In Nayru's Palm

I slid slowly back into consciousness. The ground beneath me was a far shot from the soft sand of my earlier location. It was solid, like the stone floor of my room. I sat up, expecting to see greys and reds and golds when I opened my eyes, but instead started when I saw expanses of rust brown beneath a blue sky.

My head swiveled sharply on my neck. I was in a cranny of rocks, also that reddish-brown color, hidden from anybody that would pass by, but yet sat on a flat spot. Impa was nowhere to be seen.

“Hold still, princess,” chided a soft, male voice. The tone was odd, for it sounded like whoever used it was speaking absentmindedly. I looked up, and met the large eyes of something huge, brown, and not human. I tried leaping to my feet, but I had a fleeting impression of meeting fabric instead of rock with my toes and then my face met what my foot missed. My eyes stung as my nose sent pain through my whole face, and I clasped my hand over it and tried not to cry.

“Hoo hoot! That is not holding still, princess,” laughed the thing. I turned to it. The thing had not moved from its perch. The eyes were really not difficult to meet, since they took up most of its face. When I moved on from there, I saw feathers, folded wings, and taloned feet. A bird. An owl. I recognized it a bit late, but I had only seen illustrations in books of them, and I had no idea that owls were so…so LARGE.

He tossed his head from side to side, sending the long, thin brown feathers on top of his head quivering and swaying like an odd imitation of hair, and then he twisted his head and looked at me upside down. I stared, wondering whether or not to be revolted. That wasn’t natural, was it?

“Where is Impa?” I asked weakly. The head rotated again until it was properly oriented on his body.

“She went to get food and to find the people you will be staying with. I intercepted her here, and she asked me to watch over you.” He cocked his head to the side. “I do hope she has you wear gloves, because I can’t see any other way you’re going to cover that up.”

I frowned and looked at my hands. One was fine, but my right hand…

The sacred triangle, the Triforce, seemed tattooed to the back. But tattoos didn’t glow. I held it closer to my face. The three triangles, their corners all touching, were bright golden yellow, with the inner triangle they formed shone like the whites of an eye. My skin was almost as white as the center triangle, but the insignia still shouldn’t have been so prominent. Could gloves really cover that? Something like that must have been put there by the goddesses…

I felt my pulse in my ears as the truth of that mental statement sank in. The Triforce was the symbol of the three goddesses of Hyrule: Din, Farore, and Nayru. Power, courage, and wisdom. And it was on my hand…

Why? Why would the insignia of the goddesses be on the back of my hand?

“Zelda.” I turned around, and saw Impa with a…something, slung over her shoulder. It was a large, horse-sized, scaly green thing. Its stomach was what part of the beast rested on her shoulder, and yet the tail brushed the hard dirt beneath her feet.

“What is that?”

“Breakfast.” She dropped it on the ground, and its head dropping limply to the ground, with its neck doing nothing to support it, made me suddenly ill. The head was huge and triangular, and a set of huge, long, triangular, pointy teeth lined the inside of its mouth. It smelled like cooked meat, even though it seemed freshly dead. Its front half was plated in huge green armor, even slightly eclipsing its small, piggy eyes, but its tail seemed relatively unprotected. It only had two feet, just behind its short neck.

My face must have shown my disgust.

“It’s a dodongo, and they’re just fine to eat if you know how to kill them properly.”

“I’m assuming you know how to kill it without letting it explode?” the owl asked dryly.

“Yes, but I doubt you would be able to manage it, Kaepora.” She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, then took one of her larger knives and stabbed it under one of the large plates. The sound of knife in meat made my stomach roll. “You have to throw something sharp in their open mouth and puncture the organ that lets them breathe fire, or it swells and bursts.”

“And how do you manage getting anything in its mouth?”

“You know how often they breathe fire. They have to take in a really big breath to do so, and they have to open the mouth really wide to get enough oxygen.” She glanced again at our odd companion, but this time it seemed almost sly. “You’ve been overseeing our young lad for long enough. Didn’t you know that it was a method similar that let him take down the old king dodongo?”

“If you expect me to go into any cave such as the dodongo’s cavern, you are sorely mistaken, Sheikah.”

The corners of her mouth twitched, and she went back to dismembering her kill. Amazingly enough, it was only when one of the plates came off and I saw the bloody muscle beneath when I finally got sick. Luckily, the amount of vomit was small, since I hadn’t eaten since the day before…the day before. My stomach, fickle thing, rumbled.

“Now, Zelda,” said Impa gently, walking less silently than usual to my side and wiping at my mouth and chin with a handkerchief. “It is meat like any of that you eat back at the palace. You knew that.”

“I have never seen it,” I replied bitterly. She smiled grimly.

“I am afraid, Highness, that you will be seeing much more of it. Where we are going…you do not get servants and butchers and chefs to do things for you.” She left my side and limped back to her catch. “Do not look at it like a body, Zelda. It looks like raw meat, right? Look at it that way. Come here.”

My belly still sinking, I reluctantly walked to her. She pressed the blade of her knife beneath another plate on its belly and sawed beneath.

“Try to cut it as close to the armor as possible. That way, we have more to cook and less to waste.” She made her way down one side, then withdrew the knife and pressed the hilt into my hand. “Your turn.”

“What?” I stared in horror at the body. “I cannot!”

“You can and you will,” she told me firmly, as the owl hooted to himself and said, “My, she is a princess after all, isn’t she?”

Swallowing past a warning, nauseous lump in my throat, I placed the blade so that the tip was under the plate on the other side of where Impa had worked. Steeling myself, I put pressure on the knife. It went in, but not even a quarter of the way up the blade. Dismayed, I pressed harder, forgetting my disgust, and the knife inched a little farther in. This was hard!

“Close to the armor, remember,” Impa reminded me. Nodding, my tongue between my teeth, I set at separating soft flesh from the tough hide. I got halfway down the plate when Impa took the knife from me.

“That’ll do,” she said. Somehow, there seemed to be accomplishment in her voice as she finished my job. When the plate was off, she went about taking off the rest of the belly armor, and then slit open the abdomen and cleaned out the insides. Most of the stuff I recognized, but one, an organ with a small, palm-sized knife embedded in it to the hilt, was unfamiliar.

“What is that?”

“That is what enables a dodongo to breathe fire.” She retrieved the small blade and wiped it on a grubbier cloth than the one she had earlier used on my face. “If it is still intact when the beast’s heart ceases to beat, the dodongo will explode, and leave its slayer nothing but a scattering of ashes and a few burns besides.”

“Why does it do that?”

“Well.” She paused and considered. “If it dies prematurely, it will probably deal a lasting injury to whatever did it, and prevent it from killing more of its species.”

“Then why would anything ever kill it?”

“Generally, nothing does. Occasionally the Gorons will, to use it to explode a part of the cavern and get to a choice section of rock ore, but they are usually left alone. They are the predators,” she added, tapping one of the teeth with her finger. “Not the prey.”

“Impa!” All three of us, attendant, princess, and owl, turned to the owner of the voice. It was a tanned youth, wearing shabby clothes, running toward us. When he reached us, he stood panting before bowing to—Impa?—and repeating, “Impa.”

I was astounded that, for the first time in my life, Impa seemed to be of higher status than me. I didn’t get the chance to be outraged, for the boy said breathily, “I will take you to the village, Lady Impa.”

“My charge is to come with me,” she said sternly. The boy nodded.

“Yes. Follow me. We do not wish to be found.”

He turned and began walking, then looked back over his shoulder. Impa was still.

“I know how to get there. Perhaps you will bring us something with which we may wrap up our meat? It would be the second wasted kill in two days, otherwise.”

He looked indignant, but then thawed and nodded before running off. Impa returned to preparing the dodongo meat.

“So are we near Goron City, then?”

“A bit north of that, yes,” she replied absently. “It is unlikely that we will be found up here. Be thankful that we have journeyed to this place during the summer, for otherwise we would be trudging through snow. Later we will reach a desert—”

“Gerudo Valley?”

“No.” She gave me an admonishing look before continuing, “We will reach my home, which is located near a desert other than Gerudo Valley. It is in close proximity to the mountains, and there is a spot where the two combine where my people live. We will still be in Hyrule, but barely.”

She finished cutting up the meat in silence.

“Kaepora, will you accompany us?”

“Am I to tutor your young princess?” He up-ended his head again.

“Who else?”

The boy returned later, with an odd kind of cloth and a big shoulder-pack. Impa showed me how to wrap the meat in the cloth, and we both filled the bag. The last thing we added was the tail, with all of the spines removed.

“My lady Impa,” the boy said reverently, “how did you manage to get dodongo meat?”

She smirked, but explained nothing. I rose to my feet and walked in the direction the boy had come from, but stopped when I heard no footsteps behind me. Looking back, I saw the boy trying to help Impa to her feet, and Impa doing her best to wave him off.

Her leg.

A new rush of hatred for Ganondorf engulfed me. He had wounded my attendant, after everything else he had done to us. To my people.

She managed to rise, and then limp over to me and put her hand on my shoulder.

“I am fine,” she said softly. I wasn’t reassured, and the flame in my body was far from extinguished.

The trip down the side of the mountain was slow-going, and not just due to Impa’s injury. The only ones who seemed to have an easy time of moving were the boy and Kaepora. Our guide moved over the rocks and ledges like a goat, while we followed after like a pair of stumbling flatland horses. I felt like every step I took would send me sprawling, and I was all too aware of our altitude, for every time I looked to the side of the path there seemed to be double the normal amount of space. To my embarrassment, the boy offered aid to me more than he did to Impa, and she couldn’t even walk right!

Finally, the ground leveled, and I had the courage to look up from my feet. They were bare, since the two Sheikah of the group had unanimously decided that my shoes were doing nothing for my balance. Unfortunately, now I had blisters.

“We’re here,” declared the boy.