In Nayru's Palm

More seconds passed.

Minutes really.

Nothing.

“Sheik, listen,” my companion breathed. I did. A faint scuffling echoed up to us. I got up, unrestrained now, and went to the mouth of the stone beast that had devoured the Sheikah women and their shadow aggressor. Climbing up iron rungs was Impa, clinging with whitened knuckles and resting after every step she gained. I leaned forward, balancing precariously on the lip of the well, and reached out my hand.

“Here,” I whispered. She looked up slowly, her eyes wide and, thankfully, back to their usual, pupilled state. Then she smiled wryly and took another step, reaching out and taking my bandaged hand in her calloused one. For a moment, I thought her weight would pull me over and into the maw, but two strong hands established themselves on the sides of my ribs and helped me lift her out into the world again.

We returned to the house a bit later. Impa and I held on to each other tightly all the way back—I was almost afraid to release her. For the first time in my life, my attendant had seemed mortal, and it had frightened me. To lose her would be to lose everything for me.

Even though we were all relieved that Impa had gotten out of—whatever that was—with her life, there was still a weight with us. The shadows may not have killed Pyrrna’s mother, but the fall certainly had. As much as I didn’t like her daughter, I had nothing against the woman, and though I didn’t really know her, I was upset over her loss. She had sacrificed her life to save me.

I recognized her now. She, like Letta, had been one of the women that had helped assimilate me into the Sheikah village. She had known who I was, and had died for that me. Why would she do that? Surely a spoiled Hylian princess wasn’t that important, not enough to give a life over? She wasn’t a guard of the castle—she barely lived within Hyrule itself. The Sheikah were allies, not citizens. So why? Why did she pay such a price for my life? I didn’t deserve it.

We entered the house with heavy hearts. Soun stood in his chair the moment the door opened, and Pyrrna tensed in her own chair. When they saw that we held Impa between us, Soun and Impa’s relative came forward and helped her to a chair. Pyrnna looked expectantly at the doorway, but saw nobody there. Her expression grew confused, and she turned to the one fully intact Sheikah adult present for an explanation. He winced.

“Pyrrna…”

“No.” The denial rang through the house like a knell. Her eyes were wide. Soun turned and looked at her, then at me, like I could explain better what had happened. I looked away, unable to meet his eyes.

“Pyrrna,” the man entreated her.

“No! I don’t believe you!” She stood and glared across the space between us and her. Her eyes were almost pleading. I sympathized despite the rift between us.

“Your mother…”

“Shut up! I don’t wanna hear—”

“Pyrrna.” Impa raised her head wearily. “Listen to me. Akana died a hero’s death tonight. Do not degrade her by denying her death. You are not the only one who mourns for her.”

The Sheikah girl dropped to her knees, shuddering. Seeing her so exposed and vulnerable grated on me. It was too raw. I had seen the woman die before my eyes, and yet I couldn’t pull together this much sorrow over her death? The woman had saved my life, and I couldn’t even cry for her? Sure, the tears threatened to come now, but they were only because of guilt and fellow suffering.

I turned and strode out the door.

Once I was outside, I regretted my departure a bit. Inside there was a crying girl, but out here…out here there were monsters, and some that couldn’t even be killed by human weapons. I didn’t know where I wanted to be.

I walked down the stairs and then turned and walked the flat path alongside them until I was in the corner of the stairs and the wall. There, I cried.

I did my best to be quiet as I did so, but I couldn’t help how my breath was so hard to pull in, and when I managed, I made terrible sounds. I hated it. I hated this crying, but I couldn’t stop.

Footsteps made sound against stone, and then against grass. Ten steps were taken on the grass before the owner reached me. A hand rubbed gently at my back, and the sounds I had tried to stop came out again. I cried into the shoulder made available to me, and was told it wasn’t my fault. I knew it was. I didn’t know exactly how, but it was. She had saved me.

Finally I stopped. I stopped, but now I was afraid to face the person that had comforted me through that.

“You all right, Sheik?” Soun said softly. I nodded and pulled away, grateful again for the wrappings over my face, though if they had been all that great they would have covered my leaky eyes too.

“Have you ever lost somebody close to you?” he asked. I looked at him, confused. He had his arms draped over my shoulders.

“I lost my mother,” I said. It wasn’t a definite sort of answer—more of a questioning “does that count?” sort of thing. It sort of lost its challenge, though, because my voice wasn’t behaving.

“Yeah, but you were young when that happened, weren’t you? Or was that fabricated too?” I didn’t answer. “Was it?”

“No. I was young.”

“So you’ve never lost someone close that you’ve grown up with.”

“Millions of soldiers gave their lives trying to prevent Ganondorf from killing my family. If not for me, they would have died protecting something truly important, not some princess that has never left her castle before.”

There was a lapse before I heard his awkward, “Ah.”

I bit my lip. “I do not want people to die for me. There are more important people out there to protect. Like Impa. Impa earned what she is, did she not? Was she born to her respect?”

“No. No she wasn’t,” he replied.

“She is somebody worth dying for. Not some child who cannot take care of herself, a child that knew nobody and did nothing.”

“I suppose,” he allowed me. “But then, there’s also respect for those that go about earning that respect, right? If you sit back and twiddle your thumbs and say, ‘Well, that’s that and I’m not worth all that,’ then their lives would be a waste, right? Why don’t you give their deaths a purpose?”

“I am not following you,” I said.

“Well, if you keep being a nothing and don’t try and fix it, they will have died in vain. But if you become somebody worth all that, then they will have protected somebody really worth the price. Somebody that grew up to be somebody worthwhile.” He grinned down at me. “Even if she is a crossdressing squirt.”

I scowled and turned away from him. For a second, however brief, I was willing to stop being mad at him, but no longer. He laughed and clapped my back.

“You gonna be all right, then?” he asked again.

“I’m fine,” I told him hotly. I heard him chuckle behind me. “What?” I demanded, turning and glaring him in the eye.

“Now you don’t sound like so much of a little princess,” he said, turning and walking back up the stairs.

The next morning we all had breakfast in the middle of the village, at the bottom of all the stairs. The whole village was together, eating what was called “beef stew” from a pot cooked from the house a few yards away. I stayed close to Impa, like I had the night before, and I knew I was casting her many concerned glances throughout the meal.

She looked the way she always did. From anybody that had known her as long as I had, they would have said nothing was wrong with her; there was no way she had sealed away some sort of shadow creature the night before, especially not one that had taken one of her kin with it. But when I looked closely, I could see shadows under her eyes, like one that hadn’t slept very well the night before. The whites of her eyes were not bloodshot, but they had a way of downcasting themselves when she thought nobody was looking. But I was.

Soun sat on my other side, and I observed him too. I was told he was turning fourteen that winter, and he would be a man by Sheikah standards. That was why he accompanied us—so he would have experience under his belt when he went out on his own to work as an adult. He didn’t look that old to me. He looked like a scrawny boy that was shoveling food into his mouth at an alarming rate.

Pyrrna worried me, though. She sat next to Soun’s father, as far away from Impa and me as she could get. She had been angry ever since she had learned of her mother’s death the night before, and she hadn’t spoken a word since. She avoided eye contact with the people around her, though there were so many other people with us that I don’t know how she managed it. It must have been hard to lose her mother so suddenly.

The villagers did not know that somebody had died just upstairs from here last night. They laughed and ate and told stories, assuming the stony silence at the Sheikah end of the circle was just a Sheikah thing. The Sheikah were always quiet, they must have thought.

Not this quiet.

After the meal, we thanked them and left through the mountains again. I waited before mounting, and, as I expected, my wolfo sprinted into our midst and proceeded to lick my face with such vigor that I had to pull away just to breathe. Soun even reached tentatively down and petted her head, which she allowed for a small amount of time. Pyrnna looked down her nose at Rue, but not even the horses were afraid of Rue anymore. She didn’t touch horses.

Not even the riderless little palomino gelding that walked behind us like a shadow.