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'I heard there was some question about her bloodline.'
A high-pitched voice floated over to me at the head table. My stomach clenched.
'Bloodline? But everyone knows the Queen had the gift…'
The silver fork bit into the edges of my palm. I knew what was coming next. The two girls were at the table in front of me. I could just see them at the top of my vision; perhaps thirteen or fourteen, their faces painted and their voices too loud for such a conversation. They knew I could hear them, of that I was sure.
'Yes, the Queen . But what if she's not the Queen's daughter…' the one with the green dress said.
My toes curled in my too-tight slippers. I should be used to this by now. Father said that the loudest in the room are often the weakest and I should ignore them: 'A loftwing doesn't concern itself with the worms.'
'She's the spitting image of her mother,' said her conspirator. Her dress was in a red jacquard pattern. Expensive.
'Come now.' A thin hand patted the crimson silk, and her tone was patronising. 'Surely, you don't think it's beyond them to find a similar-looking girl.'
In my darkest moment, I too had wondered if there had been a mix-up. Perhaps the Deku Tree had been wrong. Perhaps the real Princess Zelda had disappeared, and I was just a replacement, brought up to believe I was the real one. But my eyes, the exact shade of my father's, couldn't lie. My face and hair, so similar to my mother when she was my age, betrayed the truth of my heritage.
I sighed and placed my fork on the table, my appetite gone. I was wholly my mother's daughter—her only child—and I was a royal disappointment.
The sound of a crash and apologies drew my attention away from my dire thoughts. At the entrance to the dining hall, a man—clearly too deep in his cups—was being held up by a woman that I presumed to be his wife and, to my delight, a familiar face.
Younger than the rest of the guard, with his boyish face and bright blue eyes, and yet with a more stoic countenance than any of them. I didn't know his name, and, truthfully; I didn't want to.
He couldn't have been much older than me, perhaps thirteen. I had heard of a young knight, the youngest ever to be appointed, among the castle gossip, but I hadn't paid it much attention. It seemed that he had been placed on door duty during our banquets.
The padded clothing under his shining armour was slightly baggy, bunching and sagging unevenly. I knew that boys sometimes had a growth spurt in their later teen years, but right now, the drunken man towered over him, and yet he held him up effortlessly.
I couldn't hear their conversation from across the dining hall, but the knight nodded and stepped back to his place. He adjusted his gloves and then returned to his statuesque expression.
To see someone of my age being so composed was inspiring. He was unchanging. Like the solid stone of the Dueling Peaks, I had never seen him waver since had been appointed to the doors. No nervousness or stress had played on his face. He didn't fidget or lean against the wall. He simply stood, his eyes locked on the stone opposite.
A small smile broke out on my face. He was a comfort to me. I didn't know his name, and I enjoyed the mystery. Where was he from? How had he become so proficient? Did he always want to be a knight? I had taken to scrutinising his face during these dreadful events to see if I could divine any answers; I hoped I never learned a thing.
I lifted my fork, my appetite renewed.
'Link is so handsome…'
The return of those loud voices froze me in place. Perhaps I was wrong before. Perhaps they were loud because they just had no sense of propriety.
'And so kind, too! Did you see him help Lord Sage?'
I tilted my head to see what they were looking at. A stone landed on my chest.
'I saw how cute he looked in that armour!'
They were pointing at my knight. No, not my knight. Link. I tried to re-frame him with the name. It made him real. A flesh and blood boy instead of the fanciful idea in my head.
I found myself disappointed.
'We should talk to him.'
'He's on duty!'
I rolled my eyes. Hopefully, they would attempt to entice him, get in trouble, and then I would be free of them for the foreseeable future. I heard the squeak of chairs and leaned back in my seat to watch.
Green Dress sashayed towards him in a way that likely would have been far more convincing if she hadn't wobbled in her heels mid stride. Her friend in the red dress walked just behind her with her shoulders hunched, as if she was waiting to be chastised. They arrived in front of Link. I adjusted my position so I could still see his face. He didn't react to their arrival.
I wasn't sure I wanted to hear what was being said. Link was eye-level with the frankly inappropriate cleavage of Green Dress. I didn't know who her parents were, but either they were incredibly lenient or she had tugged the neckline down.
Link's gaze appeared to glaze over and still, he said nothing. Green Dress's ears were flushing, her fists clenching tighter with every ignored word. I bit my lip; I suppose knights didn't pay attention to the worms either.
Her humiliation must have reached its peak, because she grabbed her friend's hand and almost yanked her off her feet in her rush to leave the room. I laughed this time. I couldn't help myself, even when I received a confused look from my father. I patted his hand—his frown deepened—and returned to my almost cold meal.
My eyes flicked up to the door again. To the knight—no—to Link. He was still staring at the wall. I grinned. Typical.
With the tiniest movement, that firm gaze met mine. I could understand why he stared at the wall. He could burn a hole with those eyes. His cheeks, still round with the remains of childhood, lifted slightly. A smile, small and quiet and just for me, was tight on his lips like he was trying to control it. I had no such compunction and showed all my teeth in what I'm sure must have looked maniacal.
He looked away first and shifted against the wall, rolling his shoulders and shaking out his legs. Before my eyes, he became a statue once again.
My statue. My knight.
I rolled the name around in my mind.
My Link.
Yes, I rather like that after all.
* * *
Moblin faeces and rotten food greeted us when we entered the dining hall. The smell was rancid, and I had to hold my nose to progress any further into the once grand room. Link just shrugged. My glare followed him when he walked towards one of the tables.
'You can't possibly be unaffected,' I said in a nasal tone.
He shrugged again. 'I've smelled worse.'
The temptation to remind him he certainly could smell particularly ripe after a day's travelling was on the tip of my tongue. I resisted. Barely.
'I don't know whether I believe you.'
He stopped digging in his bag to fix me with a stare and held up two fingers.
'Two words. Hinox den.' His face went smug and his hand fell back to his side.
He was right. I knew it. He knew I knew it. The scent that emanated from a hinox den was putrid enough to turn the Goddess green.
He returned to whatever he had been doing, and I let myself be absorbed by the past.
This hall had seen so much. Whole lives were celebrated here; these walls had seen the joy of birth to the solemnity of death, and now, here there stood, filthy and derelict, stained with who knows what and for so long home only to monsters.
The fireplace at the rear wall hadn't seen a flame in over a century, but I remembered with clarity sitting to the right of my father, the heat at my back. The whispers of the court, both positive and negative—but increasingly negative as I grew older. The growing gulf between myself and my father, our relationship strained by stress and the pressure of our positions. His former advice to ignore what others said thrown aside in an attempt, I suppose, to motivate me. As if I needed any motivation.
My gaze slid to where my father's large frame used to sit, where he became less father and more king as the Calamity drew ever closer; where his laughter grew rarer and his brown hair greyed at an alarming rate. I had dreaded the banquets in this room, and yet now, I would give anything to sit beside my father once more.
'Here.'
Something cold and tingly was rubbed along my upper lip, and my fingers were pulled from my nose.
'Link—no, what are you—'
Instead of the foul smells that assaulted me when I first entered the room, all I inhaled was the distinct scent of cold safflina, the stench of the room buried beneath it.
I narrowed my eyes at him and the jar in his hands. 'You could have warned me.'
That little controlled smile, with his lips pressed together to hide his true amusement, grew on his face, and he shrugged.
'More fun this way.'
I could only shake my head at him; he could be ridiculous.
Without another word, he wandered off towards the tables and began inspecting the candelabra.
'Link?'
'Hm?' he said, tilting his head in my direction.
'Do you remember guarding the doors during the banquets here?'
He placed the tarnished metal down and faced me, leaning back gently on the table.
'Uh…' he frowned. 'A little. Why?'
I picked my way across the room to stand beside him. The table, which had once held feasts that exhibited the finest cuisine from across Hyrule, was now piled with rotten food and debris. There used to be fine porcelain—likely smashed—and an extensive set of solid silver cutlery. What remained on the tables was blackened with soot and filth. I wasn't sure it could ever be cleaned properly; the fine craft of Hyrule Castle had been reduced to waste.
'What do you remember?' I asked, my mind elsewhere, a century in the past.
Link nudged me with his shoulder.
'I remember you going back for thirds when they served fruitcake,' he grinned. Of course, he would remember that. The surprise on his face was one of the most extreme emotions I had ever seen him display at that point. 'And they were big slices, too.'
When I nudged him back, he let himself stumble, the scoundrel. He could always tell when my mood was sinking. I appreciated him more than he could ever know.
'I remember… when I first learned your name,' I said. One of his eyebrows raised when he looked up at me. 'And no, not when you found the sword.'
The confusion on his face was priceless. If it wouldn't have distracted him, I would've taken a photo for posterity. His mouth opened and then closed, his eyes darting from side to side, those already angled eyebrows pulling into a sharper line.
'Any guesses?'
'Uh… when I got knighted? That was quite an event.'
'So humble! I never attended them. Not even for prodigies.'
'Gossip?'
'There was gossip about a knight, but I didn't pay attention to it.'
He shook his head. 'I don't know then.'
'It was in this very room…' I began, imbuing all the mystery I could muster into my voice. 'Do you remember the two girls who tried to flirt with you?'
Link's eyes glinted with mischief. I could already hear what he was going to say.
'Well, there were so many…'
I swatted his arm. He wasn't wrong. Whether then or now, Link's magnetism knew no bounds. However, in all that time, I had never seen him accept a proposition. Before the Calamity, he was tied to his duty, to the appearance of the Hero. I had asked him once whether he was now or ever in a romantic relationship. He told me that he wasn't. The Hero couldn't leave a string of jilted lovers behind him, and besides, people only wanted to be with the Hero, not Link.
After I was freed from the castle, I asked him why he had not pursued any romantic entanglements since those pressures were no longer on him. He said there were several reasons. There was guilt and a drive to finish what was started, to save a world he had failed. But he also felt like a man out of time, only half a person without full awareness of who he had been. He couldn't bring that to someone else, but he also didn't want to further lose himself under the influence of others.
I was stunned.
'Yes, yes, you were very popular,' I said, with a roll of my eyes. 'This was two specific girls. One in a green dress, one in a red dress.'
The joviality left his face, and he looked down. 'No, I don't remember that.'
'Link,' I said. He looked up at me, the edges of his lips curling down and that deep sadness I knew lying below the surface, sitting in the wrinkle of his brow and the white of his knuckles around the table's edge. I pried his hand free and slipped my fingers under his own. 'It's normal to forget things. I'm sure you remember things I've forgotten too. It's not all the Shrine.'
He nodded, his expression still fraught, and I squeezed his hand.
' Well ,' I put on my best storyteller voice, and some of the sparkle returned to his eye. 'This was before you found the sword and you were standing guard as a knight during a banquet. These two girls were dressed very ostentatiously. They had been gossiping about me all night, and then they noticed you.'
He pointed at himself and mouthed, 'me?' with a surprised expression.
'Yes, you! I didn't know your name, and I didn't want to—'
'Why not?' Link said, indignant, perhaps even hurt.
'You were more interesting if I didn't know. Anyway , they pointed at you and said your name, and I was very unhappy. Then they walked over to you in an attempt to flirt. As usual, you were blending in wonderfully with the stone wall and ignored them. It made one of them… well, rather upset.'
Link was most decidedly pouting. 'That's not a good story. You learned my name against your will, and I upset some girls. What's good about that?'
A tiny part of me wanted to keep it to myself. I had never told anyone this, and Link didn't remember it. It was mine and mine alone. But if there was a single person in the world who deserved my memories, it was Link.
My eyes drifted to the collapsed doorway, my mind following to a time when this hall was filled with chatter and clinking plates and the smell of good food; when I was a young girl with the weight of destiny on my shoulders and unaware that across the room, my partner in life, love, and fate, was doing his best impression of a statue; when my only comfort was that same knight and his steadfast, unchanging nature, and that single smile that was just for me.
I rubbed my thumb across the back of Link's hand and squeezed, and he, as always, squeezed back.
'Well, after they had run away, I laughed. It may have been cruel, but seeing you ignore them brought me joy. And then—' I paused, long enough for his concerned eyes to tilt into my view. As blue as they had always been, but far more open. They were like a river that had finally reached the ocean: always beautiful, but more so for being free. 'And then you smiled at me.'
'I did?' he said. A grin grew across his face, and those sky eyes glowed.
'Mmhhmm. I'd never seen you smile before. It was quite the event.'
He leaned back against the table and cocked his head. I knew he was trying to remember. 'Did it make you happy?'
'It did.'
He nodded to himself, his eyes still in that faraway place only he could see.
'Good.' He looked back up at me, smile soft and gentle and full of all the kindness he was known for. 'Good.'
I grinned back, showing all my teeth. 'Good. Now, I would like to move from these tables before the mould grows over us.'
Link laughed—a sound I could listen to for the rest of my life—and spun me from the table into a hug.
'Yes, Your Highness, let's go loot your castle.'