FFMS028
It seemed like half the Company trotted through my tent over the next couple days. The Lieutenant, to take my report. Rye Daughter, to evaluate my condition. Bad Apple, just to look in on me. I'm not sure what Cup Cake and Dancing Shadows' excuses were supposed to be, although at least Cup Cake brought pastries.
The infuriating thing was that there was nothing physically wrong with me. I just couldn't get out of bed. The Princess whispered in my ear every time I tried, and somehow, the energy just drained out of my legs. And there I laid. And ponies came to see me. And talk around things, and chatter.
Bad Apple bitched for hours about her lack of action down on the river, how they had grounded her, and worse, put her on a boat. A pitifully small and timid squadron of fresh-built battle-skiffs had been assembled above the Braystown boom, and whenever their commander was feeling aggressive and bolt-proof, the Beau's warders opened up a gap in the boom and let them through to make a claim on the middle Housa. Bad Apple was this little flotilla's heavy artillery, and they were supposed to post her forward where she could fire the enemy's ships when they came in range. Except they never did – either the White Rose ran for it when they were spotted, or the hypercautious captains of the new loyalist fleet fled themselves, their crew-ponies straining vigorously against the current with those long sweeps the river-boats used.
At least the crews were getting their training in against the river's current.
Eventually the Princess and my body got tired of their conspiracy to keep me bed-ridden, and I escaped that trap. Throat-Kicker had been keeping me fed and watered along with her timber-weasel charges, and I started helping her with this in turn. She had duties in the tent-camp other than riding herd on Gibblets' forgotten pets. They'd been basically re-adopted by Cherie and her knight - once the novelty and shine had worn off for the goblin-warlock, he'd gotten bored with the animate plant-things, and just left them to the care of others.
So I took over the feed and care of the baker's dozen of timber-beasties. We'd originally named them 'timber-weasels', back when they were small and cute and swift, but Throat-Kicker had fed them well over the last few months, and perhaps, over-fed them. And they weren't nearly as small as they had been, and it was debatable how cute and swift they were now. Well, they could be fast enough when the occasion called for it, I suppose. They mostly devoured plant matter, the tougher the better. They loved thorned wood, sharp-spined runners, and other pokey bits, and when we could get them rose-cuttings, we did. But those weren't as common or as cheap as you'd think, so whenever we could get blackberry cane or thorn-bush or even just brush cuttings, those filled out their feed-bowls.
Well, and the occasional vermin. The timber-beasties had the hunting instincts of a weasel, or a cat, or a wolf, and they killed and retrieved the little furry bodies of pests like rabbits, and squirrels, and field mice. And, thankfully, rats. Rats haunt military encampments like, well – rats in a granary. It was hard to keep a troop of cats to stick with an army on the march, so we were always exposed to the depredations of the little whiskered menaces. And the timber-weasels slaughtered rats without mercy. But they didn't seem to have any use for the meat, and once the critters were dead, the timber-darlings brought back their kills and left them in nice neat rows to be disposed of, often intact with their necks neatly broken.
When I asked, Gibblets opined that they were just feeding on the life energy of the vermin, and had no use for the meat and blood and physical remains.
Well, I had a use for the blood, if nothing else, so I started collecting those fresh kills. Hang them up to drain, cut their still-intact throats, and collect the high-protein sludge. It wasn't exactly fresh, but it had its uses.
And it turns out that you can spread the magic of living equine blood uniformly across a mass of vermin's blood, even if something else had drained away the theoretical life-energy of the vermin beforehoof. I just needed to figure out how to preserve the harvested fluid so that it didn't rot away or congeal into something useless.
The first grain harvest was long over, and most of the prisoners had been sent southeast to clean up the Clearances. We'd torn that district to shreds in the rush to fortify and form the kill-zone within which we'd destroyed the White Rose's expeditionary army. Entire hamlets had been ripped down, fields and irrigation systems had been demolished, and bastions and trench networks had defaced the corridor. Worse, the damage to the irrigation network had begun to reverse the work of generations in making of the Clearances something more useful to ponykind than the trackless marshes of the Wirts along the river.
So, we sent the bulk of the White Rose prisoners to undo the damage we'd done the land. They were given shovels, and pry-bars, and rakes and other instruments of marginal destruction, and told to re-dig the irrigation ditches, to tear apart our bastions and re-build the hamlets. Not that the former inhabitants were anywhere to be found. Gibblets thought that most of them were buried in the mass graves his task force had found to the eastwards. But somepony would eventually be recruited to re-populate those hamlets, so it wouldn't be work wasted in the end. Two whole cohorts of the Company were posted to defend these prisoners from anypony who might have wanted to molest them. Such as a certain witch-traitor and his band.
But just because the main grain-harvest was complete, didn't mean that there was nothing to be done in the fields. Some families in the baronies had diversified into other side-crops, and notable among these were a cluster of berry specialists in the district to the southwest of Clear Creek. In between the grain fields were long, tight rows of mounded, interweaved bushes, various different cultivars piled on top of each other, strawberries at the bottom, blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries along the top of the piles. Interspersed were other, less well-known berry bushes to balance out the rows and to discourage pests and blights from just tearing down the line.
My parents had been berry farmers in their own, crabbed way. If you just planted the same bush in a continuous line, you were just opening up a feed-lot for some enterprising weevil or rust to devour all of your hard work. And so, interweaved plantings, cuttings put back into their places, and scattered here and there to separate them from their fellows. The bees could generally follow the scents well enough, no matter how cleverly you separated the cultivars from each other.
Bees really were a marvel of magical nature. And you've got to respect an insect that carries its own lance with it to defend the hive.
And so, Cherie and I rode herd on a hundred parolees picking their way down rows full of ripe blueberry bushes, the blackberries and strawberry and raspberry bushes beneath having been exhausted earlier that season. Their stained hooves picked carefully through the greenery, flashing between the buckets hung over their withers and the bunches hanging heavy on the bushes. The farmers' foals were trotting back and forth between the pickers and the boilers hard at work at the far end of the lane, rendering down the berries directly into awaiting preserve tins and jars. Cup Cake was kibitzing with the matriarch of the farm we were helping, cheerfully taking notes and lending her own hoof to the proceedings.
The fruit preserves were ideal supplies for long-distance transport. They kept like crazy, and the special magic the earth-ponies infused into their preserves would help stave off scurvy among the half-starving regiments trapped in the siegeworks of the distant Second Mouth. Every jar and can we put aside here, would be carried at great cost down the long inland roads between the eastlands and that furthest extent of the tormented Riverlands.
But meanwhile, in the here and now, two foals with long fronds tied cross-wise across their own withers were galloping up and down the rows, whooping and hollering, scaring off the birds which were almost always hovering over the ripe bushes at this time of year. If they let up in the least, those pests would descend and devour the better part of the crop. Everypony wanted a bite off the bushes.
We, upon our guard, mostly ignored the parolees as they took the occasional mouthful. Ne reliez pas les bouches du kine qui marquent le grain, my granmere used to say. You gotta let your workers eat, it kept their minds on the berries. Most of the eaten berries would have just ended up in the dirt, anyways.
My own attention was directed towards my pack of timber-whatevers, who were patrolling the edges of the berry patches. Airborn vermin were not the only threat to the harvest, the ground-pests made their own contribution towards the whole. And the timberweasels were having a field day among the voles, the fieldmice, and the rats that fled the heavy hooves of the parolees. The little green-thorned ones zipped here and there, tossing the smaller field-mice high into the air as they caught them in their flight. The bigger timber-beasts, who were growing so tall and wide that we might as well be calling them by their proper names, couldn't quite fit inside the narrow rows, and lurked along the farm-lane, catching little skittering warm-furred critters as they escaped the smaller timber-beasts. The largest of the true timberwolves was a beast that Cherie had named Bocage, because he had grown until he resembled a hedgerow in motion.
As I watched, Bocage caught a huge hare by the back of its neck, and shook it until that neck snapped. Then he tromped over to my own little preservation-station, dropping the still-hot body of his kill at my hooves. I picked up the warm body, and hung it beside the other vermin I was draining into glass containers. Two of the farmers' brats stared wide-eyed as I took my left spur and opened up Bocage's new kill, letting the hot red fluid gush down into a fresh jar. I scooped up a hoof-full of cut blackberry canes from a pile on my other side, and tossed them into the air, from which Bocage snapped up the treat, crunching away at the thorny runners and canes.
I gave the watching foals a little show, and spun off spiraling, twisting streams of steaming red droplets from the draining rabbit's blood. It is surprising how easily entertained foals can be by simple magical juggling displays.
Not all of the timberwolves were to be seen hunting their vermin out here in the late-summer sun. I had four of them running a distant pattern, trying to find my limitations. You see, I'd discovered by accident during my convalescence that even a little bit of my blood on the thorns of a timber-weasel or timber-wolf could mingle our essence together, could let me see through their sensory array, could let me direct these beasts in a certain limited fashion. I write 'sensory array' because the way timber-wolves see and hear and smell the world is not quite like how a pony or a cat sees the world. They feel light, they taste the wind, they know a mouse is a mouse, a hawk is a hawk, and the cold from a warm beam of sun-light. But none of these can really be described properly as sight or taste or hearing, not without doing violence to the concepts. And yet, my blood on their bark, and I could listen with them, smell with them, hear with them, and run with them.
And I was running with this quartet of timber-wolves as they quartered the fields and woods around our harvest operation. I could taste the flights of pegasi hiding out of sight in the clouds above us, I could smell the sections of Company armsponies dozing in dark shadows here and there, hidden from mortal sight. Our trap was baited well, and the teeth of the trap were unseen by anypony who was not me.
And still, the monsters stubbornly refused to put their paws in our snare. The sun was high, the fields were warm, the scent of the farm-ponies rendering down their preserves in the open air was intoxicating. And yet, nothing, no-one, no-pony. We were delicious, and careless, and feckless in our display. We were vulnerable.
They weren't coming. In fact, I was starting to suspect that Blade and his crew of traitors weren't within two districts of our pointless little trap.
"Feufollet, if you're done playing with your blood-sculptures, I'm hungry," said Cherie. "How about you put all that away, and have some jam tarts. The Cakes went to all of this trouble to build a field-oven. Come on, it's a wonderful day. Don't waste it sulking."
And so we had some of the baker's open-air tarts. They tasted like home.