Chapter Text
Zelda told the royal seamstress in no uncertain terms that she was absolutely not to be recognized at the masquerade ball.
"I don't want it to be obvious that the royal seamstress made it. It shouldn’t be obvious how expensive it is. No elaborate embroidery. No foreign silks. If you have to do shoddier work than usual, that will be allowed."
The seamstress pursed her lips, the two pins between her teeth bobbing with the grinding of her teeth. "I'm not doing shoddy work. Don't insult me, Your Highness."
Zelda threw her arms in the air. "Then use colors or silhouettes that are not in my usual style. I don't know! Something!"
Just three nights of anonymity. That’s all she wanted. Three nights where no one knew who she was and therefore didn’t immediately judge her as lacking while simpering to her face. She wanted to eat as much cake as she wished without nasty comments about it. She wanted to turn someone down for a dance if she felt like it or leave a conversation if it was tedious. She wanted to meet people without all her baggage, even if she never saw them again.
Worst of all, if anyone found out who she was at the ball, she would be expected to host. Host! It was bad enough that she had to help plan the silly thing. No. Secrecy was of the upmost importance.
In fact, she'd made it very clear that she would not be attending the ball at all. She had several important books to read or something something that she'd completely invented but sounded very boring. Her father bought her story easily, and to her surprise did not insist on her attendance. "That's for the best," he'd said. "The masquerade can get rowdy."
The seamstress tilted her head, inspecting her up and down. Zelda did her best to stand still and allow it. She pulled herself straight and tried not to breathe. Her eyes were wide as she waited for the verdict.
Finally, the seamstress nodded. "I can make you unrecognizable."
Zelda let out a relieved sigh.
A small smile crossed the seamstress' lips. "You're not going to like it."
"Do what you must."
The smile grew.
"Within reason, of course!"
"Hmmmm."
This wasn't going to end well.
#
"Good," said the Captain of the Guard, flipping through his various papers. "If this is the final list of approved vendors, then I believe we're finally all set."
"Excellent,” Zelda said, flipping her journal shut on her notes about the ball’s organization. “Best of luck to you going forward, captain. From here on out I want no part in planning. If there's an emergency during the ball, I do not want to know about it.”
He nodded, and as always it looked like a grimace. "The last thing I need is to know what you'll be wearing to the masquerades."
Zelda startled. “Pardon? I'm not going."
He gave her a blank look. Blank looks must be a requirement to enter the royal guard. Although, the captain did look more exhausted about the whole thing than Link usually did.
"We need to be able to quickly identify you in case of an emergency," he said.
"In case of emergency, I will be tucked safely away in my study. I intend to use the time reading the latest research from the Royal Tech Lab about the air turbines on Vah--"
"Your Highness, we both know that you will either use the opportunity to sneak out of the castle or you will go to the ball."
"Why would I want to go to the ball?”
He sighed and looked so very tired as he said, "I have no idea."
She was bolstered by that until he said, "We are responsible for your safety. It's a masquerade ball. There will be alcohol and revelry." He said the word as if he disapproved. "People could get unruly or careless, and we'll need to be ready to step in should anything threaten you."
"If I was going, which I'm not, I would only be attending so I could have anonymity for the three nights of the ball."
"And you'll have that, of course. We won't interrupt whatever...privacy you wish to have. No one outside the guard will know your identity.
"And yet the guard would know. And so when no one asks me to dance because they don't know who I am and rumors still circulate about how pathetic I am, I would know who to blame. So, no, I will not be attending such a torturous activity."
His eyes softened, which was endlessly annoying. “Princess Zelda, the Royal Guard prides themselves on discretion. We are quite capable of turning a blind eye to whatever carousing you wish to engage in, if that's what concerns you. But more than that, if I may say so, I doubt your fears have any basis in reality.”
She rolled her eyes.
"The king has already informed us of his costumes."
"Of course, he has. He's probably wearing a mask of his own face and a crown."
The captain shrugged with his eyebrows, admitting she was right.
She folded her arms over her chest and set her chin.
He sighed and massaged the bridge of his nose. "At least tell me. I'll only share the information with your personal guard, and make it clear that he's not to bother you."
Her eyes narrowed. "Oh. This is about him." So Link was too chicken to ask her himself and was having the captain do it for him. Brilliant.
The captain sighed again. "Everyone there will be in a mask. Keeping the Yiga out is a logistical disaster. It would be the perfect time for an assassination attempt. Please, just tell me what you’ll be wearing."
She averted her eyes. She did feel some pity for his situation.
"I'm not going,” she said, then turned on her heel and marched out of his office.
#
She regretted giving her seamstress free rein.
The dress was much lower cut that she was comfortable with, and this was not helped by the fact that her corset pushed everything up. The narrow sleeves were off the shoulder, and the dress spun out around her in yards and yards and yards of fabric.
She would have a different dress each night, and yet they were bound together by a common theme. This was so that, as her seamstress explained, if she met a young man the first night, he would be able to find her again the next night. If the young man was wise, he would also have a theme.
Zelda rolled her eyes.
Zelda's theme was birds. Tonight she had a raven mask that held a certain kind of beauty, and yet could in no way be called enticing. It covered her eyes and then had a thick, protruding beak that effectively distracted from the lower half of her face as well. She had a long scarf with a flare of ink black feathers that was tied like a choker around her neck, and then hung down her back, giving the impression of wings.
Her distinctive hair was done up and tied in black ribbons. It would be difficult to recognize her without her hair down, and she wouldn’t be the only blonde woman in attendance.
She inspected herself in the mirror. No, she didn't look like herself at all. She grinned under her raven beak.
#
The masquerade lived up to its name. Not only did no one recognize her, but no one looked at her twice. Their eyes behind their masks skidded over her. She felt invisible. She felt free. She beamed and made a beeline for the buffet, filling a plate with far too much food. She stabbed a skewer through a strawberry and held it under the chocolate fountain. It dripped a bit when she removed it, and she grinned at the trail of chocolate left across her plate. She looked over her shoulder and skewered a second strawberry.
A woman a few feet away threw her head back and cackled. She was dressed as a peacock. The grinning man next to her had curving horns like a ram. Zelda looked around the crowd and recognized no one. It was all obscured faces and flashes of color and flashes of laughter.
Well, she did recognize her father. He stood in the center of a ring of men, and he wore a very poor disguise. It looked a bit as if he had dipped the outfit he wore yesterday in gold and then put on a domino mask.
There was a crispy, salty pastry intended to be dipped in a salsa from the desert. She spent a while attempting to get the ratio of pastry to salsa correct without much success. This would require further research.
She finished eating and looked around for what else to do--a drink maybe?--when a man with a mask that branched up into deer antlers approached and bowed to her.
"May I have this dance, my lady?"
My lady! Ha!
She beamed and took his outstretched hand. "I'd be delighted."
After that song was a dance with a man dressed as some kind of demon. He talked at length about the demon, and she was glad when the song ended and she shared a dance with a man dressed as some sort of beetle. It hindered his movements, but they both found it amusing, and she gave him some pointers on how he might adjust the design.
Someone touched her arm, and she looked up from her laughing conversation with the beetle man to face Link.
Because of course it was Link. He had the worst costume ever. He wore a coat in the same style of the Royal Guard uniform but in green, and he wore a mask that was just an oversized leaf with eye holes cut out of it. The eye holes were uneven. His hair was pulled back in a bun, and he'd stuck a tiny pinwheel into it. It was by no means the strangest costume here tonight, but it was perhaps the laziest. Shocking really that he didn't still have the Master Sword strapped to his back.
She gaped at him.
He bowed and held out his hand, which she took with a resigned sigh.
They danced half of the song without speaking or looking at each other. Or at least she didn't speak (and he never spoke) and she wasn't looking at him, but who knew what he was doing. By constantly looking over his shoulder, it was easy to see that everyone was looking at them. Looking at them and whispering behind fans and cupped hands. Zelda pursed her lips.
When she couldn't take it anymore, she snapped, "There's no need to gloat that you found me so easily."
He said nothing.
"That is a terrible costume."
He shrugged.
"No. Everyone here knows who you are, and...I'm the only person you've danced with, aren't I?"
He said nothing, which she took as an embarrassed yes.
She huffed. "So now everyone will know who I am too." Her mind scrambled. "You will dance the next dance with someone else. Someone blonde. Make it look as if you're searching for me."
His shoulder rose and fell under her hand as he sighed.
"It's your own fault for trying to make a point."
He had nothing to say to that, and when the song ended, he bowed and walked immediately towards the nearest blonde woman he could find. She was also adequately short. And had a rather modest outfit.
All the whispers followed him. Good. At least he could follow some directions.
She danced three more dances, checking on Link periodically as he found a flighty girl who talked the whole dance and kept stepping on his feet and then a very regal looking young woman in a gorgeous green dress. The woman could very well be her, Zelda supposed.
And then he left. Just strolled straight out of the ballroom.
The whispers shifted excitedly, and Zelda’s heart lifted. Everyone thought she wasn’t here. On the next spin, she noted two members of the Royal Guard peel from the edges of the ballroom and rush out to help search for her.
She grinned up at her dance partner, a man dressed as what she supposed was a ghost, and then laughed as he spun her far too many times.
After she’d finished her dance with the ghost, she was too dizzy to dance more and set out to find some water.
Back at the buffet table, she decided to stick two strawberries on a skewer and drench them both into the chocolate fountain, when a man approached the food further down the table. She glanced up at him, and then did a double take, nearly dropping her plate.
His mask was a full head covering that made him look like Vah Ruta, complete with trunk and horns and two spinning wheels on the side of his head like eyes. It looked as if--but it couldn't be!--it looked as if it were made from the same material as the Divine Beasts themselves. So did the set of armor he was wearing--swirls of tan over black with glowing blue and orange lights.
She was staring. She realized this when the man noticed her. He hesitated a moment, and then raised his hand in a shy wave.
She forced her hanging jaw to close and swallowed. She should look away in embarrassment, apologize for staring and then climb in a hole and die.
But she couldn't take her eyes off the costume, and then she was rushing up to him. "Where on earth did you get that? It's tremendously accurate!" She leaned around to get another view of his profile, this time up close.
"I think the trunk isn't really proportional," he said. There was a smile in his voice, which was muffled under the mask. He held still so she could do her inspection.
"This is true," she said. "But it would go down to...here wouldn't it?” She held her hand level with her sternum. “That would be quite cumbersome. Oh look, you have the little tail in the back!" She reached up to touch it, but yanked her hand back. "I'm so sorry." She ducked into a curtsy to introduce herself and said, “I’m—but how does it light up? I assume the blue is luminous stone, but the red--"
He laughed. It was a nice laugh. "No, there's an internal power source that causes it to light up and produces an alternating electric field of a certain variable frequency that--"
"--That dampens bursts from guardian canons! It is armor!" Now she really wanted to touch it.
“It hasn’t been tested much,” he said. “It’s difficult to get the guardians to fire on people, which is a very good thing unless you’re trying to test a set of armor that no one knows anything about.”
"How did you get this? Are you Sheikah?“
"A friend is letting me borrow it in exchange for some labor intensive favors, and—I thought guessing was uncouth at this event."
“Then I have bad manners. No one will be able to scold me for it tomorrow. And I only know one person who would know anything about functional ancient Sheikah armor."
"Therefore I must be him."
"Of course not, and thank goodness. So far it is much more pleasant to speak to you."
And then she felt embarrassed.
But he leaned slightly closer. "It's pleasant to speak to you as well."
Her face heated, and she took a chance. "Would you like to speak more? Maybe over at that table?"
"I would love to. Would you like me to get you another strawberry on a stick?"
She lifted her chin. "No. I would like you to get me three more strawberries on a stick."
"How could I deny you when you ask so sweetly?"
"You can't. There's no use in trying."
He nodded sagely, which was hilarious with his elephant mask, and she couldn't help but laugh.
#
"What nonsense! The signal degradation alone--"
"I'm positive it would work!" he argued. "Vah Naboris could power a city. You watch. In five years Gerudo Town will find a way to replicate the ancient Sheikah lights and moving platforms and a city will spring up that will outmatch Castle Town."
"We are nowhere near understanding the Sheikah tech enough to recreate it!"
"We will be. And I'm not saying it will happen everywhere. I don't think we could get Vah Rudania to power anything. It's just the electricity Vah Naboris creates."
She tilted her head in thought. "Vah Ruta could possibly produce some hydroelectric power."
"See! Now you're looking at the big picture."
He pointed at her with an emphatic finger, and she scoffed and grabbed his hand to push it away.
And then she was just holding his hand.
Whatever counterargument she had prepared vanished into stillness. He held himself still as well, a tension, an anticipation present in the muscles of his hand.
His voice was quiet, almost breathy as he said, "Forgive me if this is presumptuous."
He pulled his hand close, under his mask, and kissed the back of her hand. Electricity ran down her arm as she sucked in a breath.
Then he turned her hand over and kissed the inside of her wrist, his lips lingering against her pulse point. She curled her fingers up to stroke his cheek, and he leaned into it ever so slightly, before lowering her hand and straightening. "Forgive me."
"I...It wasn't too presumptuous."
His shoulders relaxed. "Then you don't have to track me down and scold me later."
"Tracking people down is most certainly uncouth at an event such as this. And if I were to track you down it would be about your absurd ideas that Vah Naboris' power could be harnessed! That's nearly blasphemous."
"Blasphemous, or so clever that you wish you'd thought of it?"
"Don't be ridiculous."
"Why not?"
"Because no good will come of it."
He tilted his head, as if agreeing to disagree.
“My lady,” she glanced up to see a man in a costume that made him look like a rabbit—possibly a bluepee?—bowing to her with an outstretched hand. “May I pull you from your conversation for a dance?”
“Oh. I was just—”
“You should go.” Her companion stood, and she blinked up at him in surprise. “I’ve monopolized your time for too long already.”
“But—”
He bent low in a bow over her hand, and disappointingly did not kiss it. Then he was gone.
Well. She bit down her disappointment and smiled up at the bluepee. “Yes,” she said, taking his hand and letting him pull her to her feet. “It would be my pleasure.”
The exercise of dancing didn’t help her racing heart, and the lack of stimulating conversation from her next few dance partners did nothing to soothe her regret that she wasn’t still speaking to the man in the Vah Ruta mask, who had vanished completely.
A man with a mask framed with octopus tentacles pulled her into another dance, followed by a jolly man in a very unflattering bee costume. The bee man was exuberant in his dancing, swinging her about until she was laughing and dizzy. He spun her out at the end of the dance, and she smacked into one of the other dancers, who caught her by the elbow and the waist before she could stumble.
She spun around to face the solid chest of a man with the skull of some sort of monster covering his face. Curving tusks came out the side to frame his jaw. The empty eyes startled her, but the smile he flashed her from beneath the mask set her heart pounding in a different way. "Oh! I'm so terribly sorry!"
"No need to apologize. I planted myself here in hopes you'd crash into me." His voice was low, and as warm as his arm, which was still around her waist. Her hands braced herself against his chest. She should pull away and right herself, but for some reason she didn't.
Instead, she found herself smiling. "You're lucky I didn't knock you to the floor."
"I can think of worse fates."
"Such as?"
"Think of how miserable my existence would be if I had died without seeing your smile."
She rolled her eyes with a grin. "Flattery."
One side of his mouth quirked up. "Honesty. It's not my fault you've drawn the horrible, cliched truth out of me."
"It is horribly cliched."
"See? I'm lost already."
She grinned. "You are clearly a charmer, and I will not take anything you say seriously."
His smile evened out as it grew. His voice rumbled even lower when he said, "Then I'll need to be more earnest."
She imagined this man kissing the inside of her wrist.
The music started, but they were not yet in position. His hand tightened against her back, and he took a step forward. And she sucked in a breath and followed, her hands and forearms still resting against his chest. He led mostly by the muscles of his stomach tensing against hers. She'd never been pressed this tightly to someone, and a flutter erupted under her skin. She couldn't look away from the eye holes of his mask, where she could tell he was staring back at her.
As they completed the first turn, he gathered her hand from against his chest, but instead of adjusting his hold to dance properly, he pressed her hand over his beating heart. She took a shuddering breath and dragged her hand up to his shoulder, then around the back of his neck, drawing herself closer, stretching up to have more length to press against him. The hand at her back tightened, and then they were flying through a tight spin.
They moved faster, faster, spinning and gliding and crossing the dance floor with abandon. He was adventurous and daring, weaving between the other dancers and twirling so her dress spun out around them and she was nearly lifted off her feet, adding more and more intricate footwork as if daring her to keep up, as if pushing to see how easily she would follow. And she followed beautifully, if she did say so herself. It was easy, and everything he threw at her only made her feel more competent. His smile flashed, and she gasped a laugh.
"You are showing off," she said.
"Of course. Perfect partners are hard to find. I need to do my best to impress you before you're whisked away by someone else."
"I highly doubt that. I've never been whisked anywhere in my life."
"That would be a tragedy if I believed you for even a second."
"It's the truth. And it's not my fault if you've drawn the horrible truth out of me."
"Hmmm. Well, then it really was lucky you smashed into me and nearly knocked me unconscious."
She considered him a moment as they did one last tricky turn. "Perhaps," she said.
Their last spin slowed as the music ended, and she found herself breathless. She found herself pressed close and wishing she were closer. She found herself gazing at the only part of his face she could see, which happened to be his mouth. She was tempted to press her thumb to his lower lip.
"Did you like being whisked away?" he asked. His voice was low.
She couldn't stop staring at his lips. "Get me a drink?" she asked.
He began to say something, but was interrupted by the man in the bee costume rushing in. "My lady, that was tremendous! Come, dance another with me!"
She was swept her out of her partner’s arms, and hurried across the floor. Her partner held onto her hand as it stretched behind her, and she turned back to apologize, to tell him that she'd see him later, to--to--
He smirked at her and let go of her hand. She was spun about, and when she next looked back he was gone.