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So this is how it had all gone down --
-- It was all her mother’s fault, really, for pulling her aside one night to tell her that she was ready to learn for herself all about the vai-and-the-voe, told as it is through the sappy love story of the Thief King and the Sorceress -- and Rhondson was already worked up from her long day’s work at the tailor’s shop, so of course she’d come out of that conversation utterly convinced that she was going to find the love of her life waiting for her just outside the walls of Gerudo Town. Found her way to Kara Kara Bazaar only to find out that sure, there were all shapes and sizes of voe out there, but none of them could measure up to the image she had in her head of what a husband could be, and nobody seemed particularly interested in marrying a seamstress, and her mother was increasingly on her case about it, so.
So then there had been this delicate little Hylian voe in blue, meter and three quarters of him at best. Could probably be bowled over by a hydromelon with those skinny little legs of his. Made her uncomfortably aware that her walkabout had really only taken her as far as Gerudo Town’s front lawn, and if she was really intent on finding a husband she ought to look a bit farther north, but what if every voe in the world was as disappointing as the ones she’d already met?
Which is how and why she’d ended up spilling her guts at the feet of said little voe, baring her sad and tired heart for the kid as if he could fix her problem and find her a husband and get her mother to back off about it. And then he’d cocked his head and given her a long and piercing look, and shrugged his shoulders and ambled off.
And in retrospect, that should have been the moment she gave up and packed it in. No shame in going home and growing old husbandless, a Daughter of Twinrova; Urbosa herself had famously rejected all her Hylian suitors, and instead made a wife of her captain of the guard. But something about the little voe made going home seem -- well, not impossible, but unnecessary.
Which is why she’d still been at the Kara Kara Bazaar mending bedspreads when word came north that the Yiga had been slain in Karusa Valley, the Thunder Helm returned to Lady Riju; or why she’d still been there, watching from a rooftop with Konora and Shaillu, when Naboris had finally calmed her divine wrath, coming to rest atop Spectacle Rock.
She was glad for the view and the company and also the safety from a distance, and if she had wished for someone dashing voe’s shoulder to rest her head on as they watched the light show, she also found herself ruminating on how the little blue voe had looked when he had first ambled off, the way his toes dragged through the sand with tiredness, the way he’d paused and pulled a little stone tablet off his hip and stared at it, then made this weird little gasping noise like he’d just remembered something important. It was an odd thing to think about while watching the Divine Beast reorient herself vaguely to the northeast, but then again, he certainly was an odd little voe.
So maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised when he reappeared one afternoon to offer her a job way up in the Akkalas, a waypoint town somewhere between the Zora’s Domain and Death Mountain looking to open a tailor shop. And maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised to hear herself saying yes, even though it was so far away -- and maybe not far away enough from her mother, but that was neither here nor there; with Naboris calmed there were caravans travelling again.
She booked herself passage with a couple of vai out on walkabouts of their own under a severely chatty tour guide. Listened with half-hearted interest as she pointed out the Canyon Pass and Mount Hylia and the Great Plateau, the Hylian royal family’s old coliseum, old garrisons, old outposts; took point as they whipped the horses to a gallop past a group of hungry moblins; had a wonderful if bland dinner of stir-fried seafood and fruit cake at a place called Riverside Stable. In the morning they made for the Trilby Plain and took a left at Inogo Bridge -- stopping to let one of their passengers off, who was striking for the Domain and the Zora husband who most certainly waited for her there -- and right at Ternio in the shadow of Death Mountain. By nightfall they had reached the South Akkala Stable, where Rhondson bid the group farewell, and gorged herself on hot buns and egg tarts for dinner, with a plan to walk the road to Tarrey in the morning.
So this is how it had all gone down --
-- It had started with the old house southwest of Firly Pond, and the long-anticipated decision to knock it down after years and years and years of waiting for its homeowner to return. Then the stranger had bought it outright, fixed it up with a larder and a garden and an array of exotic weapons eerily and eagerly on display, got Bolson thinking about doing something on a larger scale up in the Akkalas. Set up an inn and a general store near the Great Fairy Shrine. Something to entice travellers to spend a night and a few rupees in good company.
So Hudson had gone up into the valley by the old Citadel, found a handsome plot of land where the sound of the Akkala Falls was a gentle reminder that the wilds were always close by, and built a home there. He recruited a Goron to aid in the demolition before finding himself in need of a good tailor, which is what had led the blue voe to seek out Rhondson. She hemmed his jackets. He taught her how to make rice. She tallied his finances, he built her a shop. He maybe wasn’t the most devilishly handsome voe in Hyrule, but then again nobody could live up to the image of the Thief King she had in her head -- and he was kind and thoughtful and charming and funny, and he always tried to do the right thing. Honest. A bit odd and particular, but she could appreciate a voe who could stand on his own two feet next to a Gerudo.
So this is how it had all gone down --
-- It had been a white-veil wedding in the Hatenan style, officiated by a Zora, attended by more Hylians and Goron and Rito than she had ever thought she would see in one place. Dinner was enthusiastically spicy, the cake monstrous, the music and dancing appropriately raucous, and of course they did the thing with the chairs; and Rhondson’s mother, though she sent her regrets for not being able to make the trip, sent up enough Noble Pursuits to drown a camel. Kapson took one sniff and decided against it. Fyson sipped at one and declared that enough for the year. Rhondson was confident that she’d drink the rest of them under the table, did so to Greyson and Pelison and a Shiekah kid who’d wandered in at some point and all of her husband’s old work friends, went tit-for-tat with Hudson until they finally both tapped out, sometime around midnight, to the voe in blue.
Where he put all that liquor nobody could tell. He was still that skinny little kid she’d met at the bazaar, only a bit more sunburnt, and maybe there was something else about him that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. The sword was new, the way it shimmered at his back like it belonged there.
They are sitting on the roof of her house, admiring the bone-white moon, eating the last of the salted hydromelon while her husband sleeps soundly with his head against her shoulder. The melon is the best proof against a hangover, Urbosa’s honour. He seems like the kind of kid who has somewhere to be or something to do in the morning.
“You know,” she says, carefully placing her tongue against her drunkenness, “I never thanked you for bringing me here.”
Because Mother raised a lot of things, but an ingrate isn’t one of them.
And if he appreciates her gratitude, he’s more just grateful that she could find a little happiness in the shadow of the Calamity, and he’s thankful for the dinner and dancing and drinks. He barters joy for joy and rupees otherwise. She shows him the gems she and Hudson stitched into her sirwal, and he shows her the gold seeds he brings to a place called the Lost Woods. They trade sips of ice water and bites of steak. She tells him about failing out of the guard’s academy. In return she learns about him meeting the Zora king. Somehow, those stories feel both too heavy for a wedding night, so around dawn she hears herself asking, does he know the story of the Thief King and the Sorceress?
He doesn’t, so she tells him: it’s a Gerudo legend as old as sand, about the king born to them every hundred years; and in this aspect, orphaned young and raised by his aunties. He was a heart-stealer and a conqueror, a gifted magician and statesman, who above all else loved his wife, the sorceress Naboris, loved her fiercely and passionately, courted her with the promise of all Hyrule as her garden. He was punished for that passion by the Goddess, who turned Naboris into an iron statue -- Vah Naboris, who cries endlessly to the heavens for her lost king -- while the Thief King was sealed in the Sacred Realm, to eternally watch over his queen, unable to touch her or speak to her until he is one day freed.
The story is many things: a warning against avarice, a musing on the nature of the Goddess, an explanation as to why there had been no king born to the Gerudo for ten thousand years. But it’s mostly a story about a love that persists beyond death.
He listens with rapt attention and wide blue eyes, holds his chin in his left hand and looks due east, to the rising sun, to Hyrule Castle. Atop Rhondson’s shoulder Hudson stirs a little and mumbles something about going to bed. She’d very much like to do that.
“Hey,” she says to the kid, “Kapson can put you up for a few hours if you want to sleep it off.”
He’d rather be on his way, but is thankful for the gesture. And in return for the story, he roots around in his pack and gives her a scale off the back of the dragon Dinraal, then hops off the roof, unfurls his glider, and heads off for the Torin Wetland.
So this is how it had all gone down --
She wakes up that afternoon next to her husband, in the house and town they built. He’s frying some eggs in Goron spice the way she likes it, and he’s framed and hung the fire dragon scale on their wall, and she’s thinking of drafting a spaulder and trousers in royal blue for a skinny little Hylian about a meter and three quarters tall. She’d spin the thread with sapphire to stave off the heat of her desert.
Through the dissipating fog of sleep, she says: “You ever think you’re a character in someone else’s story?”
And he says: “Like I’m the Thief King and you’re the Sorceress?”
She thinks on it. “Maybe.” Far in the distance Death Mountain wails a cry like Vah Naboris’, and a beam of light pierces the sky, and all of Tarrey Town steps out to watch the spectacle over a late brunch of coffee and steak and eggs.