“I is al-kanterloter. I say kantensprak gud very. Al-harb is super bad.” Sundancer looked down on the old workbook, pushing the pages aside with her hooves as she tried her best to avoid staining the muzzle-scribed pages with her sweat. “What language is this, mom?”
The mare went up behind her, looking down at the writing. “Heh. Commander Hurricane's Canterlotian.”
“It looks like barely-legible scribbles in unicorn script mixed with transcriptions of Tarbian thrown in.”
The mare grinned. “It is.”
She raised an eyebrow. “It's a book. How'd it get published if it was barely legible?”
“Sundancer, it's been five years and I'm surprised you don't have a reading cutie mark.” The mare sighed. “Don't tell me you haven't read Wasted Souls yet. It has a cover with burned books on it, for heavens' sakes. I thought you'd be rushing to the scandal.”
“I was putting it off. I thought it was a novel.”
“It is.”
“Oh.” She put her hoof up against her chin. “So how did it get published?”
The mare sat and began to speak. “Well, at one point they were gonna turn Earth—sorry, Pegasopolis and Unicornia—into an actual part of whatever they were thinking they were gonna make. Ever since Platinum got her gold heart stuck on a pike, the unicorns and pegasi—”
“I know that much.”
The mare shrugged. “Well, I'll skip to the good part. Thanks to the unicorns, the pegasi had to assimilate us before setting up shop forever. That meant they'd have to give every literate pony citizenship.” She cleared her throat. “Everypony literate in Canterlotian, of course. Reading pictures isn't hard enough for them.”
Sundancer tilted her head with interest. “I think I can see where this is going.”
“The unicorns said 'okay', but they wanted them to teach us Canterlotian first. To make it fair. The unicorns don't like looking like bad ponies, you see.”
She looked down at the book. “So—”
“So you're holding their little literacy program.”
She grimaced. “So what happened?”
“Puddinghead started his little uprising.” She said the name with quite a bit of bitterness. “They all signed the Trottingham concord before it happened. This was gonna be a distribution center before they told me to burn all of it.”
“You didn't?”
She shook her head in mock disappointment. “What do you take me for?”
Sundancer nodded. “So, do you know Unicorn or Canterlotian?”
Her expression darkened a bit, and she looked away. “I might've been a collaborator, Sundancer, but I wasn't a traitor.”
“Oh.” She looked away herself.
“I was a smart collaborator. Of course I know Canterlotian.” The mare turned back and laughed. “Little bit of Upper Unicorn, too. Ich bin ein Bermaner. ”
Sundancer breathed a sigh of relief and glared at the mare. “Oh, come on.”
“Gotcha.”
She shook her head. “Where did you learn it?”
“I've got tons of documents here, Sundancer.” She waved her hoof about. “The Apricot-Sky Agreement was written in Unicorn and Canterlotian. No Tarbian there. Did you really think I didn't wanna know 'bout just how hard they bucked us up against the wall?”
Sundancer peered curiously. “Have you ever been to Canterlot, mom?”
“Most earth ponies don't.” Her tone was neutral.
“But you?”
“Once.” She paused for a second. “A year before you came around.”
Sundancer tilted her head. “What for?”
The mare sneered in contempt. “Showpony business. You've read the Trottingham concord. Everypony has. They got me up there and started calling me Regulatory Commissioner for the Foal Mountain Region. All a bunch of horseapples.” She shuddered slightly. “I had to clean up a body that rotted for two weeks. Two weeks. Frozen to all hell.”
“Foal Mountain?”
The mare shrugged. “That's what they call the Blood Spike nowadays.”
She nodded. “I see.”
They sat there for a while, as if in contemplation.
Suddenly, the mare spoke. “No earth ponies go to Canterlot nowadays.”
“The Trottingham concord granted equal access to the capital.”
“The Trottingham concord was rendered obsolete by Puddinghead's capitulation and replaced by the Integration Charter.” She grimaced. “That's what they're gonna tell you.”
“It isn't true?”
“Know your rights,” she said, walking over to one of the shelves, rifling through them to retrieve a roll of parchment. “And be careful with them. I'm sure they're collector's items nowadays.” She tossed the parchment to her.
She raised her hoof; the appendage granulated around the parchment as she unrolled it and began to read. “Collector's items?”
“Back when we got free copies of the thing, tons of us burned the horseapples outta them because they thought it took their rights away. We got a bunch of leaflets after Puddinghead capitulated, said they just wanted us to be slaves, so on, so forth.”
“That's not true. It refutes that on the first line.” She read aloud from the thing, her Canterlotian somewhat stilted. “'First and foremost: none of these provisions should be taken as contradictions of the Trottingham accord.'”
“Well, I managed to get my hands on a unicorn newspaper. Turns out a bunch of hippies got together and stuck that in there.”
“So why did they burn them?”
“Because nopony knew it was there.” She went to the shelves again and pulled out a tiny wad of paper, marked with varied forms of invective. “Guess where the leaflets came from.”
“'The unicorn horn-dogs have heaped upon us a final betrayal of the most bucked-up type. It is a ugly disgrace upon our families and our homes. This so-called charter of Integration is a horseapples thing and is against our dear Chancellor Puddinghead's belief.'” She looked closely, running her hoof over the markings. “It's machine-printed.” She looked up. “The embargo was lifted last year. This leaflet is three years old.”
“And nopony writes like that. It looks like somepony who took a course in literary Tarbian and got a book called Five Hundred Tarbian Words Your Teacher Won't Teach You.”
Her eyes ran over the paper again, reading its entirety; it went on in detail. “Why would anyone believe it, then?”
“It's signed Baltimare Resistance Movement. Nopony in Baltimare speaks Tarbian. Hardly anypony here spoke enough Canterlotian to read it for themselves. Everypony thought they were a bunch of educated refugee buzzards who sympathized with us.”
“So it could've been a coincidence. Maybe they didn't read it right.”
She shrugged. “If you believe that, I've got powdered unicorn horn to sell.”
They both sighed.
Sundancer around looked for another book, as she always did.