The residents of Dueling Peaks Stable would later tell of the woman dressed in white, who, as the sun was rising, walked out of the stable and straight into the water. They said she hadn't slept the night before, but rather she lay in her bed and listened as the travelers talked. Domidak said that listening to their tall tales and easy comradery was how she had first learned the language. Before that night, she hadn't understood a word. After that night, she was fluent.
It was said that as she walked, she shed her jewelry-stiff gold bracelets that stretched up her forearms and a sold gold necklace that arched between her collar bones. She let the drop where they landed and marched across the gravel road barefoot. Rensa pointed out that this was nonsense, and she'd done nothing of the sort, but these details did make for a better story.
She walked straight into the water, even though it was close to freezing. Her stride never slowed. She didn't hug herself. She didn't dive in. She just walked, eyes fixed ahead, water creeping up her legs, her chest, her neck, until she vanished from sight without a ripple.
There was a long silence. As if nothing had happened. It had been an illusion. An apparition. The woman was a ghost, a spirit of sorrow.
Until she reemerged at the base of the shrine, hauling herself from the water to prop herself, half collapsed, on the ground. She gasped for breath, her lungs too cold to expand. Her dress was waterlogged, leaving great puddles on the stone of the shrine. Her hair had slicked to her scalp and neck. It clung to her back. The cold had made her even more pale, even more ghost-like.
She rubbed at her arms, at first as if she were working heat back into them, but then with more urgency. No one had missed how filthy she was when she'd arrived. Not just regular travel grime and horse smell either. She was covered in mud and grease and gore. She smelled of panicked sweat and of the blasted stone up the hill on the north side of Dueling Peaks where rumor had it that a guardian patrolled. She scrubbed at her arms to clean them of grime and dirt, to scrub away rain and tears, to scrub away memories. She went after her skin with her fingernails, bringing up red splotches. She moved on to her legs, scraping at her feet, her calves, her knees, then her chest and neck and face. She tried to scrape at her scalp, but her braid was in the way, so she undid it.
A hunk of hair broke off in her hand.
From the stable, where they were watching, Cima had gasped, slapping a hand to her mouth. Prissen shifted uncomfortably and turned his back to avert his eyes (something he had not done when she'd started hiking up her skirt to get clean). The girl must not have taken her hair from that braid in months. She should never have tried to take it down while it was wet. She stared at the hair in horror. Then lowered it slowly. Swallowed visibly.
She took down the rest of her hair with more care and more breakage, the frantic energy of her scrubbing had drained into a loss no one at the stable could explain, but they all felt it in the air and understood.
The sun rose and she scrubbed-her dress her hair, her face. She got in between her toes and under her fingernails. He hair started to dry with bulky crimps from her braids. They defied gravity. Even wetting, scrubbing, and finger-combing her hair hadn't made a dent.
The residents of the stable lost interest and went back to their business, checking on her sporadically.
She stared at the entrance to the shrine for nearly an hour. That was the closest anyone came to going out and calling to her. They all knew not to mess around with the shrine.
Eventually, she waded back out of the water and lay down on the grass, letting the noon-time sun dry her. She didn't move. In some versions of the story, she lay down in the grass and died. Her ghost is still there.
In some versions, she was never alive to begin with.
But then Link finally woke up. He bought some traveling clothes for her that were too big, and he couldn't find shoes that fit her, so she had to wear her strappy sandals. Cima threw in a head scarf for free. Link took out two horses and got them tacked up. Only then did he call out to her, and only then did she rise.
#
Zelda lasts about fifteen minutes from the stable until she can't keep her questions to herself any longer. "Where? Where did you find the royal gear? Is it authentic? And where did you find this horse? However did you manage it?"
He smiles and it's infuriating. "You like it?"
"I...I don't know."
His face falls a bit, and even though she didn't appreciate his smugness, now she feels ungrateful.
"It's just so strange. Seeing it again." It's so familiar in her hands, the way it lies against the horse's mane is so familiar that it's giving her vertigo. But the leather is more worn than when she last held it, and worn in different places. Its color has faded. It's gone and had a life of its own. And, as much as this horse looks like her old favorite (probably one of its descendants, if she has to guess), this is not her horse-a fact that the horse refuses to let her forget.
"Thank you," she says. "It's a kind gesture." She smiles, making sure it raises her cheeks. "It must have been quite the heroic quest!"
He smiles, but it doesn't touch his eyes, and he looks away. She has failed at conversation.
She asks, "Where are we going?"
"Hateno Village."
Her heart seizes then speeds. She fights down the need to take tiny, rapid breaths. Of course. They're headed east. She should have known. They'll be at Fort Hateno any minute. And before that-before that they'll be in the field, the battle ground before the gates, the final stand.
Link is unconcerned.
She murmurs, "I've never heard of a village of that name."
"I think it's new. Relatively."
"Oh. Of course." She swallows, talks through the dizziness. "New settlements would have risen up and others...fallen."
Her lips are quivering. Or are her teeth chattering? Her hands feel numb with cold, and she flexes them around the reigns.
The trees clear, and the battleground spreads before them. The rusted and crumbling carcasses of a thousand guardians are strewn on the ground, rising up the wall of the fort like a frozen wave. A cloud passes in front of the sun and something red moves in her periphery, and she can smell them, bile and grease and ozone, the smell of malice that she will never get off her skin, the smell of ancient artifacts, which she once found so exciting, so invigorating. She's going to be sick. She's going to die. They're all dead. She's killed them all. And now Link-
She's running. She's panting. They're coming. It's found her. A pulse as its eye locks onto her, a pulse as her heart sinks. It rushes forward. She can't move. It grabs her.
She screams.
It has her locked in a claw, a force presses against her eyes, blinding her.
"Shhh. Zelda, deep breaths."
Link. Link's dying. She's killed him.
"The battle's over. Listen to what's around you. Tell me what you hear."
"It's charging for a blast. Like a live wire. A whine."
"That's your memory listening. Listen with your ears now. You're a scientist. Tell me what you observe. Here. Now."
She's breathing too hard to hear anything. She just keeps seeing a moment: the guardian climbing over one of its fallen brothers that collapses under the weight. A crunch. A crumbling. A scrape.
"I hear the wind," Link says.
"The wind." She tries to breathe. "The wind."
Birdsong erupts behind her, and she jumps so hard she almost unseats herself from the horse. She's on a horse. In the future. Link is behind her, a hand locked over her eyes. How did he get there?
"That's a rainbow sparrow," he says. "You hear it?"
"Yes," it comes out choked. She's grasping at the sound, holding onto it for dear life. A songbird. There's a songbird here.
"Good," he says. They listen together as its song twitters and scales, as the song fades as the bird flies away.
He nudges the horse with his knees and they're moving again. "Can you feel the sun? What else can you hear?"
She can feel the sun. It's warm on her cheeks. There's no sun in her memories. She pushes them from her mind and focuses on the senses available to her. She's a scientist. She can observe without preconceived bias. "Hoof beats," she breathes. "And I can smell something floral. Wildflowers. I don't know what kind. And something...hyrule herb and armoranth?"
"That's my soap."
"Oh."
His hand is warm over her eyelids. She can feel his pulse in the palm pressed against her temple. She can feel his breathing press against her back. Both are steady. Calming.
After the longest walk, the sun vanishes against her skin and the cold rushes in. She tenses, but a moment later, Link drops his hand from her eyes, and she blinks at the shade of a forest. They've passed the fort.
Link does not return to his own horse.