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He has always grown his hair long, like his sisters do. It makes a thick mane, a heavy weight of scarlet across his brown shoulders. If he were to brush it out straight, it would reach almost to his waist. From his earliest days, his sisters have taught him to comb and braid and oil it; to tame it with ivory clasps; to string it with stone beads and topaz and tin. In the unmapped depths of his heart, he takes pride in its richness. Like all Gerudo, he trusts wealth he can carry on his person more than than treasure locked up in chests.
His hair serves as consolation as well. He has so little in common with his sisters now. The days when he could pull a veil over his face and pass for one of them are long gone. He towers over even the tallest of them; their callused hands turn childlike against his broad palm. His deep voice cuts through their laughter like the growl of a coming storm. The sisters who used to tease and trip him now step nimbly out of his path. But his hair is still as bright and as long as theirs, and at night they take turns combing out the day’s troubles.
His sisters tell him that Hylian men are never caught with tears in their eyes, so he sits grim as a statue on the day that they cut off his hair.
In the polished bronze mirror, he watches them shear him. They clip it shorter even than a servant’s, so short that he can see his own scalp through the furrows. He feels vulnerable and humiliated.
They tell him that all Hylian men keep their hair this short, and that only their women grow it long.
“I’m neither Hylian nor a woman,” he argues, though he does not resist the hands that wield the scissors. “They will never take me for either. What does it matter how I appear to them?”
One of his sisters stays her hand for a moment. She brushes the trimmings from the back of his neck and lays a kiss there. “The gods have given them so very much, and us so very little,” she says, more soberly than he has ever heard her speak. “You must be more like them than like us.”
“You were born for this,” says another. “You are the desert’s ambassador. You are the arrow we fire into the swollen heart of Hyrule.”
A third, whose belly is heavy with one of his unborn daughters, gathers up the shorn red locks and carries them to the altar prepared for this purpose. The room smells like incense and burning hair.
He is seventeen years old. He is their son, their king, and their servant. He does as they tell him to do, to go where they cannot go. So he buries the grief of loss and isolation within his labyrinth heart, and he sheds no tears.
Nabooru, who is his own age and his favorite, cries in his stead. She lets the angry tears fall unchecked, an accusation against which he has no defense. Where they fall on his arm, they burn. “You look like a stranger,” she declares.
He looks in the mirror and does not recognize himself. Hyrule is already changing him. He is not entirely surprised when Nabooru brushes off the hand he offers to her and whirls out of the room like a scarlet tempest.
But that night she comes back to him, chin raised like a dagger, daring him to remark on her swollen eyes. He is not so much a stranger yet as to make that mistake.
She has come with a peace offering: a comb. She sits cross-legged before him, her back to him so that if tears do come, she will not witness it. But he keeps self-pity at bay, like a pack of hyenas. In silence he combs and oils her hair as he has often done before. He takes his time, memorizing the feel of the strands against his fingertips. When he is done, she lays his head in her lap and blows out the candle.
That night, he dreams a stranger’s dreams: rivers that foam into green fields, pale women with long hair, gold gleaming like bones bleached by the sun.