Then, Captain, let me board your boat
And we’ll set sail to sweeter shores.
In Northern plains
I’ll find again
A mare who’ll make my feelings soar.
—from Ex Ad Aquilonem
A knock at the door.
Maria groaned and rubbed at her eyes with a hoof. Her neck ached, a dull pain that faded into being as her eyes opened. In the fireplace, the last embers were dwindling; on the floor around her, books were still wedged open, and rolls and rolls of parchment were sprawled across the room, covered in scribbled calculations that became larger and more illegible with every passing inch.
And before her lay her telescope, the wretched brass tube that had kept her from sleep for so many hours. She still didn’t know what was wrong with it, and—as her thoughts started to gain a momentum of their own, and she looked over her scrawlings—she doubted much of her work last night would have been reliable, anyway.
A second knock. She could just hear a muffled cough, too, from beyond the door.
Oh. Right. The door.
Maria grasped the door handle in her hornglow, twisting it and pulling it open, only barely remembering to smile as she did so. Beyond it stood a serving-mare, a mug of coffee carried in her mouth and a braid of blue-striped mane tossed over a shoulder. Maria’s smile turned genuine then, and she grabbed the mug of coffee in her hornglow, setting it down on a table near the door.
“Thank you,” she said, just as the serving-mare said the same. For a moment, both stood silent in mortification, before Maria burst into a fit of giggles; it didn’t take too long for the serving-mare to join her.
“Professor Everfree noticed you weren’t at breakfast,” she said, as she managed to bring her laughter under control. “He sent me to make sure you were awake in time for class.”
“Well, then,” Maria said. “Thank you for coming to wake me…”
“Heavyweight.” She stood a little awkwardly in the doorway for a moment, before curtseying. “But really, don’t thank me. Thank the Professor. It is five minutes till class, after all.”
Maria glanced up at the clock, her eyes widening in horror. She wasn’t even washed! What would her classmates say about that? Not that they weren’t already likely talking—what with her being sent away from Astronomy class early to fix her telescope, and being sent to the Headmistress twice in as many days. And, of course, the Duel, which was still the hot topic for gossip across the Arcana.
“I’ve prepared a tub of hot water for you,” Heavyweight added sheepishly. “I figured you might want to wash yourself quickly.”
Maria let out a sigh of relief, and tilted her head to get a better look at the corridor outside. The tub was just right of the door—a round, wooden affair, barely large enough for a pony to stand in, a small cloud of steam slowly rising from the surface of the water. It wasn’t how she’d usually wash in the mornings, not since coming to the Arcana, but she didn’t really have time for her full morning routine: a quick splash of water and a drying spell would have to do.
“Thank you, Heavyweight,” Maria said, and Heavyweight blushed a little, and seemed to half-curtsey out of reflex; Maria almost laughed, but managed to control herself. The serving-mare seemed almost as if she were waiting for permission to leave, she was so nervous and tense, so Maria nodded sharply. As soon as Heavyweight had left, she tugged the tub into her room and dived into it.
Her hornglow carefully controlled the water as she washed it over her coat, lifting an orb of liquid and rubbing it over her body instead of merely splashing the water over her, as she had done when she was a filly. It took some effort, but she managed to focus on the soap in her adjoining bathroom, floating a bar over so that she could use it.
In a matter of a minute, she was washed—nowhere near as thoroughly as she would have liked, but enough to make sure her classmates wouldn’t notice. She dried herself off with a blast of controlled hot air, a specialised drying spell she’d learned in first year, as she stepped out of the tub, vanishing the water inside it. Her bags weren’t packed, but it only took a few seconds to throw her textbooks and a couple of rolls of parchment in, and float the saddlebags onto her back. She picked up her headband and a brush as she was leaving the room, resting the former in her bags as she shut the door.
She was lucky that Starkad’s classroom was so close to the dormitories, but the short walk didn’t leave her all that much time to brush her mane. In the end, as she walked through the door of the History classroom mere seconds after the bell—and of course all her classmates would have to turn and look at her when she entered—to the disapproving glare of Doctor Starkad, she was only just sliding her headband over her horn.
Maria bowed her head apologetically, and turned towards her usual seat, at the back of the classroom, only to find Harry sitting at the desk, a smirk on his face. Before she could even frown in confusion, he raised his eyebrows, and nodded his head towards the front of the classroom… where, she saw, her classmates had oh so kindly left a seat in the very middle of the front row.
Refusing to give them any kind of reaction, Maria trotted briskly over to the desk, and set her things down, muttering a quick apology to Doctor Starkad as soon as he was in hearing range. The Professor nodded, and turned to the blackboard with a piece of chalk ready in his emerald hornglow, but Maria could feel the eyes of her classmates boring into the back of her head.
I’m never going to catch a break this year, am I?
Ex Ad Aquilonem was banned by the Thaumata, barely a week after it was published. It was republished a month afterwards, with a few minor changes. In the poem, Clover speaks of his love for the land to the north of the Equestrian border, and how he would brave the dangers of mountains or the sea to see it again. No copies survive of the original manuscript, and no scholar has yet found an adequate explanation for its initial censorship.