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When Cremia asked what happened to the little lost horse, and Romani told her about the fairy-child who appeared in the night to reclaim his steed and help her fend off ghosts from the sky with his magic arrows before riding off at dawn—well, it wasn’t right to scold Romani so harshly. Cremia never wanted to grow up to be that kind of adult, you know, one who ignores a child’s feelings and snaps at her for being a dreamer, telling her to shut up and get back to work. She used to have all kinds of dreams of her own, mostly revolving around being swept off on a grand adventure which revealed her to be the secret lost princess of some forgotten kingdom with magical powers yet to be awakened, that sort of thing. But there are daydreams and then there are the tall tales a little girl tells when she doesn’t want to admit that she was running around terrorizing barn owls all night instead of sleeping, and a story about a magical bow-wielding, bunny-hood-wearing forest child named Grasshopper... it just doesn’t sound very believable, does it? Can you blame Cremia for being skeptical?
She had no idea he would come back.
Romani gives her a smug look before sprinting off to hug her little friend, whose name, as Cremia suspected, isn’t actually Grasshopper. He has a bow and quiver but took off the bunny ears since last night, and there are other details Romani never mentioned: the boy is in desperate need of a haircut, a proper bath, several meals, and, from the looks of it, about a week’s worth of sleep. And then there are those eyes. He has the haunted eyes of a child who’s had to teach himself how to be an adult. Cremia recognizes it in an instant because she’s seen it in the mirror, and she thanks the goddess of time that Romani doesn’t have to, that time is flowing at its proper speed for her innocent little sister.
While Romani drags Link upstairs to look at her toys and drawings, his fairy companion stays behind to explain why they’re here. Link wants to leave his horse in their stable for the night, since Cremia and Romani have already taken good care of her and he has nowhere better for her to stay at the moment, and he’d also like a ride back into Clock Town. The stall where they’d kept little Epona is still there, unused at the moment, and Cremia was coincidentally just about to head into town anyway, so she readily agrees, hitching up the wagon while the fairy flies off to rescue her human.
For an armed and thoroughly mysterious ragamuffin, Link is easy to talk to, or maybe it’s just that Romani isn’t the only one feeling bored and starved for companionship. Cremia tells Link about the the carnival in two days, and how she’s been running herself ragged getting this big order ready in time. Romani does her best to be helpful, usually, but she’s just a little girl and shouldn’t have to worry about their situation. Better for her to stay obsessed with her silly “ghosts” while Cremia deals with keeping the family business afloat, as a good elder sister should. But it’s hard. The cows have been skittish and stressed, which impacts their milk production, and milk bottles have been turning up broken during the night—Romani nearly cut her foot on a shard of glass just the other morning. Cremia thought at first that her little sister had been using bottles for target practice again, but Romani swore up and down that it wasn’t her, and it’s usually obvious when she’s trying to lie. Cremia tried speaking to those brothers at the horse track down the road, thinking they might have seen the culprit, but they ignored her.
“Thank you for being so patient with my sister. I know she can be a little, um, much. She just isn’t accustomed to being around other children, I think.” Cremia sighs. “Poor Romani. She must be so bored, stuck at the ranch all the time.”
Link nods to show he’s listening, watching the field grasses roll past. The gold-encrusted hilt of the oversized sword on his back glitters in the light of the setting sun. The decoration seems pointless to Cremia, except as a shining beacon that announces I HAVE MONEY AND NOTHING SENSIBLE TO SPEND IT ON, PLEASE MUG ME, but talking about her financial woes may have just put her into a cynical mood. Between Link’s scratched, dented shield and his dirty clothes, she suspects that there’s a longer and more interesting story behind the sword than him waltzing into a smithy with an overstuffed wallet and his eye on the shiniest object available for purchase.
(She briefly entertains the possibility of Link being some sort of royalty, perhaps the exiled heir to some foreign fairyland straight out of a daydream. It would explain the absurd weapon and his fine horse, which he rides without a saddle, and it’d figure that Romani would get a visit from a magical prince before Cremia did.)
“I guess that isn’t a problem for you, huh? You seem very... well-traveled.”
The boy shrugs.
“It must be nice, seeing what’s out there in the world. But hard, too, in its own way.”
He nods.
“How long have you had Epona? She’s a beautiful creature.”
Link’s eyes light up, and he raises two fingers.
“Two what? Two days? Two years? Two Cuccoos?”
He cracks what she suspects is a rare smile and bashfully shakes his head, but his fairy friend is sleeping under his hat and unavailable for translation, and then Cremia realizes that the usual route ahead is blocked off, so she has to redirect the wagon toward a different path. The conversation peters out for a while.
Halfway to Clock Town, Cremia looks up at the sky. “The moon is getting big, isn’t it? So strange. I wonder if that thing really will...”
She bites her tongue. It feels good to speak with someone who isn’t her little sister, but Link is still only a kid himself. Loneliness is no excuse for scaring him without need.
“Well. I’m sure it’s nothing,” she finishes lamely. “Somebody would... there’s the mayor, all the town guards... somebody would do something about it if it were anything serious, right?”
“...”
“...Link?”
He’s left his spot where he sat behind her and nocked an arrow. Just as Cremia twists around to see what he’s doing, a pair of masked bandits bursts out from nowhere, shouting and waving pitchforks, of all things. Before she has time to be surprised, much less afraid, one of the bandits screams as an arrow sprouts from his raised arm. The wound has no chance to bleed as a thick scab of ice forms over it, the frosty edges crawling down to his fingertips and up toward his shoulder until the whole limb is encased. He screams louder, in a voice that Cremia recognizes but can’t seem to place, and his comrade frantically chips at the ice block which has consumed his arm. The wagon rolls on, unharmed.
Link sets down his bow, gives Cremia a dull shrug, and curls up on the floor between two milk crates, where he falls instantly asleep.
They make it to Clock Town without any further drama, not counting any inner turmoil as Cremia questions her own senses. There’s a Goron sitting at the milk bar and chatting with Mr. Barten, a sour-faced man with a big mustache slouching over his drink, and a big round Zora is muttering to himself by the stage as she and Link unload the crates of milk. The boy does a double-take at the Zora, but Cremia happens to call him over at that moment and he scampers along to help with the rest of the cargo.
Afterward, Cremia gives Link some of the leftover milk as thanks for his help, telling him to keep the bottle (he looks delighted about that part, for some reason) while she goes back in to make sure all is accounted-for with Mr. Barten. By the time she returns, the boy is still loitering near the empty wagon, and the sight gives her a bad feeling. It’s dark out. Those little kids with the blue hats have all been called home for supper by their mothers and tucked into their beds now. Link has the poise of a person much older than his appearance suggests, but he’s just a kid, too.
“Are you here in town with your parents for the carnival of time?” Cremia asks.
Link shrugs off the question. Cremia’s heart sinks. She wonders if she ought to invite him back to the ranch, but she doesn’t have any good place to put a stray kid, since she and her little sister already share a bedroom and she is not letting anybody except Romani sleep in Romani’s bed. That’s a coldhearted way to think about it, though, so Cremia tells herself that there’s just no point in making an offer that Link will surely refuse. He asked for a ride to Clock Town, after all, and he knows his own business. Even if he’s hardly any older than Romani.
“Um.” Cremia rubs her eyes. “Just in case you want to know, the Stock Pot Inn is still... it’s nine thirty, is it? It should still be open for another half-hour, I think. There might have been a last-minute cancellation, so... if that’s... something you need... you might talk to Anju, the innkeeper. Tell her I sent you.”
She doesn’t know if she still holds enough sway with Anju to convince her to take the boy in, but if she doesn’t, well, then at least Anju will be the one to have turned him away.
“And... thank you for your help tonight.”
Cremia hugs Link, because he looks like he needs it, but he just stands there with his arms stiff at his sides like he doesn’t know what to do with them. She lets go and he runs off, still clutching that empty milk-bottle, his fairy friend darting after him like a firefly in the night.
On the ride back home, Cremia looks up at the enormous moon, staring straight into its unnatural eyes. For a moment she pretends that she’s still Romani’s age, and sticks her tongue out at it.
Cremia was right about the available room and wrong about the inn still being open, but the door on the second-story veranda was unlocked and Link has a hookshot. For such a relentless goody-goody, Tatl thinks, he’s impressively nonchalant about breaking and entering.
Link shoots a fire arrow at the logs in the fireplace without even looking, carefully arranges his three transformation masks on the table, sets down the empty bottle from Cremia, and then dumps everything else in a pile on the floor, including the goofy cow mask she gave him before they went into the bar. This room seems unoccupied, which Link assumes is because one of the beds looks broken, but he locks the door and then grabs one of the chairs and wedges it beneath the door handle just to soothe his own paranoia. Remembering that he hasn’t had time to update the bombers’ notebook yet today, he checks off the box labeled “HELP ROMANI - GHOSTS”, then writes in two new entries (“SAVE LULU’S EGGS (SEVEN)” and “HELP CREMIA - MILK DELIVERY”) and checks them off. He starts to add a third entry but doesn’t know what to write. The Zora mask stares emptily up at him, flanked by the two other dead faces.
Link tosses the notebook aside and flops facedown onto the bed, the one that isn’t crushed in the middle. He hasn’t slept in a real bed since last winter, when he arrived at an inn much like this one and promised to help with any chores that needed doing in exchange for a room plus a stable and hay for Epona. It wasn’t so bad, mostly; he’d hauled water for the bath and chopped vegetables in the kitchen and scrubbed all the floors, and the innkeepers were nice enough—two old people with an equally arthritic cat that skipped past purring and drooled when Link picked it up—but they kept asking awkward questions about parents and orphanages, and the need to find Navi called to Link like a bird’s instinct to migrate, one which he had no choice but to resist. He’d tried to keep searching through the winter of the year before, when he didn’t know to expect anything worse than the gentle flurries and chilly mornings that came to the Kokiri forest. He’d only realized his mistake when the heavy snows roared in and it was already too late to flee for civilization, and he and Epona almost died for it. What an embarrassing end that would’ve been: the washed-up former hero of time, all of twelve years old, frozen to death out in the middle of nowhere because he didn’t expect winter to be so cold.
“Ugh, what a ramshackle inn,” Tatl sniffs, examining a patch of bare wood where the torn wallpaper’s peeled away. “Are all their rooms like this? You really do get what you pay for, I guess.”
Link grunts.
He thinks about the cat. And the old innkeepers, who spoke to him with kindness and liked it when he played the fairy ocarina by the fire in the evenings. He’s almost too tired to sleep, and if he dwells for too long on what happened today, he’ll get bogged down by memories he doesn’t want to revisit. Because he failed. He used to be called the hero of time, but soon he’ll have to go back to the first day and everyone will be right back where they started. He let Mikau die, he let Lulu down and then further hurt her with his deception, and when he plays the song, she won’t even have her babies anymore. He’s just as bad as the pirates who stole those Zora eggs and left Mikau to bleed out slowly in the water. Some hero. How do you save a whole kingdom and then fail to save one person who needs you? He should have tried harder. He should have gotten to the bay sooner. He saw what he saw, and when a person gets cut open like a rabbit there’s just nothing you can do, but he’s supposed to be a hero...
It was a nice cat. It liked to sit on Link’s lap and knead his leg with its claws while he picked out the knots in its fur. The innkeepers told him it was older than he was, which they must have thought was extremely funny because they kept bringing it up.
Lying in a bed feels good.
When he goes back to the first day, that pirate lady’s leg will heal. He doesn’t know if that’s good. A hard angry pit in his belly says no, but he’s not sure whose feeling he’s feeling right now: the thoughts and fears (and so many regrets) of three other people crowd in against his own. His head gets noisy if he lets it.
What if he put on one of the masks and never took it off? Link would sooner befriend the Deku butler’s son than become him, but the lives Darmani and Mikau left unfinished seemed so good. Darmani was big and strong and the other Gorons cared about him, they mourned and built a tomb when he died, and then they celebrated when they thought he’d come back. The Goron elder said he wanted Darmani to be their leader someday, and Link isn’t sure if he would want to be in charge of anyone, but he maybe wouldn’t have minded being called a hero if it meant what the Gorons seemed to think the word means. In Hyrule, people just called him a hero when they wanted him to do things for them. And Mikau got to play music, not the magical kind that turns tortured souls into masks or rainclouds into sunshine and back, but music for its own sake, because he loved it, and other people loved it, too. His friends cared about him. He almost got to be a papa, if only he’d lived a little longer, and Link doesn’t expect to grow up or have his own children even if he makes it out of Termina, but it felt sort of nice to play pretend, until it didn’t.
The masks on the table are watching him.
“Whoa, Link, you have to come listen to this!” Tatl hisses. “The people in the next room—you can hear everything they’re saying! Come on!”
“...Mmph.”
“Come oooonnn..!”
Link drags himself over to the bare patch on the wall where Tatl hovers and peeks between two water-warped boards. Tatl squishes herself in close so she can look and listen, too.
He sees Anju first, sitting on the edge of a bed with her head in her hands, slumped and defeated, while a stocky middle-aged woman Link assumes is her mother sits on the other bed. A mannequin wearing a silvery white mask and matching dress stands by the wall, behind and between the two women.
“Cremia is your best friend, isn’t she?” says Anju’s mother.
Link strains to hear Anju’s murmured reply. “I wonder if Kafei really is at Cremia’s place...”
“If he is, your mother will give him a smack.”
“‘Kafei’, ‘Kafei’, where have I... oh!” Tatl whispers in Link’s ear. “That’s the mayor’s adult son. Mayor Dotour and Madame Aroma.”
Useful information to add in the notebook, but the mention of Cremia is what catches Link’s attention. He’s never met this Kafei, or if he did, Tatl didn’t say so, but he left the ranch with Cremia just a few hours ago and he knows for a fact that only she and her little sister were there at the time. What does Kafei have to do with them?
“Besides, think about Cremia,” Anju’s mother continues, unknowingly answering Link’s question. “She needs strength from a partner and business support from Madame Aroma. If Kafei really has run off with Cremia, she'll get both.”
Tatl chortles. “Oh, goddess. Politics, money, a love triangle... it’s like a trashy drama, and we’ve got front-row seats!”
Link raises a finger to his lips. Too late. Tatl’s at that point of exhaustion where everything is hilarious.
“Hey, Lulu is single now, isn’t she? Do you think she would be interested in a human woman?” Tatl snickers almost too hard to speak. “We could set her up with Cremia and make it a love square!”
Link glares and swats Tatl away before going back to listening.
“—marrying a man who runs off when he’s about to be married? It would make your life unhappy,” the older woman is saying. “...Just like your mother’s.”
“But the letter said he definitely would come back,” Anju weakly protests.
“Hmph! Come back to what? Won't this town be crushed beneath the moon the morning after tomorrow? Forget about that letter. For now, just try to survive. Everything else will follow.”
When the moon falls tomorrow night, the ranch will burn with the rest of Termina, but Anju and her mother don’t know that. Anju is thinking instead of Cremia, and how they might resolve the tensions that have developed between them without her even realizing it. If she had received some token from Kafei along with his letter—his special pendant, maybe,which would have proved beyond doubt that his letter was genuine—she might have decided to stay in Clock Town, but her conviction is crumbling under her mother’s pragmatism. She wonders what she’ll do if Kafei really is at the ranch.
The letter crumples in Anju’s sweaty fist. “Yes... Mother, you’re right. Thank you.”
Tatl is sulking by the table when Link returns to it. He picks up his bomber’s notebook and the stub of charcoal. He turns to a new page.
“What are you doing?” Tatl asks.
ANJU GOT LETTER FROM FIANCÉ KAFEI (MAYOR’S SON, DOTOUR AND MADAME AROMA) BUT HE’S MISSING — KNOWS CREMIA?
“Are you serious?!” says Tatl. “What about everything else? We have another giant to wake up, and Romani, and those Zora eggs, and those other temples to go back to... we don’t have time for you to play matchmaker, too!”
Link ignores her.
“Do you have an addiction to hard-luck cases or what? Kafei probably got cold feet and panicked instead of just confessing to Anju... that kind of thing happens all the time. Besides, his mother and father are important people. If he’s really in danger, then somebody’s already looking for him.”
Link keeps writing. He’s left-handed and too tired to pay attention to what he’s doing, so the charcoal leaves black smudges all over his hand and the paper.
“Is this because of what I said? It was only a joke, come on.”
“...”
Realization strikes Tatl, and she kind of hates that she can guess what Link is thinking. They’ve been stuck with each other for way too long. “Look. What happened this morning, it... was sad, but you don’t have to keep trying to fix everything for everyone. This Kafei guy isn’t dead, I promise.”
Link licks the side of his hand and drags it over the tablecloth. The stain doesn’t come off.
“Ugh, you’re impossible.”
Link finishes writing and Tatl wants to shriek. All they have to do is awaken the last giant and then do whatever comes after that, but he’s physically incapable of not making other people’s problems his own, so who knows how long it’ll actually be until she can see Tael again. And she has no choice but to stay with this weird kid, because the moon is falling and Link is the only game in town as far as, well, ensuring there still is a town the day after tomorrow. She misses Tael. After today she doesn’t miss Skull Kid, though. Not anymore.
Link closes his notebook. He’s been so tired for so long that it’s become a basic fact of existence rather than anything to be remarked upon, but he can feel himself nodding off, so he kicks off his boots and finally goes to bed. After months of sleeping outdoors, the blankets feel warm and luxuriously soft, even if they do smell like they’ve sat in a musty closet for too long. He has no plan for what happens if Anju or some guest tries to come in here before he wakes up, but he doesn’t care. The fire crackles. He’s asleep in seconds.
Tatl tries to stifle a yawn and puts her head in her hands. Link does the heavy lifting when it comes to fighting and puzzle-solving, but she’s been with him all along and hasn’t had many opportunities to properly rest. She’s seen things today that she never wanted to. She doesn’t know what to do about any of it. They—well, Link—can fix some things, retrieving stolen Zora eggs and saving Deku princesses, but that’s all he’s doing, fixing things. It’s like Skull Kid has been skipping around throwing glass cups and porcelain plates at every wall in sight, and Link is following after him, desperately trying to gather up all the broken pieces. Putting them back together is so much harder than careless destruction, and if a piece is gone forever, well, what then?
Goddess. She saw somebody die today.
Tatl settles down on the edge of the pillow on the broken bed, shivers despite the warmth of the room, and then relocates to the pillow next to where Link’s head rests. Drifting off to sleep, she dreams that she and Tael are playing in a sunny meadow filled with bluebells and campion, a place where they once lived before they met Skull Kid. It’s almost serene except for the hordes of seagulls screeching overhead, and Tatl keeps asking Tael if he hears them too, but he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He refuses to pay any attention to the sky, no matter how many times she tells him to look up.
In his dream, Link is back in Hyrule, sitting on the roof of a house in Kakariko Village with Sheik at his side. They’re the same age as him, just a child, and instead of bandages over their face, they wear a white Keaton mask, but their eyes are exactly as he remembers, red and elegant as polished jewels. Sheik tells Link that their mama won’t let them stay betrothed to him even though they were promised to each other at birth, because he grew up to be a horse thief and a killer and he could hang for those crimes. If they are to be together, Sheik says, Link first has to let them cut gills into his throat with their long knife. Link, who can talk in his dreams sometimes, says that he’ll think it over; he likes Sheik very much, but this is a serious decision, and he doesn’t really want to be a Zora. He likes frogs better. Sheik leans over to rest their head on his shoulder, and drool dribbles down his arm.
Two hours later, an inebriated Goron who just so happens to be named Link tries to let himself back into his room, but the door won’t open. Perplexed, he decides he must have the wrong one and lumbers over to check the next door down. The key doesn’t even fit. He could go wake up the innkeeper, but he doesn’t like to make a fuss, and he’s so very sleepy, so he shrugs and decides to take a snooze right there in the middle of the hallway. Whatever he dreams, he’ll forget it in the morning, waking up with a mild hangover and twin dancers fussing at him for blocking their way to the bathroom.
Until then, it’s still night.
The Skull Kid stands atop the clock tower over a sea of rooftops, the yellow eyes of the mask bulging like sickly suns. He won’t kill Link while the little hero sleeps, though he easily could. The rules have already been set, and making a move against an opponent out of turn isn’t how this game is played. Link can prolong his turn for as long as he likes. Skull Kid doesn’t cheat.
Tael last saw his big sister two days ago when they were separated in the wooded labyrinth beneath the clock tower. He knows where Tatl and the boy in green should go to find and awaken the guardians of Termina, but they haven’t come up here to receive his advice, and Skull Kid will hurt him if he tries to get out from under that horrible moon. Tael’s been waiting for him to fall asleep so he can escape, but Skull Kid hasn’t been sleeping—he capered and giggled all throughout the first day, and now he just stands like a weathervane and twitches sometimes. If Tael tries to fly away, Skull Kid will hit him. If he makes too much noise, Skull Kid will hit him. That grotesque mask scares Tael, but he’s even more scared of asking Skull Kid to take it off.
Tael quivers.
The gears within the tower grind in circles, and the clock ticks below Skull Kid’s feet.