What the Snow Keeps

• Fandom: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• Characters: Zelda, Link, an original stable keeper; Mipha, Revali, Daruk and Urbosa (remembered)
• Rating: General / G
• Word count: ~3,200 (story)
• Summary: A few weeks after the Calamity, Zelda and Link are riding to Rito Village when a blizzard forces them into a small stable for the night. By the stove, Zelda finally asks the question she has been carrying since the castle.

The snow came down off Hebra all at once, as if someone had overturned a sack of flour.

One moment Zelda could see the road ahead. It was a pale ribbon through the brown grass of the Tabantha Frontier, and far off to the north the cliffs leaned toward Rito Village. The next moment there was nothing but white. It hissed against her hood and stung her cheeks and filled the folds of her borrowed cloak.

Her mare stopped and refused to move. Zelda didn't blame her.

"Link?" She had meant to call it. It came out thin.

A shape moved in the white beside her, and then he was there, a gloved hand on her mare's bridle. Snow clung to his eyelashes. He looked entirely unbothered, which she found deeply unfair.

Without thinking, she reached inward. It was an old habit, a hundred years and more in the making. She reached for the warm, gold place under her breastbone where the light used to live, as if she could hold the storm back the way she had once held back something far worse.

There was nothing there. There hadn't been for weeks, and her mind knew it. Her hands, it seemed, were slower learners.

Link was watching her face. He said nothing, which was how he said most things. Then he pointed.

Through the snow, low and amber, a lantern was swinging under the great carved horse's head of a stable.

The stable was smaller than the ones on the main roads. It had only a handful of beds, a cookpot and a stove, and it smelled of hay, woodsmoke and wet wool. When they ducked under the canvas, a woman looked up from the stove. She was perhaps sixty, built like a fencepost, with flour on her forearms and a stable uniform buttoned to the throat.

"Well," she said. "Either you two are very brave or very foolish, and I'd bet on foolish. Horses?"

"Outside," Zelda said. "Two. A bay and a—"

"I'll board them." The woman was already pulling on a coat. "There's a lean-to round the back that the wind can't find. Name's Dorrit. Shut that flap before you let the whole of Hebra in."

Link went with her to see to the horses. Zelda was left alone, dripping on the floorboards, with a pot that smelled of onions and a feeling she couldn't quite name.

There was one other traveler, a man asleep in the far bed with his boots still on and a hat over his face. His snoring was steady as a bellows. Nobody bowed and nobody stared. Zelda unpinned her cloak and shook the snow from her hair, and nobody so much as glanced at her. The feeling, she realized, was relief.

Dorrit came back stamping and red-cheeked. "Your fellow's rubbing them down. Says he'll be a minute." She looked Zelda up and down, taking in the cloak and the good boots and the hands that had clearly never split firewood. "Can you chop a pepper?"

"I—yes. I believe so. In principle."

"In principle." Dorrit snorted and handed her a knife and a basket. "Spicy peppers. Warms you from the inside. Cut them small, and don't touch your eyes after."

"The capsaicin," Zelda said, brightening. "It's a fascinating compound. It doesn't actually raise the body's temperature, you know. It only convinces the nerves that—"

"Does it convince the stew?"

"…Presumably."

"Then chop."

Zelda chopped. She did it badly, but with enormous concentration, while Dorrit stirred and talked about the weather and the horses and a Rito courier who had come through two days before with snow on his wings. When the flap opened again and Link ducked in, shaking himself like a dog, Zelda was so pleased with her small pile of peppers that she held up the cutting board to show him.

He looked at the peppers. He looked at her. One corner of his mouth moved about the width of a hair.

"They're uneven," she said. "I'm aware."

"They're good," he said.

"You're being kind."

He shrugged and sat down by the stove, and Dorrit pushed a mug into his hands without asking.

Something went wrong with the stew after that, and Zelda was never entirely sure what. Dorrit stepped out to check the lantern. Zelda, wanting to help, added a handful of something from a jar that she was nearly certain was salt. She added a few more things from a few more jars, because if a little was good, then surely a balanced combination was better. That was simple chemistry.

When Dorrit came back, the pot was making a noise that pots should not make. A greyish smoke was drifting out of it.

The three of them stared into it.

"Well," Dorrit said at last. "That's dubious."

"I can explain," Zelda said, and found that she couldn't.

Link took the ladle from her, filled his bowl and ate the whole thing. He didn't pause. He didn't change his expression. When he finished, he held the bowl out for more.

"Link, you don't have to—"

"It's fine." He thought about it. "I've had worse."

"Have you really?"

He nodded gravely. Dorrit laughed so hard she had to sit down. In the far bed, the sleeping traveler snorted and rolled over and kept on snoring. Zelda put her face in her hands. She was laughing too, though, helplessly, and somewhere under the laughter her chest felt looser than it had in weeks.

Dorrit rescued what she could. There was bread, at least, and a wheel of goat cheese, and some roasted apples that Zelda wasn't allowed near. They ate around the stove while the wind leaned on the canvas walls and the walls leaned back.

"Strange season," Dorrit said, picking at her apple. "Was a strange sky, a few weeks back. Red over the castle, then gold, then nothing. My nephew swore he saw a light come down out of the clouds like a falling star." She shook her