Everyone always spoke of the Princess’s grace, her poise, her stately carriage. Bred like a good horse (though they did not use that particular metaphor) for dignity and delicacy.

In truth, he had never found her to be particularly graceful. It must be one of those things people said to be polite. When the Gerudo were effusive in their praise of a sister’s looks, it often meant that she was also a hopeless archer, burned the porridge, or sat a horse like a jouncing sack of potatoes.

Not that he believed the Hylian princess could ride, cook, or shoot, either. He did not know what her gift was. (He presumed she had one.)

But it was certainly not grace.

It seemed to him that the girl could scarcely walk down a corridor without stumbling into him. At her father’s interminable suppers, she never passed him a platter without half its contents spilling onto him. She seemed all elbows--and sharp ones, at that.

Once she had stepped on the hem of his cloak as they were descending a stair. It had taken some swift footwork on his own part to keep them both from tumbling down like a beribboned avalanche onto the assembled nobles below.

No one ever praised him for his grace, but he had grown rather adept at catching her. He learned to have a hand out to steady her, though she always pretended not to see--until the next time she tripped and fell against him like a toppled sapling and got her lacy sleeves snagged on the hammered studs of his breastplate.

***

One day it struck him: the princess, when viewed from across the throne room, was perfectly sure-footed. He watched her swirl on the ballroom floor in the arms of velvet courtiers and never once tread upon their feet. She seemed to have no trouble at supper. No one got a royal elbow in their ribs by accident. (He observed her seatmates closely for any wincing.)

No, she was exactly as graceful as everyone said--when he was not standing next to her. Suddenly she was all weak ankles, awkward shoulder jostles, smacking into him with gesticulating hands, lunging after a basket of rolls tumbling into his lap.

She was always falling into him. And only him.

After he noticed this, he began testing her. Somehow, the trajectory of her frequent stumbles always sent her colliding into him, no matter how he sidestepped. (Perhaps there was a gift in the way she could twist in midair, like a cat, with no one being the wiser for it.)

Yet whenever he caught her, she was hasty to remove herself from his arm, murmuring blushing excuses. When he offered her his hand at one of the Hylians’ tedious balls (he did not enjoy their dances, and attended them as seldom as diplomatically excusable, but curiosity about the princess’s malady of sudden-onset vertigo spurred him this once), she declined to take it. She was, in fact, studiously careful never to touch him--unless it could be construed as an accident. Then, she was all hands.

"There are easier ways, princess," he told her once, after she had contrived to back clear into him under the pretext of admiring the sunset through the colored panes of a high window.

She had only looked innocent and confused. “To do what, my lord?” she replied, then avoided bumping him for an unprecedented three days.

***

It was not that he really thought she harbored a passion for him, even when he had teased her. The prevailing opinion of the court was that Gerudo men, like Gerudo women, were shockingly unattractive: their skin too dark, their noses too big, their hair too coarse.

(This was an opinion he could not fail to overhear, with how often it was discussed. Perhaps they thought him deaf as well as ugly and monstrous--for that word had been used as well. He had his own opinions on Hylians, but when he voiced them, it was always in a language they did not know.)

Fascination, then, perhaps. The princess and her bevy of maidens had scarce been able to look at him when the Gerudo envoy arrived. Even after six months’ residence in the castle, the other ladies still shrieked and scattered like pigeons if he approached. The princess, as was her duty, stood beside him and served as his escort at certain functions, demonstrating her father’s acceptance of his newest (and wealthiest) vassal. No doubt she, too, found him alarming in his foreignness.

Perhaps these clumsy brushes were her means of challenging her fear, of proving something to herself. It explained (he thought) her reluctance to openly take his hand, and how quick she was to withdraw after having made contact. Bait the wolf, but do not stroke its fur.

He did not relish being jabbed and escaped from, as if he were a beast of unknown temper.

It was with that thought in mind that he cornered her in the library one afternoon, when most of the court had gone hunting. He could be quite soft-footed when he wished. Absorbed in her book, she did not hear him approach until he was almost upon her.

"My lord!" she said with a little gasp, clutching the book to herself like armor. "I expected you had gone--"

Ordinarily, he would have stopped a respectable ten paces away, bowed, and inquired after the state of her health. (He never had been certain what a healthy Hylian looked like, but it was the courteous thing to do.) The princess gasped again when he did none of these things, but instead settled himself on the other half of the window seat. They were quite close, closer than they had ever been except at those curiously clumsy suppers, and seeming closer than that for the lack of witnesses.

His long legs took up most of the space before them. She would not be able to scurry off without pushing past him. As she recoiled, drawing her feet up under the skirts of her gown to avoid touching him, he caught her hand.

She went as still and white as a statue.

Gently, firmly, he uncurled her tense fingers and placed them against his own, matching palm to palm. “There,” he told her, “only a man. Stop flinching, princess. You see?”

"Yes," she whispered, so faintly that he could barely see her lips move. A blush rose from her collar. It spread across her face and all the way to the tips of her ears, until she was red as a beet.

He took pity on her then, and released her hand.

Instead of snatching her hand back at once, like he had expected, she stretched it out. Her fingers touched his face. Very gently, she traced its blocky lines. Daring the monster, he thought.

Then she lunged forward and smashed her lips against his: hard, graceless, entirely deliberate.

Just as quickly, she yanked away, as though he had tried to grab her. (He had not. He was too startled by the sudden pain of his face being mashed against someone else’s teeth.) She scooped up her skirts and jumped over his outstretched legs. As quickly as a deer, she vanished into the stacks of books. The library door slammed shut behind her.

He was left with a bruised mouth and the certainty that he had misjudged terribly somewhere.