"So they put seeds in the ground, pour water over them, and plants grow?" the small girl asked eagerly, blue eyes wide with wonder. "Is it magic?"
Her nursemaid chuckled, adjusting the picture book ever so slightly as she held the girl on her lap. The woman did not have the typical look of a governess; in fact, her tight clothing and severe facial features suggested the body and mind of a stealth warrior. And warrior she was. "A kind of magic, I suppose. The miracle of life."
"Did I grow from a seed?" The little blonde girl's hands grasped the book eagerly, flipping through drawings of pine cones and corncobs, looking for something that might resemble a person-seed.
Impa laughed so hard the girl nearly fell out of her arms. "Sort of, yes. But that's a lesson for another day." She stood to leave, watching as the girl's face darkened, running her hand over a set of Deku Baba seeds, violet-black and covered in spines.
"I think this must be the seed I came from," she said slowly, pausing so that the dark mark over her hand, a set of three triangles, rested next to the drawing. "They look cursed, like me."
Bending over to take the book, Impa put it aside and ruffled the girl's hair. "It's a long and complicated explanation. Now practice your calligraphy, and I'll bring you a piece of cake along with your dinner."
The girl's face scowled and brightened at the words "calligraphy" and "cake", and she settled herself into her desk to do the hated task, as Impa closed the door.
The warrior nursemaid locked the door, three locks to be exact, then erected a magical barrier around the room and another around the tall tower itself. "Impa!" the girl called through all of this. "Will you get me some rhubarb pie, if they have it?"
"Of course, Princess Zelda."
-&-
The young boy rode comically atop a horse normally used for plowing, its large size making the boy look even smaller than he really was. He wore a simple tunic colored with dyer's greenweed, and carried a long dagger (more like a short sword for him) at the hip. His only other possessions included a bottle of spring water, a tiny deerskin sack with a pitiful number of rupees in it, and a crude shield hewn from wood.
Link drew in his breath as the splendor of Hyrule Castle came into view. A structure this huge and beautiful would have long been reduced to rubble by the civil wars of Kando, the country where he grew up and learned to fight. But his adoptive parents had told him that he was originally from Hyrule, and that the mark on his hand had something to do with the legends of this country.
Five days ago, a raiding party from a neighboring village attacked in the middle of the night, looting the silos, burning the crops in the fields and salting them so nothing would ever grow again. Both his adoptive parents had fought in defense of the village. Both now rested, along with many of his friends, in the caves flanking their village where the Kando interred their dead..
His adoptive parents gave a word of warning not three months ago, when he expressed an interest in finding his roots. His birth parents had fled Hyrule in a period of unrest, and it had something to do with that mark on his hand. Other refugees hinted that it was some kind of holy icon, but that it was also associated with danger and misfortune, much liked the two-faced Goddess of Luck that the Kando revered. If he returned to Hyrule, they said, he might not get a friendly reception.
Link glanced back over his shoulder at the setting sun, hanging low over the mountains that separated Hyrule from Kando. They could be right, he knew. But he had nothing to lose.
-&-
"You would think," the tall man with sun-bronzed skin and flaming red hair grumbled, "that something this important would have been a little better preserved. Even if our people did leave this country for a number of years."
His second-in-command, Nabooru, held up a series of parchment scraps she had managed to piece together. "I suppose it's a good thing that the desert preserves things so well."
"Even the desert has to be good for something." Ganondorf squinted at the fragmented mess she had given him, trying to find something more than flowery prose describing the odd mark on the back of his hand. At first he had thought nothing of it, believing that it had something to do with being King and the sole male in a tribe of women. But recently he had discovered that his mark was Hylian in origin. What on earth did he have to do with the Hylians, a race of weaklings that simply chose to ignore the desert tribe living at the edge of their kingdom?
"It mentions several times that this icon is associated with a great power," he said at length. "But you'd think something like that would have swarms of people looking for it. Even Hyrule must have its treasure-hunters and a warrior or two."
Nabooru leaned on one hand, her elbow on the table. "It's hard to piece together, but it looks like there's a war connected to every one of the incidents surrounding it."
"Well, that's to be expected."
"I'm just saying that maybe they got sick of dealing with it, and decided to bury it under the sands of time."
Ganondorf rolled his eyes. "How poetic," he said as he slapped the parchment down on the table. "Well, there's only one thing to do. We haven't requested an audience with the Hylian royalty since we arrived here, and for whatever reason they haven't contacted us." He held up his marked hand in a fist. "I suppose this is as much a prerequisite for a visit as any."
-&-
After Impa left for the night with the remains of dinner, Zelda dropped her cute princess façade and dug her nails like a frenzied animal into a small section of the wall's mortar. She extracted a small, sharp digging tool she had fashioned out of a butter knife and pulled her bed's headboard away from the wall, using it as a lever to wiggle a flat, broad stone out of the wall. She caught it before it fell and pulled a thin book from its hiding place. Who had left the book and why, she did not know. She did not understand what force had pulled her toward it, like a divining rod nodding over subterranean water. But it had something to do with the mark on her hand.
It was a child's book to introductory magic, very simple, but Zelda had been explicitly forbidden from practicing magic. Once again, it had something to do with the mark on her hand. But she did not feel cursed by the mark. She felt the curse came from the outside, someone imposing their will on something that did not belong to them. And if the usurper chose to deny her bond to the strange symbol, then she would deny its taboos.
The first lesson involved creating a simple ball of energy in one's hand. Some nights she succeeded in doing it, some night she did not. She placed her hands together and concentrated, eager to master it so that she could move onto the next chapter.