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The bandits caught Zelda in a gully, woven through with a thin ribbon of stream that glimmered in the sunlight. Archers on the ridge above, the Bear's towering form at one end, half a dozen riders at the other—seeing no other choice, Zelda built herself a pyramid of light, not dissimilar to the barrier Ganondorf had once formed around her castle.
The Bear came at her like an avalanche, all bristling black fur and copper claws and white fangs, but her shield held. He paced around, swiping here and there in search of weak spot, snarling in frustration. Blood dripped in steady rivulets from the crevasses of magic across his pelt.
"You won't last forever, Lady Queen," Lord Hartwell called, standing several choice feet away from the growling beast. "Might as well come out now."
"You will not enjoy what happens when I do," Zelda shot back coldly. Would the Light Spirits come if she summoned them a second time? If not, she'd have to kill her way out of here—she was too outnumbered to risk sparing anyone—and that was something she desperately wanted to avoid.
She wasn't the first to tire. Elias shuddered, the lines of the crystal's spell crawling over his skin like insects, and collapsed in a shrinking shadow at the foot of Zelda's bright shield. His low, agonized whine reminded her keenly of the pitiful creature Link had killed at Arbiter's Grounds.
The man lying on the muddy streambank looked dead too, until he gave a wet, gasping cough. Saki dropped from her horse to come to his side, her face boxed up with misery.
Someone cried out atop the ridge. Zelda's head shot up: one of the archers had vanished. A dark shape sprang across the gully and came down on the other side to the sound of a second archer's yell.
Lord Hartwell skittered away. Saki yanked Elias to his feet and drew her dagger, backing towards her comrades as they dismounted and hurried towards the pair.
Inexplicably, a bow and quiver splashed into the stream by Zelda's boots. She snatched them up, craning her neck towards the ridge. The bandits clustered together, closing ranks, weapons at the ready.
A shadow eclipsed the sun, briefly, and hurtled into the crowd. Someone screamed. Steel flashed. Zelda backed away, nocking an arrow to her bowstrung but unsure when to point it—and then the bandits parted to give her a glimpse of him.
The wolf turned, blood dripping from his muzzle, to meet her gaze. And she was in the tower prison with the Twilight falling slowly outside, meeting her salvation for the first time; she was in the throne room, watching a smile touch his bloody face amidst the ruin of everything. Then, as now, Zelda looked into those fierce blue eyes and thought: The waiting is over. We're going to win. We're going to live.
Link fell upon the bandits like they were a flock of sheep.
She dropped her shield and came to his aid. Her first arrow caught a warrior in the calf. The second took a woman above the hip as she slashed at Link. The third and fourth struck the hands of the archers recovering atop the ridge.
Elias reached for his fallen shadow crystal; Zelda blasted him with magic, stalking forward to stand over the deadly object. Blood trailing from his nose and mouth, he floundered towards her through the stream. She drew the bowstring back to her ear. Link toppled a young man with a shaved head and came towards them.
"Stop!" Saki shrieked. "You've won! Call off your dog!"
She and Elias were the only bandits still on their feet. Zelda relaxed her bow arm, nodding to Link, who stayed where he was.
"He's not a dog," Elias wheezed. "He's like me."
"He is nothing like you," Zelda said, cold as the wind off Snowpeak.
"It's him, isn't it? The Hero?" Elias took a step towards Link. "I never meant—"
"One step closer and you die," Zelda promised, her arrow trained on his heart before she was conscious of moving. "If you leave us be, we'll grant you the same."
"Bold claims as always." Lord Hartwell—who she'd thought was long gone—slid out from behind a boulder with a sinuous smile, as though he hadn't been cowering while his allies bled. "But you still have the numbers, Captain."
Elias surveyed the bleak scene. His people were in bloody disarray; the shadow crystal lay at Zelda's feet under the slow-moving stream. He didn't look at her, or at anyone, but his answer was clear. Saki, who seemed like the only person with any sense left, started gathering her wounded comrades.
"That's it?" Lord Hartwell demanded. "Think of those you lost. Think of everything else! Your grudge is a drop in the ocean of all she's done—"
Link drew himself up with a vicious snarl, his bristling fur the color of a night sky edged with grey dawn, his eyes a molten promise, and that was all it took to send Hartwell stumbling back like a frightened child.
"You're lucky we still need you," Elias told him disgustedly, turning his back on all three of them without another word.
As their enemies departed, Link loped over to Zelda's side. She knew he had transformed for her sake, and she knew what it meant for him to physically become everything he thought he was: a beast, a predator, a killer. She touched his shoulders in silent thanks; he pressed his flank to her calf.
She dragged Elias's shadow crystal out of the stream with the heel of her boot, sensing an insatiable hunger that would chew into its bearer until there was nothing left. With her hand on Link, she could feel that the magic inside him was greedy too, but contained by the limits Zant's experiments had taught him. Halfheartedly, Zelda reached for the power that bound him—
And the crystal reacted.
She sat down hard on the streambank. The wolf's ears were pricked towards her in surprise. "I should not be able to do that," she breathed. "Midna could only use the shadow crystal because of who she is. I am a light dweller. I should not be able to manipulate Twili magic, only counter it."
But you just did, Link's eyes said, wide and blue in the golden glow of her Triforce.
"I can try to help, but Link…it might hurt."
He lowered his head in acceptance.
Zelda took a breath and let everything else fall away: the noise of the woods, the ache of her bruises, the mess of the bandits and Lord Hartwell and Sparrow. She counted the hammering beats of Link's heart, the rise and fall of his lungs. For a moment she saw Midna's tiny hands, lined with a green glow, reaching, tugging, coaxing out the source of the darkness.
The shadow crystal reared its head at her touch, and she could see that her theory had been right: Zant and Ganondorf had made this thing to enslave Link. But they had underestimated the formidable light of the Triforce of Courage, holding fast against the spell that wanted to devour him whole.
As Zelda reached for that ravenous force, something uncurled inside her.
This magic didn't feel like the primeval power of her own Triforce, or the gift of her bloodline. It felt like clouds billowing across gold skies, a sharp-toothed grin, a smooth pane of glass, a small hand clasped between hers. It felt like two hearts beating as one.
Oh, Midna. You never left me.
Link inhaled sharply, recognizing this touch too. Zelda gathered the fragments of Twili magic that had dwelled inside her since she'd shared a soul with Midna—dormant until she'd thought to look—and grabbed hold of the shadow crystal.
The wolf flinched under her hands. She took fistfuls of this thick fur to hold him still as he twisted and whined. The Twilight Princess could have handled this task easily, but with only shreds of her power, Zelda had to work very slowly to draw the crystal out without inflicting irreparable harm.
Every ounce of her strength went into breaking the last tendrils of the spell. Her eyes flew open to fleeing shadows, the crystal thudding to the ground—and Link, shaking and gasping and human, wrapping his arms around Zelda.
"I felt—" His voice cracked badly. "That was her."
Zelda hugged him back, surprised at how easy it was, how warm and wonderful it felt. "Only a piece she left behind," she murmured. "I wish—"
"I do too," Link said in her ear. "But thank you, Zelda. Thank you."
That was how Rusl and Ashei found them, sharing a small spot of warmth in the cold forest.
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Link's side was bleeding again; Ashei and the guards had barely slept the previous night. When Rusl suggested finding suggested finding shelter, no one argued.
Auru had deemed a small, agile unit most appropriate for finding the queen quickly and quietly. Ashei had joined up with them after she'd brought the news about Sparrow to the castle. She was a skilled tracker in her own right, but Elias and his people knew how to throw off pursuit and had left them a jumble of confusing trails.
The squad leader kept falling over himself to apologize for his failure to find Zelda sooner. She accepted the first two graciously; after the third time, she just told him with a soft smile that his effort had been enough. The young man flushed scarlet, and Link understood—Zelda's true smiles were so preciously sweet and rare; they crinkled up her small nose and dazzled her blue eyes. After all their dysfunction and cowardice, she finally had a guard who would risk her lives for her, who would regret that they hadn't done better.
When they found a cave not much later, she turned those dazzling eyes on Link and ordered him to go sit down, rendering him powerless to refuse even though everyone else was bustling around tending the horses and collecting firewood. Rusl joined him with a medical kit.
Gritting his teeth, Link shed his layers to expose the wound. Zelda, who came over to ignite one of the fires the guard had built, went as quiet as Rusl—they had noticed Link's scars.
Who wouldn't? He was littered with them. There was the long vicious slash Ganondorf had hewn across his chest. The deep furrow beside his navel where he'd been impaled on a Chilfos spear. Several bright stars from arrows. A crookedness to his ribs, which had broken and healed unevenly after Stallord rammed him off a platform thirty feet above the ground.
His arms were worse; he didn't have chainmail to protect him there. Not that it always helped. Link had caught a lash of Argorak's dragonfire as punishment for being a second too slow with his Clawshots, and by the time he'd plummeted to earth and rolled to extinguish the flames, his own chainmail had already become a scorching weapon. The result was a terrible ringlike pattern of seared across his back.
He remembered suddenly that Midna had screamed at him to flee the battlefield that day, and that he'd ignored her—because he hadn't cared that his young life was teetering on a razor's edge. He hadn't cared about himself at all, only about completing the Mirror of Twilight. When Link remembered taking up his fallen weapons to continue the fight even as his burnt skin sloughed away in the rain, Rusl's words bubbled up to the surface: Perhaps your fate was necessary, but it wasn't fair and it wasn't right. Do you understand that?
Link hadn't, not at the time. But maybe he was starting to.
Zelda and Rusl hadn't said a word about the scars. Rusl knew a bit of first aid from Uli, who he'd met when she was a field medic during the border skirmishes; he decided grimly that would need to replace some of the sutures that had torn when Link transformed. At least there was no sign of infection.
Resigned, Link drank a red potion and lay down with his cloak under his head. At the first tug on his sutures, he squeezed his eyes shut—thin as sewing thread, yet the feeling of it dragging through his ravaged skin was like being torn asunder.
Zelda was near his head, casting light for Rusl to work by. Her free hand brushed Link's clenched fist, a silent question. Link answered it by opening his shaking fingers gratefully. And when her grip slid through his, it did help to have something to hold onto—it made him feel stronger than the pain, as strong as he'd felt when Midna was with him. He owed his humanity to them both.
Ashei, looking warmer than anyone else in her Yeti-style coat, joined them by the fire. "Auru gave me this letter for you," she said, placing it by Zelda's knee. "He also said to tell you that he sent guards to the sparrow's nest. Want to fill us in here, Lady Queen?"
"That would be Lord Hartwell's estate," Zelda replied. "We shall ride there after we've rested for a while. He is behind the three attempts on my life. After those failed, he allied with the bandits to get the job done."
"To what end?" Rusl wondered. "He'd have no claim to the throne."
"Not on his own," she agreed, and then she hesitated, a thing Link had rarely seen her do. Fire crackled comfortably; a breeze rustled the bare trees; the guards talked in low voices behind them. Then Zelda continued. "I suppose all three of you know by now that Sparrow is the name of a gardener who used to work at the castle. I believe the fledgling is her child—my father's child, as well."
Ashei and Rusl met this news with diplomatic silence. Link remembered the night he and the bandits had stolen Lord Hartwell's horses, how the nobleman had stroked that kid's hair—the same color as Zelda's—and called her little princess.
"Sparrow left court three years ago," Zelda continued in a wooden voice. "I gave her money to end the pregnancy…that was what she wanted, or so she said back then. How she ended up having the baby and marrying Lord Hartwell, I cannot guess. But only my Council knew I was leaving the castle yesterday—that narrowed down the pool of the Bear's potential allies, since he knew where and when to ambush us. And then I recalled that Link encountered Lord Hartwell when he was with the bandits…"
"You figured it all out in an instant," Rusl realized. "You knew where to send Auru." The admiration in his voice made Link swell with pride, though there was nothing about Zelda's brilliance he could take credit for.
"Thankfully, Auru remembered Sparrow," she said. "He does not know the child is my father's, unless he guessed."
"But this child is no royal either way," Rusl pointed out. "Your mother was the one with royal blood. Your father's regency was only meant to last until you came of age."
"It was," Zelda replied evenly. "But I am now the last of my bloodline. If I die without an heir, it could meant civil war, which would make Hyrule vulnerable to our opportunistic neighbors. Many members of my court would prefer Hartwell's clear solution: a new royal bloodline, at least somewhat connected to the old one, and himself as regent. It's quite clever."
"Din's flaming arms," Ashei muttered. "Then we've got to get that kid out of Hartwell's clutches, yeah?"
"Yes. Hopefully the guard has done so already, but we cannot know for certain. Hartwell will likely be headed for his estate—along with the bandits, as he remains their only chance for clemency."
Between the pain and his political ignorance, Link was struggling to keep up. Mostly he understood that Zelda sounded tired in a way that wrenched at his heart. A bruise flowered across her cheek—somehow, he couldn't imagine Elias striking a captive, even one he hated. Perhaps Lord Hartwell had done it. Surely someone capable of using Sparrow and her child in this way was capable of anything.
But Zelda didn't seem appalled, the way Link was. She seemed strong, and resigned, and removed—because she had been dealing with people and problems like this for her entire life. Link hadn't meant to eavesdrop, but his wolf-ears had picked up her conversation with Impaz in the Hidden Village yesterday. There were no accidents, Zelda had said of her dead family. But there is no one left to blame.
Link couldn't imagine it. He had loved Midna as if he was dangling from the edge of a cliff and she was the only thing holding him up. He would never know what that love might look like if given the chance to stand on solid ground, but he knew that she had carried him through the killing and the almost-dying and the desperate effort not to lose himself in the process.
There had been no one to carry Zelda. Through her own will she'd remained kind and hopeful and selfless—not an Iceheart Queen like they said, not a deadened shell like Link would surely have become if he'd fought the Twilight on his own.
Ignoring the pain, he shifted to hold her hand between both of his. Zelda looked down, her eyes soft in the beautiful golden light of her magic, and she didn't quite smile—but she tried. And Link knew he would die before he left her alone again.
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