Sunlight had faded away into dusk by the time Link met with Rusl and the militia. The men of Ordon had rallied as soon as word had gotten out that Link had gone after the missing child alone. Link himself staggered along the path, Talo clutching tightly to his belt and his right hand was clasped to his side while his left brandished a brutish short mace.

The bokoblins who had taken the boy hostage were dead, as was the Moblin who had been lured into the battle by the sounds of cries and grunts from the combatants. From it Link had taken the mace before crushing its skull beneath the head. His injuries were not severe, or rather not severe enough that they could not be recovered from with treatment, but his whole body ached all over, and a slow trickle of blood left a trail behind them as they walked. Link's fingers were sticky with the blood that leaked between them; he stumbled haphazardly along a trail that had gone pitch-black in the gathering darkness.

"I…I'm sorry, Link…" Talo whimpered, "I never wanted to…"

"It's fine," he murmured back, trying not to sound as if he was half asleep already. The battle had left him so exhausted that he had been half-tempted to lie down and sleep on the forest floor, but there remained work to be done.

The light of torches in the distance finally helped to point them in the right direction, and luckily Talo made no move to leave his side as they drew closer. Whether or not these were the lights of friends or enemies did not matter to Link in the moment. Light was light, and they would need some means of navigating the dark forest if they ever wanted to leave Faron behind.

As they drew nearer, Link heard the voices of men conversing in low tones. At least he knew that these were other humans, but that could be either a blessing or a curse. Not all men who wandered in Faron Woods were friendly, and while he could hope that it was a search party from Ordon who had come to fetch them, Link was prepared to fight to his last breath if it came down to it.

Weapons came to hands as Link and Talo made their way into the clearing, Link tripping over wayward roots and nearly falling flat if the boy had not had the good sense to haul on his belt and keep him upright.

"Link!" Rusl pushed his way forward through the Ordona militia to get a better look at him.

"I found the boy," Link smiled weakly at him, and Rusl seemed to take in his condition.

"Somebody get a stretcher, he's hurt!" he called back to the other men. There was some murmuring and shuffling of boots as the militia moved to fulfil the command, and Link could have wept tears of relief that they had found help.

"Talo!" another voice cried out, and Link saw Jaggle burst forth from the men.

"Father?!" Talo sounded surprised to see his father out with the militia, and Link couldn't blame the boy. Jaggle was the town smith, not a member of the militia, yet he had ventured into the woods with the rest of them, wielding his hammer like a sword to search for his son.

Father and son embraced, and Jaggle seemed to hold the boy so tight to his chest that it seemed he would never let go.

"Father, I'm sorry, I just…"

"Don't speak, boy, don't speak…" Jaggle's voice was thick with unshed tears, and Link felt his heart swell up with empathy. He had no children of his own, but he had felt a similar relief when he had found that the monsters hadn't injured Talo at all, and that whatever they might have been planning to do, they hadn't managed to do it before Link had burst upon them.

His vision blurred, and he stumbled forward, almost losing his footing, Rusl caught him.

"What were you thinking?" he asked.

"I'm sorry," Link muttered, "Had to bring him back safe." He knew that this was it, the moment that Rusl rescinded his offer. Link had been brave to enter the forest after Talo, but incredibly foolish, and it had nearly cost both him and the boy their lives. He couldn't have done anything for the boy if he had perished himself. Colin had acted more wisely than he had, fetching the militia and Rusl, who were more equipped to handle the situation, and it was his fault that any of this had happened at all. Leaving the children unwatched had been the source of all these problems, and Link had made up his mind hours ago that if Rusl didn't know already, he was going to confess.

"Hush, Link, say nothing. Just rest now, son, we'll get you home."

"Hurts," he lifted his hand from his side, showing Rusl the oozing blood through his tattered shirt.

Rusl's eyes widened at the sight, and Link felt his eyes slip shut as he sagged in his mentor's arms.

"Hurry with that stretcher!" he could hear Rusl's voice shouting as he fell, and the next thing he knew he was being carried on his back. He could hear the panting of the men carrying him, but still couldn't find the strength to open his eyes.

"Is he going to be alright?" he heard Talo say quietly, guiltily, and he wished he could bring himself to sit up, to smile and let the boy know that he would be fine.

"Be silent, Talo," Jaggle whispered. Link imagined that the lad would be getting more than an earful from his parents once the relief that he was safe had worn off somewhat, and he couldn't help but feel a bit sorry for the boy. A small, angry part of him cursed Talo's reckless ness, but he couldn't truly blame the boy for what he had done. To blame a child for foolhardiness was to blame a river for flowing downstream.

He drifted ion and out of sleep as they walked, listening but hardly absorbing the conversations of the men while wondering if Rusl remained by his side or had headed to the front of the procession to lead the way home.

"The lad has some spirit, you have to admit," one of the stretcher-bearers was saying.

"On that we can agree," said the other. "Did you see the corpses?"

"Certainly. Boy carved his way through practically a small tribe all by himself."

"Are you surprised? Rusl trained him himself, and he's the best swordsman in the village."

"You think he'll survive?"

"Can't say, I'm no doctor. What I do know is that I've seen worse wounds before."

The first man scoffed at that. "Yeah? Remind me all the battles you've seen? What kind of wounds have you ever witnessed? A goat kick to the groin?"

"I'm serious! You weren't in town a few years ago, when those monsters raided Ordon Town?"

"Pfft, we haven't had a raid in a long time, Girio, monster's are too scared now that their numbers are thinner. If there had been a raid, I'd have heard about it."

Both men kept talking as Link drifted back to sleep, and now he was dreaming, and dreaming deeply. In his dream he was walking down a forest path, just like this one, only not so dark and threatening as Faron Woods were. This place was one of a serene beauty, practically untouched by mankind, and yet it was a wholesome, friendly place. Sunlight filtered through the leaves, casting a healthy green glow on the world around him. The soft grass beneath his bare feet felt warm, and though Link was acutely aware that he was only dreaming, the place felt so real that he could almost convince himself that the sensations were real.

Beside him, fingers intertwined with his own, Ilia walked. If he hadn't known that he was dreaming before, he certainly did now. Ilia had been a childhood friend while Link was growing up, the daughter of the town ealdorman Bo, and the only one of the children their age with an interest in horsemanship just like him.

They had bonded over it at the time, and grown so close they may as well have been related, but Link hadn't seen Ilia since she had left Ordon Town two years ago to work at one of the homesteads further south at the base of the mountains, where some of Hyrule's prized horses were bred. Sometimes on holidays she would come home to visit, but it always seemed like he just missed her when she did. As for himself, between his own job as a goatkeeper and training with Rusl to take over his position in the militia, Link simply hadn't had the spare time to take the trip to visit her himself.

Maybe once upon a time, when they'd been younger, there may have been a spark between them, something more than just a mutual friendship, but they both seemed to have come to the decision that nothing was going to come of it now. On the few occasions when he had spoken to Bo about her, he had said that she seemed happy with her work, but it was difficult not to wish for the simpler times like when they were children again.

Now, in his dream, here she was, hand in hand with him as they walked through this pleasant wood, smiling that gentle smile she seemed to always save for the horses when they had gone riding together. The forests grew brighter and more pleasant as they walked, and Link could make out within the trees little houses, as if built for children, cradled in the branches, while little lights like fireflies danced all around them. A playful flute piped out a merry little tune from somewhere in the trees, and Link could just make out the sounds of the distant laughter of children from somewhere else in the forests. He recalled legends, myths of a secret place in Faron Woods where the fairies gathered to celebrate the solstices, and where the eternally-youthful Forest Children frolicked and played and never grew up.

Towering above them, visible even above the treeline, was the boughs of a great and mighty tree, that rose so high up it seemed to blot out the sun,, and leave no harsh glare, but only gentle light dappling the leaves around them. The dream had a rich, earthy smell, and all of the sensations, real as though they seemed, were hazy and fuzzy, as if he had only just opened his eyes after a long sleep and had not rubbed the sand from them yet.

A voice, quiet, dignified, cut through the fog of the dream world. "Seek me out, Heir to the Line of Heroes. Seek out my wisdom and ease this lost soul's sorrows…"

Link looked all around him; Ilia was gone, and so were all the fairies and the sounds of children. The woods grew darker, but felt no more dangerous. Instead, a lingering melancholy swept over him. He wondered if this was the past of Faron Woods, if sometime long ago the Forest Children and their fairies had abandoned Faron and left it to fester and twist into the place it was today. A murderous place rife with monsters and dangers large and small, where there was no magic left to be found.

"Seek me out, divine beast, and carry on our legacy…" the voice repeated, and this time it came from just ahead of him. At the end of this little forest village, across a stream and a few more tree houses, a figure stood. Clad in ancient, antiquated armor, with a shield that was laden with moss and ivy and a sword chipped and rusted with age, a warrior stood. One single crimson eye looked out from the open-faced visor of the ornate helmet, and Link could see the grinning skull of a fleshless face leering at him.

"Seek me," the voice seemed to emanate from the creature, and Link watched the world melt into a swirl of multicolored nonsense as he was dragged from the world of his dream back to reality.

He woke back up in water, and the world around him was still dark. The tiniest first rays of sunlight were just beginning to peek through the canopy, and he recognized himself as laying in Ordon;s Spirit Spring. His tattered clothes had been stripped from him while he was sleeping leaving him in just his underclothes. He was soaking in the shallows of the pool, a rolled up cloth under his head as a pillow and bandages wrapped around his middle. When he felt around his side, where the gash had struck deep, he felt the telltale signs of stitching along his ribcage. Someone had at least patched him up, and he hadn't even woken up.

"How long have I been sleeping?" he wondered.

"I wasn't sure you were going to wake up at all," a familiar voice said quietly just behind him. A voice he hadn't heard in a long while. Not since she had gone away down south to raise horses.

"Ilia?!" he turned as fast as he could without tearing his stiches apart, and to his surprise he wasn't still dreaming. There she sat on a tree stump near the base of the spring, fiddling absentmindedly with a few bits of whistlegrass like they had done as children. Her hair was cropped closer than he remembered, a short twist of dishwater blonde at the back of her head the only trace of the old wild mane she had sported when they were young. She was dressed in simple stablehand's garb, a plain jerkin and comfortable breeches that allowed some freedom of movement. Her boots had been left by the entry to the Spring, and she sat with bare feet resting in the soft sand of the shore.

"Glad to see you still remember me," she said without looking up, and Link detected more than a little bitterness in her voice as she spoke. Link struggled to rise, wincing as his muscles pulled at his stiches painfully. Despite everything he had gone through, that slash was the only wound that still hurt. Everything else had, at least as far as he could tell, faded and healed while he had been sleeping. It made some sense, the Spirit Spring waters were known to have a strange healing affect on those who washed or drank from it, but Link had never experienced anything like it himself.

"Remember you? How could I not? I haven't seen you in what feels like forever and a day! What are you doing here?"

"I came up as soon as I heard what had happened to you. Just because I'm angry with you doesn't mean I wanted to see you dead, idiot."

Link was taken aback. What was she talking about? "Angry with me? What did I do?"

Illia stood up from where she'd been sitting and walked right up to him, bending low so that they were face to face.

"Two years, Link. Two years I've been gone and waited for you to come see me. To visit, to even ask about me. Bad enough you refused to come with me, but it's like you didn't even care that I left. You actively avoid me whenever I come back to town specifically to see you, and now the first thing I hear from you is that you almost killed yourself trying to be some kind of hero out in Faron Woods!"

Link was speechless for a moment, completely taken aback. Avoiding her? He'd always thought that she had been avoiding him! And she knew he was training to succeed Rusl, even back then, he couldn't have left to go with her to the south of Ordona…

"Now hold on a moment…" he began, but Ilia interrupted him.

"What were you thinking? You almost died, Link. Died! All for what? To prove something? So that everyone could see what a big strong man you are now? Did you even think, even for a moment, what it would have been like for the people who love you if you had died!?"

She was inches from his face now, and Link could see the tears in her eyes. This was hardly the reunion he had hoped for in his dream, but suddenly what she'd said seemed to sink in.

"You love me?"

Ilia sighed and shut her eyes, stepping back and sitting once more on her stump.

"Of course I do, stupid," she said quietly, "always."

Link tried to scramble to his feet, but the pain in his side made him hesitate.

"Ilia, I didn't… I thought…"

"Figures you wouldn't even know it," she smiled bitterly, "you always were as oblivious as a dog with a bone. Unless someone points something right out to you, you don't even know it's there."

Now Link did finally get to his feet and hobbled over to the stump.

"I wasn't avoiding you," he started.

"I know. I've just been so frustrated with you, and seeing you when you were just lying there, all cold and still…"

"I'm sorry," he said, casting his eyes down to the earth. "I wasn't thinking."

She snorted, "obviously."

"It's just I had to do something, had to get Talo back home…"

"What are you talking about?"

Link started; had nobody told her the actual details of why he had gone into Faron Woods in the first place?

"One of the children from town," he started lamely, "he went chasing into the woods after a monkey, or something like that. It was my fault, I should have been watching him, but I got distracted and there wasn't time to assemble the militia…"

Ilia interrupted him as she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him close in a tight embrace.

"Just be quiet," she said thickly, "Just be quiet and let me be happy you're alive."

Link said nothing more, but put his own arms around her. They stayed there for a while, just holding each other, until someone nearby cleared their throat, and Link leaped up, cheeks flushing.

"Am I interrupting?" Rusl stood on the shores of the Spirit Spring, carrying both a tray and a long package in hand.

Ilia tried to subtly dry her eyes and straighten out her clothes and both she and Link seemed to fidget uncomfortably, like two children caught misbehaving.

"We were just…" Link started, but couldn't think of anything else to say. He glanced at Ilia helplessly, but she said nothing, only sat with her face growing redder and redder.

Rusl laughed heartily, "I'm glad to see you finally up and about, my boy!" he said cheerfully. "I had brought this for Ilia, but I reckon you may need it more." He gestured with the tray in his hand, and Link saw that it was laden with a bowl of something steaming and a small loaf. He hadn't even realized how hungry he was, but at the side of food his stomach seemed to twist and groan for nourishment within him.

"How long was I asleep?" he wondered aloud.

"Almost a week," Rusl told him, setting the tray down on the stump beside Ilia and sitting on the sand with his legs crossed. "Many of us came to the spring to pray for you. Uli wanted you to rest at our house, but Cremia was of the mind that you would recover faster under the protection of the Spirits."

"She would know best," Link agreed as he tucked into the bowl of hot soup, "she's the closest to a priestess we have out here."

"You gave us all quite a fright," Rusl smiled, "It brings me no small amount of peace to know you're alright."

Link was too hungry to look up, but he did pause between bites to reply. "Is Talo alright?"

Rusl chuckled and shook his head. "If you were to ask the boy, he'd claim he was less scared of the monsters than he was his own parents after the scolding he's gotten. But otherwise he seems right back to his old self, if not just a touch more cautious."

Ilia shuffled in her seat uncomfortably, and Rusl looked up at her with another warm grin.

"I apologize for giving away your lunch," he said, "Of course I can head back to town and fetch another tray for you in a moment."

"It's alright," Ilia replied haltingly, "I wasn't really hungry. Do you want me to go? I know you wanted to speak with him once he was up…"

"I think our young hero here would prefer you stay," Rusl quirked an eyebrow playfully.

Link swallowed quickly and almost protested, but shut his mouth again when Ilia laughed. It was a sound Link hadn't heard for two years, but it hadn't changed a bit since they had been children. The sound made Link's heart swell to hear.

"I… Ilia, I think I would prefer you stay. We still have so much to talk about…"

"Business first," she said teasingly, and Link returned his gaze to Rusl. He saw the long package that Rusl had carried with him, and he already knew what this was going to be about.

"Rusl…" he began, "I think I know what you're going to say."

"Do you?" the man leaned back comfortably. "And what do you think I'm going to say?"

"I was foolish to rush into the woods after Talo, too foolish for you to still consider me worth handling the gift for the Royal Family. I thought I was ready to step up and be like you, but I'm not. I understand, and I think you're right. You trusted me and I failed you."

Rusl frowned. "I see."

"It was my fault that Talo ran off," Link continued, unheeding. "I thought since I was leaving soon that I would do something for the children to keep them content while I was gone and I bought them the slingshot toy from the general store. Then I left them unwatched while I went to see the gift for the Royal Family. Talo only went missing because I wasn't there to stop him. I should have been more responsible. I don't deserve the honor of carrying the Royal Family's gift…" he trailed off as both Ilia and Rusl burst into laughter.

"You're so stupid," Ilia chortled, "only you could do something legitimately good-hearted and assume that you'd be reprimanded for it."

"You're the one who said I was stupid for it," he protested.

"You are stupid, but under the circumstances I really do think you tried to do the right thing. If not the smartest thing."

Rusl spoke up. "Link, it was foolish to run into the woods alone, but I haven't changed my mind about entrusting the role of Captain to you, or the Royal Family's gift."

"You haven't?"

"No. Do you think that I am without my own failings as captain?"

"Well I…"

"You may not have made the best decision, but you chose to act over waiting for someone else to make the decision or tell you what to do. That is the mark of a man with the makings of a leader. And that aside, Link, my men and I saw what you made of those monsters in the woods. I would say that as a swordsman you've surpassed me already."

Link was speechless, and his mouth dropped open as Rusl set the parcel down between them and offered it to him.

"I don't know what to say…" he started.

"You can say 'yes'," Ilia advised him, "because trust me, this is the highest honor you could receive."

"Ordona Province is lucky to have a man like you ready to defend her and her people. A man who would take a blade through the heart before he allowed harm to come to any of her children. You acted foolishly, Link, rashly, but with courage that matches the legends of heroes of old."

"But…" Link looked between Rusl and Ilia. "But I'm still injured. I can't make the journey like this…"

Ilia said nothing, but placed the whistlegrass between her lips and blew. A sweet little tune echoed around the spring, and Link heard a quiet snort nearby. Epona stood ready, her saddle laden with bags and provisions, and a bedroll strapped securely to the saddlebow.

"You'll hardly be alone," Rusl told him. "Epona will make the journey easier on you, and I'll be with you every step of the way." We may not leave for another few days while you continue to recover, but as long as we take things nice and easy your stitches should not burst. We may not arrive in time for the start of the coronation proceedings in Castle Town, but I do not believe that we will be late."

"I just… I thought that you…"

"Just promise, okay?" Ilia told him gently, placing her hand over Link's. "Promise me that whatever happens, you'll still come back home safe and sound?"

Link smiled at her, his heart swelling with pride and gratitude. All his fears were dispelled in that moment, and his imagination swirled with all the thoughts and possibilities for his future here in Ordon. He wondered if that future included Ilia…

"Now then," Rusl slapped both hands on his knees and rose to his feet, "I ought to fetch you some proper clothes, eh young man?" he gave Link a sly little wink and the younger man felt himself blush again.

"Er, yes, if you wouldn't mind," he said sheepishly, earning another laugh from both Rusl and Ilia. Ruefully, Link grinned and inwardly heaved a quick sigh of relief. It seemed like everything was going to be alright after all…