//------------------------------//
// Les Trois Juments Noires 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
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FFMS022

The aftermath of our capture of one of the nascent former-White-Rose 'gangs' proved anti-climactic, to put it mildly.  The bulk of the aerial flights departed for operations in the south, but command directed the three of us to escort the captured would-be bandits to their eventual homes in the prisoner cages around that distant Baronies market-town.   And by 'the three of us', I mean Bad Apple, Cherie, and I, the 'night witches'.  How sad is that?  

Speaking of sad, I can't even remember the name of that depopulated townlet which the Army of the North seized to house the thousands of prisoners captured in the campaign.  (Sawbones will be very disappointed when he reads these pages, a good Annalist is supposed to be a bottomless source of trivia and important detail. Why can't I remember this?)  But, whatever the name of that damnable town, we would discover when we arrived that the survivors of the Baronies were trickling back into the ravaged districts to claim their properties or their inheritances.  But that is a tale for another time, and I'm getting ahead of myself.

The three of us, defrocked night-witches, found ourselves on hoof, trudging along with the ground rankers.  These Company ponies had been flown into the big empty east of Dover to help collect these ponies, and they, like us, were stuck on escort duty until we could deliver the prisoners to their prison-cages.  The scatter-brained, battered, defeated prisoners,  who were to be found stumbling and swaying listlessly in their shaggy ranks in the road-way between our van-guard and the rear-guard.  

Bad Apple's driver had taken off, hauling both of our gigs behind him, rigged in tandem.  Hopefully he was taking them straight to the repair-shops, as both of them were considerably worse for wear.  Mine was blood-stained from stem to stern, and the wicker was torn where it wasn't scorched or foxed.  And the less to be said about Bad Apple's blackened and charred vehicle, the better.  She was far harder on her gig than she was on her drivers, and she was hard enough on her drivers that the irate North Wind asked me to pass along his regrets to the earth pony on the subject of further cooperation.  BA would be stuck with Cherie at this rate, because nopony else was willing to put up with the burnt tail-hair, the heat-stroke, and the carelessness.

So, on hoof.  Not, in all truth, the worst of ways to spend several hot and humid days.  The vengeful summer sun seemed bound and determined to re-assert her dominion over her seasonal fields, and the excess waters we had introduced into the south were being ruthlessly baked out of the saturated soils.  The world was bright, and wavering, and hot enough to drop a tired pony after a trot of a mile and a half.  We had to stop and re-water our charges more times than I can count.  We made very little headway, and after the second day, some of the prisoners started to come out of the geas that Cherie had laid over their battered psyches.

By then, we had passed though battered Dover, whose inhabitants had by and large not fled the enemy advance, nor had they been heavily occupied by the White Rose aside from some incidental sacking.  Said incidental sacking was enough to leave the Bride's subjects in sunny Dover quite wroth on the subject of White Rose prisoners, and it had probably been a bad idea to parade our charges through that sullen market-town.  We got the prisoners to double-time it before the rotten turnips and fruit turned to something more sharp-edged, and I resolved from there on out, to never take short-cuts, no matter how hot it is, or how eager I was to get from one place to the other.  The roads after Dover were mostly through open fields, and that suited me just fine.

Bad Apple, Cherie, and I quickly grew bored with looking stern and officious for the rankers and the prisoners, and we amused ourselves with attempting three-part harmonies, with the hidden aid of the Princess as a sort of psychic metronome.  The Princess, whose presence was the only aspect of the Mistress which we saw on that long tromp through the steaming countryside, hummed along in our ears, providing a secret fourth voice that only we and the Company rankers could hear.  

It was becoming increasingly clear that we were in some sort of trouble, but nopony wanted to deal with us just yet.  So instead, we sang 'Mango of Heaven', 'The Ash Grove', 'Mares of Harelich', and a hundred other songs.  I noted out of the corner of my eye that the ears of the captured rose each time we took up a tune, and they seemed to swing into their stride whenever we found a good rhythm.  Some few of the prisoners even joined in once we found a common song or two – mostly bar-room standards I'd heard from the Rennet recruits to the Company.  

Cherie and I sang a few Prench duets from our common foalhood, but nopony else knew the tunes.  Such a shame.  But I saw the ponies in the coffers, and they straightened even further when Cherie's high alto carried above my weak soprano.  Her voice had deepened and broadened over the last year or so, and almost all of that foalish squeak and tremble had squeezed out of her, leaving a strong, commanding tone.  And she had lungs on her, strong enough to be heard over the tumult of a battlefield.

We were singing 'les trois juments noires' and trying to get Bad Apple to join in when the first of the prisoners' cages hove into view.  Somehow, my memory of the last half of the march westwards had disappeared into the aether, replaced by a litany of song and by the joy of trotting in cadence to the old folk-song rhythms.  The rankers had mostly drifted to the fringes of our column as the days had worn on, and the prisoners failed to show any sign of rebellion.  We had collected a few squads from the Left-Division and their respective prisoners from the would-be bandit bands caught up west of Dover as we passed along, and our entire column was considerably larger than our initial hundred and thirty or so by the time we hit the Baronies and the prison-camps. 

So it was, that the first thing the prison-wardens of the POW cages saw of us, was the better part of a battalion of captured White Rose, marching paradoxically high-headed and proud-eared, three fillies singing an old Prench standard in the fore.  From the perspective of the prison-wardens, I cannot imagine what they were thinking – were we a relief-column, to free the prisoners?  Some bizarre prank?

No, merely bored fillies caught out in a badly-timed display of youthful high spirits.  But it did not simply shake out as such, nor did we simply catch the discipline which we had earned for bucking around on assignment – however unimportant and boring.

Because the prisoners caught sight of Cherie, her grey wings spread out as she hovered over me and Bad Apple, her head thrown back as she belted out "Apres qu'ca ma bague est otee, J'en ai pour tout' l'eternite!" to our literally captive audience.  

And the applause from the prisoners-cage was so thundering that my heart's beat stuttered to the tromp of a thousand adoring hooves.

A great deal of running back and forth got the excited prisoners of cage #4 under control, while we walked our placid ex-bandits southeasterly towards a new cage being thrown up for the final few hundred captures.  The former White Rose marched past the three of us at the gate of cage #14, and almost every head bowed before Cherie as they passed.  I had… not noticed how fixated they had become upon the thestral.

I almost wrote 'little thestral', but she was a good deal taller than I by this point.  We were all coming into our final last stretches as hormones and exercise had their way with our new-found adulthood, and I could only reassure myself that at least I wouldn't be the runt of the litter – I had Bad Apple beat by a good quarter-hoofs-length, even before you took into account ears.  And ears will always let a donkey cheat when it comes to comparing heights.

Rye Daughter had us all beat, though, and she was positively fuming as she stomped up to the three of us, staring down all baleful and fierce.  She wasn't quite as tall as the old General, but she'd have been a terror on the battle-field if Sawbones hadn't stolen her for the medical corps.  And although she usually had a fairly placid and easy-going temperament, when you got her going…

"Do you have any idea what you have done, you fool of a filly?" she demanded of Cherie.  "Idolaters!  Thousands of idolaters, and all of them fixated on a grey-winged white-coated goddess, come to save them from their own self-made catastrophes!  Dug them out of mud-holes!  Told them when to duck, when to run, when to mutiny!  We've put down a conquering army, and you recruit a Crusade out of it!"

Cherie's ears folded back, and she shrunk back on her haunches.  "Rye, Rye, I was just helping, really.  And the Princess was encouraging me every step of the way!  Well, when she wasn't being me.  You know most of that wasn't me at all – couldn't have been me!  I've been on the front lines, blowin' things up, flying BA's scorched air-barouche for her!"

"You're telling me that the Mistress's Cherie, which is a phantasm and a dream-figment, managed to shadow-walk dozens of drowning ponies out of mudholes the morning after the rout?"

"Well, maybe a little bit.  But we scared most of those idiots into their mud!  Sawbones says, if you break it, you gotta fix it!  My responsibility, I think?"

All Rye did was scream, quietly, in frustrated rage.  This was only the beginning of the ordeal for Cherie.  The Lieutenant came by to interrogate her, and me, and Bad Apple.  Then this was repeated by the General, and both of her officious majors.  And the song was the same, each time: did you know what you were doing?  What do you think will come of this?  Does she have full control over these ponies?  How about those?  What happens if we let her go in among the prisoners?

Command had no idea what was going on with the prisoners, and there were far too many of them to be easy if they all decided to re-commit to their religious idiocies.  Everypony was on edge, and blaming it on the young mare with the bat-wings and the White Rose on her flank.

Of course, there were more important things going on elsewhere, but the elders of the Company were trying to keep us fledgelings away from that particular ugliness. Especially me, because they knew how closely I identified with the Nightmare.  And the crisis down beside the Housa was all about nightmares.