Chapter Ten

The Dangerous Secret

Dark followed obediently as Ilia drew him by the hand into the crystal clear, ankle-deep waters of the spirit spring on the edge of the village. By now he'd interacted with water many times before, but it always somehow came as a surprise when his bare feet sank through to the bottom instead of standing firmly on the surface.

"Ordona Spirit Spring," Ilia explained to him as they waded deeper, out to the edge of where the sand dropped off beneath them and the water became chest-deep. "It's where the guardian spirit of Ordon lives, so it's supposed to have all kinds of healing properties."

"Spirit Spring," Dark repeated, and then, "Oh! It's where we wash the goats for the shearing festival." He'd taken careful note of everything Fado had told him.

Ilia nodded, looking distracted, her eyes fixed distantly on the large boulders lining the lip of a waterfall just above the back edge of the spring. They were covered in ancient carvings, spiraling and worn, and hidden in places by moss. "I know it's not all that special or sacred, if we wash livestock in it, but when Link and I would go swimming together as kids, I always worried Ordona would appear and get angry at us." She looked back to Dark at last with a small smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "Well, it's silly. No matter what kind of old magic is in this spring, no one's going to be angry, no matter who swims here. It'll be fine."

She stepped backwards, into the deeper water, and let herself settle until only her neck was above the surface, the sparkling springwater lapping at the ends of her short-cropped hair. Still holding her hand, Dark was drawn in with her. The second his torso was submerged, his bruises numbed, and a small, surprised hiss of breath escaped him. "Oh!"

Ilia was looking up at the spiral carvings again as if expecting something to happen, teeth worrying at her lower lip for a moment. The stones sat stoically and did nothing. She turned back to him with a relieved smile. "See? It's fine."

"Is this your plan?" Dark asked, not understanding anything but trusting that Ilia knew what she was doing.

"No, this is because you look absolutely awful." With a dripping hand, she pulled the gauze off his cheek and ran her thumb over the long, half-healed cut he'd made with the shears, and it too went strangely numb and tingly. "The plan… we don't have to talk about it yet. It's been the kind of morning you need a break from."

For a while they simply swam, deliberately Not Talking About It. It was nice, diving in and out of the little shelf of waterfalls, laughing and shaking water out of their eyes, trying to clap their hands around the tiny glowing fairies that occasionally flitted down to skim like water-skaters across the spring and then darted up again, too quick to be caught. It felt, for a time, as if there were no dangerous secret between them, and nothing had changed.

It wasn't until they were lying on their backs in the warm, sandy dirt at the edge of the spring, letting the sun dry them, that Ilia finally brought it up. She rolled over and propped herself up on her elbow, her short hair dripping, and gave Dark a serious look. "That lake. The sort of… silvery illusion lake you can make. How much control do you have over it? Could you make it happen right now, if you wanted?"

It was hard to be upset, damp with springwater and lying in warm sunlight with fairy lights flickering lazily in and out of the trees all around them. Maybe that was why she'd chosen this spot; to keep him as calm as possible for this conversation. Dark also rolled over and copied her. Between them, a few feet of horsegrass and dry, wispy tufts of marram whispered gently in a slight breeze.

"Don't know."

"Have you tried?"

Dark's fingers picked at the horsegrass, uneasily. "I don't think it's safe to try."

There was a little frown on Ilia's face, more thoughtful than upset. "Because you're scared you'll black out and… do something, again, if you try to call the magic up on purpose."

He nodded, very slightly.

"I don't think…" She paused, thoughtfully. "I don't think it works like that. We can't be sure unless we test it."

"Why do we have to test it, Il'ya? Why can't we just leave it alone?"

"Because…" Ilia bit her lip and glanced out across the spring again, not meeting his eyes. "Because next time it might not be a goat." She sat up and drew her knees to her chest, still staring out across the water. A cloud drifted across the sun. "I thought about telling everyone, you know."

Dark looked up at her blankly. His hand tightened on the horsegrass, and the dry stalk of it crinkled beneath his fingers.

"I don't know if you understand. I barely understand it. But if you're really the monster from the dungeon, then Ganondorf made you to kill things. To be a weapon he could use against Link. And Ordon… right now Ordon has no idea what you are. If something happened, they would be taken completely off guard. They wouldn't be able to protect themselves. Because I brought you here, and now I'm lying to them, over and over."

Dark stared up at the sky, at the fluffy white clouds passing by in the wake of yesterday's storm. "What would happen if we told them?"

"Nothing good," Ilia said quietly.

The were both silent for a while. Dark sat up. Pulled the stalk of horsegrass up with him in a little shower of sandy dirt, and turned it over thoughtfully in his hands.

"How does it work?" Ilia asked again, at last. "The lake. Please, Derek, anything you know, anything you can guess… anything."

"Okay," said Dark, and then, "Goats."

Ilia stared blankly at him. "Goats."

He waved a hand vaguely. "Hold on. I just need to…. I don't have the right words. I have to… collect it in my head."

She nodded patiently, and didn't interrupt. She never interrupted, with things like that.

It took a moment, in a hesitant series of false starts, to allow himself to think back to that stormy afternoon, thunder rolling and rain lashing down and panicked goats milling through the mudslick grass. The spring lapped beside them, glittering in the sunlight. The world did not flicker.

"Okay," said Dark, taking a deep breath. "Goats. When they're scared, the goats try to run away from the thing that scares them. That's the lake." He made a gesture with his hands: a pulling inward toward his chest, as though gathering up something invisible around him. "It's like running away. It's a place to run away to."

Ilia followed along with serious eyes.

The memory of approaching a goat. Reaching out his hand feebly to touch its head, and being struck by those horns. The sun shone dappled through the trees, a gentle breeze whistled through the horsegrass. The world did not flicker.

"But when the goats run out of places to run," Dark continued, remembering the words Fado had used, "they get… aggressive. They charge at you, because they can't get away from you, so they feel like they have to fight. That's…" Everything was fine. Ilia was sitting next to him, everything was fine. "That's when everything goes red, and I don't remember what happens next. It's like the goats."

Everything really was fine. The world had not flickered, the red mist had not drowned him. Somehow, he actually felt better for having put it to words. He'd let the idea of it out into the open instead of keeping it coiled tightly in his head, waiting to snap outward into something sharp and dangerous. Dark exhaled slowly. The air tasted of petrichor, clean and pleasant after the storm the night before.

"You really are incredibly smart," Ilia said at last.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. When you explain it like that, it makes perfect sense. Every time it's happened, it's been because you were hurt, or attacked, or frightened, or…" a small, genuine smile played across her lips. "Or startled, like that time in Uli's house when you burned your tongue and broke the teacup."

"I didn't know it would be hot," Dark countered, and her smile inexplicably widened.

"It's like, if someone's about to hit you, you'd flinch, right?"

He nodded, the suspicion steadily growing that Ilia had figured out something important, that Ilia quite suddenly had everything in the world completely under control.

"But if you weren't just being blindly hit," she said slowly, "If you knew ahead of time, you could do all sorts of things. You could duck out of the way, or grab the person's hand to stop them, or yell for help. You wouldn't have to just flinch and be hit."

"Is the plan that you're going to hit me, Il'ya?" he asked, baffled but generally accepting that she probably knew what she was doing.

"What? No! But the way you described it, it's just a reaction, right? Fight or flight, I think it's called." She was talking excitedly now. "I grew up on a farm, I haven't got fancy education about magic or anything like that, but it seems to me like… if you wanted to magic up a creature that would attack whatever you pointed it at, that'd be an easy way to do it. You wouldn't have to teach it to flee and fight. Everything flees and fights. You'd just have to give it a really dangerous way to do it. And since a person can look at things logically and think of something better than just instinctively attacking, you'd have to make it more like an animal, by…"

She trailed off, eyes wide, smile vanished.

"By making it forget how to be a person," said Dark. "By taking its mind away."

"Goddesses, Derek," Ilia whispered.

He remained silent. Stared out at the Spirit Spring, with its ancient stones carved in spirals and its golden fairy lights.

"If it works like that, you can control it," said Ilia. When he turned back to her, there was a look of steely determination in her eyes. "If it works like that, it needs you to not be a person. It needs you to forget. You're already fighting back against it."

"I don't have to flinch," he echoed, something finally clicking into place about what she was getting at.

"Exactly. And not flinching is something we can practice." Unspoken in the air between them hung the heavy implication: because next time, it might not be a goat. So we have to be absolutely certain to never let it happen again. Dark's hands worried at the horsegrass.

"Il'ya… I can't."

That look of steel softened, and her hand touched his shoulder gently. "Look… I don't know how much you remember about what happened in the woods last night, but you called up that lake and then calmed down and sent it away again all on your own, without hurting anyone. I know you can control it because I've seen you do it. We can practice that."

Reluctantly, Dark gave the tiniest hint of a nod, and looked away. Ilia was smart. It was a good plan. It would work. He did not want to practice it, but he would agree to anything, anything, to be allowed to stay here in Ordon, with Ilia and Fado and the goats and warm afternoons swimming in the sunlight.

"And around everyone in the village, we'll have to be very, very careful not to do anything that's dangerous or could get you hurt. It's probably a bad idea to make you keep working with the goats, so I'll talk to Daddy and Fado about that for you. We'll come up with some excuse."

Alright, not anything. Dark's head snapped around quickly to face her again, utterly aghast that'd she'd even suggest such a thing. "That's my job, Il'ya!"

Ilia gave him the kind of Look she often gave her father when she was determined to get her way about something. "Derek. Daddy just gave you that job to get you out of the house, you know that. We'll find you a better job, if you want one."

"I can do it. I can do that one. I won't break anything else." There was a sharp, sweet scent coming from his hands, and he realized he'd crushed the seedpod of horsegrass he'd been holding. Dark looked down at it blankly. It wasn't red inside, but woody and dry, crumpled into flakes in his palms.

(He could make things stop being, he could do it so easily, he kept doing it by accident, he didn't know how not to, the boy in Uli's house lay pale and still…)

"You don't have to prove anything," Ilia said gently.

"Fado needs me for the shearing festival. Link can't work anymore, so Fado needs me." He was talking far too quickly, still staring down at the crushed horsegrass in his hands. Bits of it were fluttering away in the breeze. "I…" He looked up at her, and tried to match the steel in her eyes. "I'll be careful, and I'll follow whatever rules you want, but that's my job. Link can't do it anymore. Fado needs me."

She could have insisted. She could have told him no, forced the issue, gotten her way as always, and in the end he would have done it to keep her happy. She wasn't wrong, really. He'd already proved that he couldn't be trusted to work with the goats. He was not owed a second chance.

But at last, Ilia sighed heavily and said, "Don't do anything reckless."