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She sends for him the first time the nightmares come.
“I don’t know which was worse,” she tells him. “The smell of…of burning flesh, or the screams.”
The smell, he thinks. Especially after hearing the screams of the redeads, loud and shrill enough to freeze him in place. Compared to that, the screams of the dying faded into background noise that he could tune out after awhile.
But the smell clung to him. Rancid and cloying and inescapable. The smell followed him back and forth through time.
“I guess it was the screams,” she finally says. “When I woke up…the smell was gone, but I can still hear the screaming. It's like they’re right here, dying beside me.”
That’s because they were, he thinks. That’s because you couldn’t just wake up.
He says, “It was just a dream."
She looks up at him with watery eyes, as if hurt by his response. But he struggles to feel sympathy for a dream, struggles to find words of comfort for something she can leave behind when she wakes—something she tells him about behind a door guarded by her father's strongest knights, while drinking tea and looking at roses blooming in the courtyard.
"I feel haunted by it," she says quietly. For a moment, he sees someone familiar in the fear and pain that ghosts across her face, and he wonders if he isn't being too cold.
He knows how scary dreams can be, after all.
He knows she understands that peace is a fragile thing, that she understands the knife's edge her kingdom has walked since Link appeared in the courtyard, Triforce pulsing on the back of his hand. His stories and her own foresight whisper assurances that Hyrule's current path is the safest. And now, she adds this nightmare to the voices that remind her what awaits if her father cannot contain the growing tension since he refused alliance with the Gerudo King.
But then she sighs, and her face softens back into someone from a time he can't fully return to.
After tea, she walks him to the edge of the castle grounds. "Will you visit again soon?" Her eyes fill with so much hope that he avoids her gaze.
He had hope, once. Hope that he would see her again, that they would walk together like this, free to speak without riddles and shadows. He wanted to tell her about the Kokiri. About his childhood, and about everyone he met along his journey.
He wanted her teach him every song she knew.
Does the girl in front of him even know them? Does she know the lyre and the songs that Sheik played?
"I'll visit," he says.
She leans in to hug him and he concentrates on keeping his body relaxed, on returning her hug the way she hugs him—as a friend, as somebody she can trust, somebody who makes her feel less alone.
But for Link, he may as well be hugging a stranger.