Zelda is very good at catching lizards, if she does say so herself. With just a bit of quiet, patient observation, she knows three different spots near the stable where the lizards frequent. She doesn't mind waiting, and doesn't mind sneaking up on the creatures, crawling forward a foot at a time through the dirt and dust. Her knees are stained red-brown by mid-morning.
Link believes the best way to catch lizards is to outrun them, so he does a lot of charging and diving and coming out of a roll with a terrorized lizard held up over his head in victory. By noon, Zelda has caught ten and Link has caught six, and Link declares her the victor of a game they weren't playing and focuses instead on killing monsters.
He dispatches the ice wizrobe right beside the stable, and Zelda hangs back and catches a lizard.
They stroll down into the canyon, and Zelda lingers behind, taking her time so she doesn't slip on the incline, and catches a lizard.
He fires an arrow into a skull shaped cave, causing an explosion, and Zelda grabs a lizard that runs from the noise.
He pops out of the next camp with an amber in one hand and a new claymore in the other. Zelda pops up from behind a rock with a lizard in each hand.
They have all the lizards they'll need for a two week trip by the time the sun sets, and they take turns at the cook pot-Zelda mixing the next few day's worth of elixirs and Link cooking up some curry pilaf.
As Zelda stoppers the last elixir, a woman nearby gives her a dirty look. Zelda is not at all used to people giving her dirty looks, and at first she's pleased that no one here knows her as the princess. (The knowledge of who she was didn't cut out all the dirty looks, but it at least hid them.) But then she starts to worry that perhaps the woman is in the Yiga clan.
"She sells fireproof elixirs," Link says in an undertone. His eyes sparkle as he looks up at her, bent over the cook pot. "You're putting her out of business."
"Oh!" She looks down at the bottle in her hand. This is the opposite of encouraging trade and entrepreneurship. But on the other hand... "I certainly sympathize. But I'm hardly going to stop what I'm doing."
"Yeah, you're done now anyway."
"It's not as if I'm selling our elixirs to other travelers. She's losing out on our business, but no one else's. We're not even sharing our recipe."
"And it's not like you're rubbing it in her face by making elixirs ten times as powerful as hers."
"If they're more powerful, that's your doing, and ten times seems an exaggeration. And I'm still not sure I believe this thirty-hour nonsense. And I am not rubbing it in her face!"
He smiles and holds out spoon for her to taste the pilaf. She tries it and nods her approval, and he reaches out to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. It may not be blistering yet this low on the mountain, but it is hot, and her hair has started to frizz and escape her kerchief, especially after all of today's lizard gathering. She hurries to right it, and as she does, she accidentally locks eyes with the elixir woman. Her look has turned even dirtier, and Zelda realizes it's not her elixir making skills she's rubbing in the woman's face.
She darts a look at Link and then away, and bends low to fix her hair and hide the sudden heat in her cheeks.
#
Link is going to get every last lizalfo on Death Mountain. It's a more difficult journey than their march to the Zora Domain, where the road twisted and turned and there was plenty of cover and plenty of places for her to hang back out of sight. The path into Eldin is made of long, straight stretches with almost no cover. They can see the lizalfos from far off, and it's still an unanswered question if the monsters can see them or not. Link does an awful lot of charging ahead.
The path is not as defined on the volcano as it is in the Domain. Monsters appear below and above, and Link drops off the trail to get some stray chuchus on a lower level, charging back to get the next group up ahead.
He seems almost disappointed that the guardian that used to block the path is now deactivated. He frowns down at it, before sinking into a crouch to dig through its innards. He hands screws over his shoulder for her to take, and when he's done, he pats the machine's side before pushing himself up.
"Want to check out the tower?" he asks.
Of course she wants to check out the tower.
The region seems to be populated mostly by taluses and wizrobes. There's only a single hinox out beyond the volcano.
"Should we check for lizalfos?" he asks.
She cringes. "We could. But I suspect there are so many that to mark them all would take us hours and require more pins than the slate has."
Link frowns out at the mountain, at the trail ahead. "I just want to make sure we get them all."
"Why not make a couple passes first? Come back in a week and see what you've missed."
He grins at her. Then he plucks up the slate and adjusts it himself.
Zelda hasn't paid much attention to the monsters in the compendium, and she hasn't noticed before that Link has pictures of Yiga clan mambers. He sets the guidance stone to search, then steps back to let the blue liquid run its course. He smirks, holding it up so she can see there are no new marks.
"That's why you took so long picking up Symin the other day. Did you find any then?"
"No," he says, handing the slate back to her. "So who knows? Maybe it doesn't work."
"It works."
"So confident," he teases.
"Of course."
At least, she's confident until they have to descend the tower. There's no good way to warp to the bottom. More than once she falls on Link as she reaches a platform, but he catches her around the waist each time and sets her on her feet.
#
They reach an intersection, with one branch trailing down towards the lava. It's clearly not the path, but it's also just the kind of place the lizalfos would gather. Up ahead, the path is enclosed on both sides by looming walls, and it seems the path itself is blocked at the end by a wall of cooled lava flow.
Link stops, assessing the situation. She can't really fathom what kind of dilemma he's having. Does he want to clear out all the lizalfos so badly that he'll take a detour? The plan was to walk to Goron City and clear the monsters on the way. Is he worried that she won't be able to scale the lava flow, and therefore he's looking for an alternate route? She checks the map, trying to see what he's thinking. She startles at the pin ahead.
There's a talus blocking the path.
She leans around Link's shoulder and squints to try to make it out, but she can't tell which batch of lava is the monster.
"There." He points.
The pointing is not helpful.
She asks, "Are we going around, or am I hanging back?"
"If it sees you, it'll throw flaming boulders at you."
"Naturally."
"But the best place to hide is over there, and I just know some lizalfo is going to wander up the second I'm not paying attention."
She sighs.
"I should have bought that lizalfo hat," he sighs. "Or let some of the Sheikah come with us. I don't know, do you want to just warp the rest of the way?"
She scowls at him. "We know I can handle a single lizalfo. I've got ice arrows and the slate. "
"These lizalfos breathe fire."
"And I am currently fireproof."
He sighs, "Zelda."
She unslings her bow, nooks an arrow, and ducks down behind a rock, lifting her eyebrows at him until he groans, scrapes a hand through his hair, and pulls out the biggest sledge hammer she's ever seen. "I'm buying all the hats as soon as we get to Goron City," he mutters. Then he darts off to take down a rock monster, probably intending to defeat it before he changes his mind that leaving her is a bad idea.
The ground shakes as the creature rises from the ground, and Zelda sneaks a peak intending to snap a better picture for her compendium. But...it's much larger than she expected. And it's molten. And it's slamming a fist down towards Link, who's back-flipping away, and shooting it with an ice arrow so it's fire goes out in a poof. He jumps up the monster's back in two quick leaps, and he spins the sledge hammer over his head for momentum before letting it fly, spinning around and around, and she can hear the monster's deep, shocked grunts with every hit against the ore deposit on its back. She can feel every strike through the ground.
She can also see the creature revving up to fight back. The way steam rises from its surface. The way it braces its arms against the ground. It's ready to light back on fire, and Link is still spinning, so, so close. It's almost down. He's racing against time. One hit. Another. The beast growls.
Zelda pops up from behind her rock and puts an ice arrow through its head. With a groan like a rock slide, it falls back on its face. The deep rumble sends a shower of pebbles down from the walls. Link hits it four more times, and then it explodes beneath him in a cloud of purple smoke. Gemstones rain from the sky, and Zelda walks up and plucks up a ruby as big as her head.
Link narrows his eyes at her.
"What?" she asks, tucking away her bow and adjusting her quiver like a prim princess, expecting some new lecture that she knows she'll ignore and he knows she'll ignore.
"That was nice shooting," he says and drops an opal into her hand.
They stand there a moment, caught up in looking pleased with each other.
Even though she's surrounded by lizalfos, even though she just watched a lava monster try to kill her protector/friend/roommate person, even though she's dirty and sweaty, she thinks the elixir woman at the stable was right to be jealous. Everyone should be jealous.