The older Zelda did not hurry.

She walked the way a woman walked when every clearing she crossed already belonged to her by right of survival. The silver knife in her hand was longer than the one living Zelda carried, its edge blackened by use and scored with so many carved syllables of the new name that the metal itself seemed to hum with dense, accumulated history. Her face was the same and not the same—sharper at the cheekbones, colder at the mouth, marked by a thin white scar that ran from the corner of her left eye to the hinge of her jaw. The scar looked deliberate. It looked...