The Battered Princess

A New Beginning, Together

The next month felt almost surreal. The Faron winter was the equivalent of Central Hyrule's moderate spring, and it rained more often than not. The first few days were tedious, Zelda was willing to do anything to make life easier for Link; however, Link, ever the soldier, did the exact same for her. What made this different from conflicts with Father was that she knew the gentleness of the man's soul. He would not become aggressive to her unless she was a direct threat to his own life. That made it easier to confront him about their deadlock.

To say he was surprised would be an understatement. It was as if the thought that maybe she'd want to make his life easier after he literally saved hers had never crossed his mind. The poor look on Link's face... he looked so guilty, but for what? She put her researcher's mind to the test as she resolved to determine why this man was so unwilling to need anything but the bare minimum.

And she learned so much.

Link was afraid of Hylians... she'd suspected it during their first meeting, but his admission still shocked her. And why wouldn't he be? He'd spend his infant years in exile, believing Hylians followed a philosophy of 'the only good Wolfbred is a dead Wolfbred.' When his exile ended, and he and his father were summoned to the Castle, Hylians still wanted absolutely nothing to do with them except treat them as the warhounds they had been in millennia past. His view of himself, and of the world, functioned on a similar timetable to her own: Hylians began to treat him horribly after the Queen's death for reasons plucked simply from the air alone. His view of Hyrule functioned only in two colors: 'good boy' and 'bad Wolfbred.' Similar to Zelda's own childhood, the Queen of Hyrule was his only barrier from Hylian-inflicted abuse. Her father turned against her after her mother's death, and all Hyrule turned against the Wolfbred after the same event.

Apparently, the common folk of Hyrule believed that a Wolfbred's only reason for existence was to defend the Queen of Hyrule, and if she died by foul play then all Wolfbred were to drop dead from their failure. When the Wolfbred failed to fall extinct immediately following her mother's assassination, Hyrule was outright offended. Wolfbred were often beaten outside the walls of Fort Hateno. The residents of Castle Town tried to stone whatever Wolfbred guards they encountered. Her own father reassigned all his late wife's Wolfbred soldiers to Zora's Domain, refusing to be associated with them. Link's father, the Queen's most decorated bodyguard, protected the Lanayru region for about four years until Link's mother dropped dead.

Link refused to talk about anything that occurred after his mother died. It was fine, she didn't like to talk about the aftermath of her mother's death either. Plus, she knew a good portion of that history anyway. Link pulled the Master Sword about three years after his father's retirement; he returned to the Castle and was sent to the Military Training Camp to become a knight. From there, he was chosen from the crowd of recruits to be observed individually for a personal assignment, and while he was being observed, Link defended her from a rogue Guardian that had escaped the nearby Sheikah. The aftermath of that, the time between Link saving her from that Guardian and Link becoming the Hylian Champion... was also not a time she wished to relive.

Even though he didn't wish to relive his history, she learned so much about both him and the Wolfbred as a whole from just living with him.

He had a fully-Hylian conscience like she did, but he'd been trained in the military to live solely as a warhound. He was Hylian, like she was, but Wolfbred didn't speak typically Hylian, so the early days of their relationship as Princess and Knight like that of a master and his puppy. Link had only known commands in those days, which always came in the format of 'Command, Link, repeat command!' His blank stares during her rants weren't due to apathy or a lack of intelligence, but because she was yelling at him in a language he hardly knew, in a sentence structure he wasn't trained to respond to.