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Link’s grannie was a pious old woman. She remembered the war.
She remembered losing five sons to it. She remembered having to push out nine children just to be allowed more time in the evenings to teach them their letters and prayers. She didn’t like Link telling her that her faith was what they used to enslave her and her sons.
“That’s the fault with religion,” she’d reply. “Not Hylia, hallowed be Her name.”
Link thought there was plenty fault with faith that said the sons of heroes were slaves to god.
Link loved his grannie but she was trying to get him to go back to church since he turned twenty. Kept talking about finding him a good foundation in life and a good woman to keep him on the straight and narrow. She kept saying that he had no ambition.
“You spend all your time just making boats and sailing boats, is that what you’re going to do for the rest of your life?”
She wanted him to go to the city. Figured he’d look good in a suit and proof of his intelligence on a piece of paper stamped by the men who owned the land that she got whipped on.
The war made grannie a little funny. Or maybe she was just old.
She was a hundred and ten and would live for a hundred more. That’s what she said, and she was probably right. All the Sons of Twilight either went early or went long. Link’s father went early.
Link stood in the chill of the almost morning and pulled his net free. He liked going deep where the octorocks were. He liked swimming in the black ocean and getting afraid. When the sun lifted the water down there was still black black black, still scary as shit. The ocean was honest about its designs to hurt you.
When Link returned to the beach it was to a gaggle of children. They were being all sorts of nasty and uncivilized, half naked each, cheerfully insulting him and goading him closer. He kicked the closest one the minute he was off his boat of reeds.
“Link! Link!”
“The church, there’s a—”
“—looking for you!”
“Hamf! Omf!”
Link tore his net full of fish out of the mouth of two-year-old Emil who was getting his first canines. He ignored the rowdy children and walked towards the clutch of houses they called home. They followed him, screaming, pointing at the church at the top of the hill above the vegetation and little people.
He ignored Emil who was hanging onto his ankle by his teeth.
“You’d make a good father,” grannie said as she stepped out on the landing. Link shot her a look as though to say, Goddess forbid. All the children hushed reverently. “Good morning, children.”
“Good mooooorning, Tantie!”
Grannie was their teacher. She taught them their letters and their prayers. They were more articulate when telling her the story. Link didn’t notice his grandmother get either grimmer or happier. He was too busy cleaning fish in the back yard and throwing the scraps to the dog that chased away Father Kurtis’ goats when they tried to eat Grannie’s rosebush.
Grannie took the knife out of his hand.
“Ah.”
“You’re going to bathe and cut your hair.”
Link grabbed his hair. Why?! She hated his locs. She said he looked like an upside-down mangrove tree. It took three years before he took it as an insult.
“And you’re going to speak proper when you talk to her, you understand me?”
“Who?”
“The priestess!” Like the children, she pointed at the church. “A priestess from the Temple of Light!”
Link didn’t care for the whole story, but here it goes:
The papacy for the Hylian faith was in Central Hyrule. That was where the bigwigs decided to misinterpret scripture and recognize the descendants of the Hero as slaves to the royal line, which existed within the priesthood, which therefore existed for the purposes of the church.
For a hundred years they were plucked from Faron and pressed into service. Their muscles built the city’s aqueducts. Their backs supported lancers in mounted combat. Their carcasses revolutionized the medical field.
Y’know. The usual atrocities.
And it had only been fifty years since the revolution that burned their plantations and farms and breeding pens and half their coffers. The papacy wanted to demand that the Sons of Twilight pay them back for the lost of property. The Sons of Twilight had pissed on that demand.
The papacy made other attempts of control. They established schools at the edges of the territory and snapped up impressionable minds. They gave them passports and shiny new names and made the city look like the avenue of progress.
It worked.
And for that reason, Link had no respect for the latest incarnation of his grandmother’s fucking faith seated on the rickety pews of the stupid church. Link was only going there out of filial piety.
“Here he is,” the village head introduced him. He wasn’t drunk today. “This is Link.”
A woman stood.
Link snarled.
She stood like a woman born and raised in the heart of a hypocritical institution. Her white dress was perfectly pressed and her posture was straight enough to balance a spinning top. But her skin was dark like his. Her eyes were dark like his. Every other missionary had been so translucent that they could see the way the skin bloated around a mosquito bite.
“Good morning, Mister Wilde,” the woman spoke in an affected accent. She smelled pretentious and like roses. “A pleasure to make your company. My name is Zelda.”
Link looked at the village head for an explanation. His outrage must have been plain, because he was swift: “Zelda is from the University of Hylia. She’s asked for an escort through the interior to find a golden frog.”
Link’s eyes flickered back to Zelda, equally as demanding.
To her credit, she didn’t flinch. “Golden frogs are vectors for a curse and I wish to study them.”
His eyes flickered to her boots. Clean. Lurelin’s roads weren’t clean. “And what do you plan on doing with curses?”
“Some of the world’s best cures are made from curses, Mister Wilde.” And she smiled wide enough that he could finally see her teeth.
A vampire! He felt his fangs prick. Hadn’t vampires taken enough from them?!
He looked at the painted glass. “How come you can stand the sun?”
She addressed her sleeves and bonnet and said, “I’ve applied a topical potion.”
“All that cocoa butter’s why you’re so dark?”
“You’ll be showing her around today, Link,” interrupted the nervous village head.
Link would sooner swim past the continental shelf.
“Mister Wilde?” she faced him squarely. The way she stood and the way he stood and the way the village head stood made them all look like some parody of a secret wedding. She said, “The sooner you help me, the sooner I can be out of your hair.”
Link couldn’t argue with that.
As he availed himself of his Sunday best, Grannie said, “You have to bring her to dinner one of these days.”
He was furious. He did not show it in more than a white lie: “She’s here to work, grannie. She doesn’t have time to sit down and have dinner.”
“Nonsense! What sort of missionary doesn’t have time to speak with the people?”
“She’s not a missionary. She’s from the university.”
“Even better, she can put in a good word for you.”
“I’m not going to university, grannie—”
“So you’re going to spend the rest of your life here?!” She shouted. “Fishing and swimming and doing nothing with your life?!”
“Is not nothing—”
“You have no ambition! Don’t upset me. Bring her here.”
Link fled to the ocean.
-
Zelda asked, “Are you wondering why I look the way I do?”
Link supposed he’d been staring too hard. “I was wondering if your puffy sleeves don’t get in the way.”
She looked over her shoulder. Her eyes were bright with amusement. “How dare you. Puffy sleeves are all the rage in the capital.”
“You’re a long way from home, Dorothy.”
He must’ve said something wrong, because she blinked pensively before returning to her trek. Despite wearing heeled boots and trousers shinier than they were practical, she was walking half a pace farther than he was, and was utterly silent to boot.
“My mother was a werewolf.”
“Were-what?”
“That’s our politically appropriate terminology for the, er, Sons of the Hero.”
“What’s wrong with calling us Sons of the Hero? It’s what we are.”
“It’s a pejorative.”
“Where?”
“Where do you think?”
He growled in disgust.
“My mother was a werewolf. She was second generation and considered…docile enough to work in the house.”
“Safe enough for the purebloods but not safe from them, huh?”
“My mother claimed they were in love.” By her tone of voice, she didn’t believe it any more than Link did.
“And where’s your father?”
“He died of old age.”
“…never heard of a vampire dying of old age.” And damn him for having the privilege to.
“He was as old as the hills.”
“Literally.”
She giggled, and without meaning to he thought it a lovely sound. He reminded himself to hate her. Her back was straight and her shoulders were broad and she was thin in the waist and long in the leg.
He asked, “So what does that make you? A werepire? Vammolf?”
She looked over her shoulder so that he could see her amusement again. “A hybrid, actually.”
“Creative.”
“And clinical.” She sidestepped a caiman without having to be told. “There are communities of hybrids who argue that the colloquial term, while apt, heralds the history of human experimentation that their werewolf parents had been subjected to, as if hybrids themselves are part of a breeding program.”
Link growled, “I’ve heard folk are still lynching Sons and y’all are worried about the English Language?”
“Language is perennial and diurnal, Mister Wilde. It shapes the mind. It is the frontier of change.”
“Say that again when a rope is around your neck.”
She turned on her heel. The crickets and frogs kept singing like there weren’t strangers in their midst. Link was known here, his blood and four paws brushed against the leaves too often for the rainforest not to recognize him, but he hated that it didn’t respond to Zelda. She was that good a predator.
She was not smiling.
He was in his wolf form so he had an advantage, but he’d never gone up against a hybrid and was in no mood for wounds. “What?”
“I don’t know where we’re going.”
He exhaled slowly. He passed her. She did not move, her dilated eyes caught the glint from the fireflies’ eerily, and his fur brushed against her thighs as he maneuvered his way over a gnarl of roots. She radiated cold.
“Last time I saw a Yellow Frog it was raining,” he told her. “Figure they sleep in the middle of plants just like regular frogs.”
Zelda looked up from putting on her gloves. “The lake is beautiful. Does it have a name?”
“Floria.”
“Why aren’t there any settlements here?”
“Is it frogs you’re studying or us?”
“I can’t help but find you intriguing, Mister Wilde.” She smiled. “Although I’m sure you hear that often.”
Was that a threat? “Why.”
She blinked. “Because you’re a handsome man.”
Link wasn’t a large wolf, but he was damn intimidating, coming up to her waist at the shoulder and his muscle was no joke beneath the fur. He felt like a schoolboy.
“Has no-one ever called you handsome, Mister Wilde?”
“Well. Grannie—oh, stop laughing.”
Her grin was broad. “I didn’t say anything.”
“And stop buttering me up. I don’t like it.”
Her smile fell. She bowed her head and, Link recoiled in horror, she curtsied. “I beg your pardon, Mister Wilde. My intentions were to facilitate a healthy work dynamic. I had gone too far.”
Link wandered off as response. He was solidly ambivalent to her as a person for all he held onto his suspicions. He didn’t like how she got under his guard.
From the shadows he watched her work. She walked like a vampire. She walked like someone who didn’t know their way through vegetation any denser than an unkempt garden. She also walked on water, which frightened him to bits the first time he saw it.
“I thought vampires were bad with bodies of water.”
Her ears were keen: he didn’t need to raise his voice. She smiled. “Hybrid, Mister Wilde. Remember?”
“That means you’ve inherited both weaknesses too, right?”
“Well. It is true that high noon means certain death. And when I dine at my relatives’ place, I must bring my own cutlery.”
Link frowned.
“I’m allergic to silver,” she added with a laugh.
“Your family makes you eat with real silver?” He paused. “Who the hell even makes eating utensils out of silver?”
“Silver has oligodynamic properties, actually. Have you never heard of sailors or pilgrims tossing silver coins into jugs of milk to keep it fresh?”
“I’m lactose intolerant.”
She laughed. “Duly noted.”
“So they make you eat with silver?”
“Are you interested in me?”
He shut up.
Zelda cast him an apologetic smile. “Would you like to make yourself useful?”
“No.”
She approached him anyway. She didn’t make a sound against the pebbles. Her boots were still clean. She pulled out black gloves, identical to her own, and said, “Hand, please.”
“I’m not a domesticated pet.”
“Had you been I’d offer you a treat.” She met his eyes. Her smile was a touch annoyed, and he took pride in that. “Silk can be rather finnicky. They’ll catch on your calluses.”
He was curious, so he shifted and held out his hand. She took his hands: the pads of her fingers sucked the heat out of his skin. She was efficient and ignored his flinch. “If you find a Golden Frog, please place it in this bottle.”
“How many do you need?”
“What an adventurous question.” She walked away. “I think I like you.”
-
Link was having frank conversations with the watery abyss again. He was groggy from spending half the night on guard in a vampire’s—a hybrid’s company. Frustratingly, he was groggy from spending the rest of the night turning over everything she said:
The children of vampires and the Sons of the Hero lived in the holy city.
Said children made up a community who discussed the power of words.
Zelda’s family made her eat with silver.
Link rarely had to worry about predators. His grandmother had a habit of being rough but he never had to worry about poisoning: no-one in the village prepared ackee better than her. Even in the ocean he was the scariest thing around.
He couldn’t imagine being in a home and being afraid.
His grandmother chastised him when he returned from the wild. “Didn’t I tell you to bring the missionary last night? All my fish head soup! Wasted!”
“I ate it.”
“Wasted!”
In his escape he found himself following the scent of ice and puffy sleeves. When he caught himself he didn’t stop. Lurelin was dull and Zelda was willing to indulge his morbid curiosity. When she segued into animals that couldn’t vomit and spoke about how frogs threw up their entire stomach she hadn’t stopped for breath for fifteen minutes. He now knew more about the guts of horses and turtles than he needed to.
Idly thinking of what new ideas could get her eyes lit up like that again—and maybe pinned in his general direction—he almost thoroughly collided with someone who should not have been at the end of Zelda’s scent.
Thadd said, “And when you go back to the university? What are we going to get? A bag of money and a thank you card?”
Zelda’s measured response came from the doorway. “As I had reported to the village head, all scientific findings upon which my research on the Golden Frog is based will be shared with Lurelin—”
“How does that help us? What’s it worth to you?”
“What?”
“A book on curses don’t do us good. What’s your research worth to you? Pay us that.”
“Sir—”
“And I don’t think you should be wandering the place unmonitored anymore.”
“There is literally nowhere I can go during the day. I am trapped here.” They’d given her a hut that could block out noonday light but offered no paths of egress save sun and sand.
“Still, I don’t like it.”
Zelda’s pinched eyes flickered over Thadd’s head. She did not relax. She was unsure if Link was here to echo Thadd’s claims.
Thadd turned on his heel. “Link. You’re been guiding this woman during the night. Did you know she’s been taking pictures?”
“Yeah, I’m in a couple. Want one?”
“No. She shouldn’t—”
“I’ll deal with it.”
Thadd stared.
“I’ll deal with it.”
Thadd shot Zelda another venomous look and took off.
Zelda spoke softly, “And how do you intend on dealing with it, pray tell?”
“I’d probably stick to you like glue, make sure you’re not going anywhere you’re not supposed to.”
The pinched look melted into something dangerous. “With you close why would I want to be anywhere else?”
Link glared at her. “That was smooth.”
She giggled.
“Can I stick my nose in your business?”
“Usually I’d protest, but after your friend’s performance your interruption is a breath of fresh air.”
Link crossed the threshold. “Thadd’s like that with everyone.”
“Noted, Mister Wilde. At the same time I understand his distrust, indiscreet as it may have been.”
“So what’s with the Bunsen Burners and Tesla sparkers over here?” Link loitered close to her workstation and touched nothing. “Last time my grannie undid a curse all it took was boiled tobacco leaf and a rattle.”
“Did it? That’s fascinating. I’d love to talk to her about her work.”
“That’s no hardship. She’s been asking me to bring you to dinner for days now.”
“Has she?” Link tensed: she’d sidled up to his shoulder before he noticed. “My my, Mister Wilde. What had you told her about me?”
A little toothily, “Nothing. You should thank me.”
She laughed and crashed her forehead against his shoulder. It was a welcome companionable gesture. “There are things you say that surprise me.”
“Didn’t expect a country bumpkin to be witty?”
“Not that. You betray a knowledge of literature and basic science.”
“Didn’t expect a country bumpkin to be learned?”
“Not learned in a way that is familiar to me, no,” she admitted. She gestured to her tools. “I expected this to be as incomprehensible to you as it is incomprehensible to me where you place your net where you do in the mornings.”
He looked at her sharply.
“Yes, I saw you through the window.”
“You knew it was me from this far away?”
“You cut a striking figure.”
“You don’t have to flirt with me.”
“Oh, I didn’t—”
“I already like you. You don’t have to flirt with me.” She was quiet too long so he had to look at her. “Stop grinning like that.”
“Sorry.” She ducked her head. Her big light hair fell around her shoulders and face. She bat it back irritably.
“Can I do your hair?”
“Oh goddess, it’s that much of a mess, is it? I usually have someone from home do it for me. I’ve no idea how I expected to handle it away from home.”
Link frowned. “You can’t comb your own hair?”
“I was raised to appropriate vampiric culture, Mister Wilde, and in case you hadn’t noticed, vampiric culture doesn’t frequent 4A hair.”
“Foray?”
“It means—”
“I think I know what it means better than you.”
“Well, I never—!”
“I used to do my little sister’s hair. Give me a comb, bottle of butter, bowl of water, and an hour?”
Zelda, curious, consented.
Not long thereafter, Link’s knowing hands were best friends with the coils that had ruined her silhouette since morning. He had dozens of comments that she wrote out in a little book. He scoffed each time she scribbled something.
Focusing on the academia distracted her from the reality of where she was seated. She was seated on the floor between his legs, a temple on his knee when he was tightly braiding down the hair at her sides, smelling of sand and sun and gentle man and hair butter and generally lovely. She caught herself.
“I’m falling asleep.”
“Yeah, that happens. Almost done.”
“You’re skilled.” She admired his work in the mirror. “Does your sister still come to you to get her hair done?”
“No, she got married last year.”
“Oh.” She was thinking loudly.
“Ask what you want to ask.”
“It’s just…how old was she?”
“She’s nineteen this year.”
“Oh. It seems. Rather young, is all.”
“Yeah, I don’t have faith it’ll work out either.”
Zelda giggled. “That sounds like the coloured opinion of an overprotective older brother.”
“Who’re you calling coloured?”
She giggled.
“I’m not overprotective. She married the git, didn’t she?”
“The git!”
“I gave my blessing, not my approval.”
Zelda giggled. “She must fret for nothing, having such dependable family.”
Link was humming under his breath. Zelda thought she could hear the smile in it. Then: “Done.”
“Fine work, Mister Wilde!” She turned her head this way and that. The braids were narrower than the width of his pinky and capped at the end with wooden beads. “I will be the envy of Castleton! You’d make fine work there.”
“Don’t let grannie hear you say that. She already thinks I have no ambition.” He glowed with pride however. “You really like it? Canerows stray from your delicate vampiric sensibilities though, don’t they?”
She met his eye in the mirror firmly. “It is good work by any measure. Thank you.”
Link smiled, small and vulnerable, and wiped his hands clean and organized all his tools and products. “You should sleep if you’re gonna meet up with grannie later.”
“Meeting the family already? What are your designs on me, Mister Wilde?”
He stared at her for long enough to start laughing at him, but he ducked in for a kiss. Her lips were still smarting once he’d retreated and remarked, “If you haven’t figured it out yet then I’m not doing a good job.”
And he left, leaving poor Zelda wanting.
-
Something was wrong.
“Zelda Bosphoramous, ma’am.” She curtsied. “It is an honor to meet you. Link has spoken of you with great respect and affection.”
If Zelda had noticed, she was doing great work of ignoring it. Grannie was radiating vitriol and hate. Her black leather face was screwed up, like she couldn’t see after biting into the rind of a lime, and her lips were puckered ready to kiss her teeth.
Aside from her accent, Zelda had done nothing wrong.
Link asked over the song of frogs and crickets, “Can she come in, Grannie?”
Grannie’s eyes cut up and down. “Might as well.” She turned into her house.
“Please come in, Zelda,” Link said, knowing that she needed explicit permission to enter someone’s home. She smiled at him, grateful in her smile and worried in her eyes, and he frowned a little to respond, I don’t know either.
Grannie dressed up her house. She got out the good curtains and tablecloth, pure white and crocheted, and she took down the china from her display cabinet. The air was redolent with roasted meat. Grannie sat at one end of the table. Link moved to the other and wondered why Zelda hesitated.
“Oh, sorry.” He got a cloth napkin and picked up the cutlery. “I forgot to tell her you can’t eat with silver.”
Grannie replied, “What do you mean she can’t eat with it? Is tarnished?”
“She’s allergic, Grannie. Like we are.”
“Twenty years of my life I spent polishing silver—”
Zelda whispered, “It’s not a big deal, Link—”
“Yes, it is,” Link said loudly. “You put up with this at home, you’re not going to put up with it here.”
Her smile was small and grateful and pained. “I hope the lady of the house will accept my greatest condolences. I recognize the gesture as a token of respect. Thank you.”
Dourly, Grannie lifted her chin. “First I’ve heard of a vampire that can’t touch silver.”
“My father was a vampire, but my mother was…was a Son of the Hero,” she explained. Her voice dimmed as Link went to the kitchen to find replacement cutlery. The wallpaper and roof were still damp from cooking. He and Grannie had been working hard for hours. He was nervous.
Suddenly a chair dragged on the floor. Not good. He rushed out.
Zelda was standing, smiling. Her eyes were shiny. “Thank you for the invitation.” Her voice was weak! “I shan’t overstay my welcome.”
And she fled.
Grannie seemed even less impressed with Zelda’s exit than she did with her entry. Link turned to her. She didn’t say anything. She was dressed up too: oiled down her hair and everything.
“Grannie.” She wouldn’t face him with her lemon-suck-teeth-screw-up-leather face. “What happened?”
Sharply, “I don’t like when people gwan like they’re better than me.”
“When did she—”
“I see the way she turn up her face at this house and my things. Like she would have done better if she grew up here.”
“Grannie, you wanted her to come to dinner—”
“I don’t like when our people get ahead of themselves, start acting like they think they’re better just cuz they think their father is a vampire that means they’re important. She figet her heritage just because of who her father was?” She kissed her teeth, finally, long and loud and lurid. Her cheeks and chin shivered in anger. “Come set the table.”
“Grannie, my friend just fled my home in tears.”
“You go after that woman you’re not coming back here,” she snapped, wide-eyed and serious. “Sit down and eat.”
Link did not recognize the woman in front of him.
He left her house.
-
He found Zelda balled up at the top of a banana tree. “I’m sorry my grandmother’s weird biases upset you.”
He heard a tearful sob from above. “It’s fine.” She sniffed. “It was just sudden. I hadn’t prepared my heart.”
“You shouldn’t have to.” He frowned. “She dressed up the house and herself thinking you were a vampire. That was her armour, y’know? To show that she’s doing well and that everything she has she owns. But it means something different when she’s receiving a hybrid.”
“Did you not tell her I was a hybrid because you knew she would react this way?”
“No,” he growled. “It didn’t occur to me to tell her because I didn’t think it would matter.”
Zelda descended from the top of the tree in a single hop. The way she landed was as though inertia and gravity were an option for her. She didn’t even bend her knees. She was wearing platform boots today.
“I doubt she’s happy that you’re still speaking with me.”
“She disowned me.”
“Link!”
“I’ll send a letter to Aryll tomorrow. She’ll be sick of her husband by now. She’ll come and look after her.”
“The last thing I want is to get between you and your family.”
“You didn’t do that. Grannie did that.”
“She has a history of traumas—”
“You treated her with respect and she—she—what did she even say to you?”
She avoided his eyes. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Whatever it was it made you cry. It’s not fair that she throws her…her…whatever at you just because you might remind her of someone or something that happened in the past!”
“A Son of the Hero needs his family, Mister Wilde. You should go back to her.”
He frowned. “And you?”
“I’ll be going home tonight. I think I’ve stirred the Lurelin pot enough.”
“What about your research?”
“You caught me six frogs, Mister Wilde.” She grinned. “Two have already started breeding and I have a good handle on how to make their enclosures nice and tidy for them. My research won’t suffer.”
“Will you come back?”
“I…”
“I want you to come back.”
Her weirdly glinting eyes were shiny.
He huffed and thumbed her cheek. “I made you cry again.”
“Mister Wilde, you are lovely. You put side your biases to learn about me, you listen and have intelligent and funny replies, your desires of the world are simple and you are better for it. I am profoundly attracted to you. But three days does not love make. In time you will forget me and you will find real love. True love.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being infatuated with you.”
Her resulting expression was very cute. She looked like a girl being confessed to for the first time.
“If I can’t have a promise can I have tonight?”
She pouted. “So your true colours are shown. You desire pleasures of the flesh.”
“Your pleasures, yeah.” She didn’t resist his hand on her face. He could feel her flushing the way she radiated less and less cold.
“Well. I already know you have talented fingers.” And with a tongue far longer than he was expecting, she plucked his thumb from her cheek and pulled it into the sharp heat of her mouth.
His belly clenched. “Please don’t do that or I won’t last half the night.”
“On your back, Mister Wilde.”
And the night was beautiful. She was attentive, always questioning with a touch or a look, and game for the limits of his imagination. He confessed early that physical love was strictly the purview of his dreams until now, and Zelda responded with cruelty. She’d whispered lovely threats in his ear.
He had asked, “What’s edging?”
And an hour later he regretted asking.
His favourite position was what Zelda called uncreative. With her on her back, legs tied on his waist and his hips crushing hers to the forest floor, he felt really powerful and really trusted. He liked caging her in and that Zelda, easily stronger than him—which he found out early—liked being caged by him.
“Trust the archetypical protector to favour the mating press,” she’d joked.
He didn’t totally understand, but he’d learned enough about her by then to know where to place his hips and how deep that she’d be insensible for the next ten thrusts.
“Please don’t make yourself a stranger,” he begged her when she began to dress and dawn smelled close.
She slid her smooth smooth tongue against his. He wasn’t sure if it was a promise or a goodbye.
-
Aryll gave Link her baby and a cookie box. Her face was uncommonly serious. “A bribe,” she claimed. And she turned back to help Grannie with the bucket of ackee he’d picked this morning.
Link took his nephew out to sea. With the little stinker babbling at the waves in one hand, Link sorted through the opened envelopes with the other. Why would his sister think he’d care about some opened letters?
They smelled like Zelda.
They smelled like his grandmother.
As he read the letters in chronological order, the picture was clear. Zelda had written him frequently, almost immediately after she made footfall in Castleton, and his grandmother had been fielding his letters and fostering his heartbreak for the past three months.
“You can talk to me when you live in your own house,” she replied when he asked about the letters. She changed the channel on the tiny TV Aryll bought her. “Fix the antenna for me.”
Later Grannie made him his favourite meal. After dinner Aryll caught him eyeing their only suitcase.
“You’re really going to follow a woman to the city?” She folded her arms. “I followed love and look where that got me.”
“I just want to visit her.”
“If you’re not careful you’ll knock her up. If she isn’t already. Goddess, I was joking.” He looked very very panicked. “What will you do if she is?”
He picked up the suitcase. “I’ll write you.”
“And if you stay?”
“I’ll send you money.”
“It’s not easy living in the city, Link. We sometimes make it out to be a land of opportunity but you’ve got people who are smarter and braver than politicians mopping floors.”
Link rubbed his cheek to her shoulder. “I’ll write you.”
“Idiot.” She hugged him. “Grannie’s pretending to be asleep.”
“I know.” And he went to her bedroom and said his piece, but his grandmother did not reply and he left before he could smell the salt on her tears.
Link went to the city.
His grandmother said he was talented enough to make it here, but he was suddenly unsure. He’d never seen buildings taller than trees, trams faster than horse carts and more people the more corners you took. There were plenty vampires walking about in the light of day with parasols and gloves and smelling of the topical elixir Zelda used and…huh. Look at that? Puffy sleeves were the style.
There were plenty of Sons of the Hero too. Almost immediately he was profiled and absorbed into a fleshed-out diaspora. The language was familiar, the food was familiar, and the stories were familiar. After burping someone’s babies and helping someone’s father make dinner, he knew where to get his papers, where to get them stamped, and how to get to the University of Saint Hylia.
He got lost.
“I’ll laugh about this one day,” he said to the fountain in an enclosed courtyard less familiar than the last. He tossed a coin in it.
“The fountain is—”
PLINK!
“—dry,” the voice finished in amusement. “This fountain is rarely visited, I suggest…you…”
But Link had already abandoned his wish. He vaulted over the bench and had she been anyone else she’d have been scandalized or in a swoon. She looked inches from doing the same thing herself.
She wheezed: “Link—”
“Are you—”
“You never responded—”
“Grannie—”
“Then how did you—”
“I honestly don’t know—”
She barked out a laugh and realized she gripped his forearms. “Forgive me—”
“Why?”
“You never responded—”
He kissed her. Because she froze, he drew back. “Oh goddess, unless you’ve moved on—”
“Don’t insult me.”
So he kissed her.
She replied, “There’s an entrance examination in three months for most fields at the university.”
His lips were on her cheeks, her ears.
“With your level, you could apply and, mm, they have part time courses…!”
“Why are you telling me this?” He rasped his neck on her throat.
“Because you are brilliant, Mister Wilde. You are brilliant. I won’t have the only reason you’ve left your life behind be for me.”
He pulled back. He read her eyes.
“If…if you want to stay.”
“I’ll take the entrance exam.”
“You’ll need to study—”
“Will you help me?”
“If you are incentivized—”
He grabbed a lovely, indecent place on her person. “I’m incentivized.”
She bit her lip and leaned against him and touched his chin. “Slow down, my love.”
He exhaled and rubbed her shoulders. “I’m sorry. I missed you.”
“I wish to date you, Mister Wilde. I wish to romance you.” She enjoyed that his eyes widened. “May I have the pleasure?”
Link felt unsure. His head swam. He didn’t think before diving, did he? He adored her, but he didn’t know her. He adored her, but he didn’t know this city. Over dinner he’d express his wariness and she’d remark, “And in the span of a day you found lodging and friends. Imagine what rewards a year has for you?”
He sat up, in part because he felt pride, in part because her toes were running up the inside of his leg.
Three months later, with a nude Zelda sleeping in his bed, he wrote a letter to his grandmother and sister about how he was a student, and how the old man who took him in was expecting a granddaughter, and how his new job was quiet, and how he was curious about Grannie’s new favourite channel…