Two
"What a mess!"
Rickard Fenris' exclamation echoed slightly in the still, cold air of the cavernous entry hall. It was true, too. The mansion had been abandoned for a hundred years, and it looked like it. There were huge, gaping holes in the ceiling, smashed in by a tremendous snowstorm and worsened over the mansion's century of emptiness.
Areas of the entry hall were coated with slick ice, and as the brothers moved forward, they looked around at the room they were in. The hall was long and wide, with a grand staircase on either side, leading up to the second floor. The right-hand staircase was broken and unusable, but the left one was still intact.
Leif stopped and looked at his brother. "Where shall we start?"
Rickard climbed the intact staircase to a large painting that had fallen at some point, and lay face-down on the stairs. He slowly raised the painting up and leaned it against the wall. Leif came over to look.
Rickard gently brushed some of the frost off the picture with his gloved hand. "Endrew Fenris, I think. He's awful grumpy-looking, don't you think? Must be because he lived in the freezing mountains instead of Castle Town with the rest of the nobility." Rickard stood next to the painting and attempted to imitate Endrew's unsmiling expression.
Leif chuckled and reached out a hand to touch the portrait of his ancestor. "It's in pretty good condition, considering. If we clean it up, we can probably hang it back up at some point." He stepped over to another painting that was leaning against the wall, the lower part of the frame splintering from when it had landed. He brushed the frost off part of the picture, and found himself looking at a portrait of a noblewoman with striking blue eyes, similar to his own, dressed in a style from the same period as Endrew's picture. He concluded it to be Endrew's wife, and he and his brother's multiple-great grandmother.
As the brothers looked around the hall, they found a few more paintings stacked under the stairs, but decided to leave them and continue their explorations.
They opened the next door they saw, which led into a sitting room, small in comparison to the entry hall, but still almost bigger than their house on the ranch. This room was almost completely intact, with no holes in the ceiling, but the furniture was strewn about the room, almost none of it upright. There were several bookshelves along the walls, still mostly full of books. Some of the books lay on the floor, Leif thought that the room looked searched, though he could be wrong.
Leif picked up one of the books, gingerly, and took off his glove to turn the pages. This volume seemed to be a Fenris genealogy, ending with Randall Fenris. It did not list Randall's children, nor did it mention him being married. The entry had apparently been updated not long after his birth, and stopped. Leif held up the book and looked over at his brother.
"Hey, look, a genealogy. Let's see which Hero we're related to."
Rickard was tossing pieces of a broken chair into the cold fireplace, and after starting a blaze with his matches and some loose stuffing, a crackling fire soon spread heat through the room. Rickard took off his pack and set it down near the fireplace.
"Okay. Open it up." Rickard righted two of the chairs and set them near the fire, sitting down in one. "I bet it's the Hero of Time. That's what Grandfather said."
"Father wasn't sure about that," Leif said, looking up from the book at his brother. "He said the family stories didn't say which Hero it was."
Rickard gestured at the book. "Well, you've got the proof right there. What are you waiting for?"
Eagerly, Leif opened up the book, turning to the first page.
"Oh, here we go," he said, tapping the first name. "The family started with Lord Link Fenris, 'Given that name and title by Her Royal Majesty, Zelda Nohansen Hyrule, in recognition of his valiant efforts in the service of the Sovereign Nation Hyrule, and its Royal Family, in time of direst need.' Apparently, this was the Hero we're descended from, and Endrew was his son. It doesn't say what happened to Link, and there's no death date for him." Leif looked closer at the writing on the page. "There isn't a birth date for him, either. It just says he played an instrumental part in saving Hyrule, -it doesn't say what from- and that he was rewarded for his efforts, settled down and had a family.
"Endrew used his father's money to finance opening his mines, and he must have either been incredibly smart or incredibly crooked, because it says in his little biography here that he tripled the family fortune in five years, and he died the richest man in Hyrule."
Rickard scratched his chin. "Huh. I thought for sure we were related to the Hero of Time somehow."
Leif turned the pages of the book quickly but carefully, but he did not find another mention of a Hero in the text.
"I guess Grandfather was wrong. Sorry, Rickard." Leif suddenly thought of something. "When we get back to Hyrule, we can look Link Fenris up in the city archives. Maybe we can find out what he was the Hero of, and who or what he fought."
Rickard smiled. "It must have been something, since they don't hand out that 'Hero' title arbitrarily."
Leif carefully wrapped the genealogy up in a scarf and tucked it into a pocket of his pack. He would take care with this, since this was one of the few remaining proofs of his family's noble heritage.
"I say we use this room as a base for exploring the rest of the house, since it's mostly intact." The younger Fenris rubbed his face vigorously and stood, shaking out his cloak and scattering snow and ice everywhere to slowly melt into the carpet.
"I agree." Leif set his feet next to the iron grating in front of the fireplace.
Rickard sat back down and leaned back, putting his hands behind his head and closing his eyes. "I want to explore more, but my muscles severely disagree. That was a rough climb today. I think we better call it a day, Leif. This place has been here for two hundred years, and it ain't going anywhere anytime soon."
"Couldn't have put it better myself." Leif grunted with effort as he eased his boots off of his tired feet. The brothers rolled out their sleeping gear on either side of the fire and climbed inside. As was his ritual while he was away, Leif took out his small pictograph of his wife and kissed it before putting it back in his inner pocket and falling asleep.
The brothers rose early the next morning, and cooked a simple breakfast of frozen sausages over their fire.
Rickard eyed his meal with faint distaste. "Now I really wish we'd brought Nomi along. I don't know if I can take another week and a half of this."
Leif bit into his sausage, having to gnaw on it for a few seconds to separate his bite. "I know what you mean."
After they finished their breakfast, the brothers emptied out their packs and sorted the various supplies into neat piles, making room for anything valuable they might find in their exploration of their family's long-empty home.
They started with the room next to the sitting room, which turned out to be a kitchen, complete with giant cauldron and sink. There were boxes and boxes of frozen food supplies in this room and the next, enough to last an army months. Even if they were almost a century old, they were of the non-perishable sort and probably still edible, having been frozen almost the entire time. Leif began to calculate plans as he looked through the crates. A small team of laborers; his brother, himself, and perhaps fifteen or twenty more men, could live off these supplies until they got the road fixed up enough to get regular deliveries through Zora's Domain.
Assuming they found maps to Endrew's mines in the mansion, they could optimistically have them up and running again within a year, and start making profit maybe a few months after that. There were endless possibilities, and the means were within his grasp, right here in this building.
He looked up at his brother, and he could tell Rickard had been thinking the same thing.
"Let's look for an office or something first. Those maps are our first priority. We need to find the mines if we're going to make this work." Leif closed the lid of the crate and started for the chamber's other door.
The brothers decided against splitting up to cover the manor faster, since they might run across unstable areas or holes in the floor.
It took them most of the rest of the day to work their way through the manor, giving each room a cursory examination before moving on. Over the next few days, they planned to systematically examine each room, carefully going through all contents before going back to Castle Town.
The only real problem they encountered that day was a pack of Wolfos that had taken up residence in the central, open-air courtyard of the manor. Their only clue something was wrong was a low growling, seeming to come from under the ice and snow all around them.
The brothers drew their swords and stood back-to-back, falling into defensive postures. The first monster attacked from Rickard's side, springing at him with a spray of snow and a fierce growl.
He met the monstrous creature with his blade, and three slashes later, it lay motionless on the ground.
There was no time to rest, since four more of the monsters attacked the brothers simultaneously, and they moved their swords with practiced speed, dodging and slashing until the wolf-like creatures lay in still heaps on the ground around them. Leif noted several large mounds of snow on the ground around them, and watched them carefully, in case more of the creatures should leap out.
The brothers stayed alert for a few more moments, looking around for more enemies, and when none presented themselves, they sheathed their blades and moved through the door at the far end of the courtyard.
Leif and Rickard looked around at the room, and wondered at its purpose. It was circular, but with two walls of iron bars dividing the room into thirds. Beyond the bars, there were dozens of crates and boxes, with several cannons and a few swords and axes.
Rickard let out a low whistle. "I know I said this place looks like a fortress, but this cements it. So much about this place gives me the impression that one of our ancestors expected to be attacked at some point."
Leif looked for a door in the wall of bars to let him in to take a look around. "It was probably Randall's father, Rickard, who you were named for. The Great War was around his time, and the kingdom was pretty much in chaos then."
Rickard's brow furrowed. "Wasn't that when Ganondorf invaded?"
The elder Fenris shook his head. "No, that was a few years after the Great War. Records are kind of spotty from back then, and there isn't one established series of events. According to some, Ganondorf offered his aid to the King during the Great War, and once the King trusted him, he turned on him and took Hyrule for himself after the war was over. Of course, there's the other side of that argument that says Ganondorf and the Gerudo didn't leave their desert during the Great War, and Ganondorf just waited for the King to stabilize Hyrule before he invaded."
"And he ruled Hyrule for seven years before he was defeated by the Hero of Time. I've heard that part of the story. Everyone has." Rickard idly kicked one of the metal bars, eliciting a ringing noise.
"Of course. The Hero of Time is one of the more famous ones, and practically everyone knows about him. But, you can't forget about the other Heroes, since they were all chosen by the gods, too. What they did isn't any less important, just because they're not as well-known." Leif continued to look around the room, looking for a way in to inspect the cannons.
Rickard looked at him strangely. "You sure inherited Father's love for history. You ought to be a historian instead of a horse rancher."
Leif smirked back at him. "Well, you got Mother's sense of humor." Their mother had had a penchant for thinking up complicated jokes that ended in awful puns, which the boys always groaned at but thoroughly enjoyed.
Rickard grinned. "One of us had to. Hmm, how did her favorite one go? I think it started 'The King's gardener was walking through the palace one day, when he came upon a giant…'"
Leif held up his hand. "I've heard that one enough times, thank you. Let's keep going."
They left the armory and headed into the next room, which didn't have much of anything in it. There were a few more suits of armor, and more swords and axes, as well as a few shields hung on the wall. The brothers saw nothing of immediate interest, so they left, intent on at least seeing the rest of the mansion today.
The only way out was back through the armory, so they walked back to the courtyard and looked around. There were several doors they could see, but more of interest was the tower.
Rickard shaded his eyes as he looked up at the massive tower. "I'll bet you a hundred Rupees there's something valuable in there. It's completely intact, see, and the door is closed. Let's find a way up there."
Leif looked along the outer wall from the tower, and saw that the stone walkway was broken in several places, one of them being close to where the tower was. Leif peered closer at this area, and he started off through the accumulated snow. He stopped at a broken window and climbed through, looking up at the broken stone ledge.
"Rickard," he said, "If you stand on my shoulders, I bet you can get up there. Then you can lower me a rope and I'll climb up." Leif interlaced his fingers and held them out for his brother to step on.
Rickard grumbled as he climbed up on his brother's back. "We're putting a ladder here or something if we ever fix this place up. I'm not doing this again."
Leif grunted as Rickard's boots dug into his shoulders. "Tell me about it."
He felt the weight lessen as Rickard pulled himself up onto the ledge. Leif rubbed his shoulder and groaned. "How many bricks do you have in your pack?" he called up to his younger brother.
Rickard's face appeared over the ledge, a puzzled expression on his face. "I don't have any bricks in my pack."
Leif exaggeratedly stretched his shoulder as he grabbed the rope Rickard lowered. "Doesn't feel like it." He grinned as his brother mock-scowled at him.
As they walked up the gently sloping, spiraling walkway to the tower, Leif and Rickard looked around at what they could see of the second floor. Like the rest of the manor, it was partially smashed, and several rooms were open to the freezing air. Leif thought that they would be more treacherous, with more ice and greater possibility of collapse. The wood in this place had only supported itself for a hundred years, and they would have to be careful to not fall, since neither of them were trained healers, and the nearest one was dozens of miles from here.
If something happened to either one of them out here, it would be the end. It was a sobering thought.
Rickard stopped and pointed out a slumped shape against the door of the tower. "Well, this proves we're not the first to come looking for treasure here. Who do you think this is?"
Leif looked the frozen corpse over. It was a largish human man, with blond hair and wide-open, glassy brown eyes. He had an eerie, grim smile set into his frozen features, which Leif found oddly disturbing, combined with the open eyes. The warrior was heavily muscled, and wrapped in roughly made fur and leather garments. Ominously, he appeared not to have frozen to death, but had an arrow in his chest, surrounded by frozen blood. He had obviously been dead for quite some time, preserved by the cold, but Leif thought it curious that the eyes were still intact. The elder Fenris would freely admit that his knowledge of decomposition was probably lacking, but he thought the eyes were the first thing to go when a body returned to its baser elements.
Rickard touched his arm and pointed out another body laying a little further away. This one clutched a bow in its frozen fingers, probably the same one that had loosed the arrow that mortally wounded the other corpse. But, it seemed the other man had had his revenge, since a sword protruded from the chest of the archer. The archer was a smallish Hylian, clothed all in black and bearing an odd insignia on the back of one of his gloves. Upon closer inspection, the insignia was the same as the one on the stone the brothers had found further down the mountain. What hair was still left on the body was a silver-gray color, incongruous with his young-looking features.
Rickard carefully pried a key out of the larger man's icy grip, comparing it to the lock on the door. "What happened here? Who are these people?"
Leif shook his head. "I have no idea. They don't look like miners or servants, or really anybody who would be here. They look more like soldiers, especially the archer. He's definitely Hylian, though his uniform doesn't look familiar."
The younger Fenris gently nudged the fur-and-leather clad swordsman away from the door, grimacing. "He looks even less familiar. Where is he from? I've never seen clothes like his before. He looks like he belongs up in the mountains, though, with all these furs on."
"You're right." Leif stood there looking at the frozen warrior for a few moments before he continued. "This is probably wrong, but there could be a tribe of humans up here, and whatever force this archer belonged to was sent up here to do… something, and found these humans in here already. See, you can see a few more bodies down there." Leif pointed down to the courtyard, where there were several mounds of snow, more than one of which had a boot or an arm sticking out. One body had been half dragged out by an animal, and was wearing a similar uniform to the archer, all in black.
Rickard frowned. "How long would you say they've been here? Definitely not a hundred years, or even fifty. I'd be surprised if this happened more than a few months ago."
Leif nodded thoughtfully. "Hmm. You're probably right. But how did they get here? The Zoras said no one ever goes into Snowpeak, and they would have remembered a force this large passing through their domain. Even more pertinent, what were they doing up here?"
Rickard held up the key and nudged the frozen fur-clad swordsman with his boot. "Well, this fellow died trying to get into this room, so what do you say we find out what he was after? Must be something good, for him to get killed over it."
Leif frowned. "I don't know if 'good' is a word I'd use."
He looked down at the archer, and removed a small dagger with the eye insignia inscribed in the blade, tucking it into his belt. He would definitely be researching this symbol when he returned to Hyrule.
Rickard fitted the key into the lock, and lifted the door up. He only had to pull up a little, and a hidden mechanism lifted the door the rest of the way. The brothers stepped inside to find a sumptuously appointed bedroom, with a grand ceiling stretching the rest of the way up the tower. Beautiful crystal windows formed a ring around the upper part of the tower, letting sunlight stream in and practically setting the place aglow.
There was a large canopy bed on the right side of the round room, with other chairs, tables, and dressers positioned throughout the chamber. Nothing looked touched, and there was the distinct possibility that no one had been in this room since Randall Fenris, since many valuable-looking items were in plain view and undisturbed.
Leif immediately crossed to a desk and started opening drawers, while Rickard dashed about the room excitedly, putting gold and jewels into his pack. He opened up a jewelry box and held up a gold-and-diamond necklace for his brother to see.
"Look at this, Leif! Just this will pay for repairing the road here. And there are three more just like it in here, not to mention all the other stuff! We're rich!"
Leif held up an item of his own, grinning. "And we're about to get richer. Look, it's a map of the mines. They're all under the mansion! That must be why this place was so heavily guarded. Endrew must have built his house over the mine entrance so he could guard it, and keep an eye on his workers."
Rickard's brow furrowed. "I didn't see anything that looked like a mine entrance anywhere in the mansion. Where did they ship the ore from?"
Leif carefully spread the old map out on the desk and motioned his brother over to see. "Look here. It says that there was a small processing building near the entrance to the mansion, and underneath it is a tunnel network that goes all through the mountain. There was worker housing, smelting facilities, processing rooms, all underground. That's pretty smart, actually. If there's only one or two entrances to the tunnel network from aboveground, it makes it harder to steal from the mines and easier to guard them."
"But what if there was a cave-in? Everyone would be trapped down there." Rickard looked the map over, looking for another exit from the mines. But there wasn't one. The only entrance on the map was the one next to the mansion.
Leif tapped the spot on the map. "This must be that little plateau we passed on the way in, with the spiral ramp up it. I thought that looked artificial. We'll have to dig through the snow to find the entrance, since the building seems to have been eradicated."
Rickard looked up at the rest of the desk, and reached past him to pick up a small book bound in green leather sitting near the map. He opened it and leafed through the pages. "Hey, it's a diary. Who does it belong to? There isn't a name I can see in here."
"Let me see." Rickard handed Leif the diary, and the elder Fenris turned to the inside cover. "Oh, here it is. Lonathan Fenris. That name doesn't sound familiar. Let's look in the genealogy."
The brothers sat down in two of the chairs and looked through the genealogy for Lonathan. When they found the name, he turned out to be either Randall Fenris' great- or great-great-grandfather, since both were named Lonathan.
"What that make him to us, Leif? How many greats is it?" Rickard looked up at his brother.
Leif shrugged. "A lot." He looked through the diary for a moment, and froze when he saw an unexpected word on one of the pages. He looked again, read the paragraph around it, and he must have paled, because he felt Rickard shaking his arm.
"Hey, what is it?"
Leif took a deep breath and started reading out of the diary as an explanation.
"'The slaves are getting restless again. Ever since word spread to them of the cave-in in mine three, they've been refusing to go in, and not even hanging one in the courtyard scared them into going. They haven't been this openly defiant since a hundred of them escaped twenty years ago. My father had to kill thirty good workers to scare the rest of them into submission, and I hope I don't have to take similar action. Production cannot be allowed to stop.'"
The brothers looked up at each other, horrified. The royal family had abolished slavery in Hyrule four hundred years ago, well before Endrew Fenris' time. All workers and servants were required by law to be paid at least something, and the notion that their ancestors had been keeping illegal slaves was disturbing, to say the least.
Rickard rubbed his chin, an uncharacteristic frown settling across his features. "I guess we know how Endrew got rich so fast. He didn't pay his workers."
Leif frowned, also. "We don't know if this started with Endrew or not. Being a Hero's son, I wouldn't think he would do something like this."
"I wouldn't think anybody would defy the royal family and keep slaves, but there's the proof," Rickard said bitterly.
Leif closed the diary and set it back on the desk, almost afraid of what else it might say. "We learned a lot today. I say we call it a day and explore some more tomorrow."
Rickard scowled, but nodded. "The first thing we're doing is getting rid of all the bodies. Then we should try finding the mine entrance." He glared at the diary, as if expecting it to move on its own and start announcing what other deplorable activities their family had been up to.
Leif nodded. "That's a good idea. We don't have a lot of time on this trip, and we'll need to find proof that the mines are still workable to get someone to finance another expedition. Unless we sell the ranch, we can't afford another trip like this by ourselves."
His younger brother nodded distractedly, still frowning. Leif opened his mouth to say something, but Rickard stomped off to the other side of the room and threw his pack down on the floor, stretching out next to it and appearing to fall asleep immediately.
Leif understood his brother's anger. Lonathan's journal entry had been so casual, and that was what was most disturbing. He couldn't bear to open the diary again to read more, but he was curious as to why his ancestors had chosen to defy the royal decree. It couldn't have been that expensive to hire workers, since the mines were obviously profitable.
And, it would have been difficult to keep the fact that they were keeping slaves from the rest of Hyrule. These mountains may have been remote, and cut off from the rest of the country, but someone would have noticed eventually. A courier could talk to an over-friendly guard, and would then report to his employer that the providers of most of the country's minerals were using slave labor to enhance their profits.
Now that he thought about it, this could have been exactly why Randall Fenris lost the mines. The King could have found out that Randall was using slaves, and decreed that no one buy from him. The reason for the decree would have been questioned, but the King may not have provided an answer, since his word was law and he did not have to explain himself.
Leif Fenris decided that, if he got his family's mines running again, he would not repeat his ancestors' mistakes, and would run the business honorably. His family came from a Hero, the pinnacle of honor and righteousness chosen by the gods to defend the land. It pained him to know that members of his family had disgraced the honor of their forebear, but he would not.
As he drifted off to sleep, Leif decided that if he ever had a son, he would name him Link, after his heroic ancestor, and instill in the boy the proper values, to prevent the atrocities of his ancestors from being repeated by his descendants.
The brothers started out early, their enthusiasm subdued by the revelations of the previous day. As Rickard suggested, they first found all the bodies and stacked them in the central courtyard, lighting them afire, since the ground was too frozen to dig a grave. There were twelve corpses in all, seven of the black-clothed soldiers, and five of the fur-and-leather garbed warriors.
While they watched the corpses burn, Rickard was moody and silent, glaring angrily into the flames. Leif glanced over at his brother a few times, but he said nothing, his angry scowl now deepened. Once the bodies were consumed, Rickard kicked snow over the ash pile and stomped off to the door without a word, slamming it behind him. Leif sighed as he followed. Rickard had never reacted this severely to bad news before, but the elder Fenris knew from past experience to leave his brother alone and let him work out his problems on his own.
They did not find any more bodies in their further explorations of the mansion, and around noon they braved the freezing cold again to go to the small plateau outside the front door.
The brothers had removed anything of interest from the bodies before burning them, in case anything provided a clue later as to who the two groups of warriors were and why they were in the manor. They left the equipment in the sitting room and continued outside.
Leif and Rickard had found some shovels that were still serviceable, and brought them along to scoop out the snow covering the mine entrance, along with the pickaxes they had salvaged from the cave on the way here.
The brothers ascended the small plateau and set to work. Rickard was still silent, his face absent its usual jovial expression, and with each swing of his tool, he seemed to be striking a foe instead of digging.
Leif looked concernedly at his brother, but again decided not to say anything, wordlessly digging beside him.
It took them two hours of digging through a century's worth of snow and ice to find the entrance to the tunnel network, and another half an hour to clean it up enough to enter. Knowing approximately where it was had helped, but it was still hard work.
Luck was with them when they entered the first chamber of the mines, a small, square room of unpolished stone with timbers supporting the rock overhead. A box of neatly stacked torches sat there waiting for them, among various other ancient mining supplies, and they took several, lighting two immediately and venturing further into the mines.
Several tunnels branched out into blackness, and the brothers chose one at random, glad to note that long-extinguished lamps lined the walls. They lit each one as they passed it, but also periodically made marks on the walls with a piece of white chalk Rickard found.
Surprisingly, the air was not musty, as they had expected, but was instead fresh, like the air before they had come in.
Rickard held his torch as high as he could, and they could see a faint breeze playing with the flame.
"There must be vents or something supplying air here." Leif looked around. "But I don't see any."
Rickard gestured with his torch at something glittering faintly off in the darkness. "What's that?"
Leif paused and squinted at it. It shone with a dull gray light, and it could be any number of things. "Come on, let's go find out. Watch out, though. We have no idea how stable the floors are in here. These tunnels haven't had any maintenance in a long time, so go slow and be careful."
Rickard rolled his eyes at his older brother's caution, but followed as Leif led the way, holding his torch aloft.
Shadows flickered on the walls from the torchlight, making the dull brown walls dance with flashes of orange and yellow, reflecting off water dripping down the wall, as well as mineral deposits.
Rickard chuckled suddenly, and Leif turned to him, surprised. "What?"
"Look at us. We look like adventurers out of one of Father's stories. All that's missing is a damsel in distress." Rickard shifted to a comical falsetto. "Oh, help me, please! I'm in ever so much danger!"
It was Leif's turn to roll his eyes as they continued down the tunnel. He was glad to see his brother joking, though. He hadn't ever seen him like he had been last night and this morning, and he had been worried about him. He did notice the smile slowly turn into a frown again, but again decided not to say anything.
They continued on into the tunnel, not knowing what awaited them. Rickard was right, Leif thought. They were like adventurers out of an old story. He didn't know anyone who still dared to explore the forgotten parts of Hyrule anymore, and it was exhilarating being in a place no one had been in in years.
None of the high and mighty merchants in Castle Town who had refused to sponsor them had ever done something like this, he was certain.
Leif and Rickard continued into the mines, eager to see what was ahead.
Author's note: Sorry this took so long to update, but I was having problems with the story and kept geting distracted to go off and write my other one. Like I said before, I'll prompt in both this story and 'The Fourth Piece' where they tie in. As always, please review and tell me what you thought!