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so sad so young? and even in sleep?
worse times are yet to come, my love.
“I wanted a new pair of gloves,” she says bluntly.
The Goddess Statue stares down at her with disinterest. “I wanted a new pair of gloves for my birthday, or if not, then I wanted a new bridle for my horse.” She pauses for a moment. “We still don’t get along very well. So I figured, if things weren’t going to progress organically anyway, that I might as well use a bribe.” The Goddess Statue picks its nose and makes plans for dinner, glowing like a small unholy bruise in its enclave. “I wanted a lot of terribly inconsequential things,” she continues, a little louder, the violin-string of her voice pulled taut against her throat. It’s spring. The water’s cold. The fabric of her dress billows grimly around her even though she’s barely moving, hasn’t moved for the last hour or so, and she hates it. “And then someone said the world was going to end on my seventeenth birthday, and now I’m not allowed to want anything.”
The Goddess Statue regards her dimly. So what?
“So I’m tired.”
The Goddess Statue stops picking its nose. Tired of what?
“Tired of trying to save everyone.” She unclasps her hands. “I can’t do it. You won’t let me.”
Is it my fault?
“I want it to be.”
That sounds like your problem, not mine.
The wind makes a sound as it skims the surface of the water, blowing her hair into her eyes. “My problems are your problems. If Hyrule falls, who will pray at your feet?”
The Goddess Statue shrugs. Bokoblins, it suggests. Mice. Ganon. It goes back to picking its nose. Her white funeral dress keeps billowing and billowing around her like her dead ancestors are trying to drag her body into the ground while behind her a boy with a sword shaped like salvation stares at the carvings on the wall, and wonders where they came from. It’s spring. The water’s cold. The sky’s black.
No one’s going to pray for you for a hundred years, she thinks fiercely. If you refuse to help me, you’re going to be forgotten. But she doesn’t say any of this out loud. She’s a good princess after all, a dutiful descendant of a goddess from another time. She’ll complain about the weather and the boy, and she’ll complain about the gloves she never got, but she won’t tell anyone about the thing in the corner of her bedroom. The weight of knives on the back of your neck. The weight of a kingdom. That’s a princess’s secret, the bomb which all people chosen by a prophecy from hell carry under their tongue, between the heart and the eyes, where all things good go to die.
::
“I wanted a new pair of gloves,” she tells Impa, who already knows this. Impa nods her head sympathetically and readjusts her sleeve. Impa is a Sheikah warrior who can fight with knives and magic and science. She can also summon a giant frog that will appear from a portal in the sky and crush your body into the ground, killing you instantly. Impa is very good at what she does.
“I’m sorry, your highness,” says Impa, who is better at her job than Zelda will ever be.
“Don’t be,” Zelda says. She stands up and moves to the other side of her study. Light floods into the room from the windows in the domed ceiling, leaving them neck-deep in sun. Outside, in the long corridor that leads away from here and to her quarters, the master sword dozes in Link’s left hand. He holds it like something made of glass.
Zelda retrieves a book from the shelf and flips it open. It’s a slim volume, bearing a brown leather cover and clean, hand-cut pages. The latest entry is blank save for the date; last Thursday’s date, marking her latest trip to the Spring of Power and therefore her latest failure. She’s been putting off filling out Thursday’s row for a few days now. What’s the point? They’re all the same. Next week she will go to the Spring of Courage. Next week she will go to the circus. She dips her quill like someone dipping their hand into fire.
“You should be more upset with me,” she says as she waits for the ink to dry. “Gloves in the face of Calamity? Preposterous.” She laughs.
Impa looks over her shoulder. Spring of Power. Take eighteen. Notes: nothing. Changes since the last visit: nothing. Result: nothing.
Impa makes a sound that’s halfway between a sigh and an exhale. “You are upset enough with yourself to compensate for all of Hyrule, your highness.” She takes a step backwards, then another, and Zelda almost has it in her to apologize for bringing her personal feelings into the discussion, but Impa would only apologize in return. She’s very good at that, too. Much better than Zelda will ever be. It’s a pattern, you see, with all of the people around her in this godforsaken castle. Everyone is doing things right except her. Everyone is going to the right places except her.
“I will wait outside with Link,” Impa says apologetically. “Let me know if you need anything.” Zelda puts her head on the table and counts sheep on the domed ceiling until she dozes off.
::
“I wanted a pair of gloves. I thought I saw some, just beneath the surface of the water. So I tried to reach them, but I lost my grip, and I guess I was more tired than I had anticipated, because, well,” she draws the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Did you see any gloves?”
Link shakes his head. His bangs are clumped together and water is dripping into his eyes. A small puddle is beginning to form on the floor beneath him, soaking into the carpet and turning the fabric dark red, like a wound. No one thought to give him a blanket, so he didn’t ask. Though he is shivering, almost imperceptibly, and hiding one knee.
Zelda leans forward. Link leans backwards on instinct. “Are you cold?” she asks.
Head-shake. No.
“Are you sure?”
Yes.
“You know, it’s been weeks now, and I don’t think I’ve heard you say a word. Do you think I’m stupid?”
He stares at her like a wet puppy that’s just been kicked in the side and then evicted from its house of sanctuary on the basis of entirely false accusations. Now that’s an emotion, she thinks selfishly. Why did they let him keep an eye on her anyway? Who put him here? Was it Impa? Was it him?
Link and sword. Boy and prophecy. Master sword. Master swordsman. Master of what? Blue lips. Blue eyes. If he dies, the blame will be hers as well.
“I’m sorry you had to save me,” she says lightly. “It must have been awful, carrying the weight of all of Hyrule’s failures on your back.” She pushes a strand of hair out of her face. It’s all wet anyway, both of them wet dogs in the rain, kicked out of the cycle of reincarnation, but she likes being able to see the road ahead of her even if she doesn’t quite know how to reach it. When she came to she was already bundled up, Impa and her small army of personal attendants crowded around her in a tight circle while Link sat on a cushioned velvet chair a little ways to the side, hugging the cushion to his chest. Her father had been in a meeting and could not come to see her. Impa had to leave to meet with her siblings. In spite of all the trouble she caused everyone, arriving at the castle as a rag doll instead of a prince from a fairytale, things had not gone well at the Spring of Courage. Not that they ever have. But it has been a while since she blacked out of the experience, instead of walking away.
“Yo—”
A sound, and then nothing. Link closes his mouth, opens it, closes it again. He frowns, so faintly that she almost misses it. He lowers his gaze like he’s climbing into the mouth of a volcano, his clumpy wet bangs still dripping, his shoulders still slightly hunched. She’s never seen him this conflicted, but then and again, she doesn’t spend much time looking. He has the presence of a thread of moonlight. Blink and you’ll miss it. Blink again, and there it is. He has eyes like water.
She throws a pillow at him. “Go get some rest.” He looks like he wants to protest, but since when has she ever been important enough to necessitate a reply from Link, the Chosen One? She turns over, pulling the covers over her head. “I’m going to sleep now,” she says, suddenly annoyed, or maybe annoyed all along and only now realizing it. “Go away. Good night.”
::
He had been staring at a pair of squirrels passing acorns between them when he heard the splash. Turning around, it registered with mechanical precision that the princess was no longer standing in the water, but lying in it. He panicked. He dropped his sword. In his haste to reach the princess, floating in the water like a lily, he tripped on the three steps that led to her location, cutting his knee open and skinning his left palm. He would have felt stupid, but he was preoccupied with checking her pulse, the temperature of her forehead, the sound of her heart. She did not seem to be dying. When the static in his head finally began to settle, it occurred to him that her mouth was moving, and so he stopped to listen. Half-formed words climbed out of the column of her lovely throat, fortune-talk of disaster and demons. Something something, apocalypse. Something something, failure. She did not speak very often about the things that scared her, although it was clear, even or perhaps especially to him, that there was something in the corner of her bedroom which watched her as she slept. She sounded tired, even now. Her lower lip was bleeding.
You’re not a failure, he said. A bird tittered. She continued to mumble in her midday delirium.
He had been staring at the squirrels when the princess pitched forward into the water, but he had also been thinking about things, which is an activity many would be surprised to find he sometimes engaged in. If things were rocky for him, he could only imagine the kind of precipice the princess woke up at each morning, stretching her arms over her head to the sight of a kingdom waiting to be saved by her sixteen-year-old hands. Had she taken any breaks lately? He of all people should know, having followed her everywhere since the incident with the pot lid and the guardian, having been an active part of the laundry list of stressors adding to the weight on her shoulders. She hadn’t. Thus the terseness. Thus the impression of the water lily.
Lifting the princess gingerly onto his back, careful not to let her long hair tangle with his baldric, he waded out of the water, away from the Goddess Statue and its cold, indifferent eyes, and began the long walk back to the castle.
::
“What is this?”
Link stares at her expectantly. He shifts his weight from side to side, like a wet dog that’s come in from the rain, tracking dirt all over the shoes lined up at the front door, waiting with a touch of guilt to be forgiven. She peels the package open.
“Gloves?”
He shrugs, suddenly uncertain.
“You got me gloves?”
He looks off to the side like she’s accused him of murder.
The trip to the Spring of Courage was a failure. There are ten days left until her seventeenth birthday. The seventeen-year-old boy her father has assigned to make sure she doesn’t give up on saving the world and accidentally walk herself off a cliff has gifted her a pair of gloves, made of good leather, branded with the signature of a seamstress she doesn’t know. A bandage for a neck wound. A salve for a dying man. If Hyrule falls, then at least one person knew that the princess was more than a prophet’s midsummer dream. When Hyrule falls, she hopes someone prays for him.
She puts on the gloves. They fit perfectly.