Chapter Text
Her chosen knight. That was the title the blond boy bore now.
Of course, it hadn’t been the princess who’d “chosen” him. She’d barely had a say in the matter. Her father, the king, he’d made the decision to appoint Link to such high status. The boy, after all, showed great promise, his ability with a sword and reaction speed among the best in his class. The king would be a fool not to choose him. At least, that was what her father had said.
But that didn’t make her like him. It certainly didn’t make her tolerate him.
“Must you follow me everywhere I go?” came Zelda’s exasperated question as she turned on a heel to face the boy behind her. Her “chosen knight.” As it had been for the duration of the day, that boy stood just a short distance away from her, following her every step.
And, as it had been for the duration of the day, he didn’t respond further than a quick bow of his head. He was infuriating.
With a sharp huff of breath, the princess whirled back around and continued forward, making a point to accelerate her pace. If that sorry excuse of a knight couldn’t keep up with her, that was his problem.
Of course, that tactic didn’t work. It never had. The knight following diligently behind her would simply pick up his own pace in tandem with her, making no comment or complaint about it. But that didn’t stop her from trying. She’d been changing her pace, taking strange routes through the castle, everything she could think up to shake him off. Unfortunately for the princess, that little blond boy was good at his job. Everywhere her sharp and annoyed footsteps went, his quiet ones were quick to follow. No matter the area of the castle she traversed, his eyes burned into her back.
By the time she retreated to her bedchamber that evening, she’d resigned herself to the idea of an escort. At the very least, she could find solace in the little privacy she had, when that blond knight and his gaze would stand firmly outside the door of her chambers.
She spent her time in private the same way she always had. She would recite her prayers, plea with the Goddess. And once her unanswered pleas began to make her chest feel like a hollow cavern again, she’d quietly pull out the textbooks she had smuggled into her chambers from the castle library. She’d pore over pages and pages of diagrams, the kingdom’s plants and wildlife and technology. Tonight, she had decided on wildlife, retrieving her stolen copy of The Handbook of Hylian Creatures. Flipping through its pages, the corners of her lips twitched upward. But tonight was different, every arbitrary creak of the walls a reminder of the presence of that knight standing just outside.
Perhaps she could simply ignore his presence. Perhaps she could just get used to his watchful eye behind her, and pretend as though everything was as it should be. That was the idea in her head when she’d drifted to sleep that night.
The morning came with the reminder that she did not have the luxury of wandering the castle alone anymore. Opening the door met her with the sight of that Goddess-forsaken knight outside her door.
Had he slept?
She shook off the thought.
“You’re still here?” Her voice came out bitter and sharp.
He replied, again, only with a bow of his head.
The princess didn’t bother to keep her eyeroll to herself. What would the knight do, leave? She certainly hoped so.
Zelda spent much of her day retreating back into her bedchamber again and again, where the knight and his sapphire gaze had no view of her. To her continued surprise, he never made any move to follow her into that room, even refusing when she’d gestured at him to follow.
She’d only invited him in experimentally, of course. She wasn’t being serious. And so, it was a heavy relief when he’d refused.
Like her disdainful reactions to the knight’s presence before her each time she opened her door, she didn’t bother to hide from her face the way she felt about the parchment that found its way to her. Her face fell at the sight of the royal seal held firmly in the messenger’s hands. Her father wanted to speak with her. Again.
Almost condescending footsteps followed her through the palace. Sweet Hylia, thought the princess, a witness to one of these awful meetings.
As it turned out, the king’s disapproving expression was no different whether a knight was present or not. The company in the room didn’t matter to him, Zelda supposed, shoving the anger out of her facial expression. The king had more important things to be disappointed about.
“Zelda.”
“Father.”
Their cold greetings strung a line of tension between the two of them thick enough that it could be cut with a swing of a sword. The sword her knight carried on his back, perhaps. Again, she shook off the thought.
Her father, the king, sat higher in his chair. “You haven’t been trying to awaken your power. I should not need to remind you of the importance of your task.”
Sweet golden goddesses, this conversation again. What else was she expecting?
Zelda prepared herself to respond, built up her demeanor. She stood taller, forced her shoulders a little further back. “I’ve been doing what you asked of me. I’ve been trying everything I can—”
“It isn’t enough. You must dedicate yourself, all of yourself, to your dormant power! I’ve told you before, Zelda, that you must do everything in your power to awaken what lies within you!”
“I am doing everything in my power! If you would just listen—”
“You are to travel to the Spring of Courage in the Faron region due south to speak with the Goddess.”
Quickly, all forced formality was abandoned. “Father! That’s three days’ travel! You can’t expect me to—!”
“I expect you to understand the gravity of your task!” The king’s booming voice, echoing from the walls of the throne room, silenced the princess. “You are not to spend a moment of the journey alone. Goddess knows what pointless distractions you would occupy yourself with.”
“Father—”
“You are dismissed, Zelda.”
The princess couldn’t be bothered to reprimand the quiet footsteps that followed her away from the throne room. She’d almost entirely forgotten his presence.
Upon reaching her bedchamber, she’d fully slammed the door shut. It didn’t matter what the knight thought of her rash behavior — it wasn’t like he would say anything about it. Frustrated, Zelda brought her fists to her hair and let out a half-groan, half-shout. How could her father thrust something like that upon her so suddenly? How could he expect her to simply accept that her prayers, her asks, her pleas just weren’t enough? That she wasn’t doing enough? She couldn’t tell him that her every prayer to the Goddess made her feel emptier. She couldn’t tell him how sure she was that the Goddess had forsaken her. She was disappointing him enough already.
At least she was doing enough for something.
A quiet knock on her bedchamber door snapped the princess out of her angry thoughts. Right — that knight standing guard outside. She scoffed, and ignored him. And it seemed like that was the end of it, until a little scrap of paper slid beneath the door.
With a huff of breath, Zelda took the crumpled paper from the floor. Scrawled upon it in messy handwriting was “You OK?”
The humorless chuckle that escaped her lungs at the sight carried a weight she wasn’t expecting. Note-passing? He could at least try to act more mature than a schoolboy. With a quiet sigh, the princess cracked open the door, stashing the scrap of paper between the pages of the book sitting open on her desk.
“I’m fine,” she answered the knight standing before her. The furrowed brow and sapphire gaze pierced her like arrows to a target. It was like she was translucent, and he could see right through her.
Again, he made no response to her words. Well, not verbally. He tilted his head slightly at her, the gesture knocking the small earrings he wore askew.
Zelda cursed herself internally for noticing.
The princess let an exasperated breath escape her as she shut the door to her bedchamber behind her, sliding down to sit on the floor against it.
She hated that his presence beside her was almost comforting. At least he wasn’t her father. Perhaps it was for the better that the boy was silent. Was that rude? The princess decided, after a moment of thought, that she didn’t care.
Beside her, the boy — Link, if she remembered correctly — looked at her with those concerned blue eyes. He wiggled the pencil in his hand in a writing motion, which the princess caught out of the corner of her eye.
“...Writing?” Engaging with the knight, she decided, was better than ruminating over her father’s words. “You… want to write?”
He gave a slight nod in response, repeating the motion with the pencil.
“Can you… not speak?”
He furrowed his brow, lifting his hand and moving it back and forth like a seesaw. Kind of, the princess figured he meant. She only wished she could kick herself for deciding to interact with him, but she supposed was in too deep now. She’d brought this on herself, she supposed. The princess stood, retrieved a sheet of paper from the chamber behind her, and returned to her place against the wall beside him.
“...Here.”
The boy nodded his thanks, gingerly taking the paper from her hands. He leaned over it, scrawling words messily onto the sheet. He slid it back over to her.
“He shouldn’t have said that stuff to you.”
The princess’s breath hitched when she read the words. In that moment, she feared she understood the blond boy beside her, her throat restricting the words that so desperately wanted to come out.
She took the pencil from his hand. “It’s alright,” her practiced cursive littered onto the page. “I’ve become accustomed to it.”
“Doesn’t make it right.”
“I know.”
Zelda fidgeted with her hands as she sat there beside him. Why aren’t I leaving, she asked herself. She didn’t want to sit here and let this boy try his darndest to psychoanalyze her. But behind the door to her chamber lie pages of written prayers and offers and pleas for the Goddess that never listened to her, and the princess figured that maybe, just maybe, she preferred the knight’s lack of response over Hylia’s. It was true, at least, that she didn’t want the knight to speak to her.
Perhaps she found the slightest bit of comfort in being just a little less alone.
The sheet of paper sliding back in front of her broke her away from her wandering thoughts.
“Are you ready?”
Furrowing her brow, the princess glanced over at the knight. “Ready for what?”
He scrawled his response quickly across the page. “Going to Faron.”
Zelda scoffed, crossing her arms in front of her chest and looking away. Of course she wasn’t ready. Her father had sprung it onto her so suddenly. What was she supposed to do? Go to the spring, beg the Goddess to hear her, and return home empty-handed? Again? Sweet golden goddesses, she didn’t want to relive what had happened at the Spring of Power. Even more so, she didn’t want to relive the lecture she’d received from her father for her failure.
A gentle tap on her shoulder made the princess flinch. She looked at the knight, then down at the paper on the floor.
“I’ll take that as a no.”
A dead chuckle escaped her lips. “I’m sure my father would love to hear about how underprepared I am,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
The boy, Link, scrunched his nose and stuck out his tongue at her words. He gave a thumbs-down gesture, and returned to writing. Zelda raised a brow at his exaggerated, almost childlike reaction.
“Gross. I’m not reporting anything to him.”
The princess let her eyes widen at the words. Blasphemous, her first thought. But her second was a little more forgiving. There it was, on the paper in front of her — concrete evidence that she was not the only person in the castle who disliked her father. Perhaps this knight wasn’t so bad.
She took the pencil from his hand, the corner of her lips twitching upward. “Don’t let the king know you said that.”
“I would never.”
Link turned over the page for more space. On the other side, though, he found old, faded diagrams and printed words. At the sight, the princess mentally slapped herself. She should have checked that the page was blank. She should have, but she didn’t.
The knight wrote hesitantly over top of the faded text. “Is this stuff important?”
Zelda let out a sigh, covering her face with her hands. “No. It’s… it’s an old page. I’ve practically memorized that book already.”
Perhaps she shouldn’t have said that.
“Do you read a lot?”
She nodded from behind her hands.
“What kind of stuff?”
The princess cocked an eyebrow at the words. Was he… trying to make small talk with her?
“Why should you care?”
The knight shrunk back a bit at her sharp retort. “Just curious. Sorry.”
Sorry. The word sent a pang of guilt through her chest. Why was she doing that? Why was she making him apologize just for trying to talk to her?
“Textbooks. Usually textbooks.”
His lips curved up into a smile at her response. “So you’re all smart, then?”
She didn’t bother to hide her eyeroll. Of course she was smart. She wasn’t just the princess. She wasn’t just the daughter of the king. She had interests and hobbies just like any other Hylian, and it was stupid that it wasn’t what people expected.
Abruptly, Zelda stood, turning on a heel and opening the door to her bedchamber. “I’m… going to turn in for the night,” she said, forcing her shoulders back in feigned formality.
Something that she recognized as regret spread across her nerves like a mold as she shut the door. The princess did her best to shove the feeling away, sitting herself down at her desk. Her mind must be pure when reciting her prayers. That much had been made clear time and time again.
Turning the pages of the book knocked a little scrap of paper to the floor. Zelda leaned down and picked it up. “You OK?” it read.
She buried her head in her hands. No, she decided. She wasn’t.