//------------------------------// // The Colt Who Cried Timberwolf, or, Apple Danishes // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// SBMS104 The baker was grouching at her assistant, mixing a bit of flour into a shallow bowl of honey. "You know I don't like using honey to substitute for a proper sugar glaze. The glazes should be firm and skinned. You just can't get that by slopping a trail of bee-snot all over the pastries." "Sorry, Miss Cake. We just don't have any more confectioners', and probably won't for the next month or two." The mare sniffed at my standard-bearer, who apparently had forgotten he was anything other than a factotum for the defrocked spy. He was helping with the mixing-bowls. I cleared my throat, again. "Oh, Doctor! Didn't see you there, dearie. Where's your little white shadow?" "Actually on Company business this morning, I have some questions for the Annals. What are you making at this time of day?" "Apple danishes, for the evening shift's breakfast, and tomorrow for the day shift, of course." She pulled her paddle out of the mix, and the thickened honey dripped in long ropes from her stirring device. "Bah, needs something more." She grabbed an apple from a basket setting to the side, and started running a grater across the surface of the unpeeled apple, carving little flakes of apple-skin and drops of juice from the fruit over the mixing-bowl "You had questions for me?" "Y-yes, on the subject of what exactly you're doing here. Back in the fall, we were talking about repatriating you into the hooves of your superiors at the consulate in Rime. I had to be away from the Company on detached duty for most of the winter, and a good chunk of the spring. I've been distracted by other matters since then, but now, here we are, in summer again, and you're still here. Baking." "Oh, well, your Dancing Shadows took over my case when you disappeared in a puff of sulphur and terrible rumors. She apparently didn't want shut of me quite as much as you did, and said they'd prefer to keep a spy where they could keep an eye on me, rather than lurking about in the neighborhood, upsetting the civilians." "Dior Enfant." "Pardon?" "Her name is Dior Enfant. There is no pony named Dancing Shadows." "Of course there isn't, dearie! She's a donkey." "I meant that-" "Oh, I know what you mean, but I don't think you're fooling anyone with this little shell game of yours. Only a great fool would mistake her for anything other than an agent of the Company. I don't quite understand why you started that little charade, but it can only make you look foolish in the eyes of the community." "Most of her contacts in the northlands still call her by her birth name." "And that's between her and the northlands, but we're here in the riverlands, aren't we? So, Dancing Shadows. Who asks me to write up my monthly reports, and then after she censors them, to re-write them in my own mouth. She gets somepony, of whom I have no idea, to drop them off in the dead-drop locations. I've agreed to provide the proper signs to signal that they are indeed my work, and my employers in SPIES are happy, and Dancing Shadows is happy. I'm a little homesick, mind you, but that would have been the case regardless, and at least I'm not being beaten and threatened with hangings by suspicious peasants. Well, aside from your occasional crotchets." "SPIES?" "Oh, I probably shouldn't have used the agency name. 'Special Projects, International Evaluation Service'. Silly, I know, but at least it's better than the internal covert & monster-hunting service, you wouldn't believe that acronym if I told it to you. Which I won't, it's properly classified, and I shouldn't even know it. Somepony really dropped the ladle in the broth when they let that slip to a field agent." "I, I think you're lying to me about the name of the Equestrian foreign service. There is no way that anypony would dream up something so foolish. It sounds like dream-logic." She smiled, as she whipped her glaze. Her eyes tracked down, looking behind me. I turned around, and found Cherie and two of the other apprentices with her – a jack named Long Punt, and a skinny little doe named Jagged Tooth. Our inheritance from that orphanage we burnt in du Pere. "A habit of lying will draw you into a world that will never believe a word you say, Sawbones. Children, have I ever told you the story of Fallow Fields, who lied as he breathed, and found to his sorrow that nopony could ever take him at his word?" "No, Miss Cake. Why don't you?" "Well," said the earth pony, as she moved from whipping her glaze, to helping Carrot Cake roll out their batter in long, wide strips across the preparation surfaces. "The Danvers clan is vast, and fecund – that means they have lots of foals, dears – and you can find them just about everywhere. They're almost as common as Apples. Wherever there's good soil, you'll find a Danvers planting carrots, carrots and some sort of grain, be it rye, or wheat, or maize, or I don't know what. Apples tend to specialize in slightly worse soils, and often you'll find the one clan breaking lands for the other to follow in their tracks. One thing the Danvers know, that's keeping sweet soils sweet. Once they put down their tap-roots, they don't let go." "If they don't move once they're planted, how is it they're so common?" I asked. "Well, that's the thing. There are root-bound Danvers, and then there are seedling Danvers. For every dozen or so Danverlings dug deep into a hamlet somewhere, producing endless foals and slowly buying out their neighbors' plots of land to plant their children in spreading knots of family until they dominate entire townships, you get one with a wild hair, a pony so light-minded and kite-hearted that the slightest breeze picks them up like dandelion fluff and blows them downwind." The two Cakes alternated rolling their dough, and pounding them flat with mallets. "The rootling Danvers make the family what they are, successful, fiercely effective farmers. But the seedling Danvers are why they're a widespread farming clan. Eventually they're caught by some sturdy, stolid – that means serious and unflashy, dears – mare or stallion that reminds them of the family they left behind, and they put down shallow roots in whatever corner of the world they were caught. Their children and grand-children keep them grounded, and breed a new batch of root-bound Danvers in a new village. And sometimes, that seedling Danvers never quite takes root, and he or she leaves a trail of little rootlings in the gardens of a dozen different villages scattered far and wide. "Fallow Fields was a seedling Danver, all his kin saw it in him, as soon as he grew old enough to speak. He loved stories, adventure stories, foal tales, terrible tales of the monsters of the deep forests, but most of all, he loved tall tales. And as he grew old enough to be able to start telling stories, he told them about himself, his friends, his relatives, and ponies he met on the roadsides in between chores. "Fallow Fields loved telling stories so much, that he didn't let the dull details of fact, or probability, or even possibility to get in the way of a good tale. He killed himself and his siblings a hundred different times, in half a hundred different ways, before he got a cutie mark. He sent them on grand adventures, tore down the sun and the moon, and painted the heavens in the entrails and rainbows of a wild colt's bloodiest and most inventive imagination. He could look a pony in the eyes, and spin a story about that pony's death at the hands of bandits, solemnly informing them that they were their own revenants, a ghost damned to walk the byways of their living days, everypony they meet cursed to treat their phantasmic self as if they were still living. He was sometimes so persuasive that he occasionally convinced ponies they were in the afterlife." She began folding the pounded-flat dough back up on itself, smoothing it out to be pounded flat once again. "By the time he got his cutie mark, nopony could trust a single word that came out of his mouth. His endless stories were vastly amusing, and clever, and left everypony he talked to bemused, off-stride, and confused. But belief? Nopony went to Fallow Fields to learn anything. He was a black hole into which information flowed, and only nonsense re-emerged. After he got his mark, he became a carter, and a wanderer, as seedling Danvers often do. He carried his stories from town to town and homestead to homestead, and he was a favoured guest of many a pony who prized his bedtime stories for their foals, and his off-colour fireside tales for when the foals were safely asleep in their beds." The dough was folded back upon itself once again. "He found many a mare who would allow his lies for a night or two, but never one that would bother to try to bind him to the soil, as all seedling Danvers wish in the secret chambers of their innermost selves. Of all kite-hearted seedlings, Fallow Fields was the lightest-minded and most wind-blown of them all. And his endless story-telling gave nopony a reason to believe he was ever serious about anything at all. "One day, he came across a bonnie young unicorn mare, who lived in a small, young house-tree, barely hollowed out at all. There, near the fading edge of one of the fenced-in, dying deep forests, Locked Gate maintained the barricades that she and her guild had built around the dark woods, to contain the fell magics which beat in those woodlots like a wicked heart, that drove the trees to march across healthy farm-land and usurp the soils of Equestria's lifeblood. The rangers could fight the monsters and beasts of the deep woods, and the earth-ponies could purge the soils of the trees' poison, but only the barricades kept the trees within their bourne – that means, their proper place, dears. The territorial mages had been founded by the Princess as a multi-generational solution, a campaign against the dark forests which lasted for centuries, reconquering the lost lands one plot of land at a time. If ever unicorns could be described as bound to the land, bound to the soil, it was the barricade-magi." Folded yet again, and again. So many folds, for a pastry to be bolted down in a mouthful by armsponies hurrying through breakfast towards their day's work. "Locked Gate laughed at Fallow Fields' jokes, and stories, and tall tales. She became his favourite stop there next to that enclosed, dying woodlot. But, sadly enough, she also laughed at his proposals, and his entreaties. It is questionable whether she even understood she was being courted." She poured a mixture of honey and diced apples over the many-folded dough, and then she folded them one last time, trapping the sweet sauce inside the pocketed dough. "One day, he hauled his half-empty cart down the lane leading to her house-tree, and found that lane had disappeared overnight, the track overrun with the terrible trees of the darkest, deepest woods. He could see the top of her home, just over the new sharp-thorned hedges which had thrown themselves across the road. He dropped his traces, and raced back and forth along the new growth, trying to find a gap through the obstacle. He yelled over the top of the hedges, and perhaps he heard her cries for help, or perhaps it was only the wind, wailing through the thorns. Bloodied and scratched, Fallow Fields eventually gave up trying to force the hedge-wall, and galloped for Locked Gate's nearest neighbors. He found several of them likewise secreted away from the outside world by the outrunners of the affronted wild wood, which had struck back against its tormenters, its would-be gaolers." Cup Cake now began to cut the many-folded strips of dough into small, square sections, and flattened them one last time, trapping the apple filling which was making some small attempt to escape its own gaol-cells. "Fallow Fields collected his cart, and marched with purpose to the nearest blockhouse of the terrestrial guard, to report the breakout of dark magic, and the overwhelming of the defenses of the unicorns maintaining the collapsed barricades. But, sadly enough, his wounds closed, and a passing pegasi-driven rainstorm washed away his bloodstains, and by the time he could tell his story to the guards, they took it for nothing but one of the mad stories for which he was known throughout the district. No matter how hard he tried to tell them it wasn't a story, it was the truth, they just wouldn't believe him. His urgency and his insistence only made them laugh the harder, for he had often play-acted in just such a fashion to add a thrill to a given story, to add spice to the tellings. He gave up on the chortling guards, and hurried to the next outpost, to try again." She put the lumps of dough onto baking-sheets, and hooved them into the oven, adding a bit of wood to the fire. "Yet again, they thought his performance hilarious. Even the urgent truth, in his mouth, fell apart into utter nonsense, merely because it came out of his mouth. On the road to the third and last guard-post, he sat down in front of his cart, and thought deeply about how to break through this impossible barricade between him and the truth. After a panicked long while, running in circles within his own imagination, he gave up. He thought, 'the truth has never served me before; why start now?' He scripted for himself a story of banditry, of pride and theft. Then he went into the last blockhouse, and he acted out his script, his play. He mocked the soldiery, he knocked the helms from their heads. He stole a pike, and clouted the corporal of the guard across her ears with it. Then he ran like Tartarus, leaving his cart behind. "He led them a merry chase, here and there, but always towards the wild-wood hedges which had swallowed up the barricades of Locked Gate and her colleagues. Eventually the half-enraged, half-laughing guards pinned Fallow Fields against that wild hedge, and he dropped the pike, panting. Then he plunged himself into the thorns, trying to swim through the sharp-taloned branches. The guards though him mad, until he exposed the edge of Locked Gate's mail-box, and they realized where they were, and what wasn't where it ought to have been – the lane, and the mage's yard. "They brought in reinforcements, and fire, and powerful wizards to scorch away the dark magics which had overpowered the callow barricade-mages' defenses. The young unicorns were rescued from their imprisonment, not particularly worse for wear, but more than a little terrified by their close encounter with the still-strong magics of the deep woods. "Fallow Fields was humbled by his inability to tell a truth and be believed. It had nearly lost him his lady-love. Though he loved his lies and his stories, he still loved the lady more. So he made an oath, and promised the world that on one certain day of the week, every week, he would tell no lies, no tall tales, no stories. This, he would do, though he burst from the effort, he would contain his falsehoods. They say that you could always tell it was Wednesday, because Fallow Fields was looking constipated. On a day which was not Wednesday, he could declare, as a preface before whatever home truth he had to tell, that 'if it were Wednesday, I would certainly tell you this', and occasionally, sometimes, he would be believed." She took the half-baked pastries out of the oven with a mitt, and laid them steaming on the preparation surface. She drizzled thickened honey-glaze over the half-finished apple danishes, and returned them to the oven for a final pass through the flames. "They say that Fallow Fields never trespassed against the sanctity of Wednesdays, that he proposed to the unicorn mare on the edge of the dark woods upon a Wednesday, and that, eventually, after many misadventures, they were married on a glorious, sun-kissed Wednesday morning." The next morning, I was duly grateful for our breakfast danishes, having seen for myself the work that went into those little flaky pastries, and I took the time to savor the sweetness of the honey and the tartness of the apple filling.