SBMS040
The short days and long nights in garrison in Rennet were both a sort of reprieve for the Company, and a time of discomfort and unease. The first intensive field campaign in years had been a rougher experience than expected, and the cold weather of winter in the north of Tambelon was just one more thing we had not properly prepared for. Judicious looting of the half-burned barracks of the Lait Blanc had provided a supply of cloth, however shabby and ill-cut. But there were very few natural seamsters among the veterans of the Company, and the campaign had been hard on the recruits from Rime, among which there had been some with experience. Some of those had died in the fighting, and others were less than enthusiastic at the prospect of returning to the drudgery of their abandoned lives.
By mid-winter, we were all more or less clothed appropriately for the weather, but nopony really looked good in the half-stitched rags and loose robes which kept more ponies from filling my wards with frostbite and exposure cases, if nothing else. The foals and their needs were another case entirely.
Gibblets and I led a raiding party not long into the first few weeks of winter, we set out to ransack that crap orphanage in du Pere from whose negligence and disinterest we had gotten half of our apprentices. We had only gone there looking to liberate some winter clothing for the apprentices; we found a house of horrors. The earth-pony mare in charge wept and protested that she had only done what she could with what she had been given. But there was still meat on her bones, and there were well-fed rats in the mostly-empty bunk-rooms. And a carefully barricaded single room in the back where the survivors had stopped up every hole chewed through wainscoting and wall, had slept in shifts to watch each other, and survived on hand-outs from the day-jobs they were sent out to "earn" money for the "workhouse".
She didn’t even bury the dead foals. Their remains were piled in a side-room casually decapitated after the fact, from the looks of it; it only encouraged the rats.
We left that place burning as a pyre for the dead, with the proprietor mercifully garroted and left on a pile of wood soaked in oil. The party returned to the encampment with a cart-load of foals’ clothes, no food, and another cart carrying five emaciated foals, the hardened survivors of that establishment’s complement of orphans.
Gibblets and I carefully planned the apprenticeship ceremony, taking into account the mistakes we had made in the previous one. Command was present, and we carefully examined both the Lieutenant and all three cohort commanders both physically and psychically. The other military apprentices were present, as well as ponies willing to take new, physically shaky apprentices under their wings. And Gibblets made sure I was cleared as well.
The Spirit did not materialize this time, not overtly, but I certainly felt her presence in the back of my mind, and as the two caribou, two donkeys and skinny, undersized earth pony took their turns before the pikestaff, I could hear her laughing madly and weeping. I silently promised her the memory of the proprietor’s interrogation and execution, and she let the ritual pass without another display.
No long winter’s castra hiberna can pass without endless, mind-numbing meetings. Logistical reviews. Fitness reports at a level of obsessive-compulsive detail that even I found tedious. Training reviews. Troop continuing and recruit remediary education overviews.
At least the political, military, and social-economic briefings had some moments of interest and controversy. Dancing Shadows was increasingly becoming the Company’s face in interacting with the evolving post-insurrectionary provincial regime in Rennet, and the Imperial bureaucracy, insofar as the latter acknowledged our existence and the former existed as something other than an anti-caribou pogrom and counter-looting program. We would have to be very careful to preserve "Dior Enfant"’s credibility as a representative of the Imperium, or at least to muddy the waters sufficiently to make Dancing Shadows an effective agent of the Company.
Part of that was this plan, to get the provincial government established on something other than force and tribalism. Dancing Shadows had been trying to track down the legitimate heirs of the missing or dead aristocrats who used to run Rennet.
"So the Duc de Rennet died last spring of illness while petitioning the Bride in Bibelot. He was a life-long bachelor, and it is somewhat controversial which of his swarm of distant cousins is the actual heir. The most legitimate candidate is a three-year-old jenny foal who is a first cousin thrice removed. Her guardians in Rime are claiming the province by right of inheritance. They are a pack of pirates and aspirational thieves. Now, while that is hardly a disqualification for government service in the Imperium, they also show no signs of coming up to the northlands themselves, and the last thing we need is a layer of agents and appointees overseen by guardians in the name of a minor in wardship. Among the swarm of other candidates, the best choice seems to be a third cousin once removed. She has the benefit of living within close proximity to Rennet – in a town to the southeast in Hydromel. They’re minor nobility, something more than farming gentry, but not full of the usual aristocratic bosh…"
I found Dancing Shadows’ endless dissertations on the foibles and family politics of the nobility to be bracing, but the Lieutenant wasn’t even dozing anymore, she was dead asleep at the table, and Gibblets was making faces at the young jenny. I was just the Annalist, how did I become the adult at the Company table?
"OK, I think the committee has heard enough of the Ducal situation. You want us to back this third cousin for the seat? How do we go about this without pissing off the Imperium and making enemies of all the disappointed claimants and their families, patrons, and disappointed clients?"
"That’s the fun part. We do this by picking a fight with Lady Bonforte, publicly. I send an agent provocateur who insinuates that we’re supporting the Rimean minor in wardship, and provokes the would-be ducal pretender to come charging up to the ducal palace and demand her rights. She’s physically closest of all the pretenders, and if we seed her journey with the right ponies, she can arrive on site with an entourage that can allow her to hook up with the current batch of bigots and plunderers seamlessly. By the time the other claimants get a word in edgewise, it’s spring, she’s dug in like a tick, and it’s a fait accompli. The Imperium loves this sort of thing, it means they can toss the appeals from the courts. The Bride likes her judges fat, inactive, and restful. There’s a natural bias towards inaction whenever possible."
"And our posture towards the new duchesse?"
"Chilly, polite distance. We had nothing to do with her elevation, and we merely tolerate her presence. If we want to get clever, we can send you and you can do your tamed-anarchist routine. Best not let the Lieutenant do it, though. She’d have difficulty keeping it an act."
The Lieutenant snorted, still sleeping, as we all turned towards her, and imagined that earth pony in the same room as Tambelonian nobility. And we all shuddered, and hastily voted to approve the scheme. The jenny continued to explain her theories as to how this would catch the attention of the bureaucracy, and if we played it right, could either establish her "independence" or the Company’s reliability, and if we played our cards exactly right, both.
But it apparently meant that I was going into the field again. The new 'duchesse’ would be passing through Pythia’s Fell, and we needed somepony to ghost her procession and keep bandits or the weather from harming our new provincial sovereign.