Peculiar Circumstance

It's been noted that while fairies have great capacity for natural magic, more so than any mortal, they have very little capacity for reason. Great Fairies in particular are barely sane by most human standards.

- Field Studies of the Fey

Due to some dreadful weather that season – and because the Hyrulian Royal Guard couldn't be roused from their beds to assist them – the merchants coming back down the mountain roads were having more than a spot of trouble with the local wildlife and couldn't make it the last leg of their journey to Castle Town. Sufficiently stranded on the opposite side of a mountain pass, it seemed like something of considerable concern as far as emergencies. And yet – for a while – no one took note, nor paid any mind, or bothered in general to inquire as to their absence during market. However, when the local shops began to run low on essentials and locals themselves low on certain luxuries (mountain mink scarves were highly fashionable of late) the Queen was called upon to dispatch someone to handle the problem.

The average Hyrulian soldier couldn't be bothered of course, the useful ones were all doing necessary things about the country, and most of the knights currently in court bore the title in name only and quite frankly would provide very little in the way of knightly help. Thus, they could not be dispensed at the leisure of their Queen to solve frivolous problems of the common folk which might, in turn, require them to dirty their hands. And that's to say nothing of actual combat. Besides the disposal of bandits and mongrels did not seem to be a quest of much merit anyhow, and wouldn't serve well to further their reputations among high society.

Eventually the Queen deemed it hopeless and enlisted some...volunteers.

"Ahem." One of the merchants cleared his throat yet again. "Ahurrrum! Ha! Hem-hem..."

For the past two hours up the mountain he'd been in the habit of doing that, though neither Ashei nor her quiet partner could discern precisely why. The young woman glanced over her shoulder for the umpteenth time, dark eyes flashing the warning to stop being so loud with all that coughing. At her side, one could detect the faintest tic (the corner of his mouth pulled from time to time, like he might bare fangs) in the bearing of her companion, the age of whom the incredulous businessmen had concluded to be even younger than the girl, who was young enough to be a daughter of theirs in the first place.

Suitably chastened, the merchant settled back driving the cart horses, but took the opportunity to voice yet another query to the unlikely pair of bodyguards.

"Pardon, me. I know I already asked, but I just wanted to be perfectly clear, to make sure we understand each other." He thought the corner of the girl's eye twitched minutely. "The Queen sent you? Just you two? No one else?" The young man coughed quietly, the sudden exclamation sounding suspiciously like some ambiguous word for 'bothersome'. Ashei didn't appear overly concerned with whatever messenge her friend disguised in his coughing, giving the merchant her full and alarmingly undivided attention.

After a moment - in which the girl's frightfully direct gaze cowed the loud coughing merchant back into his seat - Ashei began her reply, speaking ever so particularly, taking care to be utmost selective with her wording, lest something be lost in translation.

"If I remember correctly, mister, you already asked that question, yeah? And if I recall, I answered your question and asked you to please be quiet and not bring it up again, yeah? But if I remember further, you ignored me and instead asked my friend here the very same question and he told you to be quiet. He was very polite about it. More polite than me, yeah, but here you are, asking again. Despite his politeness. And since I'm not as polite as my polite friend can you guess what I'm going to tell you?"

The older merchant had already shrunk down to the farthest depths he could manage without toppling out of the moving cart.

Ashei had a vivid look about her. "Well?" she growled

"You'd like me to be quiet," the merchant concluded meekly.

She grinned menacingly and hissed with truly unnerving delight, "Yeaaaaaaaah."

And with that, she turned on her heel and marched around to the back of their small wagon train to be certain there weren't any ambitious bandits sneaking up on their rear. The other members of the troop looked equally perturbed by the sheer dominion this tiny girl commanded. She seemed a short and frail little thing without much in the way of girth, which was, in part, correct. Ashei had the body weight of a malnourished bird. However, her lack of dimensions couldn't disguise the truly frightening projection of a fearsome young warrior. Despite being a woman she carried herself as a man might, spoke as a man might, and commanded attention like a man's man might. That she could produce such masculine volume was appalling.

The young swordsman traveling with her, however, was the anti-thesis to the tall, loud, dark-eyed, dark-haired mountaineer: A little short for his age, blue-eyed, dirty-blond – of Hylian descent they supposed – and fresh-faced, he looked all of seventeen; though one could imagine him twenty if he tilted his head just so. When introduced, he refrained from speaking to anyone immediately, leading the merchants to conclude he was shy, or at the very least so thoroughly over-shadowed by his forward companion he simply hadn't had use for talking. It seemed plausible; Ashei said everything that needed saying after all. More to the point, none of them could claim to have heard him speak a single identifiable word.

While Ashei busied herself elsewhere, the merchant wives made a game out of it.

"Do you suppose he's mute? Or just very awkward?" fretted one of the older women, looking out from the cart. A lone figure scouted the trail up ahead, stepping briskly despite the cold and the frost this morning, looking particularly fine in the warm blue winter tunic the merchants had leant him. He'd shown up in little more than common traveling clothes and, being doting mothers all, the women of the troop had been obliged to dress him properly...that and they were so terribly bored the prospect of picking suitable clothing for someone came as a welcome distraction. Besides their quiet quilting during the day's travel, they'd little to entertain them.

"Awkward," replied one of the middle-aged wives around the pin bit between her teeth. "He's Ordonian. They haven't any social sensibilities at all, I'm afraid."

"Shame," sighed another wife, this one the youngest of the wedded women. "Though he's got a very pleasant air about him, doesn't he?"

At which point the only unwedded woman, having said very little thus far, looked up from stitching a patch in their quilt. "Yes," she agreed, "he does."

The three older women gave the younger woman a very concerning kind of stare and she blushed, promptly dropping her eyes back to her stitches and pretending she hadn't said any thing complimentary of any sort about any one. Propriety aside though, no one could deny the truth of those words. There was an undeniable air of...something about the boy, thought precisely what that might be was lost on them.

Meanwhile, it had started to snow again and those not comfortably wrapped in blankets and woolen skirts and petticoats were left to contend with the harsher climbs of Snowpeak's ill-tempered foothills. Eventually the snow began to dump so heavily that Ashei called the train to a halt and ordered everyone to hunker down and set up camp. No sooner had she spoken than her companion appeared through the snow, leading his large irascible seeming mare by the reins and looking decidedly worn out with the weather, and possibly with this whole task altogether.

It was difficult to tell. He had his cloak wrapped protectively about his lower face and his hood up making him look positively eerie as he moved about the camp, unfastening cart horses from their respective carts and herding them together for the night.

Moving quickly, always with a latent purpose in mind, he went about his work with absolute silence that unnerved a number of the men. All too often they would be busy about something, minding their own business, when someone suddenly tapped on their shoulder. Then they'd spin about in a panic only to find that somehow the young Ordonian had come up unheard. Even the animals he worked with seemed to hush, as if doing him the favor of being quiet for his benefit. And even when there came a demand for some form of communication, still he managed to circumvent saying a thing. His habit of conveying his wishes through simple gestures in oppose to speaking was found undeniably odd, yet one never found themselves at a loss for what it was he meant.

One way or another he made it seem perfectly obvious.

That night Ashei found him through the blinding confetti fall of white, one boot braced against the side of a cart, tugging the knot of a horse's lead tight while the horse itself looked on, bemused at this behavior. While she could have spent hours trying to calm each horse enough to get it secure, it had taken the young ranch-hand all of fifteen minutes. Animals never did seem to give him any trouble for whatever reason. It was part of the basis she'd asked him to come up with her...that among other things. She tapped him and he turned about, unsurprised it seemed, and blinked expectantly for her to say something.

"Yeah. Link, your horse is being a pain," said Ashei by way of greeting.

Shocking blue eyes peered doubtfully out at her from the shadow of his hood, as if he - Link, formally 'of Ordon' - very much doubted that her statement sufficiently explained the story in its entirety. After a moment of petulant quiet the young woman heaved a sigh and went on.

"She won't let anyone tie her in with the other horses. Do something about it, yeah?"

Link pulled his collar down to his chin and – displaying for the world every drop of his heroic maturity – made a silly face.

Then he replaced the collar and strode away to tame his thrice-damned horse before it could justifiably mangle some poor, unfortunate merchant valiant enough to capture the finicky mare. Though the animal treated her master with the most graceful temperance imaginable in a mount, nickering and paying him attentions like a playful colt, she took an exceeding amount pleasure in treading upon the toes of strangers and head butting the unwary. Despite her upbringing as a mere cart-horse back in Ordon, Epona made it evident she was queen among equine animals and that there were very few people good enough to ride a creature such as herself and that you were presumptuous indeed if you thought you were - because you weren't.

Fool.

After a couple minutes of unsuccessful hunting, Link gave up searching the smokescreen of snow and instead put two fingers in his mouth and whistled a single, low, long and lingering note through the quiet dark. For a moment the teenager seemed forsaken – standing there, peering expectantly into the white-wash world – and then the steady canter of hooves crunching through newly fallen snow, a happy, eager rhythm, came faintly. Moments later the horse itself appeared, thundering out of the void into the perimeter of the wagons.

Link caught her reins and ran bare fingers down her dusty, velvet nose, grinning companionably at the animal. He muttered something softly to the horse and after a moment's consternation she trotted obediently away to join the other horses for the night.

Ashei got a fire going beside one of the wagons, using a canvas sheet as a make-shift roof to shield it from the snow while she built. Link wandered into the firelight after a while, the shape of his silhouette appearing from the dark, and sat down on a crate of fur-goods. His friend glanced briefly at him before staring hard back into the fire, rubbing her bare hands together near the crackling flames while she contemplated the odds of saying something clever enough to get a decent reply out of him. Having no particular skill for clever words, Ashei resorted to words she knew well instead, ones she'd fallen into the habit of saying whenever Link and she shared a fireside.

"There was a myth my mother used to tell me," she said candidly. "Before she died. It was a good one, yeah. I'll tell it to you now."

Given no particular option, Link settled back and got comfortable.

Ashei was a storyteller. This seemed to startle her companion who, like everyone else, had long since made presumptions about her based on her rough rearing and rougher regard for others. During the long watches, when she and Link sat up together, she would tell her stories until either one of them – Link preferably – nodded off into unconsciousness, or the dawn broke.

It seemed her cache of tales was infinite. Most of them she'd adapted from a variety of Shad's many – but excruciating – historical recountings and spun them up into a story worthy of mention. Other times she found it in her to speak the words of her late-mother and narrate to him the stories of her private and spiritual people. More often than not she told him bedtime stories her father told her.

It was a welcome kind of oddity; Link being the type of person with whom it was difficult to hold a real conversation, it was best to begin speaking with the expectation only one of them would be saying anything at all.

-fey-

"It is said, that the sister deities, the three goddesses, once walked the Realm for a time so that they might enjoy all that they had created. Farore, the guardian deity of wind and music, luck and bravery, took a path through the forests and there met a young Hylian swordsman. They talked for a time and in that brief conversation the deity found herself greatly enamored with the young mortal who was peerless true and courageous, and she found herself quite unable to separate herself from him without first offering him a bit of favor for having so fully captured her admiration. She kissed the boy once upon his off-hand, departed and thought nothing of it."

"At the very same time, Nayru, the guardian deity of water and literature, destiny and compassion, took her own path through the great cities of the Realm and wandering the halls of learning met a charming young princess. Together they discussed great works of art and much reading and history and magic and all imaginable things there are for sensible and knowledgeable young women to speak of. Nayru found herself very fond of her royal friend and quite unable to part from her without first offering some token of her undying appreciation for this young woman who had so duly impressed her. She kissed the girl once upon the forehead, departed and thought nothing of it.

"At the very same time, Din, the guardian deity of fire and war, capacity and ambition, took her own path through a blistering desert and there met a king thieves. She challenged him to a contest of arms and for a time they battled, fighting for nearly a full day's time until the man was at last cast down – for no mortal truly stood a chance against a goddess. Din, however, found that she could not readily part from his company without first offering him a boon for allowing her the pleasure of such a fine battle and gaining her undying respect. She kissed the man once upon the mouth, departed and thought nothing of it."

"They say in this way, the goddesses placed each a piece of themselves in the Realm of mortals. The king of thieves, having tasted power, found that nothing in this world could satisfy his thirst for something more and they say he was driven mad by his lust for it. The princess, having glimpsed into the infinite depth of true wisdom, found that she could no longer be satisfied to live in ignorance and grew to be so wise that the goddesses entrusted to her family a great and powerful treasure. The young swordsman, having been touched by true courage, found he was unable to ignore the darkness inherent in the world and he became one of the most feared heroes of the age."

-fey-

Ashei let the end hang thoughtfully in the quiet. For a moment she imagined she saw something skitter away at the edge of the firelight near Link's elbow, almost rising to her feet, but dismissing it as a trick of the shadows. Then, having completed her story she dropped her story-teller's voice – the caustic slang that usually mangled her diction, returning – and demanded rather loudly, "Good story, yeah?"

But Link had already dropped off to sleep. Demonstrating a fighter's indispensable ability to doze off absolutely anywhere, in a blinking, there was no telling how much of her story he'd actually heard. Ashei stared at him for a little bit, watching his shoulders rise and fall in a slow, even rhythm, listening to the sound of his breathing. It was peculiar circumstance that he was even here with her, she was a little surprised herself in all honesty, the enmity between him and the Hyrulian Royal Guard being so particularly vicious of late.

For a while, she thought he resented her accepting the offer of knighthood, but finding him at Lake Hylia – sprawled under the stars, staring out over the desert horizon – she realized he probably pitied her title. Again, she lacked the subtle language skills needed to ask him how he actually felt about any of it, so she dismissed the thought. Instead, she contemplated his reasons for curling up like that (like a dog or a little kid); if an older man had slept that way she might have kicked him awake on principle, but he was hardly twenty yet, so she let him dream.

But, gods, he must have some kinks to work out in the morning.

-fey-

Author's Note: Ahh, everyone is so kind. I forgot how nice reviews can be. Anyhow, there you have it. The first real chapter. A bit slow, but I'll have it pick up next chapter. I'm afraid I'm far too impatient to characterize properly. Be sure to berate me about it so I have to.