THIRTEEN
THE OLD AMONG THE YOUNG

Impa, of the Sheikah tribe

Paya hums happily as she pours tea. She always hums in the presence of Master Link, as well as frequently toying with her braids. I find the whole exhibition a little sickening, but then I recall the handsome man who made my cheeks pinken, and my hands rub together absent-mindedly. I suppose I was only a little older than she is now.

She passes the tea to the Princess first, the cup in its saucer clinking with her shaking hand, then to me, and finally to Master Link. The teacup hums a little nervous tune as well, silenced only by Link's steadier grip.

Paya almost sits down until I say to our unexpected guest: "And would you care for tea, Prince Sidon?"

Paya stops so quickly in her descent that she kicks the cushion underneath her a few feet backwards. She glances down at her own cup, deduces correctly that it would be offensive to offer a member of Royalty her own beverage, and then reaches over for the cup and pot. The handsome Zora, uncomfortably but politely perched upon a cushion opposite Princess Zelda, nods genially and holds the cup out towards her. Paya is now shaking so much, the spout rattles around the inside of the cup. She cannot tear her eyes away from the Prince's kind, beaming face, and they follow his muscular arm up from the shoulder so slowly that she almost overfills the cup until he quickly removes it.

"Thank you kindly," he says, raising the cup to his mouth and taking a sip. She goes to sit down and without even looking Link pushes the cushion forward so that her backside falls neatly upon it as she sits.

As I observe Zelda sipping her tea, both hands delicately folded around the cup, I wonder why my little Paya is so lacking in grace. With my reluctance to let her martial training begin within the recent uncertain times, I wonder if I have not done her any favours. Perhaps it would do to let her training commence sometime soon. With Link once more back in our lives, I wonder if I could manipulate something.

I cannot, however, suppress the concerns about Link and Zelda. I am, like everyone else, elated by their victory over Ganon, but I feel eaten up inside at how unprepared Link would have been. It is lucky that he recovered the memories locked inside the Slate, and indeed himself. He was always a thorough young man where duty was concerned, and he doted on the Princess.

Despite Link and Zelda's relative combined ages, and Sidon's maturity thanks to his genetic predisposition, I cannot help acutely feeling that I am the elder in a room full of teenagers. Paya stares at Sidon for as long as she can muster, then guiltily her eyes turn over to Master Link. The Princess looks at Link until she notices Paya looking, at which point she looks at the furthest point in the room. Sidon is the most convincing, looking directly ahead or at one of my various heirlooms until he raises his cup to hide his line of sight, when he looks over the rim at the Princess.

Master Link, meanwhile, seems to look only at the snack rolls on the table, of which he has already scoffed three. But the one moment he allows himself a long look at Zelda, while she is talking, his eyes take on the lustre of sapphires under river water.

What in Hyrule am I going to do with them?

I remember a time from long ago, when I was summoned to the Shrine of Resurrection, appearing just in time to see the blue silhouette of Robbie, head researcher of the Akkala lab, synchronise into place. Purah was already there, marching back and forth around the altar. Link's broken body had been personally delivered to my sister and I, a gift we were horrified to receive, by a group of Sheikah soldiers. He had been wrapped in cloth, horribly limp, pale as a water lily except for streaks of congealing blood. We had laid him on the altar and unwrapped his sheets like a reverse embalming. I placed on the floor the healing items I had travelled briefly back to my home to collect.

Despite seeing his wounds with my knowledge that they would heal, I remember feeling incredibly sick as Robbie cut away his tunic with a surgeon's precision.

"He will scar quite nastily," he said grimly, adjusting his spectacles, "But that will be the least of his worries."

Purah lays her hand flat across his chest and flexes the fingers. For a moment, I wonder if she wants to hold my hand - something we haven't done for almost decades – until I realise she is beckoning for the Slate. I pass it over to her, my stomach rolling as the tunic is peeled back, revealing a number of superficial cuts as well as two large burn fissures: one below the left side of the ribcage, and one on the opposite side, a finger's length down.

"Guardian scopes did these," explained Robbie, "Likely the large ones: the stalkers. He won't have been fast enough to block more than one. Nasty, spiteful things they turned out to be, albeit fascinating..."

He tore a cloth in half, and as he handed it to me to press on the wound closest to me I felt my throat opening and closing like the mouth of a stunned fish, and thick syrupy saliva fill my mouth. Neither of my colleagues acknowledged my quiet dry heaving. I could have put it down to the shock of seeing the young Champion who I had come to know and care for in such a state, my panic and worry, or that which I did not know at the time: I was in the earliest stages of my pregnancy.

Paya looks the image of her mother; the same sweep of hair and the bow shape where it meets her forehead, the same large, wistful eyes. I have not told her the story of the resurrection chambers, though like every young Sheikah, she knows of its existence. She did not know that the price paid for healing your body from moments after its death can often wipe your mind as clean as a chalkboard in the rain. None of us really did, not until Link returned to us after awakening in the Shrine, with far fewer memories than I anticipated.

And now I am unsure that the Princess remembers everything as she should. As she talks, however animated her speech may be, she sounds as she did years ago when she would recount a story about one of the other Handmaidens: as if she was talking about something that happened to someone else a long while ago instead of recent events in her own life. There are great swathes of information missing between both of them; Zelda's more recent, Link's further back in time. I am convinced there are things that each of them are hiding from the other, or perhaps even from themselves.

We sip tea and the young ones gradually empty the plates of food. I am on such a simple diet, having barely moved since the death of my daughter Sola, but after my brief spurt of energy earlier today, I manage a small amount of stewed pumpkin. I hope that bringing in a decent amount of fish for Prince Sidon has helped somewhat – with all that bulk I wonder how much he must eat to even balance his diet, let alone contribute to his luminescent scales and vast musculature. I suppose it would be rude to ask, even for research purposes.

I must have time alone with Master Link and the Princess. If she is planning what I believe she is planning, there is much more she and Link must both know.