Okay,” she says.
And she kisses him on the cheek. She does it carefully, catches his chin with two fingers so he doesn’t move and fits her lips against the warm plane oh his cheekbone. There. Proud of herself – and feeling very giddy – she stands up and heads toward the road. She isn’t aware that anything extraordinary has transpired until Draga says, “For fuck’s sake,” and kicks her knight escort in the ankle to break him out of the trance. She smiles all the way back to the road.
When they reach the Scab Lands, there are three Gerudo on the road
Two of them, carrying twin travel packs and matching jackets, are dressed for the road heading north into Tabantha, bundled prolifically in an excess of scarves. One of them is capped in an adorable wool-knit hat, a grandmotherly kind with a pom-pom stuck to the top. This would seem a bit much, if Zelda hadn’t seen Draga stuff himself into excessive layers back in the Rito Village and his subsequent almost primal hate for the snow. He is, in fact, still wearing a scarf presently.
The two girls are talking to a third Gerudo woman on horseback. Her violently red hair is pulled back in a heavy tail – from it, hundreds of sparkling beads catch the light when she turns her head. She’s wearing a veil. Blue fabric pinned at her temples by elaborate gold clasps. The scimitar at her hip is sheathed in a mother of pearl scabbard. Zelda notes that, upon seeing them, Draga sits up a little straighter and nudges Arbiter into a faster trot.
“Greetings!” says the girl in the cap as they draw near. Her accent is very strong. She waves while her companion – a little older, sharing enough of her bone structure and contempt to be a sister – rolls her eyes and gently pushes her arm down.
“Good evening,” says the older girl in carefully done Hylian. Then in Gerudo, to Draga, “That’s quite a horse. I’ve never seen one more beautiful.”
Draga also in Gerudo, says, “Now you’ve done it. It’ll all go to his head now.”
Arbiter, as if on cue, tosses his massive head and nickers, stomping a hoof in the dirt and blowing air at the nearest girl who startles, almost losing her cap. The older girl laughs loudly. Draga smiles a little – just a suggestion of it but so specifically gentle Zelda finds herself studying the shape of it. Cataloging it. Hoping to commit it to memory so she can identify it again in the future – like the flight patterns of birds or the phenotypes of a rare plant species.
“Are you two headed north?” he asks.
“Yeah. Meeting a family friend. He says he has work for us,” says pom-pom girl.
“That’s good,” Draga says. “Lots of young Gerudo leave town without a single part of a plan. You’re doing better than I did.”
“Didn’t plan well for the cold though,” says the older girl. “I’m not looking forward to freezing my tits off on some gods forsaken snowfield.”
“I am!” enthuses pom-pom. “There will be snow. I’ve never seen snow.”
“Say that again when you run into a snow rhino,” says Draga, amused.
The older girl stares in horror. “What the fuck is a snow rhino? Don’t say there are snow rhinos.”
“There are snow rhinos. They’re ornery. I’ve seen them.”
Zelda notes that Draga leans harder on the male-conjugation than he does when speaking Gerudo with her. The older girl gives no sign she notices – possibly because she is distracted by the snow rhino and the fact earmuffs will not protect her from getting gored by one. The younger Gerudo girl though… as the conversation goes on, visibly frowns and Zelda can tell she’s trying to figure out Draga’s understandable but slightly canted take on her own language. It occurs to Zelda that the occasion for personal male modifiers in Gerudo might be uncommon enough that not everyone might have bothered to learn them.
About sixty seconds into the conversation, the younger girl confirms Zelda’s suspicions by blurting, “Oh! You’re a voe!”
Delighted. Like she just figured out a difficult riddle. Draga and her sister, bent over a map and reviewing their likely path north for safety and friendly rest stops, stare blankly at her. Draga, still in his saddle, glances at the older girl who balls a hand over her face in humiliation. This signals to the younger girl that she’s made an error and she wilts.
“Oh, uh, I mean…” She switches to her mother tongue. “Sorry. That’s rude right?”
“Yes, Rima. That’s rude,” says her sister, exasperated. “Goddess, you’re embarrassing.”
“But both the blonde ones are women, right, Taz?”
“No, you idiot. The short one is a man.”
“Really?” She stares openly at Link who tilts his head. “Are you sure?”
“You need to get better at this, I can’t tell you who is man and woman every time.” She looks directly at Draga. “I am so sorry.”
“It’s alright,” Draga says, visibly trying not to laugh.
“Are you two on Pilgrimage?” Zelda says in Gerudo.
“Oh! Your accent is so pretty!” Rima exclaims, clutching her hands to her chin. “You know Gerudo? That’s so amazing. No one knows our language! I’m so bad in Hylian. I say the wrong things.”
“You say the wrong things in every language,” Taz snaps.
Zelda makes introductions and accepts compliments on her hair and, through the corner of her eye, watches Draga dismount and start going through his saddle bag. He pulls out a small wood box she’s never seen and what looks like a snowquill doublet and overcoat with a couple ridiculous hats. The hats are also snowquill, but twice as thick as normal with ear flaps that make her immediately regret not seeing him wear it. Draga inspects these items with a calm appraisal, then turns and holds them out to the older girl.
“You two should take these,” he says.
Rima bounces a little at her sister’s shoulder, peering as she takes the coats and opens the little wood box. “Oh. Pretty. What are they?”
“Are these warming stones?” says Taz, her eyes big.
Draga nods.
She looks up. “We can’t take these.”
“Sure, you can.”
“These are too valuable!”
“They aren’t worth a thing.”
“You’re lying!”
Draga looks mock hurt. “I’m sorry. We just met and you’re calling me a liar?”
Taz loses some of her cool worldliness to alarmed sputtering but Rima is already pulling on the snowquill doublet, and then the overcoat, patting it with warm brown hands and smoothing the thick material down. She admires its fit (a bit too large honestly, even with the doublet beneath) and spins around so the longer part flaps out around her. She can’t quite lower her arms to her sides on account of the layers.
“So warm!” she says, beaming from the gap in her scarf and hat.
“It’s standard gear, but high quality,” Draga says. “Don’t let anyone try to trade you for it. The doublet and warming stone should be enough to keep even Tabantha cold out. Don’t go without full gear once you hit the snowfield. The temperatures there are deadly if you’re not ready. Besides, I’ll hardly have use for it back in the desert.”
Link signs, onehanded to Zelda, ‘That gear is worth near its weight in gold.’
Zelda blinks, then signs, ‘What?’
‘Rito can only make so many snowquill pieces a year since they use molting feathers. And warming stones are usually ruby. That equipment is no joke.’
The girl with earmuffs is already pulling the warming stone from the box – an adjustable leather wrist-cuff into which a single small red stone is filigreed in with silver wire. The stone has to be flush to skin to transfer its effect, Zelda knows. Draga tells her so and shows her how to tie the bracer to ensure it can’t come off. Then he says earmuffs are inadequate against Tabantha cold and places the ridiculous hat on her head. Rima squeals in delight. Taz tolerates this new development like she knew it was coming.
Draga pulls the flaps of the hat down around her ears and frowns down at it with a kind of judicious pragmatism and vague fraternal concern that makes Zelda aware, suddenly, of herself and the fact she’s sitting on her horse watching her giant friend vaguely mother people on the road. Makes her aware of Link kind of grinning besides her and as Draga finishes tying the stupid hat on his fellow Gerudo, Zelda acknowledges her desire (familiar and strange simultaneously) to put her hand on one of them. Not in any way specifically, just to be in contact.
The woman on horseback, who up until now has said nothing, waits until the sisters have departed with elaborate promises of returning the favor one day that Draga clearly appreciates, but expects nothing of. The woman’s horse is shockingly beautiful, golden in color, perfectly groomed, and stands at disciplined attention until she, gently, taps her heels into the beast’s flanks. The sun catches on the painted kohl and red that lines her eyes. She smells faintly of jasmine and when she smiles, Zelda can see it in the way her eyes crinkle and she says…
“You can’t buy the love of the People, you know.”
Zelda, stunned, just stares.
Draga, however, seems unmoved, He sneers, actually, his lips curling back like a dog bares its teeth. “I wouldn’t pay shit for your affection.”
She smiles. Her voice is almost gentle, musical, even in Hylian. “Come now, isn’t it a difficult life to choose?”
“You don’t choose,” he says.
“Of course, you do,” she says, almost gently, almost affectionately. “I’ll show you if you like. It’s easy. Here tell me: What is your real name?”
Draga’s expression changes then – a scorching burn of rage like a flash-fire on clay, baking in a color. He gets darker, if possible, with the intensity, the totality, of his anger in that single moment but even through that heat, Zelda catches it – an undercurrent. A brief but violent glow of hurt. Then he speaks through his teeth.
“You should ride on.”
She’s still smiling behind the veil.
The woman kicks her horse forward a little, so the beautiful gold animal circles to his left. “But don’t you want wisdom from a sister?” she asks, continuing to circle when Draga holds his ground. “I gave it to those girls, I’ll give it you. As if you were like them. The courtesy due your mothers at the least. Here’s my wisdom: Stay out here. Don’t go back. You’ll do much better where they don’t know shit about the People.” Here, she looks directly at Zelda. “Riju isn’t a little girl on the road with no jacket. She knows a shorthair heretic when she sees one.”
“Excuse me?” Zelda says in Hylian.
And the beautiful woman switches to Hylian just to clarify, “If you want to fuck a Gerudo, you should fuck a real one, girl.”
Link puts his fingers in his mouth and whistles.
He splits the air with that whistle, cracks it open with that sound. A piercing almost painful zipline of air, high and aggravating – cut with an impossible vibrato and quite without warning the beautiful woman’s horse throws its head, issues an equine scream, and bolts. The woman, clearly not expecting that, shrieks and flails forward, snatching the reins and hanging on as the mare gallops full speed, breakneck fast down the road. By the time she recovers she and her horse are a quarter mile away.
Link drops his hand. Zelda stares. Draga glares. Link just shrugs.
“How’d you do that?” Draga says, patting Arbiter on the nose. The massive stallion acts rather like it didn’t hear a thing.
Link nudges Epona off the road. “We’re behind schedule. We should go.”
Zelda looks at Draga. “Are you alright?”
He mounts up. “Of course.”
“Why would she say something like that?”
Draga looks at her. His expression so neutral it makes a momentary statue of him. “Link’s right. We should try to gain ground before it gets much darker. This area isn’t safe at night.”
Zelda thinks about the flight pattern of birds, the mating habits of poisonous frogs, the sexual dimorphism between the male and female of a certain species of lizard, and the precise balance of the smile that touched Draga’s mouth when he tied that stupid hat on Taz’s head. She nods and follows her companions off the beaten path and they head into the wilds at the foot of the mountain range beyond, toward the uneven ridges that mark Draga’s homeland.
“That’s too much salt.”
“You said add more salt.”
“Not that much.”
“I can’t un-salt something, Link.”
There’s a silence.
“No. I’m not taking cooking critique where you spell things for me in Sign.”
“Add a little more of everything.”
“How about you give better instructions and we won’t have this problem?”
“How about you don’t dump too much salt in my salmon risotto and we won’t have this problem?”
“Never mind. Go back to not speaking.”
Zelda looks up from the bow in her lap – recurve composite, Gerudo make, one of Link’s spares dug from the vast and confusing depths of his enchanted travel pack. It feels warm and familiar in her hands. The wood curved like the dip of a hipbone. She watches her compatriots. Link is hovering and peering over his shoulder with a kind of bland anxiety that’s specific to food. Draga is glaring at him for it. She goes back to what she was doing because she explicitly warned Draga not to try and help Link cook. He gets weird about it. So, this his bed to lie in.
She smooths her fingers up and down the shape of the bow, fitting her fingers to the leather grip at the center, feeling again and again a vague sensation of reflex. Of want. It’s one of the lightest in Link’s arsenal at a thirty-five-pound draw – just enough pull to down an opponent if she puts some intention to it. The bowstring lays coiled in her lap, tacky, wrapped in wax paper.
“Could you back up?” Draga says.
Link does not do that.
“I need you to back up.”
Link kind of makes a face and Draga picks up the entire plate of spare ingredients from the grass and shoves it into his arms. “That’s it. I’m done You are like…” He says something in Gerudo that Zelda thinks is slang, but translates like ‘a jackal in heat’ or something to that effect. “I hate fish anyway.”
Link looks offended.
Draga leaves him there looking offended and comes to join Zelda. “You going to string that?”
“I’m trying to remember how.”
“I can show you.”
“No. I’m trying to remember.”
He frowns, then realizes. “Oh.” He crouches down in front of her, inspecting the weapon in her hands with a thoughtful reconsideration. “What is that like? Trying to remember something that didn’t happen in this life?”
“Like I’m remembering something I did in a dream,” Zelda says, carefully unspooling the bowstring from the wax paper. “I can ignore it if I want. What I remember in a dream does not confuse me. I am never uncertain about what I have done and what has been done by my predecessors.” She hooks the top of the string into the notch at the bottom of the bow. “Often, it’s not memory at all. Just a feeling. Indistinct.” She stops here to stand up, bracing the bottom of the bow against the ground just outside her right boot with the curve hooked up hugging the back of her left thigh, set diagonally between her legs. “It’s nothing specific. Just…”
Draga waits. “Want a hint?”
“No… I know this. I…” She grips the top curve of the bow and pushes it down like a lever forward, the body of bow bending against her leg. This gives her just enough time to hook the string into the top notch. She releases the tension and the line goes taut. “Ha!” She steps her leg out of the freshly strung bow and presents it to Draga. “It’s like muscle memory!”
Draga tilts his head. “Well, if it’s muscle memory, Princess, maybe we should try some target practice.”
She falters a moment. “Oh… well I could try.”
Draga fetches his own quiver from their equipment, taking long enough that she begins to regret her decision. She fully regrets it by the time he hands her the first arrow. He waits. Clearly not intending to help her figure it out whatsoever.
Nervous now, Zelda readjusts her grip on the bow in her left hand, awkwardly sliding her hand down the arrow from the middle of its length to the feather-fletched end. The feel of it sends a vague blush of familiarity through her. She closes her eyes. She imagines… fitting the bolt to the string, drawing it back. A compound movement, pushing the bow away and drawing the line back, high at first, then lining up. Mathematical. Precise. Her line of sight focuses and – she opens her eyes.
Draga is peering down at her, waiting and curious.
She shoves the arrow back at him, a sick well suddenly in the back of her throat.
“Never mind. I don’t want to practice this.”
Draga blinks a little owlishly. “Why not?”
“I just don’t want to. The draw weight is too heavy for me anyway.”
“How would you know unless you tried?” Draga says, his brow rising slightly.
“I… I just would rather not.”
He takes the arrow.
“Is this because you said you thought about killing me?” And when Zelda goes ramrod stiff, petrified, he scratches his chin and says, “Your dream-mind notwithstanding, if you think you can kill me, it’s going to take more than an arrow, Princess.”
She sputters, horrified. “I would never –!”
“Then there’s no reason not to learn this,” Draga interrupts.
He offers her the arrow again. When she does not immediately take it back and, instead, stands there frozen, he says, quietly, “It would be useful if you learned this.” A beat. “Relearn it.” Another beat. “Whichever it is. I barely follow you two when you talk about these things.”
“Draga…”
He steps forward and with an old archer’s ease, he fits three fingers beneath her left elbow and lifts her bow arm to a proper height. He nocks the arrow to the string for her, his fingers momentarily fitting hers to the line.
“Just draw,” he says.
Eventually, after a long moment, she draws.
It’s like taking a breath.
“Hm,” he says.
“What’s ‘hm’?”
“You have a long pull.” He moves out of her line of sight, behind her. “You draw all the way past your ear.”
“This feels right. Is that bad?” she asks, maintaining her stance, aiming indistinctly at the trees.
“Not necessarily,” he says. She can feel the shrug. “Your footwork is good. How does it feel?”
“Familiar.”
“It should.” His mouth is suddenly very close to her ear. “I saw you shoot at that dragon.”
A shiver runs down her spine and coils in Zelda’s stomach. A murmur enters her heart, but before she can react, he loops his quiver belt around her hips, drawing it tight. He’s kneeling behind her to do this, his hands occasionally bracing against her hip as he fits it. He’s not gentle exactly, tugging at the strap with a utilitarian strength she might expect if he were tacking Arbiter for the road. It forces her to brace. She looks over her shoulder to glare at him, but when she turns her head, he looks calmly up at her from where he’s kneeling. The fire light illuminates one side of his face, painting a gold heat into the high plane of his cheekbone and –
She immediately faces forward again, suddenly very aware of his hands against her hip.
He finishes adjusting the quiver and stands up.
“There’s a knot in that oak. Think you can hit it?”
She squints down the shaft, the bowstring digging into her fingers as she holds the tension and… she relaxes. She lowers the bow with the arrow still nocked to the string and turns at the hips to look up at Draga.
“Why did that woman speak to you like that on the road today?”
Draga blinks. “This is an obvious delaying tactic.”
“It’s an honest question.”
Draga thinks about it. “When you were learning Gerudo, you were taught the importance of gendered conjugation in our language, yes? That our pronouns delineate Gerudo as its own gender category. Then non-Gerudo women and men.” When he gets a small nod from her, he goes on. “Naboorian dialects are the only Gerudo dialects that allow for Gerudo-specific male modifiers at all and that dialect is not widely spoken. So, in effect, my own language does not properly allow for my existence.”
Zelda’s brows lift in surprise. “The dialect you speak… it’s an offshoot?”
“A slight variant. But yes. My family spoke it, but not many outside the Highlands do.”
She hesitates, then admits, “I honestly thought that Gerudo-specific conjugation was gender indifferent until I met you.”
He shrugs. “Our most common conjugation structures evolved without distinction. Hardly unnatural, but it’s also why that woman said what she said. If I have used any modifiers other than Naboorian – then she wouldn’t, perhaps, have spoken up.” He pauses a moment, thinking. “I have had more fights with Gerudo over my dialect than any other moral disagreement.”
“Why?”
“It’s very hard for the narrow-minded to ignore me when I speak Naboorian Gerudo.” He smiles a little, but it’s a brittle baring of teeth. “It’s subtle. Outside of my own dialect, if I wanted to specifically delineate myself as a man… I would have to linguistically separate myself from being a Gerudo.”
Zelda shakes her head. “Why don’t I know this?”
“You’re Hylian,” he says, shrugging. “Also, you were fighting Calamity Ganon so I hardly fault you for not being finely aware of the societal riffs among my people. Now, are you going to shoot that bow or do you want a grammar lesson?”
“Well…”
Draga waits.
“Oh, very well. I will try.”
Draga smiles.
Zelda turns back to her target. After a moment’s consideration, she draws a second arrow, hooking the feathered end into the loop of her pinkie finger while she sets the first arrow to the line – both shots held ready now in her right hand. She breathes. She thinks – not of the desert. No. Not the desert. Something else. Like… like standing in a long yard. She imagines her hair shorn short for battle, her fingers callused and scarred. Zelda draws. Aims. Releases the shot. Flips the next bolt over her knuckles and sets it to the line. Pulls. Fires.
When she lowers the bow, two arrows stand quivering from the mouth of the hollow, clustered at the head.
“Huh,” says Draga.
“That’s a Sheikah’s draw,” says Link.
Zelda blinks, her heart-pounding elation -- alien and effervescent, like she’s stealing it from another world entirely – subverted by the frank certainty the statement. Link is no longer cooking by the fire. He’s standing with Draga, watching, arms folded. The campsite smells of salmon risotto. Link’s hair catches bits of gold in the fire light, Draga beside him lit in copper. She blinks again at the peculiar mirror they make of one another, both peering at her with identical looks of intrigue.
Link points. “The way you bring it up, pull past your ear, and sight. The reload method. It’s Sheikah.” He shrugs, then signs, ‘I don’t know how to shoot like that. It’s one of the most challenging styles I know of.’
“Oh…” Zelda looks uncertainly to Draga, who just shrugs, then back to Link. “Really?”
He nods and she feels a strange dissociation, staring at her own fingers.
She shakes it off. “Okay, so I use a Sheikah draw? Is that bad? What style do you use, Link?”
Draga interrupts immediately, at volume, “Link shoots with his wrist out and some bizarre pinch and draw I’ve never seen and it’s appalling. Do not do what he does or ask for his advice.”
Link shrugs. “It a Zora draw.”
“It’s what?”
“I trained with Zora when I was younger,” he says blandly. “They shoot that way to keep their fins out of the line. I didn’t know that when I was a child.”
Draga stares. “So you shoot weird because you’re too lazy to retrain yourself?”
Link shrugs again.
“You’re unbelievable.”
Link says, “Dinner’s ready,” and walks back to the fire. Rather like nothing of great surprise occurred, leaving Zelda and Draga to stare after him.
Zelda shoulders the bow for a moment. “Draga… thank you for telling me all that.”
“You both deserve to know before I take you into it.”
“Can I ask one more thing?”
“Of course.”
“Why did she ask for your ‘real name’?”
He looks at her, a little surprised, then says, “Only demons have many names.”
Zelda blinks. “What?”
“Do you not say that in Hylian?”
She shakes her head.
“Oh.” He ponders this, rubbing his neck like there’s a knot there, his other arm folded across his stomach. “I’m not sure how to say it in Hylian, Names have power in the desert. Saying I have the wrong name...”
Zelda lays a hand on his arm, drawing his hand down. He looks at her.
“You know that we prefer you as you are, right?”
He stares at her. A strange expression. Like he hadn’t seen her properly or the dark made odd shadows in her face. “Thank you, Zelda.”
“Always.”
Zelda wakes to Link’s hand on her arm.
It’s still dark. She can hear crickets in the forest. Even the embers of their fire are dark.
Link’s face is just barely discernable in the moonlight, the blanket having fallen off his shoulder when he rolled over to wake her. He says nothing, but she knows what’s wrong. She crawls carefully over her knight, bare feet sinking into gap between their sleeping pads, fingers bracing against the mess of bedding. She can feel dew on the fur Link pulls over the top, strictly to keep the dampness off the wool.
Draga, lying next to Link, is breathing too fast. Keeps jerking involuntarily. Half-formed words escaping him in quiet suppressed bursts, like someone has a hand on his throat. He’s on his side, spine curled slightly forward, arms drawn close to his chest, like he’s cold… or like he’s trying to clutch his throat in his sleep and can’t. Zelda lays a hand over his brow and a faint gold light wells gently in her fingers. Link’s eyes – suddenly visible, blue, holding the glow in a way that defies what she knows about illumination – meet hers.
Eventually, the tension leaves Draga’s limbs. His hands unclench and the faint, pained tension in his features smooths away to unconscious neutrality. For another minute she sits there, her hand against his head and Link’s chin against her shoulder. She listens to them breathing until, vaguely, she realizes they’re breathing together and Link’s fallen asleep against her. They won’t mention it in the morning.
A reminder: Link doesn’t look dangerous until he is.
Lake Alumeni lies shining at the foot of the Gerudo Highlands. An icy wellspring of water wreathed by a copse of apple and evergreen trees, knotted with heather and long grass. The grass gives way to a sandy slope of shore before the lake’s edge and it’s there, under the dying sunlight, Link does as Draga asked of him. Namely: be very dangerous for a while.
He’s crouched, waiting, sword in hand.
He says, calmly, ““You won’t beat me without magic.”
Draga, knotting anther bandage around his forearm, snarls, “I know, you tiny bastard.”
Link doesn’t smile.
The lackadaisical courtesy of previous sparring sessions has gone, replaced with mercenary indifference – the blank, blue-eyed battle stare that is precursor, Zelda knows, to terrible violence. That’s the face he wears now. Apathetic as physics when he puts an impossible bend in the universe and uses it to smash his friend to the ground. Repeatedly. Viciously. Trying to draw out an response. Even the blunt edge of the sparring sword does the job – laying a ragged road of bruises and shallow cuts down Draga’s arms. Leaving him panting, laved in sweat and sticky with blood. IT’s been hours.
The air stinks with like live current. Link’s breath like the air before a lightning strike. There’s a storm in his eyes when he’s like this. Zelda almost forgot.
“Ready?” he says.
Draga thinks about it. Then nods.
Link hits him instantly. The blade sings with the blow and Draga lunges back. He swings a massive blow at Link’s flank, but he just pivots, ducks the side slash, and smashes his elbow into Draga’s back as he goes past. Draga hits the ground rolling and comes up instantly. Draga attacks. Fast. He’s still so fast, even now, but Link is always that much faster. He deflects the blow, pivots, and comes up slashing, sword ringing when it slams into Draga’s. It puts a terrible vibrato into the metal, driving the bigger man back but Link does not stop. Doesn’t slow an iota.
He presses the exchange with a merciless speed, the entire time saying, “No,” and “C’mon!” and “I’m going to kill you, if you don’t get this!”
(Zelda tells herself he doesn’t mean that. It’s a tactic. It’s just talk.) But he doesn’t stop.
Draga’s breathing hard. He tries to catch his balance. Link keeps coming. Link gets past his guard, strikes a glancing blow to his head. Draga keeps his feet, but only just and Link lays open another bleeding line against wrist, his thigh, his hip – Draga flinches and that’s when the lake shore shivers. Draga is already swinging when it happens. He brings the blade down and the impact is Lynel-like, buckling Links arm and spinning him around.
This time, the metal does not howl. It eats the impact and the air around him becomes heat-smeared, mirage-like. When he steps forward, small pebbles on the ground begin to shiver and jump as if caught in the gravity of a localized star. The surfaces of the lake ripples, a barometric shiver in the air displacing the mirror shine.
But Draga’s thrown his sword down.
He stands there, stock still, his hands clenched in front of him. Eyes closed. Breathing too fast.
Link, seeing this, steps back and lowers his blade.
“Control it,” Link says loudly. “Focus!”
“What the hell… do you think… I’m doing?”
His eyes take on a shine – glowing internally, red – usually a controlled burn, steady as the embers in a blacksmith’s forge. Now, she can see the erratic pulse of it, like someone is inexpertly pumping bellows into the forge, throwing sparks and heating the interior too fast, too much. He shakes his head. He breathes too fast.
Zelda steps in.
She’s got her hands around Draga’s wrists, then around the back of his neck. It’s like grabbing a burning skillet from a flame. She can feel the heat hissing against the thin golden shell that paints her skin, like heat crackling in water. She pulls his forehead down to hers and pushes that golden light through her palms into the muscles in the back of his neck where it travels like water down a wall, dousing his skin where it touches.
He's gasping. “I can’t breathe…”
“You can breathe. Breathe when I breathe.”
Draga’s breath is hot against her face, but it’s cooling. She feels the resistance start to give, like trying to dam water with your hands then letting it go. He lets her pour out light, running over his skin, into his skin and evaporating on contact. And in the same breath she can feel the… depth he was talking about, like a house that’s bigger on the inside, the vast space into which she is pouring herself with no hope of filling. The void that dragons opened inside him. But even so, Draga’s skin feels human again. When he breathes, there’s gold in it.
She pushes, carefully, another dose of sunlight against his skin and he twitches, shivering.
“It’s like a ocean moving around you,” she murmurs. “Like a river. You can direct part of the flow, but you can’t control it. Do you feel it?” She breathes slowly, speaks calmly. “You have to let go or you’ll drown. Every time.”
“It’s like you have your hand in my chest,” he says, surprising her.
“I won’t hurt you.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“It’s okay. You’re not losing control.”
“That’s not what I meant, either.”
She blinks. “Oh.”
Zelda doesn’t recognize the way he’s looking at her. But at the same time, she knows it exactly. There’s gold on her tongue when she kisses him. There it is again – that dirty copper taste, like swallowing a coin. Like warming a spoon with her mouth. Her fingers close in his hair, her nails dragging on his scalp and when she finally pulls away, the air is calm around them. No longer boiling where they touch. Nevertheless, she feels hot. Her fingers against his neck pulsing, her heartbeat in her hands and in her stomach and she feels dizzy, like her head is filled with vapor.
She pulls away.
Draga shivers. “Thank you.” He looks at Link. “Both of you.”
Link joins them. The alien battle blank edge resolved into a kind of wry concern. He wipes sweat from his face with his sleeve, managing a small smile and a shrug that says, without sign or sound, ‘Whatever it takes.’
“Honestly,” Draga says again. “This would be much harder on my own. I’m glad I’m not this time.”
“Of course,” Zelda says emphatically. “I said you could rely on us and I mean it. I do. We’re going to figure this out together. We’re going to figure out the nature of this new magic. We’re going to go with you back to the Gerudo. We’re going to move forward.” She smiles. She doesn’t’ know why – overwhelmed suddenly by an excess of happiness. Or hope. She hadn’t been aware she lacked that before. “I have every confidence. I really do.”
Link taps her shoulder.
“Hmm?”
He cups her jaw and draws her into a kiss, tilting her head and his tongue is salt and milk in her mouth. Her heart races. A dizzy delight rising in her throat and she giggles a little. For some reason, Link seems to like that, and the way he’s kissing her becomes a little feral, his fingers knotting in her hair, his teeth just barely catching against her lip and rather without meaning too, a small moan rises in her throat. High and broken and Link immediately pulls back. Red in the face.
“Sorry,” he says, stepping back.
“What for?” says Draga, arms folded, looking a little disappointed.
Link blushes harder. “I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Why not?” Zelda says, a little punch drunk.
Draga laughs. “You’re allowed, you know.”
Link hesitates. Then, rather like he’s repeating a question, he moves toward them again. He looks between them. She can tell he’s trying to figure out the best tactical execution here. Draga just rolls his eyes, bends down, and lays a hand against Link’s jaw.
“For someone who clearly knows what they’re doing,” he says, “you embarrass easy.”
Link gets redder. “Got to hell,” he says, but in the wrong tone of voice.
Draga smiles.
Zelda notices the back of his left hand is brushing her bare wrist.
“Maybe later,” he says.
.
.
.
go to chapter 10...
#botw#legend of zelda#legend of zelda breath of the wild#loz#zelda#link#ganondorf#lozfic#in which the cycle starts over immediately#and no one told link or zelda#you can actually#run into the next triforce holder on the fucking road#and he might be kinda chill#tagging for#polyamory
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When you lose your sword... panic?
This idea was concocted from a conversation with @gintrinsic-writing and Just_Bonesy :)
CW: blood, gore, violence
Twilight is not the best fighter of the group by any means, that title goes to Sky or Warriors, or possibly Wild when he isn’t setting the battlefield on fire. It’s clear which of them have had professional training and who hasn’t; where Sky moves with precise elegance, Hyrule fights with almost desperate brawl. Where Warriors parrys and jabs with meticulously calculated technique, Legend’s style is rather a brutish scuffle. But while the professional soldiers of the group have the upper hand while fighting with swords, there are certain situations where those who have learned exclusively from their own wits and experience come out on top.
Take now, for example, as Twilight faces three lizalfos head on. His sword is in the ditch somewhere having flown out of his hand a few moments ago courtesy of an unsuspecting swipe from his blind spot, and he has no other weapons on him. The others aren’t in any position to be helping him, they have their own battles to fight; the waves of enemies are approaching fast.
The lizalfos on the right comes at him first, swinging sword glinting maliciously, and Twilight jumps into action, light and sturdy on his feet. He lets his adrenaline run wild and his most animalistic instincts kick in, and he lets out a snarl, baring his teeth in battle-fuelled rage. He doesn’t dodge backwards away from the first swipe, he lunges towards it seemingly heedlessly so that instead of being hit by the blade, he’s struck with the inside of the beast’s elbow. It stumbles slightly in surprise and Twilight uses the opening to grab its wrist and turn it forcefully clockwise, hearing a couple of bones in its hand crack. In his mid-battle high, they might as well be twigs snapping beneath his palms. It lets out a pig-like squeal but doesn’t drop its sword – Twilight is forcing its hand to keep its grip underneath his own.
It’s a struggle, but he manages to turn it enough that the wrist too snaps beneath its scaly skin and the sword plunges into its own stomach with a little added force. Twilight shoves it away with excessive strength and it falls to the ground, unmoving, dark red pooling beneath its body, congealing with the grit and mud in a viscous concoction of its own defeat. Twilight staggers slightly from the momentum of the push, his knuckle scraping painfully along the floor, and the next lizalfos takes the small opportunity to grab him in a steel headlock.
He doesn’t hesitate as he turns his head to the side with sudden force and uses his entire weight to pull on the arm that holds him. It gives way immediately, almost too easily, and he twists his body, the lizalfos hand with it, until he’s in a position to shove it to the ground alongside its companion. He finishes it off with five kicks to the head, the tiny, fragile bones of its face shattering beneath his worn, blood-splattered boot.
There’s one left now, weaponless, and Twilight can feel it’s hesitance, it’s eyes flickering to it’s fallen comrades with what Twilight would like to think of as nervousness. Good. A hesitant opponent means it’s more likely to make mistakes, more chance of openings for a kill. Still, there’s strange determination in its cold, reptilian eyes when it runs at full speed towards him, and it’s almost a shame that it lasts as little time as it does.
Twilight squats in preparation, and as it reaches him, claws outstretched in front of it, muscular tail poised for attack, he manages to grip it around the underside of its arm with one hand and the scraps of its tunic in the other, and then pulls with all his might. It goes flying over his shoulder with more momentum than Twilight had expected, and he feels its neck crack as it tumbles to the ground behind him.
He straightens up, eyes roving over each of his three enemies to confirm that they are indeed still motionless, and rubs the dust off his hands contentedly before turning around, coming face to face with Wind, a fierce look in his sea-blue eyes.
“Show me how to do that,” the sailor demands, the pointy end of his sword pointing straight at him. Twilight takes a step back, startled.
“What?” he asks. The others are coming to the end of their respective fights and seem not to have noticed the gruesome brawl that went down only seconds ago.
“That.” Wind waves the sword to the place the third dead Lizalfos lies, “The thing you did with the twirly arm where you threw that guy over your shoulder.”
“The one arm shoulder throw?” Twilight questions, parroting the name Rusl had taught him all those years ago when his mentor used to beat him every time they sparred.
“I don’t care what it’s called! Just show me!”
So he does, later, when they’ve set up camp and the others are doing their own thing elsewhere, either practicing their own fighting or foraging resources for their journey. Twilight has had experience teaching hand-to-hand combat to the children of Ordon – it’s strongly believed in the village that children should learn to fight as soon as they are able, and not everyone can afford swords – and he is pleased, but unsurprised, that Wind has the enthusiasm of all of the village children put together. He is also considerably more competent at listening and picking up the moves (again, not altogether surprising considering he defeated Ganon at the tender age of twelve) and he manages to learn a good few techniques in just a couple of hours.
“This is fun,” Wind grins, looking down at him as Twilight picks himself off the floor having just been taken down for the umpteenth time, on this occasion with a solid kick to the back of his left knee. Hylia help them all if Wind grows any bigger, who knew his skinny legs held such brute strength.
“Hey Captain!” Wind shouts to Warriors who is walking into the clearing carrying a stack of logs, an axe on his back, “you wanna spar? Twi taught me some new moves.”
“Sure, Sailor,” he replies, dropping the logs into a neat pile by their camp and swapping the axe for his sword, “don’t go too hard on me,” he grins good-naturedly, clearly not noticing the mischievous glint in Wind’s eyes. Wind picks up his own sword and they get into their respective stances, eyeing each other from across the small clearing. Wind waits for Warriors to swing first, at which point he tosses his sword to the ground beside him.
“Wait, wha-“ Warriors manages to get out mid-swing before Wind is careening towards him and grabbing his wrist in the way Twilight taught him. Twilight is proud to see he executes the move perfectly, twisting Warriors’ wrist towards him and immediately sending him to the ground, sword and all.
“Holy mother of FUCK!” Warriors shouts, clutching his wrist in obvious pain, his sword lying some few metres away. Twilight hopes Wind didn’t break anything.
“What next, Twi?” Wind asks cheerily as the captain rolls around at his feet.
“Now you kick him in the balls,” Twilight informs him.
“WAIT, NO! STOP, I SURRENDER!” Warriors pleads, and Twilight gives Wind a wink before going over to help Warriors up, grasping his good hand and pulling him to his feet.
“Where in Hylia’s name did you learn to fight like that?” Warriors asks him, clutching his wrist to his chest.
“Rusl taught me some of it,” he replies, “some I learned from just being on the road, and some of it’s stuff I learned from goat wrangling.”
The Captain considers him for a moment, clearly impressed.
“You think you could teach that to everyone?”
So that’s how Twilight finds himself standing in front of a scene that might be even more chaotic than when he was teaching Colin and his friends hand-to-hand. In his defence, he’s almost certain it’s not his teaching skills that are to blame; goat wrangling is nothing compared to herding these supposedly ‘respectable’ holders of the triforce of courage.
Wind successfully managed to take down Time before the lesson even started, and he now sits next to him, sheepishly holding some ice from Legend’s ice rod over the old man’s nose while the latter glares stonily into the distance. Behind them, Warriors has Legend in a headlock and Twilight almost chuckles at the distinctly rodent-like way Legend is trying to squirm out of it, punching every square inch of torso he can reach.
Four’s eyes flash blue-green as he gleefully pulls Sky down to his own height by the clump of hair he mercilessly has clenched in one fist, and Hyrule and Wild are hanging upside-down from a tree (though Twilight is pretty sure that has nothing to do with the lesson at hand).
All learned technique has gone out the window. Scratch that, it’s left the Goddessdamned kingdom. Though, Twilight supposes, that was kind of the point in the first place. Besides, Wind has fully mastered the one arm shoulder throw considering the way Time landed face first in the mud like a sack of potatoes not so long ago and Warriors has lost his usual stringency that so often prevents him from improvising in tight spots. All in all, they’re not doing too badly, and he fancies next time they find themselves up against an enemy without a weapon, they’ll be considerably more prepared. Rusl would be proud.
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