I liked my candy. Maybe that's why they fed me so little of it.
My first teacher turned out to be a taxi driver. Crossroads lived up to his name and matching cutie mark. With a white streaked black mane and a deep yellow coat, the husky earth pony doubtless matched his carriage, though I never got to see it. I suspected the C. A. Syndicate had some share in his taxi medallion, but he never said anything other than to teach me all the best routes in the city.
By hoof.
Having committed the Borough Map to memory—the layout of the various overlapping territories claimed by the various "organizations" in the city—I understood he knew how to get from point A to point B with as few "trespasses" as necessary. Some days we traveled during the morning rush, some days the evening one. Twice a week, we walked during the late evening, or after the bars closed. The latter meant seeing the sunrise either from The Woodlands that overlooked the city to the northeast, or from the bay.
Calling a stallion that pulled a five-seater for a living "physically fit" was an understatement. Despite my training runs for the fights, I found myself having to speed up almost every block to keep up. At least I slept well.
He chattered about fares that had caused him trouble, like a repeat fare, a filly who kept on reversing the numbers in an address and the letters in street names like "Stone Heave", which was "Heather Stone." Both existed. He insisted I learn address numbers and cross streets, so I could reroute without having to resort to maps.
"You're not going to take out a map and light it up if you are trespassing in somepony's territory, now are you?"
Beyond work, he barely opened up. I didn't know if he had children, or if he was even married. Of course, I never admitted I was a runaway or that I was an Earl. Or that I had a hobby moonlighting as Princess Grim, despite him admitting he picked up fares on fight nights so that he could see some of the fights and be ready for uptown fares afterwards.
I guess my blue dye disguise worked well. He certainly didn't recognize me.
Soon he was assigning me destinations, having me map them at home, and letting me lead. And fail. He'd point out pedestrians to expect at certain hours that I didn't want as witnesses. He'd point out unwise trespasses. He'd point out traffic delays and missed detours I was too stupid to think to take. I learned a lot of foul language and was happy he didn't have a ruler to hit me with, too.
The only thing I learned to do with magic in that first month or so was that Trigger could make potions. He could cook too, but I guess it makes sense if you can cook magic you can cook food.
Which meant he could read my magic book.
I trotted into a smokey apartment one night and started coughing. I rushed to the kitchen, expecting to find his tail smoldering and wishing I could conjure water.
I found him stirring a foul indigo blue soup bubbling in a cast iron stock pot with a long-handled whisk grasped in his teeth. I held my nose with a hoof and asked, "What horse apples are you making?"
He didn't miss a beat, talking around the handle. "The potion to turn you into a mule." He grinned, after a fashion.
"No, really."
He glanced at what I first mistook for a bakery recipe book on the white tile counter.
"Hair regrowth? Um. Might sell better if it didn't stink."
It was more of a scrapbook. He'd pasted in magically duplicated pages from a book—you could see the shadows of wrinkled discolored parchment. The margins were filled with very neatly printed notes in masculine dark blue and black ink. He'd never be a doctor with such legible hoof-writing. I saw trans-dimension dot clouds that annotated relatively simple integral equations that he had solved into matrix tables over the next three pages. Many of the number sequences rhymed and they actually demonstrated a perceptible rhythm. My eyes were drawn in, flashing left to right. Was that true of my horn calculations?
"Wait. That's dactylic hexameter! Potions require math?"
"Well, duh." He spat the whisk into the sink and hoofed off the gas burner. "Earth ponies make things grow and become stronger." He shrugged. "I guess the maths help me channel that. As I did better at maths, I got better at these 'horse apples'. Classmates liked to call me an egghead until I earned a rep that brought an end to that: Plenty of bloody noses to go around."
I blinked, not so much that he had to fight, but had had to fight not to be bullied. I said, "Trigger."
"Yes?"
"I meant the meaning of your name." I felt my lips compress, realizing that I expected confirmation of my pet theories. His cutie mark was a flange lever with a spring. "You got your cutie mark when you realized math let you make potions, right?"
He started laughing. He ran water in the sink and started washing the whisk.
"What's so funny?"
He snorted and kept snickering. "Your serious expression."
"Yeah, funny." I sighed and shook my head. Not everything was about cutie marks. I looked at the potion. It was more of a smelly recipe than a spell. I started to see that I might be able to cast it, which was difficult without a wish predicate or a proper mnemonic other than the description. Could I use Illuminate's predicate, instead?
He dropped the whisk from a red plaid hoof towel into a drawer with a bang.
I looked at him.
He said, "Yes."
"Yes? Yes, what?"
"Yes, that's when I got it."
It took a couple seconds for me to connect "it" to my cutie mark question. I gasped. His recipe book immediately glowed bright bluish green.
"Hay!" He grabbed away the book. I'd reflexively cast a high-level Illuminate on it. Remember, I'd long ago blown past just lighting my horn.
"Hay, back!" I cried, levitating it back to the counter, rifling the pages back to the recipe. "It's just light," I said, reflexively pouting. I added, "I'd never hurt a spell book."
"They're sacred?" he asked, archly.
"All books are," I corrected. I flashed back to when Sunburst got his cutie mark and the tower of heavy grimoires and tomes toppled over toward me: An intersection of gravity, mass, and cutie mark magic. "And deadly."
"I see," he said, looking over my shoulder at the glowing book.
My hide at my shoulder ticked at his closeness. Together with my revelation about Trigger, it made it difficult to concentrate but, after a few minutes, I spellified the recipe. The ingredients seemed to be metaphors: "spaghetti", "an oft-used comb." Others he told me were magic channels, like "soil from the roots of turf." Quantities and weights harmonized with the matrices of numbers...
Who was I making a foal of other than myself? I knew nothing about potions.
I cast it on my own front fetlocks, which had not grown in particularly thick this winter. It refused to trigger, no pun intended. I grunted and tried again.
Trigger noticed the glow around my ankles and knelt down to examine it. The short hairs crackled with static amongst the popping sparkles. His closeness caused the hide on my legs to tick, but he got this professional look on his face and I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.
"Well, you are a unicorn," he said.
"Which means?"
He touched a hoof to his chin. "Not an earth pony."
I snorted.
"Look. Nopony can tell if it works when you apply it; I tell customers that all the time." He stood. "Hair magic is problematic, you can't just grow long hair instantly because a pony is an animal, not a plant. Different 'ingredients.' If you did, it'd fall out. You could make a toupeé, or a wig in your case, but who wants that?"
I looked at my still not luxurious front fetlocks. "I couldn't braid them this year."
"And she pouts again."
I turned to walk away.
"Don't be that way."
I huffed.
"I mean—" He huffed. "At least stop my book from glowing!"
"It'll make it easier to read at night! Ok, ok. Never learned to cancel spells." I had been going to work on that with Sunburst, but, then, you know... cutie mark. "I apologize."
"Look, Gelding, sorry. You wanna to try an experiment? Put some of the potion on the your rear right fetlock and use that as a yard stick..."
I did.
We ended up eating at the carrot dog pushcart at the corner. Even outside, the stallion making the dogs asked if I'd stepped in something. Still, it was better than the flat, even with the windows open to air the place out. We discussed spell math around bites of carrot, onion, and pickle relish slathered with spicy brown mustard that made my tongue tingle. He couldn't calculate worth hay without a conjoined stick contraption marked with logarithmic gradations—something earth ponies called a "slide rule"—but he understood analytic geometry and integrals. He probably should have been studying to be a magical pharmacist or a civil engineer, not a managerial-level thug.