SBMS079
She returned to the conference, and the officers of the Company were gathered for her convenience. She dropped her glamour again in the hall, and looked back and forth coquettishly between our officers and Gibblets and I. I noticed a bit of blood in her hoof-print as she walked to the table at the back of the hall where we sat.
Her manner was giddy but businesslike, and her subject-matter consisted mainly of requests for parchment and ink, and interrogations of the Captain and the Lieutenant regarding their intentions and desires for the balance of the current season, and plans for the following year. They were tentative and uncertain, as to be honest, our intentions had been undefined, and our desire to catch her Imperial eye, and ascertain our position and place in her plans, intentions and desires. This is, after all, what it means to "be in service" to a sovereign or a principal.
"Your Majesty," I interjected after several fruitless rounds of deflections, "We truly do need to understand your mind in all this. We have gotten as far as we have this year and the year past by playing knight-errant, but it has been a play, an act. In absence of direction, we have been operating like a knightly order, like something out of a troubadour's chanson, enacting a rondalay of the Matter of Tambelon. In our natural state, we're more a Company for sirventes. How can we help you accomplish your goals?"
The dead-eyed alicorn grinned, her wings half-extended in enthusiasm. She leaned over to me, and confided in a false whisper, loud enough for the entire table to hear, "I have no idea what to do with you all."
She straightened to her full height, and continued to the whole meeting. "I must confess I have been treading water for the past ten years, and it is more than the work of an afternoon to break that inertia. As you have seen, here, my tools are blunted, cursed, or otherwise unhelpful in accomplishing my goals. I wish for a beautiful, mighty, and prosperous estate, full of smiling subjects, sturdy, healthy households, and orderly affairs. What tools I have to hoof are destructive, corrupting, or both. And I myself am neither beautiful, nor healthy, nor particularly orderly in my instincts. I adore your work here in Dance Hall, but for reasons that I know, in my rational mind, are abhorrent and vile. I will, when I leave here, travel through the Riverlands, and greatly enjoy myself looking in on my legates and their work. I will be going alone, as I generally do on these inspection tours. Living donkeys and ponies tend to not thrive in those conditions.
"Well, indeed. So much for the mis-match between my intentions, my inclinations, and my goals. The fact that, given your head and in the total absence of guidance, you chose to do this, here, with the tools available to you, is quite encouraging to me. Perhaps this land does require a new chanson de geste. Even if it is delivered as a satire. But tread lightly, sirvens. I will always prefer a beautiful lie to a destructive truth. It is in my nature. Like all sovereigns, living and dead, I prefer in my heart of hearts to be lied to: I want to be flattered. Flatter my name, ponies. Make me look better than I am."
She wrote as she enthused, and produced several documents for our official use. A draft on Imperial funds; a proper contract with Her Majesty, the Bride, Empress of All Tambelon; a warrant for the arrest of the person or persons responsible for the outbreak of Caribou City; license for our presence in Rennet and Pepin, and written instructions to defend the peace of both provinces against enemies foreign, domestic, and posthumous. All properly sealed by a device conjured from some hidden bag of holding held in her black mage-field.
"Hold Dance Hall in my name, and in my absence, defend the province, and complete your 'clearances'. Such a term of art, you sound like some of my greedier vassals, plotting their endless enclosure conspiracies against the collective property of the peasantry. Well, so long as you limit your operations to those against wildling undead and true rebels, I will be satisfied. Try to limit your depredations to this province, I have not yet decided how you will be used in the greater Riverlands. I still must evaluate the conditions to the south; my information sources have become hopelessly corrupt."
"Speaking of hopelessness and corruption, do you have any idea why an Equestrian diplomatic attaché might be asking questions about your Company? My discovery of an Equestrian consulate sprung up like a mushroom in Rime was what eventually led me to your front door. Equestrians are hardly a common sight this side of the Chain, certainly since the rearrangement of the geography between there and here. I remember them, of course, from my second life, before my dear husband's fall, before the Smooze ate Flutter Valley. But since I took authority in my own name? Nothing but crickets and wind from the Sisters. Although I hear now that it has been just Celestia for quite a long time now. Are you why the Princess of the Sun and Moon suddenly now deigns to recognize my half-existence?"
The Captain licked her lips, and thought. "Your Majesty, the Equestrians used to keep observation of the Company back on Openwater Bay, but as far as we could tell, they kept tabs on all the mercenary companies of Crossroads. For a world with such a reputation for sweetness and light, their foreign service is notably paranoid. Perhaps their interest was more focused upon the Company in particular than we had thought. It has recently come to our attention that the Company's ultimate origins are Equestrian in nature, although it is so far in our past that we have little institutional memory of the exodus."
I closed my eyes in regret.
"Really? I thought I asked earlier about origins, Sawbones? Were you holding out on me?"
"Your Majesty, we have records, detailed chronicles, for the last five hundred years of the Company's existence. Our history prior to that break in records is entirely oral in nature, and I'm sure you, as a mistress of an imperial bureaucracy, are aware of the value of hearsay."
"Spoken like a born courtier." I did my best to not cringe at the naked insult.
I opened my eyes to discover the Bride staring at me, her long horn hovering right above my mane, her dead, clouded eyes bare inches from mine.
"Your Majesty, we will do our best to not let our ancient history with the Equestrian Monarchy affect your interests in even the slightest degree."
"See that this is so. I do not wish to find a second paladins' crusade crashing my worlds' portals. I will grant you, Celestia is hardly the wild-maned crusader her sister was. And even the madmare of the Moon never found time to join in the suppression of my dearly departed husband and all his works. Not even when they were so much closer to our gates than they are now.
"Well, enough of ancient wars and distant queens. I feel like dancing. Can you summon musicians from the neighboring town?"
So we did. It was the first time the Mondovan musicians set hoof in Dance Hall. And it turned into a delirious bacchanal, wasteful of lamp-oil, food, and alcohol. The Bride, in her earth-pony semblance, led the musicians from barrack-hall to barrack-hall, carrying booze, food, and a train of drunken Company ponies in her wake. Like many an absolute monarch, the Bride proved to delight in getting her retainers drunk as lords, the better to examine their true selves through the prism of debauchery.
We fed her all the liquor and ponies her heart desired. It exhausted our seized stocks from the granary raids in Rennet the year before. It was epic, it was chaotic.
It resulted in massive hangovers. We suffered under this misery as we saw the Bride off on the next leg of her solitary tour of inspection. She trotted away from Trollbridge, Death once again wearing her Ladyship like a stole, a single mare walking alone into the wastelands alongside the great river.