Chapter Eleven

Reckless

"Is this reckless, do you think?" Dark shouted out across the goat field.

Distantly, where the goats were all milling about on the far end of the paddock, Fado cupped his hands and shouted back: "Reckless? 'Course not! We waited for your bruises to heal up a bit before tryin' this, didn't we? And we stuffed your clothes with hay! That's foresight an' responsibility, that is. That's the opposite of reckless!"

Dark hesitantly patted his chest, where his shirt had been packed tightly with handful after handful of itchy, unpleasant hay. "Are you sure?"

"What?" Fado shouted from across the field.

"I said are you sure?" Dark called back, louder.

"Sure I'm sure! Hay's soft! Fallin' into a pile of it doesn't hurt, right? So, stands to reason, you can't get hurt with your clothes stuffed full of it."

That did make sense. Dark nodded sharply and braced himself, feet apart and arms out in front of him, mimicking the position Fado had taught him.

"Ready, and… here she comes!" Fado slapped the rump of the goat in front of him, and with a panicked noise it lowered its head and began charging forward, straight towards Dark. Fado raced along behind it, quickly outpaced. "Remember, keep yer feet planted and yer center of balance low! It's all about timing, just grab her by the horns!"

The goat's hooves were thunder against the earth; the grass seemed to vibrate around Dark's feet. He swallowed, anxiously, heart hammering. But there's hay this time, Fado says it's safe, it's not going to hurt, it's not going to hurt, it's not-

Fear turned into a momentary thrill of excitement as the goat barreled into him, and Dark's hands smacked against her circular horns, so hard that his palms stung. Fado had made it sound like this was supposed to stop her. This did not stop her. She continued her panicked sprint as if he had not grabbed her, and Dark found himself being pushed along in front of her, his heels tearing up long swaths through the grass behind him.

"Throw her!" Fado was screaming, a long ways off. "Remember, you've gotta… You sort of twist the horns an-"

If there was more to the explanation, Dark did not hear it. The goat suddenly tossed her head wildly upward, and then it was Dark who was being thrown. He lost his grip on the horns, tumbled haphazardly across the goat's back, and hit the ground hard as she stampeded on past him. He rolled a few feet and came to a stop, winded and facing the sky. A cloud of glittering dust and bits of hay drifted down around him, bright in the morning sunlight.

After a moment, Fado's silhouette was rushing up to bend over him. "Derek?"

Still lying flat on his back, Dark stuck a hand into the air and gave him a thumbs up, which Fado had taught him was the universal gesture for "I have not broken any bones and we do not need to explain anything awkward to Mayor Bo about what we're doing out here today."

A nervous grin from Fado. "See? What'd I tell you. Hay."

It was hard to tell if the hay had helped at all, or if it was grabbing the goat's horns that had slowed her charge, but everything definitely hurt less than the last time a goat had rammed him. His torso was a mass of dull, throbbing pain after hitting the ground, but he'd had these bruises for days. It was an old, familiar pain by now, and mostly healed up. He could shove it to the back of his mind. More importantly, he had not called forth the lake, not even for the split second when she'd hit him, not even when he'd been thrown.

Dark beamed back up at Fado. "I didn't flinch."

"You didn't, and that's not worth nothin'." Fado seized Dark's forearm and pulled him to his feet. "But, ah… you also didn't do the Goat Trick." He rubbed the back of his neck, sheepishly. "I'm not real certain I'm explainin' this right."

"Feet apart," Dark said, carefully mimicking Fado's instructions as he echoed them, wincing slightly as his bruises protested. "Center of gravity low. Arms out like… this. Timing is important. Grab the horns and twist it. The Goat Trick." He looked up at Fado from his ready stance, quizzically. "Which part am I doing wrong?"

A hopeless shrug from Fado. "Maybe none of it, maybe all of it? I told you, I could never get the hang of it. I think this is how Link used to do it, but maybe I'm forgettin' something." Somewhere behind him, the goat finally finished her wide loop around the paddock and rejoined her sisters, looking huffy. They were all crammed into one tiny corner, as far as they could get from Dark, and their milling about was as uneasy as ever. Fado gave them a puzzled look, crossing his arms as he gazed across the grass at them. "But… hey, you've got the thumb thing down for certain."

Dark gave him another thumbs up.

{oOo}

Working as a goatherd, Dark explained to the denizens of Telma's Bar, as rain pattered distantly on her roof and dripped arrhythmically into buckets and jars, had not gotten any easier, even with a few days of practice. The goats shunned him; they continued to cluster at the farthest point in the paddock from him with such reliability that Fado had taken to having him stand across from the barn when it was time to round them up for the night. They went into a blind panic if he came too close. Tossed their heads and stomped their hooves and wauled in sheer, animal terror until he backed away. They could be driven in his direction, chased into charging him, but it was always with violence in their eyes: the determination that if they were forced to interact with him, it would be to hurt him.

"Fado can't have had no idea why," said Shad, a mug of something steaming and mildly alcoholic in his hands. Telma was pouring another for herself.

Dark shrugged noncommittally. "He acted like he had no idea. I don't think Mayor Bo ever told him why he was supposed to take me on as an apprentice. He wasn't in on any of it. He saw the goats acting scared just from seeing me, just from smelling me, and it just… puzzled him. Goats acted like that around wolves, not people."

"But logically," said Shad, and Telma rolled her eyes and took a long drink of whatever she'd just poured for herself, "If the goats were acting like that around you, wouldn't it be obvious that they hadn't been reacting to a wolf, before?"

"I think," said Dark, slowly, "That even if he started to realize that, he must have decided there had to be a wolf after all. Seeing me get thrown and battered and trampled about a dozen times while failing to do the Goat Trick probably convinced him that if a goat and I ever got into a fight, it'd be me lying bloody on the ground by the end of it."

Telma gave a bark of laughter.

She nudged an empty glass toward Dark with the elbow of the arm holding her own drink. "You want a Hot Pursuit, honey? Old family recipe, puts a fire in your chest on nights like this. You old enough to drink?"

"I have no idea how old I am, Miss Telma," Dark answered honestly.

"Then who can prove you aren't?" She poured him one. "On the house."

"That's uncharacteristically generous of you, Telma," said Shad, and the barkeep shot him an amused look.

"He's trading a story for it. You're paying for yours."

"Ah good, you had me worried there for a moment. So, Derek," Shad said, as Telma topped off her own drink. "When you say he taught you the Goat Trick, you mean THE Goat Trick, don't you? Link's goat trick?"

Dark was surprised. "I didn't think anyone had heard of it outside of Ordon."

"But infamous in your village, I'd wager?" said Telma. "The stuff of local legend, Link flipping those goats?" She grinned knowingly at his nod of confirmation. "Oh honey, word of something that reckless gets around."

"I heard," said Shad, "That he once flipped a Goron with it. Grabbed it while it was rolling and threw it right off Death Mountain."

"That so? I heard it was more than one."

The door of the bar opened and closed as they were talking, letting in a brief blast of wind and rain. Metal sabatons clicked across the floorboards, and a moment later a sopping wet woman in a knight's well-polished armor sat heavily on the barstool next to Dark, black hair plastered to her forehead and neck. Telma went automatically for the pile of muddy towels that Shad and Dark had discarded, but the woman ignored her and simply picked up the glass in front of Dark, downing it in one long draw.

"I could have poured you your own," said Telma.

"Yeah, well, I heard he was getting free drinks, so I'll just share his," said the knight, to Telma's amusement and Shad's sputtering indignation. (Though Dark couldn't help but notice, Shad was also surreptitiously running his fingers through his hair, trying to make himself look less disheveled, and shooting the knight glances to see if she was looking. She was not.)

She set her empty glass down on the bartop with a glassy thunk. "Talking about Link's Goat Trick? I heard, back when we all stormed Hyrule Castle, he flipped Ganondorf with it."

There was a moment of silence as they all tried to picture that.

"That one can't have happened," said Shad.

"Hello, sir Ashei," Dark said, because no one had yet. The knight nodded to him casually, as if it hadn't been months since they'd last seen each other.

"Shad. Telma. Boy with the curse. Still so formal, yeah?"

"Derek," said Dark. "And yeah."

"Telma tells me you misplaced your sister."

"Misplaced is hardly the word," said Shad.

"They just got split up in the crowds," said Telma. "I've no doubt she ducked into a shop somewhere to wait out the rain."

"I take it you haven't seen her either," said Shad. To Dark's dismay, Ashei shook her head.

"Yeah, and I'd be a little more worried about it than you're all being, sitting in here swapping tall tales about the Goat Trick."

Telma refilled what was now Ashei's glass. "Hardly any reason to worry, is there? Not a lot of danger she can get into in Castle Town."

"Never used to have street thugs and pickpockets, did we?" said Ashei. "Never used to be all these broken buildings and boarded up windows." She ran a finger along the rim of her drink, metal ringing against glass as her dark eyes met Telma's flatly. "Never used to be a club under that bar."

Shad coughed loudly, eyes flickering toward Dark. "No worries! If Auru hasn't seen her, we're certainly all going out to search," he said, in a fumbling attempt at cool unconcern that failed to cut through the morose mood that had settled over the bar. "No point in starting until everyone's gathered. Derek was just passing the time by telling us this fascinating story about how he and Ilia met."

"Plenty of blood and death so far," said Telma, with a forced cheerfulness. "Plenty of rural domestic life too, if you find farm labor exciting."

Ashei's eyes, too, shifted to Dark. She'd always been hard to read; she had the dull, expressionless face of a person not used to people. "Right. Keep him talking, bad if he panicked, huh? Makes sense now, why you're all pretending she's fine."

"We're not-" Shad said quickly, and Telma spoke over him with a sharp, "Ashei!"

Dark blinked slowly, starting back at Ashei. Was that what they were doing? It was true, he'd been calm because they were calm, so sure of Ilia's safety, so certain he was overreacting. Was that all just a show? Had Telma warned everyone how to act in her letter? Despite the chill of the storm outside, the warm, cozy little room suddenly seemed too hot, stiflingly so. Why was he here, instead of out looking for her?

Ashei startled him when she stood up, with as much clanking and shifting of armor as when she'd sat.

"Eh, no reason why she wouldn't be fine, either," she said with a shrug, breaking eye contact with Dark to eye the dripping ceiling. "Don't mind me. I was born with my foot in my mouth. Don't care to sit and listen to anybody's tragic backstory, but if we're waiting around, I'll take a look at your leaky roof." A jerk of the head towards Dark, a sort of come-on-then gesture. "Help me out, cursed boy."

"Derek," he said blankly, standing automatically.

"Hah. Still just do whatever you're told, yeah? Come on."

{oOo}

Taking a look at the leaky roof turned out to involve literally looking at the leaky roof. The two of them climbed up a pile of pallets and old crates stacked in the alley outside, at one point disturbing Telma's cat Louise from where she'd been watching the rain from her favorite sheltered spot on the windowsill. She darted off into the night with an indignant meow as Ashei reached down and helped Dark climb up over the eaves, and then they were standing on Telma's roof.

Castle Town spread out before them in a forest of stone buildings and ceramic tile roofs, twisted chimneys and the old crenelations of what had once been fortresses and temples, all turned to dim, misty shapes by the downpour. For a moment, Hyrule Castle appeared distantly in looming silhouette as lightning flashed behind it, skeletal bits of scaffolding still clinging to its towers. Then it was lost again to the darkness. Ashei kicked idly at a roof tile.

"My father and I, we homesteaded alone in the mountains for most of my life. I know my way around re-tarring a roof. You any good at repairing things?"

"The barn always needs something repaired," said Dark, raising his voice to be heard over the roaring of the rain. He'd dried off considerably inside, but already his clothes were soaked through again. "And I helped build a shed for the shearing festival, once."

"I figured," said Ashei, looking out over the town with that unreadable face.

"So I know you can't fix a roof in the rain," said Dark.

"Sure can't," said Ashei. He wasn't sure what to say to that.

She cocked her head to the side and looked him over, hands on her hips, water streaming down her face. Dark got the uncomfortable impression that she was taking stock of every bit of him that wasn't human. He'd really, really never known where he stood with Ashei.

"Hey, Ilia's probably fine, yeah?" she said, which had nothing to do with leaky roofs. "More likely to be huddled up somewhere dry like Telma says, than jumped in an alley and dead in a ditch. I don't soften my words to make people feel better. So take it for truth when I say that."

"You're right, though," said Dark. "People get jumped by footpads here, at night. I've seen them do it. They've done it to me."

Ashei tilted her face upwards, toward the sky. "Footpads don't want to be out in this, either. Who's wandering around to rob?"

Dark nodded slowly, but she didn't see it, and didn't seem to care if he was reassured.

"Maybe it's not more dangerous than it used to be," said Ashei, to the weeping sky. "Maybe it just feels more dangerous, yeah? Maybe it's looking up and seeing all the scaffolding, that chunk taken out of the castle. Maybe it's that autumn's rolling in and there's still not as much food as there should be, 'cause we lost our spring planting to Twilight. Or maybe it's just that Princess Zelda doesn't talk to the people so much anymore, and when she does, she's harder. Colder. Like everything that happened beat the kindness out of her. Shad'll give you some poetic crap about it. 'Hyrule's holding its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop,' something like that."

"Wolves in the woods," said Dark, who understood, on a much smaller scale, that kind of atmosphere very well.

"Yeah. Poetic crap."

"Why are we really on the roof, sir Ashei?" Dark asked.

She actually smiled at that, or at least, the corners of her mouth quirked upwards. "Still so formal. You've been telling them about your past down there?"

He nodded again.

"They bully you into it?"

"Nobody bullied me," said Dark, nonplussed.

"No, I bet they asked real nice. Just curious, 'cause who wouldn't be, when you're whatever monster thing you are, yeah? 'Oh, we're just dying to know.' But you've got the least backbone I've ever seen in an Ordonian. You just do whatever people tell you to. Even when it's talking about things you don't want out in the open. I get the feeling you've got plenty of things you don't want out in the open."

The rain pounded down around them, and rattled against Ashei's armor.

"I guess," said Dark, at last, "when your life story starts with, 'Ganondorf made me,' you've already gotten past the worst of it by the first sentence. Anybody who doesn't hate me for that won't care about the rest."

"Hm," said Ashei, which didn't tell him her opinion on that at all.

"I don't need bailing out," said Dark. "If I didn't want to tell them something, I wouldn't. But I don't mind. The good parts and the bad parts; it all happened a really long time ago."

"Ganondorf died six months ago," said Ashei. "That's a long time?"

"It's literally my entire life," said Dark.

Again, that flicker of what might have been a smile. "Alright, you don't need bailing out. You know, you've grown up a lot since I saw you last."

"I know," said Dark. "That's kind of what the story's been about."

They climbed down from the roof. Under the sheltered archway of the narrow stone corridor leading down into Telma's rathskeller, Dark wrung out the worst of the water from his shirt while Ashei leaned idly against the wall and stared out into the darkness.

"Hey, I'm not going back in," she said. "I know what I said about Ilia probably being fine, and I know there's not much point in just one person out searching in this mess, but there are always town guards, even in a squall like this, yeah? If somebody got jumped in an alley, they'd know. Can't hurt if one of us is out asking around." There was the unspoken addendum of: and the streets might be dangerous at night for a girl from some backwater farm town, but nowhere's dangerous for me.

"I should go with you," he said, that desperate desire to be out there doing something rising in him. "I could help."

"You'd have every single one of those cowards running and hiding, appearing out of a stormy night looking like that, cursed boy," said Ashei. "I'd rather actually be able to talk to them, yeah?"

"Yeah," said Dark, resignedly. He knew what he looked like. People had been running from him tonight. "I hate not doing anything, though. I hate it."

"Yeah," said Ashei, again. "Yeah. Not being able to do anything but watch and wait and plan… It burns."

Dark looked up at her, but her face was still blank, focused on the rain. He had the feeling that she wasn't talking about Ilia; that she was remembering something bigger and more hopeless. Quite suddenly, he wasn't sure why he'd ever doubted where he stood with Ashei. Ashei was a good and noble person. He didn't need to read her face to know that.

She shook her head, brought herself back to the present. "Hey, you wanna be productive, here's a favor you can do me. Telma sent that letter to everybody. Doubt we're getting Rusl all the way from Ordon, but Auru's probably on his way, yeah? If he gets here before I do, just fill him in and wait for me. I'll be back in… give it an hour. Might be she's with him. Might be I'll hear something. Either way, we'll know where to start."

He hated the waiting, hated sitting and biding his time without knowing, but what she was saying made sense. Shad and Telma had made sense too, for all that they'd probably been just as worried as he was and faking nonchalance about it. The idea that Ashei was out there doing something about it helped immensely; loosened something tight in Dark's chest that had seized up and hadn't slackened since she'd called them out on it. He exhaled and inhaled, slowly and deeply, a relieved breath of cold, humid air that carried with it the dusty, earthy scent of rain against the cobblestones. "Okay. I'll let them know."

She stepped out into the rain, and briefly shot him a look over her shoulder. "You gonna keep telling them that story?"

"I guess," said Dark, because they were deep into it now, and it really was an effective distraction to keep the worry from eating at him. "Did you want to hear it too?"

She shrugged, and waved casually as she started to walk away. "If you want to tell me sometime, go ahead. I'm not going to ask."

Dark decided that he defintely did like Ashei.

{oOo}

"No one is pretending your sister is fine!" were the first words out of Shad's mouth the second Dark reentered the bar. "There is no reason, absolutely no reason to believe that she isn't! Ashei just talks like that sometimes, she's a pessimist, you can't take it to heart!"

Telma, more practically, threw the pile of towels at him. She magnanimously did not mention that the roof was still obviously leaking.

"She really is a wonderful person when you get to know her, she just grew up away from people, so she'll say things that-"

"I know, Master Shad," said Dark, rubbing one of the towels vigorously through his hair and trying not to drip on any of the rugs.

"-and I mean, of course we're all worried, of course we're assuming the worst in spite of ourselves. It's not as though we were just trying to distract you. We all needed a distraction, and frankly, I'm quite invested in the domestic farm labor-"

"I know, Master Shad," said Dark, more emphatically.

"Well," said Shad, long ears going pink. "As long as that's clear."

Telma, leaning with her elbows on the counter, chin in her hands, aimed a soulful sigh at Dark. "Honestly, you'd just gotten dry. We were both half afraid you'd run off to look for Ilia again."

"Ashei talked me out of it," he said, and explained, in short, how he'd promised they'd wait for her.

Telma nodded thoughtfully as if she'd expected as much. "They're an independent group, this lot. It's like herding cats, trying to get them all in a meeting together, even when the world's ending." Louise, who'd wandered in through the cat door and was perched haughtily on the end of the bar, licking rainwater from her fur, yawned toothily and gave Dark a level, golden-eyed look. Cats did not fear him the way most animals did, probably because they believed with absolute certainty that they could disembowel him. Dark, who'd had plenty of traumatic experiences herding goats, determined that herding cats was likely much, much more terrifying.

Looking mildly disappointed that Ashei wasn't coming back, Shad fiddled with his drink in silence as Dark took a seat at the bar again. Dark looked from the barkeep to the scholar and back, all too aware that they were deliberately, self-consciously avoiding his gaze.

There was silence for a while, save for the dripping of the leaky rafters.

"So," said Dark at last, "Fado and I were doing domestic farm labor."

Instantly, they were both leaning forward eagerly. "Well?" said Telma, bent halfway over the bar, grinning ear to ear. "What happens next? Did you learn the Goat Trick?"

"No I did not," said Dark.

They wilted in disappointment.

"I could skip ahead to the part where I learned to use a sword, though."

Shad's mouth fell open in the beginnings of an obvious and disbelieving you mean to tell me that after all that bloodshed, they immediately started trusting you with bladed weaponry, but Telma cut him off by shoving another drink in front of him, that grin somehow impossibly even wider.

"Honey, just checking, but you do know what reckless means?"