Chapter 9


Three days later, Rat trudged up the muddy road to Wetland Stable. A salvaged scrap of tent awning covered his head and fell behind his back like a cloak. His sword hung from his waist, beside three arrows, tied together with a strip of canvas. A lizalfos bow sat across his back, the gut bowstring taut across his chest. His boots were unrecognizable under their socks of mud.

He limped up the hill, eyes fixed on the plume of smoke rising from the mouth of the wooden horse above the stable. Smoke meant fire. Fire meant warm toes, dry clothes, hot food. He hadn't been dry in three days, since jumping in the pond to swim into the cave. Rain, rain, rain. There was so much water on the surface, he could finally believe his mother's stories about an ocean of it.

The clouds parted for sunset. Golden rays of sun fell on the green hills, and the broad leaves in the lowland trees fluttered in the wind. A wide river rushed at the bottom of the hill, brown and swollen from days of rain. In the bushes on the side of the road, Rat glimpsed a red fruit growing on a spidery bush under a tree. He was so close—the stable was just ahead—but he veered off the road. He didn't know what the fruit was called; it had a mild flavor and exploded into watery juice when he bit into it. But he'd eaten several of them these last few days, and he hadn't died. He tucked it into his rucksack. Link had said to meet him at the stable, but he'd made no promises.

If you go back on me now, after all this… Rat gritted his teeth.

As he approached the stable yard, he shrank into himself, eyes darting beneath his makeshift hood. Travelers milled around the muddy yard, sitting at a fire, chatting while roasting meat over the open flame. Most carried large backpacks, weapons strapped to their backs or hips. Besides their muddy boots, they were clean and well-groomed. Walking into them, Rat felt like an infestation. He stank of his own sweat and a persistent fly buzzed around his rucksack.

Several horses stood lazily under an awning, heads down, ears flat, tails swishing at flies. A stable boy about Rat's age mucked out an empty stall, shoveling dirty hay into a wheelbarrow. Is that what Link would ask him to do? The horses were so big. Their hooves looked heavy and sharp. There had been no horses in Karusa Valley. The Yiga traveled light.

A man in a fur-lined hat with the flaps upturned stood behind the stable's counter, writing in a ledger book.

Rat's heart picked up, but he adjusted the heavy strap of his rucksack and approached the counter. "Excuse me."

The man looked up. His eyes narrowed in suspicion. "We're out of charity. The recovery funds ran out when the princess disappeared. Run along."

"I'm not a beggar," Rat said. "I'm here to meet Link." Yesterday, Rat had seen two travelers limping down the road, with hollow cheeks and dead eyes, who carried the stench of the Depths. He had veered off the road and detoured around a hill, afraid their gloom might cling to him, that it might remember him.

"Link, eh?" Keeping a finger on his page, the man peered closer.

"He told me to meet him," Rat snapped. "Is he here?"

"I haven't seen Link in two months."

The world spun. Rat swayed and clutched the counter. His chin fell to his chest, and he stared numbly through his muddy boots.

"What did Link want with you?" the man asked.

Heavily, Rat lifted his head. His tongue felt thick, and when he spoke, his words ran together. "I was going… to work for him. As his squire."

The stable master's eyes widened. "Link finally chose a boy?"

"Not yet," Rat mumbled. "I've been walking three days. It was… my test."

The man glanced over Rat's tattered cape with new eyes. "Why don't you sit down? But leave your boots outside, please."

Rat pried off his boots and his sodden socks. On pruned, bare feet he limped across the inn. A woman seated at a table looked up from her newspaper and stared. He shot a glare back at her and dropped into a chair at the only other table. He fell forward and dropped his forehead onto his arms. His hood settled around him, blocking out light. His stomach growled in his cave.

Ten rupees left: enough for a meal, but not for sleep. Maybe they'd let him wash dishes for a bed? His feet ached through the bones and blisters dotted his heels and toes. Peeking through the crack under his hood, he glimpsed a soft bed waiting across the inn, set with a plump feather pillow.

I'm going to kill Link.

Plenty of ideas had come to him in the last three days. While ducking against the sheets of rain, while huddling under a leaking shelter, rubbing two damp sticks together to start a fire. On the first night, he'd shattered the piece of flint he'd bought from the strange man holding the sign at the bottom of the trail to Zora's Domain. Ten rupees, wasted. And he'd lost his apples when he fell in the river, after sneaking into a monster's camp to steal the bow. Which he still hadn't used. So much trouble to impress a man who wouldn't keep his word.

Light footsteps approached, and a clunk sounded as someone set a tray down on his table. Rat flinched and sat up.

"You're Link's boy?" A woman with warm green eyes stood over him. Her brown hair curled around her ears.

"I was trying to be."

She slid the tray toward him with a mug of milk and a bowl of steaming stew. Orange carrots and potatoes floated in brown broth. "Link saved my brother and I from an ambush. He bandaged us up and escorted us to this inn, and now we work here." She smiled and handed Rat a spoon. "Take care of him."

Rat snatched the spoon. As she disappeared through a swinging door into a kitchen, he shoveled the stew down. He should have tried the squire tactic at the last inn. It would have saved him thirty rupees. He licked the inside of the bowl clean and set it down, disappointed. One bowl wasn't enough. He fingered his last few rupees.

He needed to get stronger. Three days on the road, and he was ruined. Feet torn, clothes falling apart, too broke for a second bowl. The dagger nudged into his mind, where he'd left it, hidden under a rock down the road. His clothes were too wet and thin to hide it anymore.

I will get stronger. He sat up straight. If not through Link, then another way. I don't need him.

A horse snorted outside. Tack jingled with the plod of hoofbeats, and weapons clanked. Rat's ear twitched. He stood and limped to the open wall, standing in a patch of orange sunlight.

Link pulled his horse to a halt in the stable yard. He rode the largest horse Rat had ever seen: a chestnut mare with a white mane and tail, her shiny coat flecked with mud. Link swung his leg over her flank and hopped down.

The stable boy ran up and took the horse's reigns. "Welcome back, Link." He beamed like the sun had risen. "I'll sponge her down for you."

"Check her right hoof," Link said. "I think she has a stone."

The stable boy nodded and led the mare away.

Link faced Rat. His eyes swept over him, from his raw feet to the bow, to his tattered tent-cape. They stared at each other for a moment, then Link turned and followed his horse.

"Oh, no you don't!" Rat limped across the yard after the swordsman's back. "Come back here! You can't make me walk three days in the rain, after I just died—"

Link spun around. "Yet you still have the strength to insult me." He swung open a gate and entered the paddock.

Face flushed, Rat planted his feet and waited outside the fence. Link unbuckled the saddle cinch and tossed the strap over the saddle.

"Really, I can do that for you," the stable boy said, hanging awkwardly in the background.

Link lifted the saddle and blanket from the mare's sweaty back, and gave them to the stable boy. He unbuckled the bridle, asked for it, and the mare spat the bit out in his hand, then nipped his sleeve.

"I didn't forget," Link murmured to her. He drew an apple from his pouch, took a bite, then fed the rest to the horse. As she crunched, juice dribbled from her lips.

"What's her name?" Rat asked.

Link combed her forelock with his fingers. "Epona."

Epona's ears flicked forward at her name.

Rat extended his dirty hand over the rail. The mare sniffed toward him. Her brown eyes reflected the light, warm and curious. She bumped Rat's hand with her nose, then dropped her head and snuffed at the hay on the ground.

Link stroked her shoulder. Rat wiped his hand on his shirt and retreated to a safe distance. "Where have you been?"

"Around."

"Where's 'around?'"

With a secret smile, Link hung the bridle on a hook.

"You smell like the Depths," Rat said.

"What else?"

Rat sniffed. "I can't smell anything else. There's too much horse. But you went to the desert, after the Depths." He pointed to grains of golden sand stuck to the swordsman's boots.

Link nodded. "You missed one." He pointed up, and Rat craned his neck to the sky. A cloud drifted across a floating island.

That was the airy smell, Rat thought. A clean, cold smell. Like wind, like freedom.

The swordsman stepped through the gate, returning to the yard. Touching his pouch, Link withdrew a brown shirt and a clean pair of pants. He extended them to Rat. "Take a bath."

"I don't have any money."

"I do." He pointed around the side of the stable to a bathhouse. Steam rose from a vent in the pointed roof. "We'll talk over supper."

Clutching the shirt, Rat hurried into the bathhouse and latched the door. A bath had been dug from the floor and lined with stones, creating a small pool. He pulled hot stones from a grill over the fire and dropped them in, heating the water. As he scrubbed the mud from his arms and legs, he rehearsed a lecture, but his speech dissolved in the warm water. He sighed, dunked underwater one last time, and let the mud wash away. Link had come back. Rat wanted to know why.

He dressed in the new clothes and threw his damp shirt, still burned from the battle, into a bucket of rags.

When he returned to the inn, Link was sitting at a table, wiping up his second bowl of stew with a loaf of brown bread. As he approached, Rat held his bow and his makeshift weapon belt behind his back. Compared to the gilt bow clipped to the swordsman's back, and the sturdy hilt over the man's shoulder, the weapons Rat had fought so hard for seemed like toys.

"That idiot sent me to the wrong stable," Rat said.

The swordsman chewed his bread.

"I could have been here yesterday, but he sent me to Woodland Stable. Why is he holding a sign if he can't give directions?"

"I have salve for your feet," Link said. He nodded toward the opposite chair, and Rat sat down as the woman approached, bringing two more bowls of stew on a tray, and a second loaf of bread. Link thanked her, took one bowl, and pushed the second toward Rat.

He plunged into the meal. They ate in silence, focused on their food. When Rat finished, he sighed and leaned back in his chair. His eyes struggled to stay open.

The swordsman pushed his empty bowl aside and folded his hands, resting his arms on the edge of the table. "Tell me everything you know about the Yiga Clan."

Rat started. He sat up straight and glanced around the room. Besides the stable master in his booth, they were alone. "Why?"

"Because I want to know." Link watched him carefully.

Another test. Rat remembered the bodies strewn across the supplies room in the Yiga hideout on the day he lost the sun. Had they deserved that?

He remembered Josi handing him a honeyed apple, felt her hand tousling his head. Faintly, he heard Yiga laughter echoing around the dining hall, cackling at Master Kohga's latest joke. He felt chanting rumbling under his back, as he used to lie on the rocks above the Pit, gazing at the stars as the new recruits recited their evening prayers.

Then Rat flinched at the memory of Karta's hand grasping his wrist. The shove against his back, the long fall into the darkness.

"They're building a weapon," Rat said. His heart beat faster. He ducked, expecting a blade to glide across his neck. It was exciting, being bad. "They forced me to mine zonite for a year. They're mining all across the Depths to make crystallized charges."

"What type of weapon?" Link asked.

Again, Rat glanced around the inn. He lowered his voice to a murmur. "I never saw the plans. But it's big. Some kind of ancient machine, like a giant man."

"Where are they keeping it?"

Rat paused. "Kohga sent you to the Lanayru mine, but that's a diversion," he murmured. "It's just another mine, and I think that one's almost dry. They're building the weapon under the Hebra mountains. If you have your map, I can show you."

The swordsman studied Rat's face for a moment, and the boy squirmed in his chair. But he met the man's eyes. I'm not lying.

Unhooking his pad from his belt, the man activated the screen and showed it to Rat. The boy leaned in. The map was so detailed. Contour lines spread across the image like ripples in a pond, matching the elevation of mountains and valleys. Glowing blue dots sprinkled the map. If Rat had a map like this, he thought he could go anywhere, do anything.

He shook his head. "This is the surface. The mine is underground. But I heard it's about right—" His finger hovered over the map. Suddenly, he yanked back his hand and sat on it. "I'm not going to tell you."

The swordsman raised his eyebrow.

"But I can take you there."

Slowly, Link withdrew the pad and hooked it on his belt.

Rat crossed his arms. "The Lanayru mine is a waste of time."

"I figured that out. Yesterday."

"You've already been there?"

Link took a long drink from his mug of water. He stood, scraping back his chair. "What you told me matches what I found."

Rat jumped up after him. "Have you been to Hebra?"

"Not yet."

"You should. Soon. You should destroy the weapon."

The man tilted his head. "Why do you want to help me?"

"Because I don't want them to use it," Rat said. "I don't want them to revive Ganon. I never wanted them to, but it wasn't my choice." He stared at the floor. The last three days ached in his sore feet. The fairy tonic tingled in his healed bones. "I'm sorry," he muttered.

Speak up, his mother said.

Rat squeezed his eyes shut. Why was he doing this? Why hadn't he done it sooner? He lifted his head and met the swordsman's eyes. "I'm sorry for shooting you in the Depths. I was wrong."

He drew in a breath. His chest lifted, light.

Relief softened the swordsman's face. He glanced past Rat, west, into the twilight beyond the open wall. "You've been underground for years. Are you sure you can lead me to the chasm?"

"I can. I drew copies of maps for them when I wasn't mining. It made me feel—" He stopped himself. Like I was outside in the world. "The Hebra mine is completely cut off from the rest of the Depths. You'll never find it unless you already know where it is."

Link's eyes narrowed one last time, studying Rat. Then his expression relaxed. He touched his pouch and handed Rat a small pot of ointment. "Clean your blisters and your boots. We leave at dawn."