"Say it again."

"My name is Dela. This is my mother, Sara. My father was a smith. You knew him. He once gave you shelter when you were injured and being hunted. He died a month ago, and his creditors took the smithy and threw us out. You're repaying your debt to him by taking us to my uncle in Snowhead. He works for the gorons there, mining iron in the narrow seams they can't reach. He'll take us in."

"Again. Work on the accent."

"My name is Dela…" as Zelda continued the mantra, her voice morphing into something that wouldn't have sounded out of place in Kakariko, Impa leaned over the cauldron where she was mixing more of the Sheikah potion. Raegis was trying hard not to breathe through his nose when he instructed the princess; the smell of that old, familiar drink was giving him cravings, but he suspected Impa would have cut off his hand if he so much as reached for it.

"Don't talk much," he told Zelda as she droned. "Let people think you're stupid, and they won't ask difficult questions. Don't look anyone in the eye. Hunch over so your face is hard to see, but try not to look like you're deliberately hiding your face."

"If you get us killed, I'm finding a way back just to skin you alive," Impa told the potion. Raegis sighed.

"We're not going through the middle of the camp," he said yet again. "Just the outskirts. It's possible nobody will even talk to us."

"And it's possible everyone will try to talk to us."

"He died a month ago…" Zelda watched the flames as she recited, barely noticing the biting cold. That morning, they had woken up to frost powdering the tips of the grass. She experimentally put a small quaver in her voice at that sentence, and found it to be an improvement.

"There are no walls, no guards, and nobody is expecting us. This is our best chance to get through. If we take the long way round, we'll freeze to death halfway up the mountain."

"He'll take us in…" a flicker of doubt improved that part. Raegis had to admit, her acting skills were impressive. She was a very fast learner. And, thinking of learning…

"She needs to learn to fight."

Impa snorted. "She needs to save her strength. When I started my training, I could barely walk at the end of each day. She won't be climbing any mountains like that."

"… threw us out…"

Impa felt irritable and vulnerable. She would not be fooling anybody with bright red eyes, so she had not taken a single dose of the potion since the plan was hatched. Her eyes had faded from red to reddish brown, and were now more like a brown with a faint hint of red, but along with the colour, her senses had faded. She was still quite certain she could take on any enemy she was likely to encounter on the road, but Gharan was another matter. No, there were no guards or walls, but that was because the camp was populated almost entirely by Sheikah. Not all of them had managed to reach their peak before being exiled. Some were only part trained, some were old, many had never been particularly good at it, but a part-trained Sheikah warrior was still a more dangerous obstacle than any given country soldier.

But, Raegis was right: winter was chasing them across the plains, and would chase them all the way up the mountains. The time it would take them to put a comfortable distance between themselves and every populated area would likely kill any chance they had of reaching Snowhead before the mountain passes were sealed off until spring. If they wanted to take the direct route, it was either through Clock Town with its endless guards and thousands of watchful eyes, or past Gharan.

"You're both right."

Impa almost startled; Zelda's voice had changed so completely into her new role that when she seamlessly switched back it took them both by surprise. Zelda stood and stretched before settling back down onto the blankets. "Reaching Snowhead doesn't need to be any harder than it already is. It's poor timing." Then she fixed Impa with what Impa had come to think of as the King's look. "You'll start my training when we're back down here."

"Yes, princess," Impa replied, seeing no profit in an argument. The potion had thickened. She took the cauldron from the fire, letting herself have a lungful of its fumes before she set it aside to cool. She wasn't allowing herself to drink it, but she wanted enough in storage that as soon as they were past Gharan she could dose herself back to full strength in an instant.

Now that the fire was free, Raegis reached for the pigeon he had managed to catch that morning, but Impa beat him to it. "You could let me do something," he said lightly. Impa did not reply, lips tight as she began to pluck the bird. Raegis had done absolutely nothing to deserve her suspicion, except to exist and be an exile, but for her it was enough. She would not allow him to handle the food, nor to be alone with the princess, nor to get too close to her back. She had not slept since he had joined them, though with the potion wearing off, that was beginning to take its toll. He took the whole thing with good nature, just the occasional roll of an eye, and showed her total trust, eating and drinking whatever she gave him, letting her walk directly behind him, sleeping almost every night. It was not enough to win her faith. If anything, it made her feel worse, full of creeping doubts and always on edge. She plucked the pigeon as if she had some reason to hate it.


"Rumour has it, the Deku turned her down."

The news did not have the effect Akhan had hoped for; a sarcastic smile barely twisted one corner of Ganon's thin lips, and he did not even look up from the scroll he had been reading. "Oh, good. I need no longer fear retribution from an army of waddling turnips." He carefully underlined a few words on the scroll, then set it aside and pulled another towards him. "Progress with the Temple?"

"The inner chamber is sealed. Our men have been trying, but they're running out of ideas that don't involve bomb flowers."

Ganon gave a light shake of his head. "Some of the Hylians are finally starting to accept me. I won't respond by bringing explosives onto their holy ground. Tell them to be more creative. What else?"

"People are starting to ask questions about Zora's Domain, my lord."

This time, it was almost a genuine smile. Somehow that was even more worrying than the half-smirk. "Fine. Send men to check on them. Tell them… tell them to dress warmly."

"And the Princess?"

"What about her?"

"There's a bounty on her head, the humans and deku have refused to help her, and it's growing cold. Surely she'll come to her senses soon. It could be worth reaching out to her…"

"No. If she wants to come home, she will find her way. Do nothing."

"My lord-"

"The Princess won't wait for Spring. She'll be halfway to the Gorons when snow closes the passes. If they don't take her in, she and her nanny will die on that mountain. If they do take her in, they'll soon find they're alone in supporting her. When the Zora of Termina find out what's happened to their king here… they may be reluctant to pick a fight with me for the sake of a penniless orphan child. There are limits to even a Goron's simple-mindedness. Her little adventure is over. Go."

After Akhan had bowed out of the room, Ganon tried to carry on his research, but found he could no longer focus. His eyes wandered off the page and over to the mostly healed burn on the back of his hand, the scar in the shape of the Triforce. In the dense silence, he thought he could imagine it faintly singing.

After his ill-fated attempt to take control through the Sacred Realm, he had woken with an itch in his fingertips, a sense of power flowing through him, trying to escape his skin like a fly battering against a window. It felt different to anything he had felt before, like a constant, intense version of the faint afterglow that always followed his experiments with sorcery. So, he had experimented.

Zora's Domain had been his first experiment.

He idly traced the pattern of the burn, thinking of how fast the frost had snaked along the river to the waterfall and beyond, how instantly the air had changed, how one breath had been warm and comfortable, and the next pricked the back of his throat before turning into a cloud of mist in front of him. He had no idea how far the spell had spread or how long it would last for, but he felt with certainty that it would be a long, harsh, early winter.


Sorry for the two-year hiatus... I overslept :/ But I have the next many, many chapters mapped and I'm back in the game! Be back soon with chapter 15.