Welcome To The Rodeo

“She’s expecting me. If I don’t report back soon, she’ll get suspicious.”

She frowned, that pretty mouth of hers twisting down, and stirred her soup. “And when you don’t bring her my head on a spike? What then?”

“She only asked for your heart,” I said, gesturing to the gaudy box the queen had given me for the deed. The doe’s heart sat in it now, flushed and lifeless. “That should satisfy her. Buy you enough time to disappear.”

She peeled back the lid, grimacing at the organ inside, entombed in a bed of purple velvet stained with blood. It fell shut again with a click, and she went back to stirring her food, the circuitous flick of her wrist just a little more furious.

“I don’t like this. It’s too dangerous.”

Only for me. And that hardly mattered, so long as she was safe. Not that she would accept that, of course, so I didn’t bother to say so.

“I’ll meet up with you in a few days,” I sighed, threading my fingers. Frowning at her bowl of stew, still conspicuously uneaten. “I’ll stay in Castleton a while, in case she has me followed.”

She nodded slowly, scheming, calculating. Eyes staring through the fire to someplace else. “All right. You can meet me in—”

“No. Don’t tell me. If things go south, I don’t want to have anything to give away.”

She scowled at me, but there was too much concern in it. A soft, hazy edge to something that was meant to be sharp as steel. “Then how will you find me?”

I parsed down the half dozen other explanations that wanted to tear loose—my life is yours; my soul is bound to you; one look from you has muzzled and hobbled me forever; it’s fate, and I don’t even believe in fate—offering her something simpler, something that seemed more reasonable, but was just all the rest boiled down to their most innocuous.

“I found you the first time.”

That didn’t seem to please her. She just kept stirring, eyes through flame, shoulders concave.

“Is it very convincing?” she finally asked. “I don’t know what a human heart looks like.”

My throat went tight—a new reflex I’d become accustomed to over the last few hours, manifesting whenever our differences were laid bare like this: her innocence, my sins, like a goddess and an unbeliever crossing paths for the first time.

I said, “It’s close enough.”

She nodded, and took a bite of stew.

We parted ways at the mouth of the forest. She made a last ditch effort to talk me out of it, because she’s good like that. But I think she knew I wouldn’t be swayed. I gave her the sword—she objected to that, too, but a sacred blade forged by the gods was a flamboyant sort of weapon to be carrying deep into the queen’s stomping grounds—and marched towards the glistening spires, set alight in the morning sun, without glancing back to see which way she’d gone.

I made it to Castleton near dusk. The eyes of the guard at the city limits lingered as I passed, and the ravens on the watchtowers murmured at each other; she probably already knew I was here. Still, I didn’t rush. Her rewards and good favor had never tempted me to hurry to her side before, and certainly wouldn’t now, when I had reason to hate her.

Let her slobber all over herself waiting for her ill-gotten prize.

At the gatehouse, the portcullis was already open. It was another deliberate gesture; another tired threat. I see you. And if that wasn’t intimidating enough: you’re trying my patience. Heaven forbid the queen should be made to wait for anything. I made my way through the interior to the highest tiers of the citadel, and then climbed the great stairway, flanked in banners and brilliance, into her Sanctum.

The Queen of Hyrule was draped over her throne, arrayed in jewels and feathers and silk and two handfuls of glittering guards stationed to do her bidding. Her posture was lazy and disinterested; but her lips and fingers twitched at the sight of me, grabbing reflexively at the whisper promising death that followed me like a shadow.

“Do you have it?” was all she said.

I produced the ornate box from my satchel, and she stuck out her hand, rising from her judgment seat to meet me halfway when I didn’t bring it to her fast enough. She snatched it from me and whirled, giving herself the illusion of privacy as she peeled the lid back. She took her time staring at her treasure; ran a slow fingertip over the shape of it, and then licked it clean.

She curled the lid shut again as she turned back around, something vile lurking beneath calm, amethyst irises, something I was intimately acquainted with. Killer instinct.

“Did she give you much trouble?”

“None,” I breathed, shifting lazily. Playing at being bored. I usually was, at these meetings. “Easy to track, hardly struggled. Almost like she knew you’d be coming for her.”

A smile bloomed over her mouth, the torchlight illuminating a row of pearly teeth. Then she shook her head, crossing the last of the distance between us until her hips were pressed into my thigh, and rested her hand on my chest.

“Poor Huntsman,” she breathed, tracing my brow, the line of my jaw, and clucked her tongue. “She’s gotten to you too, hasn’t she?”

I went to draw breath to answer, and my blood ran cold. It wouldn’t come, my chest frozen in place, and every other muscle in my body with it. My throat twitched, trying to gulp air and swallowing nothing. A filmy layer of gold shone briefly on my clothes, my skin—and then my arms snapped back, wrenched aloft by translucent chains crafted of magic and light.

“She’s a magical creature herself—did she tell you that?” she droned, watching me sputter and choke, watching my eyes widen and my brow furrow where she deliberately left me free. “But she’s very raw, untrained and uneducated as far as these things go. She wouldn’t know, for example, that a heart carved from someone like her would have unique properties. Properties that would be noticeably absent from something unremarkable, like the heart of a deer.”

She let the box spill out of her hand and crash onto the floor. I couldn’t watch it go. She had drawn my eyes to hers with a wave of her hand, rolled them up in my head as though attached to threads.

“You know your own value, and you aren’t plagued by excessive pride. If you’d simply failed to find her, you would have come back and asked for more men. But this—this poor, deliberate attempt at deception—you’re trying to hide her from me,” she reasoned, perfect, milky features marring with a scowl. “Why would you do a thing like that?”

The pain started at the soles of my feet, like standing on hot coals. It spread up my ankles, my calves, brushed at my knees. It was fire, melting skin and muscle, licking steadily at ligaments until they snapped from the heat, and spreading just a little more. Screams welled in my chest and went nowhere as she looked on, as the fire reached for my spine and gut, molten and crackling. Burning me alive until I could feel my own flesh ready to fall off the bone.

My eyes flitted desperately to her guards, hoping one might be perceptive enough, merciful enough, to kill me where I stood rather than let the fire spread. Their eyes stared back, deadened. Had they seen this before? Had she done this to them? No wonder they seemed vacant. No wonder they obeyed so mindlessly.

The fire had barely reached my ribs, charring and carbonizing until they were brittle, until they were snapping off in pieces, one at a time. My vision started to white as it spread into my shoulders, as it lodged in my throat where trapped screams were, reaching with clawed fingers up into my jaw—though from the pain or the lack of oxygen I couldn’t say. It licked up my face to the crown of my head, and I was consumed. Suspended in the sensation of skin turning black and hair singing off, held up by unyielding chains, until I thought the light I saw was just fire burning my eyes out, spitting angry flames from empty sockets.

Just as the world began to tumble away it ended, reality and breath snapping back like a frayed bowstring. The end of a broken shout burst from my throat as the spell shattered. I sagged on ethereal chains, gasping for air, and she caught my head as it bowed, cradling it against her chest.

“I know, I know,” she soothed, running lithe fingers through my hair. I shuddered against her breast as long as she would let me, breathless and reeling. And then she pulled away, hands beneath my chin to draw my eyes. “Now, are you going to tell me where she is, or shall we begin again?”

I hung my head, trapped inelegantly between her binding magic and my own tragic, misguided heroism.

I had nothing to tell her. I’d made sure of that.

She sighed. “What a shame.”