Chapter 23

The whack of a hammer woke him. Curled in Link's tent, Ravi pulled his woolen blanket over his head, muting the growing daylight. He covered his ear with his forearm, rustling the pages of his mother's letter, tucked between the blankets against his chest.

His throat was raw from weeping. His eyes throbbed, like they hadn't hurt in weeks. Last night, Link had found him crouching in the shadows behind a crate, rocking on his heels, the letter clutched to his chest.

She's gone.

Pain squeezed his heart, immediate and vicious. Like a clawed hand was twisting his heart, trying to unscrew it from his chest.

They found her. They killed her.

Fresh tears welled up behind his sore eyes. How did she die?

His imagination offered suggestions. He heard the slice of the blade across Kohga's throat, imagined his mother's smooth skin splitting…

Ravi bit his knuckle. Stop.

But his imagination wasn't through. He remembered the arrow sinking into the Yiga soldier's chest, back on the Great Plateau. And he pictured his mother, crouched over a campfire, while an assassin drew his bow in the bushes.

"Stop!" He flung off the blanket and pressed his fists to his eyes. "Please, stop," he whimpered.

A shadow fell across the tent flap. "Ravi?"

The boy caught his breath.

Link stood outside the tent. "Are you all right?"

"No."

The swordsman paused. "Do you need anything?"

"No."

"Can I talk to you?"

"No." Ravi fell back into his bedroll and covered his head with the blanket.

Link's shadow bent and set something on the ground. "Stay hydrated." He walked away.

Ravi waited several minutes until he knew Link wasn't coming back. Then he folded his mother's letter and tucked it securely in his backpack, which Link had brought down from the bluff with the horses overnight. He crawled to the tent flap and pulled a bowl of rice porridge and a cup of water into his cave of grief.

He ate, because Mama would want him to. My brave boy. Tears burned in his nose, but he swallowed the porridge and the water. Then he combed his tangled hair, stiff from seawater, and scratched sand from his scalp.

Mama ruffled his hair. Someone needs a bath.

He smiled. She loved me. He tucked away his comb and brushed his teeth, spitting through the tent flap. She was fighting for me.

He pulled on his only other shirt, which he'd been saving in the bottom of his pack, clean and folded from the laundry lady at Outskirt Stable. He meant to wear it when he met his mother, so she'd think he was taking care of himself. Leaving his bed unmade, he strapped on his goggles and crawled outside.

Link had set up camp on a flat, grassy shelf east of the village. The embers from his cooking fire still smoldered in the fire ring, leaking a trickle of clear smoke. Sadee and Aurora grazed nearby, picketed to a palm tree. Ravi stretched.

More villagers had arrived overnight. And an entire construction crew. A small city of white tents stood on the opposite end of the beach, next to a growing pile of downed trees. Ravi recognized the trees from the bluff overlooking the village—and the green plasma gluing the trunks together. A flash of green magic lit up the eastern end of the village. Ravi shaded his goggles, squinting into the distance. Link lifted an entire palm tree and held it upright in the ruins of a hut while a flurry of men rushed to prop it in place.

Ravi sat down by the fire. With his pocketknife, he began peeling a volt fruit.

"May I join you?" Myra came toward him, wading through the dewy grass. Gathering her skirt in one hand, she sat on a freshly cut stump opposite the fire and dropped a stick of wood on the coals. She held her withered hands to the heat.

Ravi continued to peel his fruit. After Link found him last night, the two of them half-carried Ravi back up the hill. He remembered Myra tucking the blanket around his shoulders as he lay, shivering and speechless, in Link's tent.

"How did she die?" Ravi asked.

Myra stirred up the coals with a stick. "Kira left in the middle of the night when she was seventeen years old. We'd had an argument. She wanted to be an explorer. I wanted her to stay with me. She had a marriage offer from an honest fisherman. She ran away." Myra sighed. "I should have gone after her. She wanted me to, but I was proud. I wanted her to come running back to me. Eight years later, I received a letter bragging about her new life with her 'bad boy,' Saahe. She wanted to get me angry. It worked. I sent a letter back."

"She burned it," Ravi said.

"I would have. Two more years, and one night there she was, on my doorstep in the rain. She said there was a child." The old woman smiled. "You were all she talked about. How much you loved bananas. Your toy swords, how smoothly you stole things, and how innocent you looked when you lied about them." She tilted her head, beads clacking. "You've been in the Clan all these years?"

The boy nodded. "Until Link rescued me and made me his squire."

"He said you tried to kill him."

Ravi made a mental note to spike Link's rice with hot peppers.

"Kira was a different woman when she came to me," Myra said. "She asked for my help to locate the Chamber of Resurrection. She never begged me for anything in her life, but she said she needed my spirit-sight. Trying to find the cave was impossible for mortals—she needed magic. We set out together. She practically carried me out the door, and as we traveled, her hand never strayed from her sword. One night at the Great Hylia Bridge, she gave me that letter." The woman paused. She glanced at him, gauging his condition.

Ravi wiped his hands on his pant leg and folded his knife, bracing himself.

"I found her the next morning on the shore of the lake. Her face was… painted by the Yiga."

"You mean branded." Ravi squeezed his hands between his knees. "They brand the bodies of deserters so everyone knows."

Myra nodded.

Ravi hung his head. His leg bounced, restless. He felt heavy, like he wanted to sleep forever, but also like he wanted to take off and sprint down the beach, run so fast, no one could catch him.

"I brought her back," Myra said.

Jerking his head up, Ravi met her eyes.

The old woman stood, wincing as her knee bent. "I'll take you to her grave."

Speechless, Ravi followed her through the village.

They slipped past the clamor of construction workers. Past unsupervised children racing through the chaos, past adults picking through the charred ruins of huts. She led him up the road, and halfway to the bluff, she turned onto a small trail that climbed up the cliff. They stopped a couple times while Myra caught her breath, and the trail brought them finally to a graveyard on the crown of the hill.

Shells hung along the weathered picket fence encircling the graveyard. Mounds of stones sprouted from the short grass and flowers shot between the mossy rocks. Myra led Ravi through the stones to a pile beside the fence. A pile of smooth beach rocks propped up a rusty broadsword, and a seashell necklace hung around the guard, clacking against the blade in the wind.

Ravi stood over the grave. He felt like he should kneel, run his hand over the grass. Pull the weeds from between the stones. Each clack of the shell against the blade pounded a stake into his chest. It lodged there, gray as stone, for life.

He lifted his eyes, four years older. "Thank you for showing me. For keeping the letter."

"The letter wasn't all," Myra said. "She left you something else. I buried it here." She kneeled in front of the cairn and began removing stones, one at a time, revealing a flat, square slab embedded in the earth. She sat back on her heels. "Kira wanted to provide for your future. But she left you more than treasure. This is her legacy."

She gripped the rim of the slab, strained, and pulled, raising the stone like a hinge. She let it fall with a grunt and Ravi leaned over a stone-lined cavity in the earth. But the cavity was empty.

"Dinraal's fire," Myra muttered. She felt around the inside of the cavity, then sat back on her heels. "They stole the chest."

"What?"

"I'm sorry, child." Her face tightened with pain.

"The Yiga stole it?"

"They must have followed me here." Myra's shoulders fell. "I'm very sorry, Ravi."

"How could they steal it? It was mine!" Ravi paced across the graveyard, itching to kick something over the cliff. He spun back. "What was in it?"

"It was heavy. Enough to keep you going for the rest of your life, if you managed it well. But there were papers, too. I think there was a map."

Ravi gripped his hair. His breath came quick and shallow.

Myra strained to lift the heavy stone, and Ravi ran to her side. He helped her settle the lid over the cavity. Working in silence, they replaced the stones on the cairn, piling them around the sword.

She kissed the necklace and let it fall into place. As she lifted her gaze, her eyes flashed. "You know who has it, don't you?"

Ravi nodded.

"You know what you need to do."

He supported her arm, drawing her to her feet. She leaned on him as they limped from the graveyard and they followed the trail down the mountain.

Grief was a wicked thing. It wasn't over in a moment, or an hour. Or a day.

Returning to the village felt like walking into a cloud of acid. The smiles of the villagers burned him as they ran up to Ravi to shake his hand. He wiped his palm on his pant leg as they wandered away into the sunshine of their restored life. As he headed back to the horses, he glimpsed Link retrieving a sunken chest from the bottom of the harbor. The swordsman kicked it open to the surprised cries of a pair of children, and their father lifted out an heirloom tunic. Link caught Ravi's eye and his smile vanished.

Ravi struck his palm and disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Link found him the next morning, sitting on a boulder, knees tucked up to his chin, watching the crystal waves roll up a white beach. The sky still held wisps of pink from the sunrise. Ravi had wandered far enough from the village that the sounds of hammering vanished under the hissing waves. Link climbed up on the boulder. He sat cross-legged, just outside of Ravi's invisible wall, folded his hands in his lap, and gazed at a flock of seagulls circling on the ocean.

The boy scrunched his shoulders, closing in on himself. Red anger stirred in his belly. "She was looking for you."

Link stared at the ocean.

"She might have lived, if she had found you." Ravi dropped his head, folding into the dark cavity created by his arms.

The swordsman didn't speak.

"I know it's not your fault." Stiffly, Ravi lifted his head. "I always wondered, during those years in the Clan. When she first vanished, I waited for her to come back to me. Even when I forced myself to believe she was dead, I still hoped."

Link turned to him with an expression of genuine sorrow.

"What do I do?" Ravi whispered. "I really thought we would find her."

"You did find her," Link said quietly. "This wasn't your fault."

Ravi squeezed his knees. His chest tightened with a fresh sob.

"She made her choices," the swordsman said. "Other people made theirs. The result was never up to you. I've wished, many times, I could change what happened in the past. But all I have is what's in front of me, in this moment." He searched for Ravi's eyes. "Does that help? At all?"

Ravi shook his head. He curled deeper into his knees.

"I didn't think it would. I was never good with words." Link lifted his hands to his mouth and whistled.

A shadow came bounding up the beach. Ravi straightened. A black dog with a white face rushed up to their rock. She scrambled up the side of the boulder. She dove into Ravi's chest, a tangle of claws and dog breath, and licked Ravi's cheek with her wet pink tongue.

Ravi leaned back, twisting to avoid the tongue, but his arms wrapped around the furry body and his fingers threaded through her long fur. She wiggled into his lap and gazed up at him with brown eyes.

The swordsman's face warmed. "She's yours."

"What's her name?"

Link shrugged. "I asked around the village. She followed the refugees here, looking for a home."

Ravi stroked her silky ears. The dog pushed her nose against Ravi's chin and licked the side of his neck. A smile crept across the boy's face.

"She's not your mother," Link said quietly. "But maybe you can talk to her. She'll keep you warm."

Ravi cleared the hitch from his throat. "I always wanted a pet. But I never..." He lifted his face. "Why are you doing all this for me?"

Anger flashed across Link's face, but not at Ravi. His jaw hardened. "Because this is how I defeat Ganon: one act of kindness at a time."

Something struck in Ravi's soul. It resonated through the darkness, like when the Yiga rang the dinner gong in the Depths. The door he'd been waiting for swung open. Untangling himself from the dog's paws, he stood. Link rose with him.

Ravi clenched his fists. "You asked me what I was fighting for. Now I know. I want to protect my grandmother, the village. Tulin and LeeLee. I want to fight for them. I know what it'll cost. Make me stronger. Take me with you."

Link's eyes shone. "I can work with this." He extended his hand, then pulled it back. "Are you sure? There are other soldiers you can train under if you don't want to be around me."

"I'm sure." Ravi filled his chest. "Why would I train with anyone else when you're the best?"

The swordsman shrugged. "True."

"Besides," Ravi murmured, eyes falling. "It's what my mother wanted."

"I think she'd want you to make your own choices," Link said, and the boy lifted his eyes. The swordsman smiled with pride. "You're a very strong young man. Sidon saw that in you. Courage isn't always charging into battle. It's picking yourself up when you don't want to go on." He held out his right hand.

Ravi stared at Link's black skin. The broken, pointed nails. The bowstring callouses growing on his new fingers.

Do I want to go on? He drew in a deep breath, then clasped Link's hand.

The dog barked and nipped Link's wrist.

"Sit," he commanded.

She turned a tight circle on the rock and slipped. She tumbled off the edge and landed in the sand. Ravi jumped down, but she was already on her feet. She circled his legs and planted her paws on his chest.

"Traitor," Link muttered, but he smiled with one side of his mouth.

"Where are we going next?" Ravi asked. A ghost of pain twisted in his heart. The old ache: Mama's gone, and it's your fault. He sighed and let it go.

"Akkala," Link said. "To the end of the journey."

"This wasn't the end?"

The swordsman shook his head. "Not the one I had in mind." He pulled a stick from his pouch, caught the dog's attention, and hurled it down the beach. She took off sprinting.

Ravi crossed his arms. "Do you think you would have followed my mother? If you stepped out of the Chamber of Resurrection and a crazy lady was there, begging you to go to the desert, what would you have said?"

Link thought for a moment. "Remember when you woke up in Zora's Domain and saw the sunlight? I was in shock. I had nothing: no food, no weapons. The clothing they left me was falling apart, and a cranky old man told me I was destined to save the world." He shook his head. "If your mother approached me and offered supplies, I might have followed her for the money."

The dog raced up to Ravi and dropped the stick, panting.

"Cherry," Ravi said.

She barked.

"Fetch." He threw the stick far into the surf. The dog charged into the waves. Wiping his hand on his pants, Ravi turned to Link. "How long will it take to get to Akkala? Another week?"

"Much shorter," Link grinned. "I'm taking your advice to work smarter. We won't be riding—we'll be sailing, in that." He pointed down the beach to the pirate ship, anchored in the harbor. "If you're ready, we'll depart this afternoon."

Ravi filled his lungs with the ocean air. "I'm ready."