He said it again that evening over supper. “Huh.”
Applejack lifted her muzzle from her plate. “Feeling talkative, are we?”
“Twilight’s an alicorn.”
“That she is,” Applejack agreed. "Pass the taters."
“And a princess.”
“That too.”
“But she’s still Twilight,” Big Mac said.
“Course she is.”
Big Mac frowned, turning these facts over in his mind, looking for some angle at which they’d fit together.
“Maybe she was always a princess, and didn’t know it,” he said.
“I guess that stands to reason,” Applejack said. “Being as things are what they are. You can’t plant pinecones and get apples.”
He said nothing else, so she dipped into the steamed thistles and carrots again. The farmhouse was unusually quiet. Apple Bloom had wolfed down her food and rushed off to meet her friends to prepare an ominous-sounding “special surprise” for the new princess.
“Sis,” Big Mac asked, “what am I?”
Applejack raised an eyebrow. “Pretty sure you’re a pony.”
“Everypony’s a pony.”
“Well, I reckon you’re also an apple farmer.”
“Is that what I am?” Big Mac stared past her, out the window, off toward where the summer orchard was.
“Do you plant apple trees?”
“Yup,” he said, with the slow rising “yup” that meant “Where is this leading?”
“Do you take care of them trees as they grow?”
“Yup,” he said, with the quick rising “yup” that meant “Go on.”
“And do you gather in the apples, and stack the baskets in the barn, and take some off to market, some to the cider press, and pack some into barrels to ship to Canterlot?"
“Ayup,” he said, with the quiet falling “yup” that meant “I see where you’re going, and you might be right, but I don’t have to like it.”
"And have ya got one half of a bright green apple plastered across each side of your big red behind?”
He looked back down his flank. "Yup," he said, with the flat harsh "yup" that meant "That's a fact and no denying it."
“Well, then, I guess you’re an apple farmer.”
“I guess.” He kept staring off into the distance. “But what if there were no apples?”
“Don’t talk nonsense. As long as there’s Apples there’ll be apples, and as long as there’s apples there’ll be Apples.”
“That’s true,” he said.
“And you’re my big brother,” she added.
“That’s good,” he said.
“Sometimes I wonder what’s rattling around in that big head of yours, Mac.”
“Yup,” he said, with the soft breathy “yup” that even he didn’t know the meaning of.
They cleaned up together, her washing and him drying, then went up early to their separate bedrooms. They had twenty barrels to pack and haul to the station before the afternoon train left for Canterlot next day.
As Big Mac drifted off to sleep, he thought of all the bushel baskets of apples stacked and shelved up to the barn’s rafters, waiting for him. It was a lot of apples. He wondered, half into the dream world, what he would do if they turned on him, packed him into a barrel and rolled him down to the cider press. Then he felt the soft black curtain of darkness over him, and the wood staves squeezing his shoulders together, and realized it was too late. They already had.
He smelled their sharp tangy breath all around him, and heard prayers murmured for him by a thousand trembling leaves. He was their slave and their god, and they poured him out into the cider press barrel, not roughly, but reverentially. The barrel's oaken slats were stained with the juice of a thousand Apples. He poured in smooth and filled it snug and tight.
Then the big screw pressed down on him from above, and he was flowing out between the slats. They caught everything dull and dirty, so that only what was sweet and strong ran through the gaps, down the trough, and spilled into another barrel. The apples sealed it, bunged it, and shipped it off to the palace, where a purple princess on a throne of gilt-edged books sipped the fresh cider from a silver goblet, and smiled.