Queen Zelda of Hyrule always said that her eldest and only child, the Crown Princess Zelda, had known herself from the moment she was pulled, thrashing and furious, from the womb.

Most children don't know themselves at all. They must make their own acquaintance over the years or decades it takes to grow up, and some never do. But Zelda had been different. Maman's beloved friend Urbosa told her the story many times.

"You came out screaming and screamed for two hours more. Your father's doctors were mightily concerned: why was the bloodline of Hylia Herself so purple in the face? Why was the heir to the royal crown wailing worse than a Redead? They measured your length and your width and your coloring and the response of your kicking feet to pinpricks. They were afraid of you, and your infant wrath like a storm. Your Maman had fallen into a deep faint as you came forth. Some physician or other was trying the effect of a cooling elixir on your overheated cheeks when your Maman came awake. She sat bolt upright on the birthing bed, grinned with pleasure at her noisy child, and said, 'This one knows what she wants, and what she wants is the nipple. Give her to me.' As soon as you latched on to her breast, you lay quiet as an afternoon cat. And you've known what you want and what you fear and what you need ever since. A blessed thing, in a girl who will one day be Queen."

Her father had a different interpretation. "Willful child," he said. Dotingly, when she was still small enough for her willfulness to charm him. With increasing frustration as she grew older and her will began to grate against his.

Zelda privately thought that Maman and Père and yes, even her beloved Urbosa, were reading a little too far into a newborn crying for milk.

If there was one true lesson to be learned from the story of her birth, it was that Zelda's human vessel was too small for the hugeness of her feelings. Because she was a Princess, and because she was of a holy bloodline, she received every possible attention from nannies and governesses and tutors and mentors. Every one of them tried to teach her to hide her outsize emotions, and every one of them failed.

"She'll learn to play politics when she's good and ready," Maman said, "and not a moment sooner."

Her childhood tantrums were a thing of legend. When she was two, she screamed at her nanny so loudly that he bled from one ear and had to be sent on medical leave till it healed. When she was five, a visiting dignitary patted her patronizingly on the head, and so she lifted a leg and urinated on his shoes. "Treat me like a dog and I'll be a dog," she shouted as she was hauled away by her mortified mother.

When she was six, she was assigned a theology tutor whose role was to prepare her to take over the devotionals her mother led each week in Hyrule Sanctum. Zelda did not relish these sessions, which were far more boring than music or botany or chasing cats around Castle Town.

"With your mother in her… condition, she will have to give up performing these devotionals in a few months. Someone must take them over," the tutor explained to her young charge. "Don't you want to be a good daughter, and help your Maman until she is better?"

"Not 'specially," replied Zelda. She was mumbling a little because she had a finger in her mouth, prodding and wiggling a tooth so loose it was hanging by a thread. "How come it has to be me? Why can't Père do it?"

"Because only the females of your line bear the blood of the Goddess," said her tutor. "Your grandmère heard the whisperings of the divine voice. Your mother will one day teach you to hear it as well. That is after she recovers from her present...sickness. Until then, you must take on her duties, for the good of Hyrule."

"She's not sick, she's pregnant. And I think it's silly."

"It's the very highest honor. And take your finger out of your mouth. You're not a peasant."

Zelda gave her tooth one final, purposeful push, and took her finger out of her mouth as instructed. Then she spat her baby tooth at her tutor, in a globule of red foam.

"Now you've got the bloodline, too," she sweetly lisped.

In the end, no one succeeded in teaching Zelda control, but she taught it to herself. Sooner than anyone might have predicted.

She remembered it with narrative clarity. She was dressed in heavy velvet beside the fur-draped form of King Rhoam. His was the more splendid figure, but it was she, pale and tiny beside him, who drew the eyes of the court. It seemed as if every breath was being held, waiting for an outburst. Zelda's blood was like fire in her veins; her hands and feet were icy. She might boil over at any moment. She might freeze into a statue and never move again.

King Rhoam was looking down at her. She saw herself, distorted, in the golden curve of his crown. She looked in his face and knew, even at six, that he expected her to fail this most public of tests. He expected her to rage, or scream, or wail, or laugh uncontrollably. Zelda turned away from him, anger at his faithlessness thawing her frozen fingers.

She walked composedly up the steps of the dais in the center of the Great Hall. She reached out with untrembling fingers, lowered a silken veil over her mother's face, and returned to her father's side as the pallbearers bore the dead Queen of Hyrule away.

She walked beside King Rhoam all the way to the gravesite. She was only six, but that was old enough to feel his grief falling from him like a perfume. Old enough to know that sometimes people died, and it was no one's fault. Not even Père's, though he could certainly be blamed for getting Maman in the state which had led to her death and the death of their unborn son. Old enough to offer him real comfort, true comfort, not from child to adult but from one human to another: a quiet touch, a sharing of tears, a sympathetic remark.

She reached for his hand. He looked down at her from his great height, and she saw a new pain join the pain that already lived in his eyes: he did not know what to do with her. She was another weight on his shoulders. She was a burden.

The look was gone as quickly as it had come, but it was too late: Zelda knew now that she had lost both parents in one day. King Rhoam put his arm around her shoulders, but there was a stiffness to the gesture that repulsed her. She dodged his embrace and walked wordlessly away through the crowd of mourners, who parted to make a path for their princess. She heard the king melt into tears behind her, calling after her once in a broken voice, but she held her head high and gritted her teeth and walked until she could hear him no more.

From that day on, gone was the enfant terrible whispered about belowstairs and in the alleyways of Castle Town. Zelda became, in the years following the Queen's death, the very picture of royal good breeding. She smiled at important people and nodded regally at unimportant ones. She learned her lessons and thanked her tutors. She began training with priestesses to unlock the holy power in her blood that King Rhoam was sure would prove crucial in the coming war against the prophesied Calamity.

To the common folk, Princess Zelda was a beautiful, accomplished young girl who bore up under her terrible and unfair destiny with wisdom, grace and munificence. A hope for the future, a gleaming link in the chain which stretched back into a mythical past and would survive— Hylia willing— into an uncertain future. She was laboriously gentle with the people she would one day lead, and they were devoted to her.

This might have bridged the widening chasm between father and daughter. If she had been less stubborn, if he had been less of a king and more of a father, it would have been enough. But something had fractured between them the day they laid the Queen of Hyrule to rest, and it never did heal properly. Zelda's young pride, as fixed at six as it would be at sixteen, could not prevent her longing for her father when she woke in the night with wet cheeks. But it prevented her from going to him for comfort, when it was so plain he had no belief in her. Her hardness hurt his feelings; his faithlessness sickened her. Zelda knew that the fault was partly hers— but it was his fault, too, and she would not beg him to love her.

For all this, never did their antagonism break the surface. An outside observer would have thought their relationship proper, wholesome, even affectionate. The battleground of their wills was littered not with curses and blows, but with poisonous praise and double-edged smiles. In his presence Zelda was docile to a point of insolence. She followed his commands with a vicious exactness, without ever complying with their spirit. He responded with barbs of his own, shards that melted in her flesh like ice so that she could not even remember, afterward, exactly why they hurt.

To her, he was an arrogant autocrat, an obstacle to be thwarted. To him, she was still a six-year-old child refusing from spite to cry at her own mother's funeral. They did not want or need or love the same things. There could be no peace between them, only truce. And when the king now called her a "willful child", she glowed with pride.

King Rhoam insisted on a classical education for his daughter. He recruited only the best tutors from the distant reaches of Hyrule: Language and composition from a Rito, mathematics and technology from a Necludan, equitation from a Faronian, martial arts from a Gerudo. He taught her Hyrulean history himself, unwilling to trust so vital a subject to anyone else.

Despite their frequent head-butting, Zelda and her father enjoyed their history lessons together, which served as a daily ceasefire. The king had a profound love and respect for the old tales: the Goddess Hylia, the first evil Demise, the Hero of Time. The princess particularly enjoyed hearing about the messianic bloodline of the Goddess, every one a Zelda stretching back to the first primeval Hylians.

Every day she would rise with the sun, eat breakfast and bathe, all in the company of her handmaidens, each an honored noblewoman in her own right. Then she would study: in the study above her bedchamber for morning lessons, then out into Hyrule Field after lunch for practical lessons in botany and athletics.

As she grew older, she also took on more of the responsibilities that would ordinarily have fallen to the Queen of Hyrule. As the oldest living Zelda, it was her duty to perform weekly public devotionals to the Goddess, reciting prayers in the Sanctum, singing ancient songs. She did not enjoy these functions, which were tedious in the extreme; but her father insisted. "'A drop of sweat will save a river of blood,'" he always said. It felt like more of a bucket of sweat to Zelda, but she did as she was told.

To help her develop the proper musicality, she took lessons in singing and elocution from a court poet, a Rito named Kheel.

For a time Zelda was Kheel's only student, as the Rito considered herself a bard first and a teacher second. But when Zelda was ten, her tutor took on a second student, a lad named Mikah whose natural talent captivated even the choosy Kheel. Mikah was a Kakarikan, well-spoken, polite, and highly trained in the combative arts even at the tender age of thirteen. Thenceforth Zelda and Mikah studied music together, sometimes performing duets for the court.

Though she never excelled in music, Zelda came to treasure her lessons with the stern but fair Kheel and the spirited Mikah. Her teacher knew how to manage her naturally impatient temper such that the princess never became overwhelmed, even when it took her a long time to grasp some tricky musical concept. Kheel never lost patience, keeping time with rhythmic clacks of her curved beak and accompanying Zelda's rather imperfect melody on the concertina.

Mikah, on the other hand, had a temperament much more like Zelda's, if somewhat better regulated. They understood each other immediately. Mikah, though just as quick to take offense to slights as Zelda herself was, knew better than to risk his good position with bad behavior.

He might have been annoyed at the younger girl who frequently trailed around after him, peppering him with questions; but if he found her tiresome it never showed. As a result, she was fiercely protective of him, and would defend him against all comers. Even so, he did not have an easy time of it as a Kakarikan at court. Noblemen's bratty sons teased him unmercifully for his scarlet eyes, dark skin and the shock of white curls which he boyishly refused to comb. He sometimes showed up for their lessons with fresh bruises on his face, fresh cuts on his knuckles; but he stubbornly resisted Zelda's doctoring, recounting the brawls for her in such merry, colorful terms that he soon had her laughing. So easily did he redirect her attention that she never quite understood how bad it really was for him.

She was horrified, therefore, the first time she caught him in the middle of a real brawl. She was twelve then, and he fifteen; she followed sounds of a commotion to a narrow alley where she found him fending off a much older assailant, an imperial guard twice his age and three times his size. He was doing fairly well for himself, dodging and darting around his attacker, landing quick sharp blows that drove the big man back for a moment. But he was no match for the guard's superior strength, and his stamina was flagging when Zelda found him. She screamed with all the outraged fury of an offended queen.

"Step away from him at once!" she commanded, channeling an authority she had never possessed before, even in her wildest outbursts. The guard backed away from his victim, his reddened face fading to grey as he realized who was yelling at him.

"Your Highness!" he exclaimed. "Forgive me, I didn't see you—"

"That much is evident! I daresay if you had known yourself to be observed, you would at least have had the decency to pick on someone your own size! And you wear the armor of a sworn knight of Hyrule. For shame!" She helped Mikah to his feet.

"Your Highness," the man protested "I must defend myself— I was deliberately provoked! The cur disrespected the crown, and your own family name!"

"I refuse to believe such nonsense," snapped Zelda. "This cur is my friend, and you are no more than a bully. Get out of here, and expect to be chastised for disgracing your rank!"

She helped Mikah away, escorting him up to her own chamber where she could give him a healing tincture and a basin to wash in. He seemed unusually grave, and could not respond to Zelda's words of encouragement with more than an unconvincing smile.

"I hope you don't take that brute's words to heart. I've never heard such drivel. He was raving mad! H—"

"He spoke the truth," said Mikah dully. "I insulted the crown. I did provoke him."

"But—"

"I was passing by him on the east promenade when he said… he said…" Mikah's tan cheeks flushed brick-red.

"What did he say?"

"He said, 'Long live King Balthus.'"

"King Balthus? But my father is King Rhoam."

"He was speaking of King Balthus Pistoriam the First, who imposed the relocation of the Sheikah tribe during the Triforce Era. Your father's ancestor, who corralled my ancestors into the mountains like rats into a trap, and murdered whoever dissented. Your father's ancestor, who silenced our voices and stole our lands and destroyed our—"

"My ancestor," interrupted Zelda. "You mean my ancestor."

Mikah looked at her steadily. He did not answer.

"What did you do next? After the guard said… what he said?"

"I spat at his feet."

"Oh, Mikah."

"Zell, you don't understand. What he said— it's the same as if someone said to you, 'Hail Ganon!' King Balthus Pistoriam— to my people, his name is a dirty word."

"Your people? But you're… you're Hyrulean," said Zelda helplessly. "You're Hyrulean same as me."

"I'm a Sheikah. That is what I am first, before I am a Hyrulean, before I am a Kakarikan, even before I am a man."

"Well, not to me!"

"Then you are willfully blind! I am proud of who I am; it is everyone else who wishes me to change. If you cannot accept that, then do not call me friend ."

Zelda's lip trembled. Looking at her, he softened. He held out his arms for Zelda to stumble into.

"I'm sorry, Zell," he said softly. "We are friends. Aren't we?"

"'Course we are. I'm sorry that horrible man was such a pig to you. And I'm not at all sorry you spit on him. I would have spit on him, myself."

"You look so tired. And we have an early lesson tomorrow. You should rest. I'll see you in the morning."

Zelda could not stop thinking of what Mikah had said. She asked her father about it during their next history lesson.

"King Balthus Pistoriam the First was not quite the tyrant your friend supposes," said the king. "He did what he had to do, for the good of the kingdom."

"But the Sheikah are part of the kingdom," pointed out Zelda.

"This is all ancient history, my child. Why are you so fixated on it now?"

"It doesn't feel very ancient. Mikah still has the bruises on his face from what that man did to him."

"He picked a fight with a much more advanced fighter, and received some scrapes for his troubles. He should be grateful it did not go worse for him. If he were a little older, and a little less skilled a singer, I would not be so inclined to look the other way for this misdemeanor. A grown man would receive three days in the stocks. Your friend is lucky to have gotten off with a few knocks to the head."

"That guard should be the one in the stocks, not Mikah! And how come you never told me about all that with Balthus Pistoriam when we did our unit on the rise of Ganondorf the Demon King?"

"Because it is neither so simple as you childishly suppose, nor so relevant as you wish."

"But Père—"

"I grow weary of your childish pique. Today's lesson is finished. We will reconvene tomorrow, at which point I expect to see you in a more cooperative mood."

A/N: This fic came about after my sister and I decided to do a March Madness-style review of all the voice actors for every translation of Breath of the Wild. We discovered that small acting choices had compounding consequences for the feel of each character and the story as a whole. Russian Urbosa had warmth, self-possession and grace. Japanese Daruk had a gruff authenticity. French Revali was extremely horny. French and Russian Mipha imbued the character with a worldly maturity some other versions lacked.

Of the title character, we each had our favorites: she adored Japanese Zelda, the perfectionist who always feels like she's falling behind. We both felt an urge to protect the Spanish Zelda, who seemed younger and more vulnerable than the others. But it was the Zelda voiced by French actress Adeline Chetail that hooked my imagination. This Zelda was stubborn, angry, passionate, insolent. Her prickliness attracted me; her rare glimpses of softness intrigued. I meant, at first, to write three short stories: one based on the Japanese Zelda, one on the Spanish, one on the French. That will most certainly never happen, but I don't mind because this one has grown into a complete story, and French Zelda was my favorite anyway.

I strongly recommend, if you have the DLC, that you recover and watch all the memories in different languages so you can see which ones appeal to you (I wouldn't bother looking them up online unless you can find them with subtitles in a language you understand).

This is cross-posted to AO3, where you can find it (with, hopefully, eventual illustrations) under my username travelingneuritis. And if you want to read some of my sister's gorgeous writing, you can find her on AO3 under username wreathoflaurels.