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“I don’t even remember the blow,” Ilia says, and throws another stone into the sacred spring. It sends out ripples, catching the morning light in each little wave. “Isn’t that stupid? I don’t remember it happening, but it still hurts.”
Link sticks out his hand, dipping his fingertips into the icy water of the spring. The ripples from the tossed stone break against his fingers. “I don’t think it’s stupid.”
“It feels like it.” Ilia rolls a new stone from hand to hand. He thinks she’s going to throw this one too, and maybe the next- but the one after that, she’ll keep. “I feel stupid. Every time I wake up and I can’t get out of bed right away because my head hurts too much, and my dad tries to get me to stay in bed all day even after I feel better, and whenever I remember that I can’t remember, I feel like a silly, stupid little girl.”
Plonk. The stone settles to the shallow bottom of the spring.
Link hums, and works the fingers of his left hand. The band of scar tissue around his wrist pulls at the movement, thick and numb, as always. “You saved yourself from the bokoblins. You got to safety, to Castle Town, all by yourself.”
“But I can’t remember it.”
“It still happened.”
“Sometimes it feels like it didn’t.” Plonk. There goes another stone. “The whole thing- Like I dreamed it. Everything. All my life, until I woke up in front of the fireplace in Telma’s bar, and that’s as early as it gets. That’s all I can remember that doesn’t feel like someone else’s life.”
Link hands her a new stone. Ilia takes it- starts rolling it from hand to hand, running her thumb along the rough surface. It has little glimmers of some sort of mineral streaking across it, and it catches the light in a gentle, purely mortal golden glow.
“I can’t get out of bed either, some days,” Link says, because Ilia is quiet now, in a way that does not lend itself towards wanting to speak again, because there is something snarled and choking caught in your throat and you don’t know if it is anger or tears or something else you cannot name. “It feels like everything I did- none of it was real. It’s a story someone else told me, not something I lived.”
“But it happened.”
“It happened.” Even when he doubts himself- even when it feels as though it cannot, cannot be real- he has the pull of his scars, the ache of old wounds- not even that old, only seven months, the very oldest- and, a scant few, a precious handful of memories of sensations that even he cannot convince himself were made up, no matter how dark and endless the night seems.
Legends speak of heroes that turn into beasts and birds and monsters, that wear masks that turn them into everything but themselves. None of them speak of what it is like- what you feel, when you are in between paws and feet, fur and skin, fangs and teeth.
For as long as Link lives, the memory of what it was like to transform into a beast- the pain, the warping and snapping of his bones, his body dissolving into twilit haze and reforming into a shape that was both him and at the same time, horrifyingly not- will never be fogged, be it by time, or failing memory, or a nightmare’s whisperings.
Even if he can doubt all else- that he is the reborn spirit of an ancient hero, that he drew a sacred blade in a forest grove that no one else had stepped foot in for hundreds of years, that he slew an ancient evil that has haunted Hyrule since time immemorial, that he lost a friend to her own realm by her own choice- he cannot doubt this.
“Do you ever wish it didn’t?” Ilia almost whispers. She still hasn’t thrown the stone. It’s cold and still in her hands, calm and patient; like every other stone in the world. “That none of it happened? That it was all just a dream?”
Link leans forward, and puts both hands fully in the water. The faint hum of magic curls around his wrists- barely noticeable, as the spring reaches to try and mend his hurts. It’s too close, too intertwined with memories of pain, of brief seconds of reprieve in the middle of hard, harsh nights- it doesn’t feel safe, the way it used to, before everything happened. It tugs on his memories, like a hooked claw caught in the weave of his mind, like a shadow curling around the back of his neck to whisper in his ear.
He remembers a cell and an unfamiliar body and a weight on his back that laughed and taunted and yanked, that pulled at his fur, kicked at his sides, all harsh and unforgiving and impatient.
He remembers the soft sound of a chain rattling against itself, the hiss of his paws on the sand, his own panting breaths, and something almost like peace, in the cool desert night, the gentle rocking of a familiar weight on his back, this time, a comfort.
He remembers Colin, tied to a flagpost, the din of a warhorn ringing in his ears.
He remembers Renardo, soft-handed and quiet-voiced, swiping back his hair from his eyes and pressing a cool rag to his face, as he floated in-and-out of consciousness in a haze of pain, unable to pinpoint where he hurt as much as just knowing that he hurt.
He remembers breathing in the warm, savory steam of Yeto’s soup, the tang of it on his tongue; the most delicious thing, at the moment, that he had ever tasted, freezing cold in a giant mansion with more dead ends to be found than ways forwards.
He remembers; it wasn’t always so bad, being a wolf. When the night breeze rolled across Hyrule field, when Midna would hum, twining little braids in the fur around his ruff, when he found himself chasing down a scent, all his body angled forwards into the hunt, feeling fully, truly alive-
“I don’t know,” Link says, and picks up a stone.
Plonk.
“Rusl attacked me, when I was a beast,” Link says, flat on his back in the grass, the sky above almost too blue to be real.
A goat nibbles at his hair. Ilia scratches it behind the ear, and leans over him, chin propped on her hand, listening.
“It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know.” Link feels the need to add, and pushes the goat’s nose away from his head. It bleats, affronted, and wanders off.
“Do you want him to know?” Ilia asks, shifting to two hands under her chin.
“No,” Link says, then, “Yes.” then, “I don’t know.” A pause. “I don’t want him to feel bad, about it. He didn’t know it was me. He couldn’t have known it was me.”
“But it was you. And he attacked you.”
“I was a wolf. It was reasonable.”
“Doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to be hurt by it.”
Link lets that stew, for a moment, mulling it over in his head. Ilia rolls over, in the meantime, so the two of them are lying on the grass in something like a line.
“Uli flinched, when I looked her in the eye, the other day,” Link says, finally. “She apologized for it, but. She was scared of me. For a moment, she was scared of me, and I don’t know what I did to make her scared.”
“Is that what it is with Rusl?” Ilia asks. Link starts to twine his fingers through the grass. “Does it bother you more that he attacked you, or that he was scared of you enough to attack you?”
And Link has to think it over, for a moment, before he realizes-
“That he was scared,” he says slowly, fingers curling up to make a fist, as he works through it, as it all clicks into place and just like that things start making sense- “I hate- I don’t want people to be scared of me. I don’t want to be the cause of someone’s fear.”
Ilia doesn’t say anything, for a moment. Then- “I don’t think anyone in the village is scared of you.”
“Uli flinched-”
“I think they’re scared for you.”
Link rolls over, so he can look at Ilia right-side-up. She takes this as the silent prompt to explain that it is.
“My dad does this- to me- where he just- he looks at my scars, and- I try to keep this side,” she gestures vaguely to the scar stretching over her right temple, down her neck, fading along her shoulder, “facing away from him, because a few times- I’ve caught him flinching, when I turn around and it’s just suddenly in his view. Like it scares him, that it’s there, because that means that I got hurt . Even though he didn’t see it happen. Even though it’s all over.”
Link can see where this is going. “... You think that’s what happened with Uli,” he says, and his hand rises to trace across his cheekbone, the ridge of his nose- right along the curve, dangerously close to his eye, jagging out to his ear until it skips up to end in a deep notch in the tip.
“It looks like something that almost killed you,” Ilia says, and reaches out a hand herself, hesitantly, questioningly- Link closes his eyes, and tilts his head, all in silent permission. The feather-light brush of her fingertips is a gentle thing- he can only feel it when she veers off from the scar tissue, brushes against unmarred skin.
It’s an unspoken question. Link could ignore it, if he wanted.
He doesn’t. “It almost did,” he says, and to her credit, Ilia does nothing but exhale a little harder, still tracing the unforgiving line of the scar.
It was inflicted on him as a wolf, not a person- and that, more than anything else, is probably why he survived the blow, and being thrown into a wall right after.
Midna had been screaming. At him, or the monsters, he doesn’t remember. He remembers how her voice had rung, all meaningless noise, in his ears all until the fight was over, and he was left standing spraddle-legged with his head down, sides heaving with painful pants.
He didn’t come out of it until she yanked the both of them through to Kakariko, and then he was on two feet again and stumbling into Renardo and after that, nothing. Until he woke up in a bed in the dead of the night, dazed, lost, and was met with Midna, swinging between frantic scolding and threats so fast his head spun, a thick plaster of bandages over his face, and Colin, asleep, slumped over his chair onto the mattress, at his bedside.
“They don’t talk about things like this, in the legends,” Ilia says, quietly, eyes hard, almost bleak. “It’s always how heroic the hero is, how he triumphed over all his challenges.”
“The legends are bad at actually saying what it’s like to be the Hero,” Link says. Goddesses, they really are so bad. “It’s all glory and fighting ancient evil and rising to the challenge of the gods, and nothing else.”
Nothing about curses, and pain, and being afraid. Nothing about a golden, searing power, locked in the back of your hand, burning like a white-hot coal as you try to raise your blade and face down evil as it looms above you. Nothing about seeing an ancient sword gleaming in a clearing in a woods, and having all your mind go quiet as something in your soul reaches out and knows that blade- knew, before he had even touched it, that his hands would fall upon the handle as perfectly as though it was made for him.
(Nothing at all about knowing, with a horribly old, otherworldly certainty, that- it was.
This blade was made for him- for his soul. For his ancient, ancient soul- as ancient as the sword, more ancient than the trees growing all around- all centuries-old titans, far older than anyone, Hylian or Zora or Goron that lives, that ever lived, and yet. And yet.
What that means, for how old his soul is-
There is nothing in the legends, about what the Hero does, when he realizes that his soul is one of the oldest things in all the world; older than trees; older than the ruined temples, lying in crumbled disrepair, untouched for hundreds, if not thousands of years; older than the oldest known building in all of Hyrule, Hyrule Castle itself, standing strong after thousands of years of time, and it is young, this ancient, enduring castle, so incredibly young, compared to the vast expanse of time that his soul has existed.
Link still doesn’t know, what the Hero does, or what he should do, or what any hero who came before him did with this knowledge; he tries not to think about it at all, but sometimes. Sometimes he looks at the tree that the Mayor claims is over five hundred years old, planted by one of his ancestors, and has a dizzying moment where he realizes- his soul predates the planting of this tree. His soul predates the very forest surrounding Ordon- his soul predates Ordon.
What are you supposed to do, with that sort of knowing? What do you do with it?)
“The last Hero was a person too,” Ilia says, almost to herself. “Just… a person. Just like anyone else.”
“Yes,” Link says. Then, “He was ten.”
And Ilia almost chokes.
“What?” she breathes, hands locking up on his face. The fingers of one are splayed across his cheekbone. The other’s thumb is curled around his ear.
“The Princess told me.” And I knew it was true, in a way I try not to think about. “He was ten years old. Everything- everything he did, in the legends, all of it, the whole time- he was younger than Beth. ”
You don’t hear that part of the legends.
“Ten,” Ilia breathes, and- this. This is why he trusts her, why he will put his heart in her hands and trust her to keep it safe, because she has a slow-building fire in her eyes, outrage warring with disbelief all over her face, and she looks, for a breathless moment, like she would stand up and challenge the gods themselves, for this.
Ilia has always been a protector. For anyone, for any creature, person, or thing, that doesn’t have the voice to defend themselves, or won’t, or can’t. She’s always been there, forcing her way in to stand between, spine tall and defiant and ready to fight this injustice with everything she is.
Sometimes Link thinks she deserves to be called ‘Hero’ far more than he does: Link stabbed a man, and killed a lot of monsters, and gathered ancient relics of a long-forgotten world for otherworldly princesses and spirits living in springs. Ilia defends the helpless, and she does it with everything she is, body and spirit and heart all in one.
“I wonder what the legends would sound like, if they were told right,” Link says, quietly. “What did the Hero of Time do, when he got hurt? Did he have a home to go back to, after? What did he think, about all of this?”
What did the Hero of Time do, when he realized how far back the legacy he was part of stretched?
(What did he do, with the knowledge that his soul predated the kingdom of Hyrule, itself?)
“We won’t ever get to hear it, will we,” Ilia says, and it’s not a question. “The Hero of Time- he was a person, a child, and we don’t even know his name.”
Link stays silent, and does not say; in the records held by the royal family, as far down as they have recorded history; we know his name. We know every Hero’s name, as far back as it goes.
It’s Link. It’s always been Link. It’s never anything but Link, and it never will change.
Ilia’s hands drop from his face, lacing together as she sits up. She stares down at her fingers. There’s a blade of grass, caught between two of her knuckles. “They’re not going to tell your story right, either, are they?”
“No,” Link says, as gently as he can manage- like talking to a newborn goat, an injured kitten, as calm as can be. “They won’t.”
They’re crimping pie crust on a sweet fall day- when the air is crisp and the leaves all a-changing and there’s a stack of pumpkins all tumbled over themselves in every house in Ordon- when the knife slips and there’s a sharp stab of pain and a quietly exhaled ah.
Link looks down at the little drop of blood sliding down the tip of his finger, ruining the edge of one strip of carefully cut crust.
It’s not that it reminds him of anything in particular. It’s not even the first time he’s been cut, since his legend finished writing itself and he was left in the desert with a broken mirror and the memory of wind in his fur and the ache of wounds not-yet-healed.
But- he’s bleeding. And it’s ruining the crust.
“Oh,” Ilia says, and then her hands are blocking his line of sight, her fingers wrapping gently around his palms, covering that deep, pale brand, the cut, the marred crust.
He watches her, distant. Watches as she untangles the knife from his hand, tugs him over to the window, splashes water across his skin, chill enough to draw a shiver from his bones, even as he feels, almost, as though the water’s not touching him at all.
The little spark of stinging- not even enough to call it true pain- as a cloth gets wound around his finger, as Ilia guides his other hand over to press against it, the squeeze of her hand over his, isn’t enough to call him back, fully.
It’s such a little cut. Hardly anything. It doesn’t remind him of anything at all.
But still. It is there.
When Link stirs again- when he can drag his eyes from the cloth around his finger, bring himself to rise to his feet once more, back to the table- Ilia bumps up against his side, briefly, as she carries off another carefully-crimped crust to set aside, waiting to be baked.
The marred crust has vanished, new, uncut, rolled-out dough in its place. The knife is clean. Placed to the left, at an angle, the tip barely hovering over one little edge of crust.
Carefully, Link picks up the knife, and, fingers out of the way, cuts another long slice.
The pies, full of rich, creamy pumpkin, or juicy berries, or soft, roasted sweet nuts, with their crust latticed over the top, or woven in concentric braided wreaths, or simply crumbled all over, are welcomed by the villagers with open arms, when they’re toted out to the tables for this year’s autumn harvest festivities; they’re nestled in beside steaming, hot buns, sweet creamy puddings made from the morning’s milking, loaves of spiced bread studded through with nuts, a bowl of goat cheese swirled through with thick, vivid spirals of blackberry jam.
Somewhere between pulling the cart with their bounty into town, carefully balanced, being met with enthusiastic children clamoring around his feet and Uli’s please noised when she pulled the cover off the top of a pumpkin pie, to sitting on the cool, damp grass on the hilltop, sinking his teeth into a piping-hot hand-pie with the buttery, honey-sweet apple filling all oozing out, having to catch the juices with a cupped hand under his chin, watching as the first stars start to wink in the sky- he settles.
By the time full night has come on to try to lull them all to sleep, only to be met with the light and cheerfully defiant merriment of a small village in the woods, all determined to celebrate the last big harvest of the year all through the night, until the sun rises on them once again and sends them all off to their rest- by the time the stars are bright overhead, and someone’s struck up a tune, and the first dances start up, Ilia swooping in to tug him to his feet and off the two of them go, caught up in a whirl- and the knife, and the pie crust, and the quiet moment of not being entirely in his own head- it’s all forgotten, for this night,
And so it will remain, until tomorrow’s dawn. And there, in the first rays of light- it will seem a distant thing. Just and simply in the past, and gentled, by the distance of it.
When Ilia’s eyes are sleep-heavy and shadowed with pain, they go muddier; more brown than green, darker, distant. Turned inwards, because what’s happening inside, it’s too much to see anything else.
So when Link hooks an arm around her window, and she looks up at him, too-pale with muddy eyes and a tight tension to her jaw, her temples, her shoulders- curled up small in her bed, as still as a stone- it’s as quiet as he can get, when he gently places the old wicker basket on the table under her window, and slides in himself, landing softly, one-two as his feet roll against the floor, muffling his steps.
Link eases himself down, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside Ilia’s bed, and props his back up against the wall.
He’s met with a shaky exhale, and the ghost of a hand gliding along a swathe of his hair; and then it vanishes, and her hand is curled up loosely at the top corner of her mattress, just enough that two of her knuckles just barely kiss the skin of his temple.
Eventually, the tension around her closed eyes ease, and she slides into sleep.
Link stays where he is, and thinks about rain.
When she wakes, Ilia curls herself upright to sit with wobbly-armed determination, and Link ferries the contents of the now-cooled basket to her lap, and has to make a quick escape out the window when the mayor bursts in after hearing Ilia make a shrieking cackle of delight, eyes bright in her too-pale face, when he solemnly pulls out half-a-dozen rough, slightly lumpy rolls with an unmistakable resemblance to a cuckoo, with little currant eyes and a scattering of oats pressed into the side for the suggestion of wings.
When she drops by the next day, early enough in the morning to startle him out of bed, she presents him with an empty basket, and words of praise from the mayor, and when she laughs and pushes an inquisitive Epona’s nose out of his basket, she’s steady and sturdy, and only faint shadows still cling to the edges of her eyes.
There are good days.
And there are bad days.
There’s days where Link is having a bad day and can’t get out of bed, or can’t move, or can’t remember how to move, caught and petrified by some invisible gaze, by a shadow, by the inability to remember how many legs he has, or how they work; there’s days where a scent catches wrong in his nose and he has to leave, he has to fight, he has to get his blade because there’s danger, somewhere, somehow, and it’s going to come for him-
(Link can’t help with the annual round-up and processing of livestock to fill the larders, now.
He can’t decide if it makes it worse or better, that after that first time- when the scent of blood caught in his nose and it all hit him so hard he didn’t even realize what was happening until he was in Rusl’s house, curled up in front of the fireplace, muscles aching from being locked in one place for so long- nobody even tries to accuse him on skipping out on the hard, unpleasant work.
No, he just gets soft eyes, and pity, and nobody tries to stop him when he slips out of the village for the day, roaming restlessly through the woods, bow on his back and blade in his hands.
He comes back with mushrooms and wild herbs, and they’re stewed up with the mutton that night into a rich, meaty soup, and he eats it with his back pressed up against a wall with his sword, unsheathed, lying across his legs.)
And there’s days where Ilia is having a bad day, where her head is splitting open and she can’t get out of bed, or can’t move, or remember who she is or what’s happening through the pain ruling over her mind; days where everything feels wrong, and she feels restless in her skin, and she can’t stand to be still a moment longer.
Sometimes they both have bad days on the same day, and those aren’t always the worst, but they’re never the best, even among bad days alone; sometimes those bad days are spent each stuck in their respective beds, sleeping and resting and bodies trying to mend, even when everything that can be fixed has been, and there’s nothing more to heal.
Sometimes those bad days are a little less so- these are more frequent. The bad days where Ilia gets just a little twinge in her temple, and her focus is gone, and her temper rises; the bad days where Link can’t stop remembering the taste of blood in his mouth and what it was like to have a shadow bleed on his back and what it was like to have golden power like a goddess’s heartbeat pounding through his body as he raised a sacred blade to an ancient evil in a timeless dance that may, or may not, have been a part of the world for as long as it has existed.
On days like these, they go to the spring.
“Maybe I’ll leave Ordon one day,” Ilia says, with her little stack of stones, methodically piled up and deconstructed over and over. “Go out and see Hyrule again, but this time, without a head wound, or being kidnapped. And maybe then, I’ll stop feeling like it was all a dream.”
Link thinks. “I’d like to see Kakariko sometime,” he says, and flicks a tiny pebble into the spring. Plip. Ripples, fading out to the edge of the bank. “Not any time soon. But- maybe later. I want to know if they ever got to rebuilding. If the residents ever came back, or if new ones ever moved in.”
“Telma was nice. I want to go see her, sometime. But not sleep at the bar. I don’t think I could do that, now.” And she runs a hand over her temple, facing away from Link, all unconscious movement, eyes lost in the remembering, for one long, long heartbeat in time.
“I’d like to see Telma, but I never want to go to Hyrule Castle again,” Link contributes, both in words, and in stacking a new rock on the next layer of Ilia’s tower. “Or to have to see the guards. Or the princess.”
Ilia pauses, mid-way through balancing a rock. “... I keep forgetting you’ve been in the Castle. And that you really did meet the princess. You know that if the kids knew, you’d never get any peace until you told them all about it, right?”
“They’d be disappointed, probably. I don’t have much to say about it.”
Sure, it’s big and fancy inside, and all that, but it gets a lot less grand when you’ve spent two days dangling from the chandeliers and keep having to bat away keese and rats while you’re trying to solve puzzles.
The more impressive parts, as retellings would go, all revolve around living suits of armor trying to chop off his head and giant charging bokoblins on the backs of boars and the crack of thin shells over insubstantial shadows giving way under his teeth. Maybe they’re the sort of things that get written into the stories of heroes, and the Hero, that last as far as time can take them through the legends, but they hardly stand out in his mind. They’re nothing novel, once you’ve fought them once, twice, ten times and counting, when the action of cutting them down is all thoughtless muscle-memory, pressed into your bones with a thousand repetitions, stretching back to far beyond the very start of your life.
“And the princess?”
“I got to the throne room and she immediately got possessed and tried to kill me with a lot of holy magic and a very sharp sword. I am never going to be able to look at her without remembering that I almost killed the ruler of Hyrule because an ancient evil thought she’d make a good weapon.”
Which- considering he almost died to her more than when he actually fought the literal embodiment of evil that possessed her- clearly hadn’t been an incorrect assessment on aforementioned ancient evil’s part.
“Oh, yikes,” Ilia hisses, wincing. She stacks another stone up on the tower, this time, in almost a deliberate sort of precariousness. It wobbles dangerously as she moves her hand away. “How didn’t you get executed, again?”
“Apparently, being the reincarnated soul of an ancient hero that’s saved Hyrule all throughout its history means you’re incapable of committing a crime within the kingdom of Hyrule.”
“Bullshit.”
“There is literally an exemption written into law specifically for the soul of the Hero. The princess showed it to me.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“It’s framed,” Link can’t resist adding, “and hung on the wall, next to a tapestry. Also of the hero.”
“What- why did they decide this was necessary?” Ilia abandons her rock stack, leaving it to stand as it is, forlorn and alone, in favor of staring at him, purely baffled. “Exactly what happened that made them decide that this was something to actually write down as law?”
“Do you have any idea how many of Hyrule’s laws I broke while I was running around trying to stop the world getting eaten by a power-mad tyrant?”
“... No. Do I want to know?”
“Arson, theft, and breaking-and-entering all go right under the almost-regicide, for starters.”
“Oh gods.”
“I’m pretty sure divine law starts getting involved there, somewhere. Probably something to do with disturbing holy ground, destroying historic monuments, and walking away with technically stolen ancient artifacts.”
(Murder, he doesn’t say, but adds silently.
He tries not to remember, how man-like the ancient evil was, at the end.)
“Goddesses,” Ilia half-snorts, and kicks her feet out so her heels land in the water of the spring. The conversation lapses into a silence that’s almost peaceful- that, in another world, could maybe even be called contented.
Link copies her, settling his feet into the shallow edge of the spring. The water is cool against his skin; that faint tickle of magic, ever-present, creeping up his ankles. It doesn’t put him on edge, now, not as much as it used to. Not as much as it did, three months ago, six months ago, nine months in the past.
Maybe, with enough time, it will become comforting again.
“Hey,” Ilia says, fingers curled into Epona’s mane. She was caught in the morning’s sudden shower of rain, hair still damp and sticking to her skin, even as the sun comes out, stretching warm fingers down to the earth. “I’m going to ride out to Castle Town, next week.”
“I’ll bake you some buns for the trip,” Link says, pushing a stray lock of hair out of his face, the grit of flour a now-familiar scrape upon his temple, leaving behind a streak on his skin in the wake of his fingers. “But you have to promise to try and steal Telma’s flatbread recipe for me.”
“She’s never going to let you have it,” Ilia laughs, and follows him into his house, swinging up the ladder with ease. She hops up to sit on his little stool, propping her chin on her hands, as she watches him pull out his flour, measuring out easy handfuls of ingredients. “I’ll try anyway, but I’ll really try if you mix a good handful of walnuts in those buns.”
“You say that like I was ever planning on leaving them out,” Link says, and digs his hands deep into the dough.
Ilia, as always, helps him knead halfway through. And, as always, she steals half the nuts to put in her own mouth, and the other half to work into her lump of dough every time she thinks he isn’t looking.
When she leaves, it’s with half a dozen buns studded through with nuts, and half a dozen buns that are more nuts than bread, and his stock of walnuts is looking very depleted, when he surveys his shelves.
It’s okay though.
Because when she returns, Ilia brings him back two pounds of walnuts, a bag of spices, and, held triumphantly aloft, Telma’s coveted flatbread recipe.
( “I was joking,” Link gasps through a laugh, the recipe still where it was placed, with great ceremony, on his table. “I didn’t think you could actually convince her to share it!”
Ilia, as pleased as a cat with a bowl of cream, drapes herself even more smugly across his chair. “You underestimate the power of nut buns.”
They eat the flatbread for dinner the next night, fried golden in butter and slathered thick with goat cheese; chasing it down with the last jug of apple cider from last fall’s pressing that was hiding in his cellar, passing the bottle back and forth.
They feed winter apples to Epona, and Ilia gives Link the news from Castle Town, from Kakariko, from Telma and Renardo and Luda; and it’s a good evening, where remembered shadows cannot stick for long, and so when sleep comes at last, it is not nightmares that greet him.
Link dreams, instead, of the soft tickle of fairy wings; of one night in the desert, where stars streaked and flared across the sky; of the breathless wonder of looking over the edge of the City in the Sky, and seeing an endless sea of clouds below, in a way that, in some odd, soul-deep way, almost felt like coming home.
Some small hurts slip in. They always do. But they’re soothed away by the other things, this night; the soft, the gentle, the wonderful.
That’s enough to make it a good night.)