NOTICE: The following section is canon. This happened. It happened before, it will happen again. It. Always. Happens.

…

Tale #5: "In My Eyes"

Wind: weak, easterly, carrying the scent of spice and pork from a meat smoker, although not as strong as before. It must not have been in use at the moment. The dry air up here also made scents hard to carry. She often had to focus harder to smell anything.

Sun: only minutes from high noon and against her back. She could feel the heat penetrate her black suit. If she were anyone else, she might sweat. But with desert in her blood, she was incapable of giving herself away in a foolish manner. Where she hid, someone would have to look almost directly into the sun to find her. The inexact shadows below helped her conceal her own from her target. Surprise was assured, although she did not allow that assurance to weaken her focus.

Presences: seven. Only three were relevant. They wandered the deck of the ship underneath her, each one dressed in blue with their hair and faces concealed by black cartwheel hats. One of them should also have been concealing a bright red scarf in one sleeve of her bodysuit. It would take all of her concentration to spot the red scarf, which was supposed to be the target bearing her prize. The other four were undisguised members of the Island Symphony crew. The large man known as "Flower" loitered around the poop deck with his eyes cast ashore. Leynne, the ship's executive, stood next to the helm with the perverted helmsman who called himself "Line". She wondered if his name was meant to be some sort of poorly-chosen Hylianism for Line's lecherous nature. Perhaps, "clothesline", from which he would be likely to steal women's clothing? Twali and Biluf were still missing a couple items of underwear. The last one on the deck was My Captain. He sat on the port staircase with a book in his lap. It looked like some kind of fiction novel, which was strange considering his preference non-fiction history and biographies. Then again, he had not been reading a lot lately.

Layna willed thoughts about My Captain out of her head and returned her focus to the main deck. None of her sisters were turned to look at her. None of them even seemed interested. Two swept the deck, but the scarf could be in the sleeve of the third as well. She could easily judge each girl by their body type if she lowered herself from her perch on the starboard mizzen-mast, but it would defeat the exercise. She had to—

EYES!

She swung around the top of the mast and peered between it and the sail as she kept one hand on the top of the mast itself and the other on one of the stays. She could feel the eyes probing where she had just been hanging. They were merely a set of prying eyes from ashore, a uniformed man on the docks who probably thought he was seeing things. She freed the hand holding the stay and retrieved an anesthetic-tipped needle in case he decided to press his investigation. However, he chose to ignore the feeling. He was lucky he was not her target; his turned back would have been the perfect opportunity to embed a throwing blade into his neck.

She placed the needle between her teeth and pulled herself onto the mast. With no eyes on her, she replaced the needle and returned her focus to the deck. Flower was still looking at the port. Leynne… had just smacked the back of Line's head. She had to admit to a touch of personal satisfaction, but she quickly hid it before the lapse in concentration caused her to fall. My Captain had decided to walk across the deck with the book under his arm. He must have become bored with it. Her targets continued to wander the deck, not even looking up to find her. She was not concerned that her shadow would give her away; none of them were looking toward th—

EYES!

Someone had turned to look in her direction, and she quickly ducked to one side of the mast again as she located the perpetrator. It was My Captain, having turned to gauge the time of day by glancing at the sun with a hand shading his eyes. He lacked the kind of attention required to notice her, but her talent for sensing when someone was about to look at her was so finely-tuned that she could tell when someone was about to look at her through a mirror at five hundred paces. Such had been the extent of her training. She waited until My Captain was done checking on the sun before she positioned herself so that she could descend comfortably, one hand on a stay mounted to the deck while one foot was hooked to the top of the mast and the other waited to push against the side of the mast.

There it was. The hat-wearing sister sweeping the deck near the opening in the bulwark had just flashed a bit of the scarf. Now that Layna had her target marked, she would have to wait for the perfect opportunity to spring and attack for her prize. Her field was wide open since there was little in the way of witnesses. But, since she was on the opposite side of the ship, she did not have as basic an egress as expected. She—

EYES!

Layna quickly sprang from the mizzen-mast toward the starboard main-mast in front of her. She balanced one foot on the stay connecting the masts and used the elasticity of the connection to bound again, this time toward the port side. The feeling of eyes on her had been gone the moment she jumped from the stay, so she grabbed onto the stay between the port mizzen- and main-masts and used her momentum to swing a whole circle on the line before hooking an arm and a leg to halt her movement. She looked in the direction she had felt the eyes to see Line scratching his head as he looked at the starboard side. Without considering the consequences, she used her free hand to pull a needle from a thigh pocket and flung it in Line's direction. Line had turned to examine the ship's wheel, and then he fell to the deck a little over a minute after the needle stabbed into the back of his left arm. Although she had been told many times before, she was willing to endure another lecture from My Captain if only to avenge her sisters' embarrassments at Line's unclean nature.

She slid toward the mizzen-mast with slow, calculated movements to prevent any of the rigging from rattling further. She was closer to her target, which made her exit path much easier. Once the sweeper made to turn her back toward the mast, Layna would use the rigging to descend and strike, and then she could escape by leaping away, grabbing the shroud that would be at her target's back, and conceal herself over the edge until the exercise was over. It was routine, but she needed to keep her stealthy mannerisms up. With as dangerous as a life My Captain had given her, she would be a fool to not maintain her abilities.

"Biluf?" Layna glanced afore where she had last seen My Captain in response to his voice. He watched as he approached the false target standing near the port stairs.

Betrayal.

Biluf knew how the exercise was supposed to work. Biluf was the one who should have been carrying the scarf. And Biluf should have been holding the prize in her front pocket. She swung around the back of the mast to get a better look at the trousers worn by her current target. Empty. Nothing in the pockets.

Layna's response was immediate. She mounted the mast and used the stay connected to the main-mast to gain speed and momentum as she traversed it. She slipped a stone weight loose from her sleeve and dove past the main-mast on the inside as she tossed it ahead. The weight slung itself around the stay between the main-masts, and Layna had a brief moment to change the direction of her fall using the wire attached to the weight just before her fall pulled the wire loose. It was just enough to steer her toward a stay mounted between the nearby main-mast and the deck. She caught herself on it and silently dropped to the deck. She would enter My Captain's peripheral vision in less than a second, and his short stature made it impossible to simply sneak underneath his vision. She would be seen.

She did not care. Biluf was her target. Now that she was on the deck, she could clearly make out Biluf's slender and decently-endowed figure. She dodged to the outside of the port fore-mast, still using her gathered speed to aim herself at the gap between Biluf's back and the stairs.

"What are you doi—" Link was just asking when—

WHOOSH!

A black-clad figure sailed past behind Biluf. Biluf suddenly stood straight up, but Link was so caught off-guard that he stumbled backward two steps. "What the…?" he asked, idiotically glancing in the direction that the figure had approached from. He quickly corrected himself, but by the time he realized that the figure was going for the stairs, it was already gone. Momentarily forgetting that Biluf did not speak Hylian, he asked her, "What was that?"

He caught the stunned look on Biluf's face. Then he watched her slip a hand into her trouser pocket. When she removed it, she opened her fist to reveal a crumpled piece of green paper.

Meanwhile, concealed in the shadow and around the corner of the stairs, Layna spied on their stunned reactions. Then, as she casually descended the staircase, she pressed her prize between her lips.

She loved cherry-flavored candy, made much sweeter by her victory in spite of Biluf's deception.

…

Tale #5 of the Island Symphony – END

NOTICE: As stated above, this is completely canon. Nobody, not even friends, get between Layna and her candy.