The Unicorn and the Crow

by Foxmane Vulpequus

Part the Third - Giant's Bread

Madeleine stepped through the curtain of little universes between the staff grotto and the hotel without stopping to consider the feelings of mystical oneness or disorientation this often caused in the unaware. Even if she did feel them, she did not care. Her eyes swept the sleeping-berths and drawn curtains until she found the one figure she was looking for. She trotted over to the one ladder near the back of the dim-lit chamber and craned her head up at the pegasus curled in on himself up above. The bed of cloud on which he lay was as grey as his coat.

“Skipper!” Madeleine whispered urgently. Rock Skipper had his back turned toward the mare, and he did not turn his head toward Madeleine at the sound of her voice. His tail flicked listlessly.

“What do you want, Miss Crumpet?” said Rock Skipper, indolent.

“Skipper, please,” Madeleine said, resting her hooves on the ladder leaning up to his cloud-berth. “I need your help.”

“Seems like you got on just fine last time,” said the pegasus, pulling his cirrostratus blankets over his shoulders with his wing-tips. “Aren’t you afraid that good old Skipper will just up and away again and leave you stranded?”

“Skipper, I…” Madeleine said. The mare stopped, and sighed, slumping to the ground. “I’m sorry about that. I am sure that you had your reasons…”

“And you didn’t want to hear them.” Rock Skipper stirred, and he hung his head over the side of the berth, staring down at Madeleine with an expression that was half anger and half… half Madeleine didn’t know quite what.

“I had just come back from the Withers!” Madeleine hissed, gritting her teeth. This was not going as she had envisioned.

“So what? There’s no excuse for being a shrike, Miss Crumpet.”

“I’m sorry!” said Madeleine in low tones. As she felt the prickling feeling of deerish eyes turning toward her, Madeleine realized that she did feel sorry – in fact, she felt just awful. “I’m… sorry. I’m sorry for lashing out at you like that, Skipper. I’m sorry for accusing you. I am not just saying this because I need your help, because I do, Celestia know that I do. I’ll even try to make it up to you with some –”

Madeleine paused. She had been about to say “with some pearls” before realizing what a ridiculous image that was. “I’ll make it up to you as best I can,” she finished, feeling the tips of her ears turning red. “But Largo’s taken Mister Rubyk and I don’t know what other pony I can turn to right now.”

“And why is that a problem?” Rock Skipper tried to sound unconcerned. Yet behind the bluster, Madeleine thought that she could hear a note of uncertainty in his voice.

“Skipper, think of the pony we are talking about here!” said Madeleine. “She gives with her right hoof at one moment and takes away with her left. First she says that she will give Mister Rubyk bit and full rein to investigate the murder, then after only a little trouble she takes him away in star-chains. Does that sound like a problem to you?”

“Wait, what?” Rock Skipper nearly fell out of his cloud-berth in surprise. “So when you say ‘taken away,’ you mean… the real thing?”

“Yes!” whispered Madeleine, trying to swallow the scream that was just waiting for a free moment to bolt and slip out of her throat. “Celestia help me, it’s as if she doesn’t want him to find out what pony killed Calvados Apple. I don’t know what to do, Skipper!”

“Oh.” The grey pegasus disappeared for a moment as he dove into the cloud that made up his sleeping-berth in search of something. He emerged a moment later and dropped to the ground with his wings tightly folded. The white corner of a paper concealed beneath his wings was just visible as he landed on his hooves with a feline quiet.

“Then I suppose we had best get a move on, Miss Crumpet,” Rock Skipper said in the same even, low tones. Then he smiled and put his other wing around Madeleine, pulling the mare close. Madeleine’s jaw hung slack, and she delegated body-moving to the little pony in her head as Rock Skipper led her, unprotesting, from the staff quarters. The pink in her ears deepened as Rock Skipper spoke rather noisomely that they might take a stroll down by the beach to look for pretty stones and shells scraped clean by the surf. Madeleine’s little pony was adept enough at the trite social dance to make the apt replies without any conscious thought on her part. Several Clavia sported an happy smile at the sight of their Rock Skipper finally having found that somepony special as the two passed by.

What a fantastic ruse! Madeleine thought, amazed in spite of herself once they were free from prying eyes. When all this messy business was over and done, she would need to find a way to thank Rock Skipper properly for being so quick on the wing.

Rock Skipper had not been joking when he mentioned a walk on the beach. Thus, if only to keep up appearances, Madeleine found herself trudging along the seashore with Rock Skipper, the evening lights of Currycape flickering like candles just across the causeway.

“Here,” said Rock Skipper, taking the paper folded tight against his body and offering it to Madeleine.

“What is this?” Madeleine said, the combined light of Luna’s moon and the glow of her horn just letting her eyes see the scrawled mouth-writing on the page.

“You asked me to snoop around and go where only I could. Well…” Rock Skipper said, sounding apologetic. “That’s a list of everything that I could remember that went missing some time in the last three months, both from staff quarters and from guest rooms – when they actually reported it. Turn the page over.”

Madeleine did so. The other side bore a similar list in the same broad, looping letters that was perhaps a third shorter than the other.

“And this?”

“That was everything from the first side that I found today in staff quarters. Most of it was put away in the same locker. We don’t use pony-keyed locks like the guest rooms do… nothing that a bobby pin, a good ear, and an uninterrupted minute can’t get into.” Rock Skipper flashed a smile – a real one this time, not a bashful neck-rubbing smile, nor the false one he had just plastered over his face.

Madeleine returned an only half-conscious smile as she ruffled the paper, turning it over and over in her magic as she compared the lists. The mare let out a sound that was not quite a whistle. “That is a lot of contraband. But you missed one, Skipper.”

The pegasus looked dumbfounded. In an instant, neck-rubbing Rock Skipper was back. “I don’t understand. What have I missed, Miss Crumpet?”

“Only this,” Madeleine said, bringing the gold band she had forced out of Hodgepodge and his grease-tent earlier that afternoon out of her saddlebags and displaying it to Rock Skipper in the citrine glow cast by her horn. The pegasus blinked at it, then at her, uncomprehending. Madeleine sighed.

“I mean that I know for a fact that this ring was stolen. It’s one of mine.”

“What, out of your room, Miss Crumpet?” Rock Skipper said. Madeleine shook her head angrily, fighting the urge to crumple the paper in her magic’s grip or to wave the ring under Rock Skipper’s nose.

“No, worse. I think it must have been stolen out of the staff area within the last two days. I gave it to Doctor Leaf for safekeeping for Seamoss’ retirement fund. And I had to personally buy it back from that grimy gouger up in the Withers earlier today! Do you see now why I might have been a titch upset, Skipper? I mean, in addition to the obvious?” Madeleine’s eyes narrowed.

“Who was it, Skipper?”

For a long moment, Rock Skipper said nothing. The pegasus picked up a smooth, flat stone from the beach in his forehooves, giving it a critical look. “Nobody knows for sure,” he said, and hurled the rock into the sea with a certain twist. Even on the unquiet waters, it bounced once, twice, three times before it sank beneath the waves. He made a quiet sigh and shot a look toward Madeleine.

“But we all know,” he said. “Once things started disappearing, it didn’t take long to figure out who on the staff was doing it, or why. It was maybe about a year ago that Papaya got a letter from home by mailgull. Her grandbuck had taken awfully sick: something had gone horribly wrong with his insides that star-magic just couldn’t fix. That’s the version of it that I heard, anyway. Papaya was awfully quiet about the whole thing. I overheard second-hoof that she had wanted to book passage on Captain Nuce’s ferry to get home as soon as possible, but her family insisted that she stay on. Apparently, they needed the money more than they needed her antlers back on the farm.”

“Oh, my…” whispered Madeleine. “Is her grandbuck alright?”

Rock Skipper shrugged, picking up another flat stone from the beach. “Dunno. She never talks about it to anypony, let alone the staff. Miss Largo might know, but I doubt it.” Rock Skipper cast the stone and it bounced four times before running into the crest of an abnormally large wave. He smiled.

Madeleine thought of the sweet-dimpled young doe, and how she had gone so wrong. Her heart cracked. Oh, if only I had known!

“She started stealing for her family,” Madeleine said sadly. Rock Skipper nodded.

“And sending the money home to help out the family. It didn’t take us long to put together what was going on after one of Doctor Leaf’s books ended up on Hodgepodge’s bookcases. None of us wanted to say anything to Papaya about it. I heard that Doctor Leaf went to her afterwards and told her that if she was going to carry on like that, she needed to be much more subtle about it.” Rock Skipper smirked. “I also hear that it was the only time that Hodgepodge ever gave anything back for free without a gun to his head, but there comes a point where a pony can be too credulous.”

Madeleine laughed, and the two moved farther down the beach. Rock Skipper’s eyes scanned the ground for more likely-looking rocks to practice on. They had walked a few minutes in silence when Rock Skipper said suddenly:

“I saw Papaya coming down from the Withers this morning.” The pegasus cast a third stone, a flat, three-sided specimen, getting six bounces out of it before it sank beneath the choppy water.

Madeleine’s stomach leaped up into her chest. “What was she doing there?”

“Oh, same as usual, I suspect. She was carrying a little bag with something in it she was awfully fussed to not let me see. My guess is that she had just come from Hodgepodge’s tent with a bag of bits. She teleported away when I tried to see just what she was carrying.”

Madeleine frowned. She contemplated looking for a stone to throw into the sea herself. “That does make sense, but it feels off. You saw her coming back from the Withers this morning, right?”

“Of course. It was not long after I left – er… had to go take a little flight.”

Smooth, Skipper. Smooth. “But that would have been only a few hours after Miss Largo told the staff about the murder. If she was being careful, the very last place Papaya would want to be seen is about half a mile in any direction from old ‘Podge’s tent.”

“Wait, what?” Rock Skipper blinked at her. “So, unless she absolutely needed to, she wouldn’t have gone to trade in something stolen?”

“Exactly,” said Madeleine, the rush of discovery creeping into her voice. “It would seem suspicious to anypony who happened to know a little bit about what was going on. Unless there was something that she absolutely needed to get rid of…”

Rock Skipper’s eyes widened, and he looked at Madeleine with a fearful expression. “But to need to get rid of something right then would tie her right to…”

Madeleine nodded gravely, though every inch of her coat prickled like the electric charge of a coming storm. “Right to Calvados Apple’s murder. Somehow, Papaya was involved with this. And I intend to find out how.” Madeleine raised her head high, setting her face toward the lights of the town stretching up into the hills. She tugged at the strap of her saddlebags with a frown; she had worn them for so long that they were beginning to chafe. Madeleine shook her head and began to trot resolutely in the direction of the mainland.

“Miss Crumpet?” Rock Skipper said, following close behind her. “Where are you going?”

“We’re going to pay another visit to the Withers, Skipper,” Madeleine said. “And we’re going to see if Hodgepodge would be willing to part with something else for free. I’m game for anything once; you?”

“I… don’t know,” Rock Skipper said, hooves kicking up the sand as he trotted alongside Madeleine. “What exactly are you looking for?”

Madeleine’s eyes flashed like hard diamonds. “We are looking for something that should never have been there.”

“You have… no right. I seek… a murderer. I want to bring… justice… for the sin done… under your nose.”

“I am familiar with what your people call justice, Lord Rubyk. Anypony else might call that murder.” Miss Largo looked down at the giant of Trotheim lying prone on the floor.

Rubyk could not raise his head, nor his legs, nor shift his haunches under the weight of an hundred stars that lay in corded bands upon his body. The deer guards had left him the use of his tail, and he lashed up clouds of the cellar’s ancient dirt, though his face remained a stoic mask.

“Why… should I care what just anypony thinks… of the Pride of Trotheim?” Rubyk said. The unicorn’s words came out slow and laboured, and no wonder: his jaw was moving the weight of an hundred tiny suns. “There is… always a difference… between murder and justice.”

Miss Largo shrugged. “And either way, ponies end up dead. Do forgive me, Aktur, if you find me still a skeptic of your idealism at the end of all this.”

“I do not need… your approval. Unbind my head,” Rubyk grated, “and then we talk. Know… you want to.”

Miss Largo touched her cheek with an hoof, as if considering a novel proposal for pest control services on her hotel grounds. For a glacially long moment, she scowled and looked as if she was minded to refuse. But she finally gave a curt nod toward the two Clavia bucks kneeling in concentration on either side of Rubyk. One of them, panting at the exertion, put out the stars dancing on just one prong of his many-pointed antlers like a candle flame. The chains of starlight slithered down from Rubyk’s head and neck like a cosmic serpent, allowing the Aktur of Trotheim to raise his head and look about the hotel’s cellar. (A thin, starry cord like a watch chain was still wrapped about his horn.)

Pome and Rubyk had been taken into the wine cellars of the hotel. Each lay between large brandy casks laid up against the wall, two Clavia close enough to breathe on taking up the rest of the space on either side. The place had the feel of a dungeon about it; fitting, then, that it had been a dungeon in the glory days of the deerfolk, as Miss Largo could not stop herself from informing them on the way down here. The cellar seemed to be one of the few areas of the hotel not lit by the ubiquitous lampwood staves. Aside from the light shed from their jailers’ antlers and the shining bonds they cast, the only illumination came from a waxy candle in an old iron lantern Miss Largo had carried in her mouth on the way down. The tang of spilled wine and the dusty smell of antiquity filled the dark.

“Do you normally treat paying guests in this way, Miss Largo?” Rubyk said, voice as smooth and breezy as dinner conversation. Miss Largo shrugged again.

“No, but circumstances being what they are, I do what I must.”

“Must?” repeated Rubyk, the word coming out as a sort of rounded half-laugh. “What kind of ‘must’ is it that does what you have done, Largo?”

“The kind that wants to keep a fight from breaking out in her dining room in full view of paying guests,” said Miss Largo, adding still another shrug to the end of her statement. Rubyk squinted at the seafoam mare whose face was shadowed in the flickering lantern-light.

“No,” Rubyk said in an half-whisper. “That is not the case. You had another reason for this.”

“Pray tell me what it was, Lord Rubyk. You seem most assured of yourself. I would very much like to know my own mind.”

“Then you will be so kind, Miss Proprietress Largo, to give me an account of your movements last night until the time when you found me in Calvados Apple’s suites.”

“I have given you full access and a free rein to do as you see fit, Aktur. I gave to you the most sensitive evidence of the case in Madeleine Crumpet’s pistol. I even kept this suspect under my own eyes while you were bothering my staff in their own private quarters with a, pardon my language, most mulish rudeness,” Miss Largo said, gesturing toward Pome prostrate between brandy casks. She began to pace in the narrow space of the cellar, her hooves making crisp, agitated strikes against the stone. “Am I now to be considered a suspect to a murder simply because I wished to do my duty to my guests and my Clavia? Really, Aktur, this is outrageous.”

“So be outraged,” Rubyk said. “It is all the same for me as long as you tell me what I need to know.”

Miss Largo stamped the ground. The sound was like a hammer falling from the top of the brandy casks. “Very well, Aktur. You may come to see me in my office when you are ready and able to do so. I will tell you there everything that your not inconsiderable imagination may wish to know.”

“And when will that be?” Rubyk said, glancing first to the glass-eyed deer kneeling next to him and the red unicorn across the aisle, then at Miss Largo. The proprietress’ muzzle was posed in a rictus calm.

“As long as this present business may take,” replied Miss Largo with another shrug. “Good evening to you, Lord Rubyk. I leave you with the ample company of your companion for now. Please do not hesitate to let my staff know if you require anything.”

With this parting, Miss Largo took up the lantern and the dripping candle in her mouth and retreated up and out of the cellars, leaving the two unicorns in winy darkness save for the wan light of the chains about their bodies. As she reached the stairs, Miss Largo turned and gestured with her neck at the prone form of Pome Apple. The Clavia guards on either side of him removed the chains around his head and neck. Once freed, Pome glared at Rubyk.

“I suppose y’all want to keep on grilling me over the fire, then?” Pome said, voice coming out choked. The unicorn coughed on the dust.

“Since it seems that we are preordained to share the other’s company for the time being,” Rubyk said, a mirthless smile creasing his muzzle, “then yes.” Pome sighed and his whole face seemed to slump.

“Dung and haystacks, I might as well. Luna knows how long that crazy mare plans on keeping us down here. I don’t see how it’ll change y’all’s estimation of me, though.” He fixed Rubyk with a sad stare.

“I think you asked me if I’d cast any spells in Uncle Calvados’ room. Well, yeah. I did. I cast it on him.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. ‘Oh’. I took one look at Uncle Calvados when I came back to the room and saw the signs of Earthsbane poisoning, clear as day. Uncle was…” Pome gulped. “He was practically dead already. I either tried to purge the poison from his body, or I killed him. By Celestia, I wish I knew which.”

Rubyk cocked his head. “How do you know the effects of Earthsbane poisoning, Pome Apple?”

“Personally,” Pome said, spitting the word like a bad apple pip.

“Come again?”

“When I was a colt, I got into my mom’s medicine chest when she left me at home one day. There was a potion there in a pretty blue bottle that tasted sweet, like a cider just on the sweet side of fermented. And I spent the next few hours dying inside.”

“But –”

“But how?” Pome gave an half-choked, mirthless laugh. “If you haven’t figured it out by now, Mighty Actor, even Uncle’s severed branch of the Apple family tree is all earth ponies, back as far as the line has names. My mother left Uncle’s plantation before she had me, seeing how he didn’t exactly approve of the arrangement. She never told me, but I know that Uncle Calvados threatened to throw me in the river after I was born.”

“Ah. I see. You know this from the notes that you kept from your uncle in the last month.”

“Right. That and a compost heap of other sprite gunk I have no interest in telling you.”

“Because it has nothing to do with why you might have killed him?”

“No. Because you’re an ass.”

Rubyk frowned, though Pome could not tell whether this was due to his latest remark or not. “Thank you, Pome Apple. I have just one more question for you.”

“Just one? Good. Go ahead.”

“Other than the Oranges, were you acquainted with anypony else living on the island or staying at the hotel before you arrived on the ferry?”

The scornful look vanished from Pome Apple’s face. In spite of the unicorn’s jaw being forced against the cellar floor, he looked perplexed. “Anypony else? I can’t see how. I’d never been in the South Seas before we got the invitation from Cousin Orange for our business meeting.”

“Thank you, Pome Apple. I shall trouble you no more,” said Rubyk, nodding his head.

“What? No ‘just one more’ questions from you, Mister Actor?”

“No. I have had no sleep and far too much stimulant, and I must rest; and until Miss Largo decides that we have been kept down here long enough to behave ourselves like good little colts, I intend to do so. I shall determine who killed your uncle – even if that pony happens to be you. But I cannot do that without laying down my head for a while. So, good night to you, Pome Apple.”

Rubyk closed his eyes and, to judge from the sound like a winter’s gale whistling through bony trees, was quickly sound asleep. Pome snorted and turned his head away from the unicorn opposite him.

“Oh, shut up,” said Pome. Though to whom he was speaking, Rubyk could not say.

“Miss Crumpet, are you sure about –”

“Shh!” Madeleine gave a perfunctory tut! and laid an hoof on Rock Skipper’s mouth. A spitting distance from their muzzles, the shell like a black pearl Madeleine had conjured around herself and Rock Skipper glittered dull in the moonlight. Outside, the light would bend around it, leaving a hole for the active equine imagination to fill in by its own fretful artistry in the dark. Inside, it glinted with internal reflections from crazy angles that made Rock Skipper queasy if he looked at them too directly.

“Of course I’m not sure, Skipper. I’d much rather be laying on my luscious sheets right now, maybe with some juicy company. But I don’t have any better ideas,” Madeleine said. She grimaced and shot an hopeful look at the pegasus, who had turned his cap down against his own nausea. “Any last-minute flashes of that lightning Cloudsdale intellect, by chance?”

Rock Skipper just shook his head. Madeleine rolled her eyes.

“Well, unfortunately, since I never got the knack of teleporting and you can’t fly me up to ‘Podge’s tent, we’re well and truly stuck. Let’s get going.”

Rock Skipper did not nod. The pegasus began to mechanically put one hoof in front of the others as the two made their way up the slope from the town proper into the hills, huddled together like a couple under an umbrella too modest for two.

The Withers had a sinister cast under the moon. Every palm cast a looming shadow; every hutch and sagging lean-to seemed its own sagging castle with flickering eyes for windows. Or perhaps that impression had more to do with things like the small clutch of Clavia menacing another of their number with starlight and half-shattered rum bottles in the shadow between hutches, or the odd whiff of strange zebra brews that wafted out of a windows as they passed. Rock Skipper turned his head in the direction of a choked scream farther down the hill, but Madeleine put her foreleg around him and shook her head.

“Eyes forward, Skipper. No time for that kind of thing,” Madeleine said with a touch of regret. Rock Skipper scowled, but nodded in agreement.

Madeleine dropped the pearly shield screening them from view as they reached the edge of the wood where Hodgepodge was keeping shop. Hesitating a few fearful seconds, she lit her horn with as dim a light as possible, throwing the light forward in a narrow beam.

“At least it’s not the Everfree,” Rock Skipper said, staring up into the black mass of trees.

“No, but slogging through tropical woods in the dark of night isn’t exactly my idea of a good time. After I find out what’s going on, I’m going to make somepony at the hotel draw me an hot bath and make Mister Rubyk buck the bill,” said Madeleine, grumbling as she made the first step under the cover of the trees. She swept the light of her horn along the ground for snakes or any of the more magical, and more dangerous creatures that sometimes crept along the edges of the outposts of civilization in the South Seas (like gem-eye spiders, she thought with a shiver). Fortunately, nothing appeared to molest the two as they stole along the path except for the odd bloatfly, which Rock Skipper shooed away with a wingtip.

The oily glow of guttering lamps added to the feeble light of overused lampwood shone out into the dark wood as Madeleine and Rock Skipper reached Hodgepodge’s tent. They shared a look, and Madeleine thrust her body through the tent flap first.

“‘Podge!” Madeleine said. “Hodgepodge! I do hope you’re in, because I need to talk to you right no –”

The words died in her throat. Hodgepodge looked up toward the tent flap with wide, watery eyes from a battered table surrounded by a curtain of gauzy grey magic that fluttered like muslin in the breeze. He was joined by Jett Black, who more than ever seemed like a pony-shaped void cut out of the fabric of the world. Whereas Hodgepodge’s coat merely looked dirty and dull in the dimness, the pegasus’ black coat seemed to swallow up the light cast by a tarnished brass oil lamp set on the table between them. He regarded Madeleine and Rock Skipper with an inscrutable coolness. There was a nauseating smell of something like half-burned tallow hanging in the air under the tent’s black canvas, and Madeleine did not mean to ask what exactly it was.

Madeleine saw the black unicorn’s mouth moving, but there was no sound. Hodgepodge seemed to realize this at the same moment as Madeleine, and he made a quick flicker from his horn that tore the gauzy curtain from top to bottom with a sound like a sharp intake of breath. The curtain dissolved into the thick, cloying air.

“Maddie?” Hodgepodge rasped, sheer surprise driving the unicorn’s voice up into a register he did not often use. He cleared his throat and quickly recovered himself. “You’re back soon. Forget something, maybe? Have a bit more to donate to poor old Hodge’s charity fund?” Hodgepodge flashed an oily grin at Madeleine. Behind her, Rock Skipper’s eyes were throwing daggers at the grimy black unicorn.

But Madeleine had no time for Hodgepodge’s grasping just now. She trotted slowly to the black pegasus looking at once at his wiry build and his dark eyes. Like coal, she thought. Very much not a jewelry sort of pony.

“I’ve seen you before,” Madeleine said, locking looks with the pegasus. “You are staying at the hotel now, I believe?”

“You took note of it for yourself. Spare me the preambles, if it please you.” Madeleine could recall (and not with fondness) an hours-long haggling session with a dragon in his lair early on in her career. Although this pony’s voice was not quite that deep and commanding, it was not by much.

“You were talking with Mister Rubyk in the gardens two days ago… and you were at the casino when we were all there for the game with Calvados Apple.” Madeleine took another step forward, confidence growing within her. “And I’ll stake a bag of pearls that you don’t have family or friends here in the islands, either. So, tell me: how did you know about this Sun-forsaken little tent, and why are you here?”

The pegasus’ eyes widened for a fraction of a moment before his face returned to stone-jawed blankness. “You are right, madame jeweler, that I am not a native of these islands, and I have no reason to come to or know about this tent of iniquities. But you have been rather busy today… very busy. I suspect we are about the same business.”

Madeleine started in shock. “Wait a moment. Did Mister Rubyk enlist you in this whole investigation business, too?”

Jett Black gave a deep chuckle. “As I have seen it, I believe you have that rather backwards. First, I believe that you sought out the Lord Aktur when you went wandering where you smelled bits and stallion to be had. You passed a door you couldn’t bear to see unexplored, and you saw something that you shouldn’t have seen. And then you didn’t know what to do, and you ran to your obsession du jour for help instead of asking around for the pony that actually can help with your friend Largo’s mad demands.”

“Oh, and let me guess,” Rock Skipper said, stepping up to Madeleine’s side. “You’re the pony that can really help, Mister Black?”

“I am,” said Jett Black, somehow without an hint of arrogance. He gestured with his massive wings to include Madeleine and Rock Skipper in the conference around the table. “It seems that we have the same errand here. Join us, madame jeweler, and let the truth come out.”

Hodgepodge chuckled. It sounded like he was laughing through a plug of grit stuck in his throat. Madeleine looked from the black unicorn to the black pegasus at the table with a blank expression.

Two peas in a blanket, these two. Steeling herself for what was about to come, she scowled and stepped up to the table, Rock Skipper standing rigid as a board at her shoulder. Hodgepodge grinned his warmest and toothiest (and grimiest) smile and, with a flicker of grey and the sound of a satisfied exhalation, the gauzy curtain descended around the four ponies at the table. After the curtain fully covered them all, Madeleine’s ears stood on edge at the unnatural pressure of silence.

“Maddie, this fine fellow bought something nice and pretty indeed!” said Hodgepodge through his yellowing teeth. “Something I think you’d be very interested to have a look at. How badly would you say you’d like to take that little peek…?”

Madeleine and Rock Skipper simultaneously shot a glare at the black unicorn that could have punctured steel. Jett Black reached beneath his wing, casting an hard something that made a muffled clatter as it struck the table.

“On the contrary,” said the pegasus, his coal-black eyes glinting like diamonds in the firelight. “Information ought to be as free as love between friends, especially where a pony has been murdered.”

Madeleine felt Rock Skipper press close enough to her that she could feel the warmth coming from the grey pegasus’ body. Too close to think, Skipper. She leaned forward over the table, away from Rock Skipper’s ‘protection’, and peered closer at the object, a necklace that Jett Black produced. A thin line of spittle ran down Hodgepodge’s chin he also took in the stones on the table. She blinked. It was… a necklace

Perhaps he is a jewelry sort of pony after all? She thought before the little pony took over. Polished malachite. Stones irregular and of inferior quality for jewelry-making. Hemp cord is rough, unsightly, and visible even between stones – probably utilitarian, enchanted or something, possibly to help out a pony’s latent magic. Center stone is…Madeleine gasped and started back so suddenly that she nearly fell over onto Rock Skipper.

“M-Miss Crumpet!” he stammered. “What’s the matter? Are you hurt?”

“No…” Madeleine said weakly. “No, I… I’m fine. Just… had a bit of a surprise, that’s all.” Her horn glowed as she took up the necklace and brought the center stone close to her eye.

Tight-packed semi-irregular hexagonal cells… thin channels suggesting the presence of blood vessels at some point in the past… and that colour is bleached, but no mere animal has a bone with a red carapace like that. Just to be sure, Madeleine held her horn close to the white center stone so that an amber spark flowed from its tip into the necklace, then touched her tongue to the malachites, then to the center stone. She was rewarded by a small spark, green, that jumped from the necklace onto her tongue. She jumped. That did not taste of her magic.

“Hornbone…” she muttered, horrified. She looked at Jett Black, feeling a cold shiver run down from her horn to her tail. The black pegasus no longer seemed so interesting. Madeleine was struck by the thought that he might at any moment leap upon her, and cover her with those wings, and then… and then…

Madeleine bit her lip. She tasted blood.

“I assure you, it’s quite spent,” Jett Black said with disquieting calm. “A curious sort of thing to find turning up in a pawnbroker’s tent the morning after a murder, wouldn’t you say? The enchantment on there might have been anything – so long as it was appropriately dark. The hornbone is one thing, but the malachite rather gives the game away, wouldn’t you say, madame jeweler?”

Madeleine nodded numbly, feeling her mouth going dry. What had she put her hoof down into? She removed the stolen ring from her saddlebags and set it on the table beside the necklace, taking care not to brush against it with her hoof. Spent the necklace might have been, but the twisted tang of foreign magic was not something Madeleine wanted to feel again. She frowned for a moment; did her saddlebags feel lighter than usual, or was she only imagining troubles?

“I need for you to be honest with me, ‘Podge,” Madeleine said. “Did the same pony bring both of these items to you?” And sod your “client confidentiality!” she added to herself.

Hodgepodge hesitated for a fraction of a second, then shook his head. “Nope, Maddie. I can say that with allnoble virtues.”

“Then what was that little hiccough about? Why not just say it right away? Why did you have to think about it?” Rock Skipper shot back, punctuating each question with an hoof-strike on the table. But the silent curtain swallowed up the sound and pressed down harder, and the pegasus shrank back, the tips of his ears going violently pink.

“I concur, ‘Podge. That was the sort of thing I would expect you to say.” Madeleine fixed the black unicorn with a flinty stare. “It wasn’t a pony at all, was it? Perhaps it was a sweet little doe from Largo’s hotel? And maybe, just maybe, she might have been one of your faithful regulars?”

Hodgepodge’s jaw clenched, and Madeleine allowed herself a little smile. The other unicorn did not say anything, but he didn’t need to: not with a scowl like that.

“I’m not saying nothing I wouldn’t say n’otherwise,” Hodgepodge said, “but I will say if, say, that thing is important for whatever it is that’s going on here, murder or no murder, I suppose I might say you can take it for whatever you have to do. Old ‘Hodge doesn’t go in for that sort of thing n’more. I aim to run a respectable business here, and I say it’s hard enough to make ends meet without having truck with things like that.” Hodgepodge made a showy dismissal of the necklace on the table, but his sidelong glance never quite stopped caressing the strung stones.

Madeleine swept the stones and the ring into her bags before Hodgepodge could change his mind. Three gems and a platinum band was still too much for that information, and she knew he knew it.

Jett Black gave another chuckle that made Madeleine’s mane crawl. “I see that the evidence is in the care of all the right parties. Now that the Aktur has everything he needs for his crusade, I will take my leave of you all. Good evening, madame jeweler.”

Madeleine held out a forehoof. “Wait,” she said. Her little pony had a question, but she had no idea how it would come out.. Jett Black and Rock Skipper both looked at her expectantly.

“Is there something else?” Jett Black said.

“Yes!” Madeleine shouted. Rock Skipper jumped. “How?”

“Beg pardon?” Jett Black arched an eyebrow like bushy pencil lines.

“How did you know to come here?” Madeleine demanded, raising herself onto her forehooves on the tabletop. Hodgepodge looked at the mare in shock. “How did you even hear about Calvados Apple’s murder when Largo is keeping it from the guests? What do you know, Jett Black?”

Smiling thinly, Jett Black answered, “I keep my ears open, Madeleine Crumpet. That is all.” The black pegasus cocked his head, and Madeleine could see the secrets lying just behind that smile.

And then all the verve seemed to flow out of Madeleine at once. She suddenly felt very tired and lowered herself to the ground, rubbing at her eyes. Whether it was from the sting of oily smoke inside Hodgepodge’s curtain, or the weight of too many secrets crashing down upon her at once, or finally reaching the bottom of that high hill called coffee, Madeleine felt as though her head was filled with dry cotton.

“Miss… Crumpet?” said Rock Skipper at the same time as Hodgepodge’s timorous “Maddie? You alright?” Madeleine rubbed her temples, but it did not seem to help much.

“I’m fine, Skipper.” I’m just at the center of a glass cage I can’t find a way out of. “I’m just… tired.”

“You have my condolences,” Jett Black said dryly. The black pegasus rose from the table, half-spreading his massive wings, and fixed Hodgepodge with a flinty stare. “I have what I came here for. I now think that this interview has gone on for long enough. If you would, please?”

“Absolutely – at once – been a pleasure, sir!” Hodgepodge’s tongue raced his teeth to say. The curtain fell once more, admitting the rustle and buggy screams of the unquiet night. To her own dim surprise, Madeleine heard other noises, small and songlike like children’s voices, from just outside of the tent flap rapidly receding into the black of the wood. But before she could ponder the meaning of that fact, her tired mind heard Jett Black saying to her:

“…one gone now. Only two days left for you and your friend to find justice. But I pray for your success, and I trust that we will be seeing each other again before we quit this island altogether. Good evening to you, madame jeweler.” Jett Black’s eyes went to the tent flap. “And take care how you go as you leave this place. This place is nothing fit for the likes of you and me.”

What in Equestria are you blathering on about? Madeleine wailed inwardly. She heard her overtired body reply instead, “yes… of course… good night.” Jett Black made a bow just an inch or so too deep to be really sincere, and the black pegasus stooped his head as he exited Hodgepodge’s tent. The force of his wingbeats threw dust into the interior as Jett Black rose into the night air and was quickly lost beyond the keening night-song.

“So…” rasped Hodgepodge, breaking the silence. “Anything else I can help you with tonight, Maddie? Need a new cap, Rock Skipper? You’d make a dapper fellow in red, or old ‘Hodge has lost his mind entirely.” Hodgepodge flashed his glinting teeth at them, but Madeleine just shook her head. Hodgepodge sighed and bade them a fine, fine farewell, and Madeleine and Rock Skipper began to make their way back through the wood.

The pair walked in silence. Madeleine hung her head, looking only far enough ahead in the moonlight to see the ground for her next hoof-fall. Either a murder investigation was particularly exhausting, or too much travel in too few hours had finally caught up with her. Behind Madeleine, Rock Skipper trotted close on the path. The pegasus looked as if he were struggling to bring up words from somewhere deep whenever she looked back, but as long as he was kept tongue-tied, just at the moment, she didn’t particularly mind.

They were out of the wood and out onto the bare hills where the Withers crouched and brooded under the moon when a soft voice confronted them.

“It’s a nice evening out, isn’t it, Miss Crumpet?” Madeleine jerked her head up as a shock ran from her horn down her spine. She felt the sharp pressure of a spell in the air around them as three Clavia, two before, and one behind on the path, walked out of the empty air as if they had just stepped down from the starry sky above. One of them, a petite doe with a golden chain around her neck, stepped forward.

“Ah,” said Madeleine, her nerves calming. “Yes, it is. You’re…?” She frowned as she searched her memory “I don’t believe I’ve made your acquaintance, miss…?”

“Oh, that’s not important,” said the doe, flashing a strangely tepid smile. “We’re here on business.”

“What kind of business?” Rock Skipper said as he shot a wary look at the other two Clavia, both bucks. One was almost as thickly built as Calvados Apple, and in spite of his stature, the brass caps on his antler-tips made him stand tall enough to be nearly pony-sized. The other still had the half-spotty look of a young deer caught between foalhood and adult responsibilities, but his hide and muzzle were covered with pale, angry scars that Princess Luna’s moon brought into shadowy relief. Rock Skipper pressed himself closer to Madeleine. This time, she did not reject the gesture.

The doe gave a laugh that sounded like tinkling bells. “I don’t like to have to go into too much detail. Your black saddlebags are awfully pretty, Miss Crumpet. Sleek and black never goes out of style. May I try them on?”

Another shock, bone-dry and cold, shot through Madeleine’s body as full comprehension dawned. Trying to keep the citrine glow of her horn as subdued as possible, she reached out with her magic into the contents of her saddlebags, growing more frantic as her mind poked and probed in every corner. First one… then the other… where was it…?

It wasn’t there. It… wasn’t… there!

The doe kept smiling sweetly, but her antlers were a constellation of winking star-points. A golden chain like a serpent biting its tail appeared out of the air between them. The bucks each wore a dagger holstered in an hemp-fiber sling. The bucks looked grim and even a little apologetic as the daggers turned this way and that in their starry grasp.

“This is insane!” Madeleine burst out. “Are you really trying to rob me? Me? When I can just go to Miss Largo with one word and have you chased from one end of the islands to another? When I’ve been such a friend to all the Clavia on this island?”

The doe’s smile crumpled for just a moment. It was brief, but she hesitated before answering back: “That’s awfully funny, Miss Crumpet. It’s not kind to assume that everydeer cares a grass blade for what Miss Largo thinks she can do to us. The mare down in our old fortress might think that she is queen over all the Clavia, but you ponies really need to know your place.” Without warning, the golden chain flew forward like a striking snake and wrapped itself around Madeleine’s horn. Madeleine gasped as an heavy weight pressed down upon her neck. She strained her magic against it, but trying to lift the chain was like trying to shift a mountain. With a teaspoon.

“Please don’t be the cause of any unpleasantness. We’re good folk who sometimes don’t get enough to eat, and Hodgepodge doesn’t ask questions. Everydeer likes you, Miss Crumpet, but it’s always been deer before the tribes. I’m sorry about this – really.” The doe’s smile spread to the two bucks, and with a nod of their head, they, and their daggers, began to close in.

“Hold on, and stay still.” Rock Skipper’s voice was fainter even than a whisper, as if Madeleine had felt rather than heard it. Then she felt rather than heard Rock Skipper’s wings beating at the air, and felt rather than heard the pegasus’ legs lifting her body under her shoulders up off of the ground, and she felt the scream of vertigo ripped from her chest before she heard the chink! of a dagger-point striking hard gemstone. She heard the outrage from the trio of deer, all niceties and smiles abandoned, and the searing hiss of starlight at their fetlocks as Rock Skipper strained to keep them aloft. Dimly through the terror, she wondered how long he would be able to keep this up.

The answer came soon and was as blunt as the ground: not long at all. Madeleine and Rock Skipper lay in a sprawled heap on the cobbles on the abandoned streets at the base of the hill. The flickering firelight from the hutches and lean-tos of the Withers up above seemed to laugh vindictively at them. Madeleine groaned and lifted her jaw from the soft flesh on Rock Skipper’s side – well, softer than cobblestones, anyway. The pegasus had inverted the two of them as they fell and took the brunt of the crash.

“Are you alright, Skipper?”

“Are you okay, Miss Crumpet?”

Madeleine stared at Rock Skipper under her hooves. Rock Skipper looked up at her and flushed. The two ponies stood and dusted themselves off, Rock Skipper using his wings and Madeleine with her tail, neither looking at the other. The green glint of peridot on the cobblestones caught Madeleine’s eye.

Must have fallen out of my saddlebags. Instinctively, Madeleine reached out and tried to take it up in her power. But the chain upon her horn, clinging tight as if it were bonded to the bone, sealed her magic like a leaden lid.

“Er… Miss Crumpet?” said Rock Skipper, pointing an hoof at Madeleine’s saddlebags. She looked down and saw that though the dagger had fallen during their escape, the tear in her bags remained and was wider than she had imagined. In fact, the peridot was not the only gemstone or stray bit lying on the ground.

“Oh, for the love of Celestia…” First the murder, then Rubyk gets taken away for whatever Largo’s paranoid reasoning was, then a mugging of all things, then her magic gets shut off for Discord only knew how long, and now this? Madeleine shucked her bags and began to move the contents of the torn bag into the other.

“You didn’t lose too much, did you, Miss Crumpet?” said Rock Skipper, rubbing at the back of his neck again. Madeleine looked up, lines of tension creasing her forehead.

“I don’t know. It’s too dark too see, too much to take in, too… too much, Skipper,” Madeleine complained. Rock Skipper pursed his lips and trotted to wherever he could see anything shining in the moonlight. He carried a cache of gems, coins, and gold-nibbed pens in his wings cupped like a bowl to Madeleine. She accepted them without a word.

Then, without warning, she threw her forelegs around the pegasus’ neck, withdrawing from the embrace almost as quickly.

“Thank you,” Madeleine said softly.

Even under the wan moon, Rock Skipper’s blush burned bright. “Just doing my job, Miss Crumpet.

The sound started low at first, like an orchestra just beginning to tune their instruments in the dim burble of a concert hall – if those instruments happened to be ill-tempered cats. Soon, though, the sound swelled to a roar that bounded off of the stone walls and wine casks and seemed to shake the foundations of the ancient stone fortress now called the Clavia Hotel.

The bucks on either side of Pome and Rubyk were in a glass-eyed panic. Pome jerked his head up from a fitful doze in alarm. The noise mixed with the pounding in his temples to make a migraine like an iron spike through the half-unicorn’s head. Rubyk opened a bleary eye and sighed.

“Dear Celestia,” Pome gritted through the nimbus of pain and flashing lights around his head, “it’s a salting earthquake!”

“On the contrary, Pome Apple…” Rubyk said. “On the contrary…”

The sound swelled like a symphony playing an explosion of chords. It took on form and dimensions of rage with a thundering percussion of hoofbeats as it reached a deafening crescendo. It was, unmistakably, a voice. A voice that screamed like a brass section.

“Ruuuu-byk!” Frost Pane’s hoof-falls clattered on the masonry like the march of a one-mare army as the Frei of Trotheim descended into the cellar, dragging her train of furs behind her.

“Down here, grandmama.” Rubyk did not bother to raise his voice above a whisper.

“You dander-headed whipling!” The Frei of Trotheim barked out as she raged her way down the cellar, eyes ablaze with frigid light that made dancing goblins and cruel bugbears out of the shadows of wine barrels. She pressed her snarling muzzle to Rubyk’s nose, ignoring the quavering Clavia. “You thunk-brained gaffler! You let the dudgeoning deer-lover catch you and bind you? You? My grandfoal does better than that!”

“I did, grandmama,” Rubyk said, nodding his head. He showed Frost Pane the glassy golden chain wrapped around his horn. “They took me by surprise. It was a mistake on my part – one that I do not intend to repeat.”

“Hmph!” Frost Pane snorted a blast of frigid air from her nostrils into Rubyk’s face. “Yet the old blood of the Pride of Trotheim must rescue the young and the strong. And you make me traipse this salted rock to look for you when I was dreaming of real food in this hungry place!”

“I can hear you quite well, grandmama.”

“Good!” Frost Pane bellowed. The old mare turned to the Clavia buck crouched at Rubyk’s left, who was trying very hard to maintain the semblance of glass-eyed stupor. Frost Pane’s lips curled back in a lupine smile.

“You!” Frost Pane said. The buck flinched. “You will remove these glint-chains! Now!”

“I…I…” The buck shivered and swallowed loudly. “I cannot and will not do that. You must leave now for your own safety, ma’am. I will not ask you again.”

Frost Pane roared with laughter. “Oh, the serving-boy says ‘must!’ There is daring and gall and good spit in this one – I like this deer!” She grinned a smile that showed off every vicious tooth-point. “I like him much. I will like him better with sauce.”

The bucks on either side of the aisle panicked. Four bright bursts like novas cut the darkness of the cellars, and thick, ponderous chains like transparent gold fell upon Frost Pane, binding the old mare under tonnes of star-mass. Frost Pane’s knees shook as length upon length of chain fell from the vast space between stars and onto her back. The old mare looked down at the deer in surprise.

And then she laughed. It was a noise that froze the blood of the Clavia more than the hunting-call of any manticore or dragon of far Everfree. The old mare touched the tip of her white-frosted horn to the chains on her back. Frost spread from its tip over the gold links and down their long length, and the chains themselves seemed to quaver from the cold.

Then Frost Pane yawped in triumph and stamped her forehooves on the ground. The golden chains shattered with the destructive euphony of a thousand rocks thrown through the store windows of downtown Manehattan and vanished as they lay and smoked in shards on the floor. The Clavia either stared at her in glass-eyed shock or lay curled very still upon the ground.

Frost Pane grinned the more broadly and licked her lips. “Gallish deer make the Pride of Trotheim hunger. The sickness of the North lies in my bones. It eats up my magic; why should it not eat up yours also?” Her grin spread, her pupils shrank, and all the Clavia shook with naked fear as she pressed her nose right to one of theirs. “I like you. Take your magic with you and run, or I may stop liking you so well.”

Frost Pane snapped her teeth. The Clavia jumped and stumbled and fell like fawns getting their first legs, running as one to the cellar stairs. Pome and Rubyk just stared as the Frei of Trotheim howled with laughter, then broke down in an equally raucous coughing fit. The two stallions rose to their hooves even as the chains upon them faded like stars dissolving in the dawn.

“Thank you, grandmama,” said Rubyk. The unicorn’s joints cracked like gunshots as he stretched himself.

“I suppose y’all want me to thank you both now?” said Pome, wincing as he rose shakily upon his legs. “That y’all have me in your debt?”

“Oh, no, Pome Apple. I like you far too much for that.” said Rubyk. The tall unicorn actually smiled for the briefest instant before cold duty froze his features. “I want you to come with me.”

“…what?” Pome Apple said, raising an eyebrow.

“Grandmama has affrighted the little deer. Their magic cannot touch her; though whether this is some effect of the Ice Sickness unknown to the ponies of Trotheim or merely the end of swallowing down stardew like icewine, I cannot say,” said Rubyk.

“Is it my fault my medicine jigs and spritzes like cherry-figs in soda-water? If they did not make it to be drunk, it should not prance in the belly so well!” Frost Pane retorted.

“A little help here?” Pome said, an edge of irritation in his voice.

“I mean that they will not return so long as grandmama remains down here, which is just as well. We have work to do, you and I.”

Pome cut a swipe in the dust. “Sod this, will y’all just tell me what you’re going on about?” Rubyk merely lighted his horn, throwing a beam of stark, blue-white light into the cellar ahead of them and motioned for Pome to follow.

“Now that the little deer have learned that it is impossible to hold the Pride of Trotheim,” Rubyk said, casting his eyes and the light from his horn into far corners and behind racks of wine bottles covered with gauzy spider webs. “I want to see what they are hiding down here. I have it on good authority that what was once your uncle is somewhere down here. I want you and myself to have another look at him.”

“That is the last thing I want to see. Why?” said Pome as he trotted along behind Rubyk, though behind the contempt there sounded a note of curiosity. Chuckling to herself, Frost Pane swept along grandly in her furs in the rear.

“Why do I bring you along, or why do I wish for another look?” said Rubyk.

“Oh, indulge me,” spat Pome. “I suspect y’all are going to anyway.”

“It is not difficult, Pome Apple,” Rubyk said. The Aktur of Trotheim came to a door in the wall, squat and low and supremely old, studded with iron spikes in its heavy wooden planks set into the sandstone. He bent low, putting his eye to the keyhole. Pome watched, irritation and confusion both growing as the giant put his tongue to the keyhole, wincing as at some bitter flavour. Rubyk drew himself up and shook his head.

“First, I need you, Pome Apple, to help me get in here. Your uncle’s body is in this room. The magic sealing it is foreign to me, and neither grandmama nor I can pass this low-set door for little backs and hooves. Second, I want to watch you while you do to your uncle the one thing whatever you wish.”

Pome gaped. “What? But – y’all want me to… huh?!” Rubyk did not respond to the outburst. Instead, he turned his back to the door, placing one of his rear hooves on the iron-shod surface.

“On three?” Rubyk said. Blinking, Pome sidled next to Rubyk and crouched, muscles tensing.

“One,” said Rubyk. “Two…”

The noise as the door fell from its hinges in the close quarters of the cellar was absolute, a scream of metal and an explosion of splintering wood. Rubyk stooped his head to see through the aperture. Pome stared at a scene that the half-unicorn had not expected to see. The room beyond the door was evidently an ancient armory for the Clavia in their desperate defence against the pony tribes of Miss Largo’s view of Equestrian history. Brass spears and nut-shaped helms with two openings for a pair of antlers hung upon hooks on the walls. A rack of polished brass cones purposed as antler-tips stood to the side, and several salt-rusted mauls and maces and long-dulled knives with stone pommels lay on the floor like refuse – all small for ponies, all toys to the giant of Trotheim crouching just outside of the door.

But the curious thing was not that the body of a murdered pony was thrown into a disused armory in the basement of an ancient deerish fortress. It was that, to all appearances, this room was not simply allowed to fall into disuse. The old armory, and all that was within it, positively reeked of the magic of the stars. Old magic, new magic, overlaid and intertwined and soaked into the porous stone so deep that the traces of the spells once cast here blurred into a foggy ambiance of raw, alien power. The stones could not contain it all; old magic found new expression as it seeped out of the walls and ceiling, fluorescing as winking constellations scribed in sandstone and phosphorescing as a cool glow more like the Milky Road than crude lampwood. A golden blanket of magic lay over a distinctly pony-shaped object on a table of rough-hewn lampwood glowing dully in the middle of the room.

Eyes wide, Pome Apple stooped, his overgrown colt’s body scraping the sides of the narrow doorway as he entered. His mane and tail puffed and stood on end at the pricking feeling of foreign magic bearing down upon his frame. As he moved to the center of the room, motes of amber, gold, and silver flicked in and out of sight around his horn as magic called to magic. The half-unicorn did not dare to even magick the blanket that had been cast over Calvados Apple’s lean body. With a deep breath, Pome, pulled back the pall over his uncle’s body – for it was no spell at all over him, but merely magic soaked into every fiber of a bedsheet – showing the face of Calvados Apple. The Clavia that had brought him down here had evidently done what they could for the old stallion, closing his eyes and his injuries.

Pome’s entire face and muzzle drew up in disgust. “You’ve never looked better, uncle,” he said, bitterly. He paused, then spat upon Calvados’ face. He turned and began to trot back toward the door, with heavy, angry hoof-falls.

Rubyk shook his head. “Pray, stay for a moment longer, Pome Apple. Look at the pony you hate so much and tell me only one thing.”

“Oh, what more do you want from me?” Pome half-wailed. He trotted back over to the corpse.

“Does your uncle have any bruising under his coat on his ribs?” Rubyk said in the tone one would say, “did you pick up any hay down at the store?”

Pome cast a glance down to the brown coat of the prone corpse. “Yeah. There is.”

“Good… that is well,” said Rubyk, going whispery. “Are there three marks upon his chest?”

“Huh?” Pome peered more closely at his late uncle in the strange light of the armory. “No… I think there are only two. ’Bout hoof-shaped, too.”

Rubyk nodded his head slowly, as if the answer could not have been anything else. “Thank you, Pome Apple. I will ask no more of you.”

Pome did not respond immediately. A different air came over the half-unicorn in the unnatural light of the magic-charged armory. He took up the gilt-light sheet and pulled it back over Calvados Apple’s broken body.

“Would y’all mind leaving me alone for a while? I’ve said about all I feel like saying to you.”

Rubyk opened his mouth to speak, but Frost Pane laid a cold hoof on his shoulder. She shook her head sternly. Abashed, Rubyk nodded to his grandmare, and as one the Aktur and Frei of Trotheim turned and began to make their own way back out of the cellar, Rubyk again lighting the way. As they left, Rubyk cast one last glance back toward the door.

Behind them, in the constellated room of old wars turned tomb, Pome Apple sobbed silently into his hooves.

Miss Largo perused the morning papers in her usual way: with deliberation, with poise and a rigid spine, and her constant breakfast – two bananas, peeled, and a plate of crudité with water – untouched until she had consumed that which was more important than mean food: information.

And, as always, she took her own good time. Madeleine shifted anxiously in her seat, the mare on the other side of the high table dissolving into images of grime-toothed unicorns, black pegasi with wings like Death’s own dark cloak, and ponies draped in bangles of hornbone and skulls and… and… and things that even her imagination did not dare to picture too clearly. Then Miss Largo, stern and prim and constant as ever, would snap back into focus and the smells of Madeleine’s hay frites and weak, milky tea would batter themselves against her nostrils. Somehow, coffee seemed out of the question just at the moment.

The proprietress chewed idly on a radish. “Trouble sleeping last night, Crumpet? You look like something the Clavia might dredge up from the wrecks after a bad storm – no offense, dear.”

With a start, Madeleine shook her head, perhaps just a bit too emphatically. “No, no! It was a fine evening, really. All of the staff are always so kind to me. This trip has been no different.”

Miss Largo smiled thinly. “I see that you have lost none of your acumen. Having the ability to say just what somepony wants you to say while meaning nothing at all is such a useful trick for the gem-brokery business, isn’t it?” Miss Largo chuckled as Madeleine’s mouth opened involuntarily, just the barest slit. “That’s more like it. Why don’t you ask me what is really on your mind, Crumpet? You’ll feel better once we put all this business behind us.”

Madeleine licked her lips. Her mouth was going dry an awful lot lately. “What did you do with Mister Rubyk, Largo?”

“You say that as if I have done something wrong, Crumpet. Honestly, I’m hurt. You don’t really mean that, do you?”

“What else am I supposed to think?” Madeleine rubbed her temples. “Mister Rubyk and I were making such progress. We spoke with all of the ponies who might have had something to do with the murder. We found evidence. We were doing exactly the task that you set us to do, and we were on our way to finishing in this ‘three day’ business you clapped on Mister Rubyk like a shackle. And… and…”

“And I stopped him from finishing his task? I stood in the way of justice? I aided a criminal in the most heinous act that ponies can do to each other for motives of my own?” Miss Largo said. Madeleine winced at the words, but the other mare just looked at her with tired eyes full of old affection. Miss Largo sighed and raised her hoof. In an instant, three serving-bucks approached the dining table and cleared away forks and cups and uneaten hay in their magical grip. Madeleine hardly minded; the hay frites were normally a cherished part of her island stays, but today even their oily smell was repulsive.

Miss Largo rose and trotted to Madeleine on the other side of the high table, laying an hoof tenderly on her shoulder. “Take a walk with me, Crumpet dear? I think there are some things between us that deserve their privacy.”

Madeleine bit her lip, but nodded. The image of the thing that had once been Calvados Apple, alive and breathing, swam in her vision and led her out of the dining room, down a corridor, and into the library. Dimly, Madeleine wondered why it looked familiar. Then the image dissolved and the proprietress of the Clavia Hotel regarded Madeleine with a face full of concern.

“What’s happened, dear? Is there something I’ve done to make you mistrust me?” Miss Largo said, taking Madeleine’s hoof in her own. Madeleine stared at the limb locked around hers, too numb to move. Miss Largo drew back, a sad dullness filming her eyes.

“I see…” murmured Miss Largo, the proprietress’ voice near inaudible.

“You haven’t done anything to me, Largo. But… I don’t know… just… why?” Madeleine said, fighting the urge to paw at the ground from the welter of irritation and emotions she couldn’t name welling up in her. This meeting was doing no favours for her mental state.

Miss Largo turned from her to the stacks of books, mainly histories and contrarian biographies suited her own tastes, running her hoof along the spines. “Again, Crumpet, you ask me ‘why?’ But I have to retort to you, ‘why not?’ Why should I not put away a pair of potentially dangerous ponies, either of which might have killed a pony on the night before last, when I see them about to come to a wizard’s duel and hoof-knocks before my guests?”

“But… Mister Rubyk didn’t –”

“Oh?” Miss Largo whirled on Madeleine suddenly. “He didn’t kill Calvados Apple?”

“No!” Madeleine snorted and did stomp at the ground, the blow of her hoof swallowed up in the ample plush carpet.

“Crumpet dear, how do you know that?”

Madeleine’s jaw hung open in earnest. She moved her mouth silently, trying to find words to form a reply, but no sounds left her lips.

How did she know that, exactly?

“I… asked Mangosteen and Frond to keep an eye on him. I thought he was an interesting stallion. They told me that he talked about… goodness, and justice… and that he actually prayed… I travel a lot, and hardly anypony I see ever prays…. and… um…” Madeleine trailed off, her words going thin and sour in her mouth.

“Is that all?” Miss Largo said, softly.

Madeleine grimaced. “Yes,” she said, and looked down at the floor. The proprietress padded softly over to her, throwing a foreleg around her in a tender hug.

“He prays, Crumpet? Shh… shh… you did nothing wrong at all. But what am I supposed to do with a pony who prays when he also has legs that can buck my doors down? Have you seen his teeth? Have you seen what he eats?” Miss Largo stroked at Madeleine’s mane, brushing away a few strands that had fallen in the unicorn mare’s eyes. Eyes that were full of embarrassment and gathering tears.

“Sweet Celestia, Largo…” Madeleine whispered, shaking. “I was a fool and a half…”

“No, Crumpet! You did what you thought was right… shh…” Miss Largo said, placing an hoof on Madeleine’s lips. “So what if he appears to be investigating? Isn’t that just what a clever member of the criminal classes would do to cover his tracks? He’s so foreign, Crumpet… I just wanted to protect my own… I just want to protect you, dear.”

“I’m sorry, Largo!” Madeleine wailed, crying into Miss Largo’s friendly shoulder. Miss Largo said nothing: there was nothing more to be said. She just stroked, and stroked, and stroked at Madeleine’s mane until the tears all stopped.

Rubyk grinned as he found Madeleine in the Grand Foyer, not showing his teeth amongst the throng of Clavia and other guests brewing coffee, perusing their newspapers, and one old buck with dim eyes and darkening magic who was struggling to peel an orange.

“Friend Madeleine!” the Aktur of Trotheim said, beaming down on the mare. She looked at him with the slow movement of dread, her neck muscles tensing. “I am freed as you see – no small thanks to my own grandmama. Come! I am eager to hear of what you found while I slept in the starry dark. There is coffee yet to be drunk, and…” Rubyk paused. The Aktur of Trotheim flared his nostrils and peered closer at Madeleine. She gulped and made every apparent effort not to back down or away.

“Something has happened,” Rubyk said, sounding completely ambivalent. “You smell of terror. Old and new.” In spite of her fear, Madeleine felt a stab of annoyance. Yet again with the pompous not-questions!

“Something has.”

“Oh?”

“Mister Rubyk,” Madeleine began to say, but the stallion’s eyes stopped her words in her throat. It was like getting her tail caught in a jutting icicle. She swallowed. “Can I really trust you?”

Rubyk blinked. Clearly, of all the things he might have expected her to say, that was not on the list. Madeleine saw the change come over the unicorn’s face as he realized the import of her words.

“I see…” growled the Aktur of Trotheim. Madeleine flinched and closed her eyes, waiting for the inevitable hoof to fall, for the foyer to suddenly chill the blood in her veins, for Rubyk to start thundering and stamping, or – something!

The hoof-fall never came. Madeleine opened her eyes to see a suddenly very tired Rubyk, Lord Aktur of Trotheim, pushing past her toward the coffeepots. He did not wait for something so mundane as a coffee cup. He simply magicked the whole tall pewter pot and began to sip from the spout, a soured look creasing his muzzle. He was no longer hiding his teeth.

“I do not know what has now given you pause, friend Madeleine. You might have imagined me as a monster. But you are right to do so. You have no reason at all to trust me.”

“You’re right, Mister Rubyk… I really don’t.” Madeleine sat herself on one of the sofas under a reddish light cast by the glassy antler chandelier, looking down at the carpet. Rubyk trotted over and sat himself down beside her, pulling in his legs and taking up almost all of the remainder of the sofa. It was a very tight fit.

“Do you think that I killed Calvados Apple?” Rubyk said in a whisper. Madeleine shivered. Cold seemed to radiate from the stallion in more than one sense.

Madeleine took a deep breath. “I don’t know,” she said, fixing his jewel-cut eyes with her own. Seeing them this close, they were more like aquamarines than sapphires. “All I know is the same from the beginning of… all this. That you seem to be a good and just pony. That everypony seems to speak well of you. That you’re not a cruelpony, no matter what may happen.”

Rubyk nodded, his eyes half-lidded as if in thought. “But a pony not cruel might still have murdered? Might still be capable of harming ponies if his justice and goodness demanded it?”

“He might have.”

“Am I such a pony?”

“I don’t know,” spat Madeleine before an half-mad chuckle forced its way out of her.

By Celestia’s mane, am I actually laughing? Madeleine shook her head, shooing the cobwebs and the nagging voice of her little pony reminding her that this was no time for a conversation like this, that she had not slept in Luna-only-knew how long, et cetera. There seemed to be a long, dark tunnel full of a very great deal of ceterastretching out before her.

“Mister Rubyk, how can you prove that you had no connection to Calvados Apple before you came to this hotel?”

Rubyk sighed. “I have no evidence I can offer to clear myself in your eyes. I have only the word of the Pride of Trotheim.”

“But I don’t know what that is,” said Madeleine, striking the sofa. “Whatever it is, Mister Rubyk, you scare me. You’re not a normal pony by any stretch of the mind. How can I know that you didn’t see Calvados Apple doing something you disliked and decide to kill him yourself? You’ve got magic to spare – I’ve seen that much myself. And…”

Rubyk let the silence fill the space between them. “And that is all that need be said,” he mumbled, sadly.

Madeleine hopped down from the sofa, looking into Rubyk’s eyes one more time. They were as inscrutable as an iceberg.

“I have to go…” she murmured, even as she started trotting away. She felt the cool pricks of his eyes at her haunches as her trot turned to a canter, then a gallop, as she fled toward the open great doors of the foyer, and out into the open air.

Doctor Leaf looked up from a ledger held in the grasp of a few winking stars at the clip of hooves stepping from the silent corridor onto the stone-tiled floor of the hotel apothecary. Upon seeing whom it was, the Clavia buck turned back to the rows of bottles in clear and amber-glass upon the shelves of the glass-doored cabinet behind him, a look of mingled annoyance and puzzlement upon his muzzle.

The buck brought a clear vial to eye-level in the grip of his magic, scrutinizing its contents. “I had not expected you quite so soon,” he said without turning his head. “I’m not quite done yet, unfortunately. Unless this is particularly important, you may consider returning at some other time.” He paused and sent both the vial and the ledger to a low table in the rear with a wag of his head. A set of brass scales and weights lay upon it. Rubyk watched the deer’s movements with an appraising stare as he himself moved, shoulders stooped, into the small space, seeming to fill it to bulging by dint of his mere presence.

Doctor Leaf carefully weighed the vial with its cork, adding and subtracting more and more minute weights until the balance stood as level as the table. The little deer clicked his teeth in evident frustration and make a blotchy mark on the parchment with a bit too much verve. It matched the others on the ledger list from what Rubyk could read from where he stood.

Then Doctor Leaf sighed, raising his eyes from his work up to the giant. “You have been awfully silent, Aktur. Not ill, are you?”

“Not ill, no – but strained? That I am.”

“From causes beyond your investigation?”

“I admit it.”

“Then that’s different,” said Doctor Leaf, laying down his quill. He motioned with his head toward a squat, round bottle mostly covered by a wicker-weave on its base, drawing it toward the table along with two small, thick-walled stone cups perched high atop one of the cabinets. The Clavia eased the cork out with a wet pop and poured two small portions of clear, tawny liquid.

“To our work, then,” said Doctor Leaf, raising up his cup, “and all its attendant strains and woes.”

“Amen,” replied Rubyk in a whisper, tossing back the whole cup. It was for him barely a swallow. The physician sipped at his with a bit more care.

“You have an almost impossible task, Aktur,” Doctor Leaf commented between imbibing.

“And I know it now more keenly than ever,” said Rubyk, and the unicorn’s face seemed even more pinched.

“Then let me aid you as I can,” said the Clavia. He set his drinking-cup down and took up the ledger to put it toward Rubyk’s squinting gaze. “Whatever is the truth of this mess, I could not get one thought out of my mind: what if the murderer, however he ‘did it’ – did the deed with one of my medicines? What if I was in any way responsible for the death of that… admittedly unpleasant pony?”

Rubyk’s eyebrow rose. “What are you implying, Doctor?”

“Well, what did you come here to ask me? Certainly you did not come just for a social tipple,” said Doctor Leaf, refilling Rubyk’s cup.

“I wanted your opinion on where the poison in Calvados’ system could have come from. There are only so many ways that it could have been given to him from what I know of the events of that night so far.” Rubyk took the stone drinking-cup and threw it back. “Thank you, by the way.”

“Well,” said the Clavia, chuckling grimly. “Normally I serve alcohol to ponies under quite different circumstances, but this was professional – or, if you will, medicinal.” Doctor Leaf gave one more bone-dry laugh before he turned once more all to business. “Aktur, your business is your business, and your private affairs I leave all for your own. But I take my business – my real business, you understand, and not the daily drudgeries I bear for the sake of brute necessity – just as seriously.”

“You are talking in riddles, Doctor.”

“Then let me be clear. I am what you call a ‘medical pony,’ Aktur – in the loosest possible sense of the latter, but strictly in the former. I studied in Canterlot General; I took the same oath that every single nurse and doctor of your kind take before your Princess when they finish their studies: to do no harm. And I meant it. No Clavia should ever knowingly take the life of another. I merely vowed that I would always look on any pony who came under my hooves as a fellow whitetail.”

“Why tell me all this?” Rubyk asked, but his voice did not have the lift of real query in it. Doctor Leaf sighed.

“For the same reason I find to get out of my bed for the next shift, Aktur. For the same reason that I told you what I knew and suspected. Every single pony in this hotel is my patient,” Doctor Leaf said with sudden verve. Then the Clavia gave a long look at his cup and tossed it back all at a go. He coughed and looked Rubyk squarely in the eye. “Poisoning one of my patients turns your crime into a professional matter. You understand, I see.”

“I do. We are cut from the same cloth, Doctor.”

“So we are.” Doctor Leaf turned his attention to the shelves, bringing a number of bottles and cork-capped vials to the table in a burst of concentration. “I have been trying to satisfy myself on one point, Aktur – and I was nearly finished when you came in the door. That sheet records the current weight of each of the medicines and decoctions in my care that contain Earthsbane.” The Clavia shook his head, agitated, even as he placed another amber-glass vial onto the balance pan.

“So far, not a one is even a drop lighter. And I am coming down to the very most dilute mixtures now, just for the sake of my own conscience. But I am almost sure even now: wherever the poison came from, it was not lifted from my stocks.”

“I see…” whispered Rubyk, half to himself. “Then there are only a very few possibilities.”

“Oh?” said Doctor Leaf. It was the little deer’s turn to raise his eyebrow.

Rubyk stamped his hoof with an harsh crack on the tiled floor. “One: Pome Apple brought the poison along, foreseeing that he might have cause to use it on his uncle in such a remote place without police like this.”

“In which case he did his research well. But he hardly seems like the type.”

Rubyk nodded his head in agreement. Crack. “Two: Calvados Apple brought the Earthsbane himself in case he would ever have cause to use it for his wounded honour – like a senator of Old Roam carrying a flask of zebra-brewed hemlock for a quick and noble end.”

Doctor Leaf wrinkled his nose in rank disgust. “As a physician, I’ve never been able to understand the impulse. Unfortunately, the old deerfolk also had such a habit. It was lauded with wine and song as a way to leave these dust-and-bone frames and leap directly into the heavens to become a star with all one’s youthful powers intact. Never mind the ‘great leap’ was off the backs of one’s people.” The physician sighed as he placed a new sample on the balance pan. “The old Clavia would come together to throw a mountain into the depths of the sea if it meant avenging the wounded pride of one of their own: and the histories say that actually happened. Once. Murder – or crimes worse than murder – meant war between clans and bloodshed for generations. The populations of entire islands were wiped out by our own lust for honour.”

The little deer snorted as he shifted weights from the other balance pan, coming closer with each attempt to matching the weight of the vial. “But they would just go and off themselves and write doe-ballads about the victims of… of self-murder! I just don’t understand it, Aktur. If the coming of the pony tribes on their fearful longboats meant anything, it was that my people finally loosed the death-grip of their jaws on the notion that it is ever better to take the breath from a living soul for the sake of a mere inconvenience. Especially if that life should belong to one’s own self.”

Rubyk nodded his head with a slow movement of profound comprehension, but he did not meet the little Clavia’s eyes. For a long moment, he said nothing at all. When he stamped his hoof again, it had none of the gunshot intensity of the other blows. Clip. “Three… some other pony not yet accounted for brought the Earthsbane with them when they came to the island.”

Pulling the ledger-sheet back toward him, Doctor Leaf shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s impossible, Aktur.” He made a similar mark by the next item on the list and paused. “Or if not impossible, very, very unlikely. All medicaments and preparations containing Earthsbane, to say nothing of whole leaves or pure extract, are a highly controlled substance in all lands under your monarchy. All unicorns employed for harbour patrol are trained to cast a spell on all bags and passengers to screen for it and sixteen other poisons, drugs, and toxins harmful to pony or even nonequine life in general. A pure extract is usually only transported in a locked enameled box tethered to a unicorn or pegasus, and even then is registered to its destination – usually a research university. It’s not the sort of substance that normally just goes missing.”

“But conceivably a black market for it might exist?”

“I suppose,” said the Clavia, but he sounded doubtful. “But it would be far easier to divert a quantity from its legitimate ends in research or wizardcraft. A bribe to a starving student would be all that might be necessary to obtain enough poison for an hundred murders.”

“And you are quite sure, Doctor, that all of the Earthsbane on this island is in this room?” Rubyk’s eyes bore down upon the little deer like icicles. Doctor Leaf’s tail twitched as, for just a moment, he hesitated before answering.

“Yes…” the Clavia answered, just a bit too sibilant. “I think that I can safely say that is the case.”

“Good.” Rubyk held out his forehoof to the buck, and once again, for the slightest moment, Doctor Leaf seemed to hesitate before he touched it with his own.

“You have been exceedingly helpful, Doctor – in more ways than you know,” Rubyk said, punctuating the latter remark with a sigh too small for his frame. “I but wish all of the ponies on this island were half so cooperative as you.” Rubyk flashed a small smile that nonetheless gave the little deer a start.

“Your kindness is noted, Aktur,” said Doctor Leaf. But his eyes were focused on something in the distance as Rubyk turned to leave.

Mare. Schoolteacher. The earth pony Madeleine was watching had her own eye on two little figures splashing in the pool, unconcerned but still vigilant for the always possible just-in-case. Thirty-six years old, two foals. Madeleine squinted. Just had an hoplicure – but no external adornments? Sort of mare who saves for indulgences. As if to confirm her suspicions, the mare’s husband returned from the bar, a carefree smile on his muzzle, balancing a tray of two drinks full of fruit. The sort of thing that one buys when one has children and no time nor money for anything harder. Not a customer.

Madeleine champed her teeth, annoyed. Were none of the ponies in this hotel the sort for jewels and bangles around their necks? Canterlot was easier. The silly things were all over the ground in Canterlot.

She tried to turn her attention back to the sketchbook that lay open on the poolside chaise before her. But though her horn held a pencil that twitched to be put to good use, the page remained pristine and creamy-white. Madeleine closed her eyes, but the same images came rushing back in, pushing any thoughts of gems and gold settings out to the corners of her mind’s eye: a grotesque pony, shot and maimed even more grotesquely; Hodgepodge’s rotted-out smile grinning up at her, his tongue running over the unicorn’s cracked lips; Largo ordering her own guard to carry a massive, dangerous pony off to the cellars to keep everypony safe. To keep her safe. And, finally, piercing through them all, his eyes – those cold, searching, jewel-cut eyes…

“Your thoughts could fill a brass-bit thimble, jeweler. Pour them out into these hoary old ears and stop your fretting.”

Madeleine looked up from her sketchbook with a start, nearly upending the poolside umbrella that had been shading her lounging body.

“How do you do, Frei Frost Pane.”

“What, what?” demanded the same and clutched her furs tight about her. The old mare of Trotheim leaned in close, frost clinging to her horn and hooves even in the languid light of late afternoon. “Eyes do wander like that, but not when the heart leaps for joy to see a bread-mate. What has happened, jeweler?”

The Frei of Trotheim was not the sort of pony who asked twice for anything. She seated herself on her haunches at Madeleine’s side with a movement like a boulder suddenly tumbling from the top of a canyon. The little buck carrying a tray of drinks from the poolside bar gave a wide berth around the long train of white that flowed from the old mare’s shoulders like water, and a father together with his son gave a stink-eyed glare at the silly old fool, however large, who was blocking hoof-traffic.

Frost Pane did not seem to mind. In fact, the old mare seemed rather nosily concerned about Madeleine’s affairs, leaning in close to scrutinize “the jeweler” with a searching stare that seemed only too familiar. Below the black ravages of her disease, the facets of her eyes gleamed with the same cool thoughtfulness as… as…

Madeleine shook her head. “Nothing is wrong, Frei Frost Pane. Other than the obvious, I mean, which both you and I know about.”

Frost Pane’s stare just bored into her all the more. Madeleine felt a bit like a bug pinned on a corkboard and shifted her hooves beneath her, uneasy.

“Not so, jeweler. Not so,” growled the Frei of Trotheim suddenly, with a vicious shake of her head. “I may look out on you through these briars of dead veins, but lies are poor bangles for your ears. Some squint. Some squirm. But the lie makes you burn, jeweler.”

Well, now I know the talent runs in the family…

“But I assure you, I’m quite alright!” Madeleine said, a strained chuckle following her words. She fought the urge to fold her ears back and run from the mountain of a mare threatening to crush her..

“Not what I asked, jeweler. Not at all.” Frost Pane drew herself up, tall and proud and strangely regal with her horn crowned with unmelting frost. Whether done for intimidation or just out of habit, it was impressive enough that Madeleine felt the impression of being a bug-watcher’s specimen only increase – even her hooves felt fixed to the chair where she lay.

“You were happy enough to run with my grandfoal for a time. Why are you not with Rubyk now, charging the scent of blood to its end?”

Madeleine swallowed, but the hard lump that came up of a sudden into her throat would not budge. “I… have my reasons, Frei Frost Pane.”

“And you will tell me what they are.”

Madeleine clenched her teeth. Bother these ponies! “Could I not just say that I would rather wave my tail at the whole thing?” She lowered her voice to a whisper for the sake of the blissfully unaware ponies gathered around the pool. “After all, murder isn’t something a well-bred lady puts her hoof into every day. It got to be a bit too much for me. That is the honest truth.”

Madeleine had hoped to see some form of begrudged acceptance in the old mare’s keen and judging face. She had not expected to see the old mare rear suddenly and crash down upon the ground with a sound like an ice cube cracking, nor the gout of cold and misting breath that was snorted in her face. And in spite of her attempt at discretion, Frost Pane’s act earned them a gallery of staring wide and glassy eyes from those gathered around the pool.

“You are no fool, jeweler!” growled the Frei of Trotheim, her lips curled back into a snarl. In the space of an half-second, Madeleine remembered just why it seemed a good idea to keep the Northland ponies at an healthy distance. “So we suggest that you stop acting like one and begin to talk the real sense you have locked up in your head! My grandfoal does not suffer imbeciles, nor entrust his work to little foals. You will tell me why you run from him now, or I will be very angry and shall throw things into other things.” Frost Pane finished with a tone that suggested the words in your general direction might have been added without changing the meaning in the slightest.

Madeleine swallowed and licked her lips. Had her mouth ever been this dry? She opened her mouth to speak, but somepony had shoved a wad of cotton down between her vocal cords, and no sound came out other than a strangled half-gasp.

“Miss Crumpet? And… Ms. Pane?” Mrs. Orange’s voice was tentative, even confused as the Manehattan socialite trotted up to the pair from the direction of the hotel. She cocked her head as she came close and stared at the two: one snorting and grotesquely regal in furs, the other looking like she wanted to leap to her four hooves and bolt right then and there. “Is there something wrong?”

Frost Pane shot a contemptuous glance toward Madeleine, who felt a stab of regret – oh, Celestia alone knew why! Then the Frei of Trotheim tossed her mane and grumbled: “Presumption and gall, guts and bile! ‘What is wrong?’ you ask, little mare?” She pointed an accusing hoof at Madeleine from beneath her furs. Madeleine, for her part, felt her cheeks and ears burn as hot and red as a certain pegasus’ ever had. “Only that this creature has forsaken the good grace of the Pride of Trotheim! She imagines that the loyalty and favour we give is a thing lightly shucked like a bit of filth from her tail. And she imagines that she is in the right when she will not even tell the whither nor the why!”

Madeleine stood up from the lounge chair, feeling her four poor knees shake at the pricks of so many eyes upon them as more and more ponies turned to watch the little drama unfolding at the poolside. Nevertheless, she made herself stand as erect and tall as her petite frame would allow and met those eyes, crossed by the black lines and nodes of disease, and she reminded herself that the old dear needed a gentle response – even if she did feel the twinging urge to buck her in the pointed teeth. She took a steadying breath, and her little pony flicked through her mental dossier until she found the entries on the two Trotheim ponies.

“Frei Frost Pane, let me be as clear as I know how: you are wrong in that from the end to the beginning.” Madeleine spoke crisply, giving every word the edges and clarity of a cut diamond.

“Oh?” Frost Pane challenged, once again sounding uncomfortably like her grandfoal. The old mare bent her body so that Madeleine could feel the cold emanating from her horn-tip. “And what bangly-worded reason do you have to give me to prove that, jeweler?”

“Well,” said Madeleine, and took a step forward as she looked the old mare directly in the eye. Frost Pane blinked and drew her head back in surprise. The “jeweler” fought the urge to grin like a fool as she continued: “How about, for starters, you never gave me any reason why I should trust your Pride any more than I should trot out in front of a pride of manticores. Or maybe I could say it was seeing what you and that grandfoal of yours like to nosh? That would only be mildly disconcerting; no, it wasn’t that.”

Taking another two, then three steps forward, Madeleine no longer fought the mad urge to grin as all the pressure of all the past days’ unvented emotions came out in a tumble of pointed irony. Frost Pane leaned backward, staring down in wide-eyed surprise at the petite little mare jabbing her hoof into her fur-robed chest.

“Or perhaps – just perhaps – just maybe I am the rational pony here? Where was your Rubyk all during that night, then? Are you really going to tell me, Frei Frost Pane, that I am supposed to trust a pony without any alibi? Who never even stoops down to tell us what he was doing all that time when one blow from his hooves could have done the job as well as anypony else in this hotel?” She laughed (perhaps a bit madly, she realized, but unable and unwilling to stop the rising tide), and she turned toward Mrs. Orange. The poor Manehattanite’s bewilderment had only grown plainer upon her face since she had started to watch the unfolding scene before her, and her mouth hung open as Madeleine’s hoof pointed toward her, bringing her into the circle of this tirade.

“Even this lovely vision of a mare has a good excuse for not being the ‘dunnit’ pony! Even her husband – lovelycitrine ear-bobs, by the way, you must tell me which designer did them – didn’t go out all the night! And do youknow where your Rubyk was that whole time?”

Madeleine had thought, somewhere in a dusty, unconscious corner of her own mind, that Frost Pane would be the kind of pony to launch into a fit of red, apoplectic anger at this kind of treatment. Probably some tittering spider spinning webs in that same corner egged her on in that course. Instead, she was disappointed (stars alone knew why) when the old mare just continued to stare, eyebrows rising. But the Frei of Trotheim possessed herself well; she did not even blink. The air seemed to stretch tighter and tighter as two, then three, then a dozen seconds ticked by.

And Frost Pane still had yet to blink.

Madeleine’s ears flattened back against her skull. A bead of cold sweat began to slide down her temple right by the corner of her eye. Those aquamarines behind the black lattice cage just drilled into her.

Isn’t there anything normal about these ponies? moaned the little pony in Madeleine’s head. She had to agree.

Come on.

Come on.

Blink.

“Actually…” said the timid voice of Mrs. Orange, off in a distant somewhere that Madeleine only half-heard, “there was a short time when Bergamot…”

Madeleine’s head shot to the side, and she rubbed at her tearing eyes with a fetlock. “What was that, Mrs. Orange?”

Frost Pane snorted her haughty victory, but Madeleine’s mind had already leapt altogether onto quite another track. Her mind’s eye opened not onto the page of a mental dossier, but to an old mouth-scrawled notebook from days of sitting at a Canterlot sidewalk café, just pony-watching. The spark of unexpected recognition was already stirring in her head as she ran down the items on the list of tells and social cues, long since memorized.

Bridge over muzzle rises while ends of eyes droop; cheeks suddenly sallow and bloodless; restrained movements in shoulders indicating urge to place hooves over mouth stifled by practice; slight widening of mouth accompanied by flare of nostrils. Type: shame. Cause: inadvertent revelation of a fact preferred to be concealed by self or another.

Madeleine blinked.

Madeleine grinned like a foal.

“Or maybe this was all just a misunderstanding,” she announced, all prim poise. Madeleine began to gather up her sketch pad and pencils, magicking them into her bag. Frost Pane eyed her quizzically, even defensively, as if she expected the “jeweler” to suddenly leap upon her brandishing sharpened bezels.

“Why, Miss Crumpet…” said Mrs. Orange, sounding even more timorous, “that was… certainly an impressive valse-face on your part. If I may be so bold, what caused you to change your mind about… well, Mister Rubyk and that incident?”

“Hmm?” Madeleine hoisted her bag onto her back, tightening the strap in her teeth. “Oh, I’ve not changed my mind. Not quite all the way.”

“Then… why?” said Mrs. Orange.

Madeleine shot a cheeky smile toward Frost Pane. “I only just realized that I have something rather important that I need to do. You might say it’s only lately fallen onto my back. But better late than never, I say.”

As she turned to leave, poor Mrs. Orange more bewildered than ever, Madeleine heard the exact moment when the Frei of Trotheim caught on. Frost Pane’s laugh grew and swelled until she was bellowing for a celebratory round and toast to the “jeweler-pony’s” good sense for all the ponies gathered at the pool. It was the perfect distraction; it was also the perfect way for word of their little exchange to drift up to Largo, and fast.

Madeleine closed the wicket gate into the gardens, closing it softly behind her as she moved out of sight of the ponies singing paeans to Frost Pane’s magnanimity. She took a deep breath. Okay, so you still don’t know if Rubyk really didn’t kill Calvados or not. If he did, he’s a dangerous pony. Sweet Luna, he’s a dangerous pony even if he didn’t! But if he didn’t kill Calvados, he needs to know. And if he did… well, there’s just one more pony to be suspicious of to get the heat off him.

Her thoughts running ahead of her, Madeleine trotted to the hotel, her one goal flashing before her mind’s eye in garnet ink: find Mister Rubyk.

It didn’t feel like a very good plan, but it was a plan. And it was all that she had.

Madeleine suppressed a shiver.

“He’s where?”

Like Rock Skipper when the pegasus had developed a sudden case of hoof-in-mouth, the galley doe called Endive rubbed at the back of her head with a fetlock, just below where her two stumpy, feminine antlers protruded. “It’s just like I said, Miss Crumpet: the tall one came down to the kitchens and strode in just as bold as you please. The poor little thing looked so lost, like a little foal, standing there with his hoof raised in the air like that. Chef finally asked him what he wanted, and he said so low you could barely hear him over a simmer, ‘I am looking for somewhere quiet to think. Can you help me, friend cook?’ And just like that, Chef shoved him in the walk-in, as he was blocking the hoof-path. Seemed to suit him just fine.”

Little? Madeleine thought, blinking to cover her incredulity. Then, because her mouthy little pony hadn’t yet caught up to her mouth, she said:

“You put him in the freezer?”

Endive pointed a cleaver toward the tall wooden door of the massive icebox. Polished turquoises set into a gilt-thread spell on the door glowed faintly in the harsh light of overcharged lampwood staves hung from the rafters of the kitchens. “Yeah, and I was about to go check and make sure the daft little thing hasn’t curled up and gone to sleep in there. Bad idea, sleeping in a walk-in. You hear tales about some poor ponies who decide on napping for a bit after the lunch rush and end up taking a dirt nap instead. This unicorn was a nice little thing. I would hate to have that happen to him.”

Alarmed, Madeleine glanced down at the galley deer. “Perhaps we might check on him… now?” Endive answered with a shrug and walked deliberately up to the door, laying an hoof upon it. The door hummed in recognition at her touch and creaked open on protesting hinges, releasing waves of tumbling white fog into the kitchen’s steaming air.

“Make it quick, Miss Crumpet. We don’t want to break a gem right before the dinner service.” Numbly, Madeleine nosed the door open wider and pushed her way inside.

Even though the inside of the icebox was lit by a guttering fire-ruby instead of lampwood (which tended to not work at all below a temperature of “subtropical”), Rubyk was impossible to miss. He had been wedged between two tall milk cans behind dangling bundles of banana skins stuffed with rice and beans and sewn back together with fine thread. It was a futzy (if delicious!) dish if ever there was one, and Madeleine supposed that it made sense to make as much ahead as possible – then she knocked her hoof on the side of her head, forcing herself to remember just why she was here. She stepped in front of the “little” lost pony that had wandered into the galley and coughed.

“Mister Rubyk,” Madeleine said, “I think I may have found out something rather important.”

Rubyk did not move. For that matter, he did not seem to even hear her. Looking over him in some alarm, Madeleine saw the hoary icicles drooping from the thin muzzle, the thin and sallow cast of Rubyk’s coat in the red light, his slumping shoulders, the solid shell of twilight colours where the outside of his mane had frozen. His eyes were closed, and his lids did not flutter. Madeleine put an hoof to Rubyk’s chest and let out a tense breath. He was breathing after all! Just… asleep? Thinking? Or, maybe – what did the llamas call it? Meditating?

Well, whatever it was, he had done enough of it. Madeleine reached into her bag and extracted a small hammer that she used for those little repairs and dings that traveling with baubles often made needful. Never thought I would be using it for this, though, she thought dryly, and proceeded to play an up-tempo 27/8 rhythm on the rim and handles of the milk cans by Rubyk’s ear. It really wasn’t half-catchy.

Rubyk did not move. “Stubborn, aren’t you?” Madeleine muttered, beginning to shiver at the cold against her bare flanks. She extracted a silken kerchief from her bag and waved the very edge of its corner against a very certain spot just below and behind Rubyk’s folded-down ear, nearly at the neck. There hadn’t been a stallion alive who wouldn’t melt at that spot being touched just-so!

Apparently, Rubyk wasn’t alive, or a stallion, or both. Madeleine nickered in frustration. The breath curled from her nostrils in thick, white, angry puffs. “Okay,” she said to herself, beginning to pace in front of him. “You have ice for blood, Mister Rubyk. I knew that, but it’s one thing to say it, and another to refuse the attentions of a beautiful mare, you know. You’re just lucky that I’m a patient pony.”

Madeleine stopped her pacing and took another long look at the still-frozen stallion in front of her, thinking quickly. The cold was beginning to seep up her legs, and the kitchen staff would be wondering why she hadn’t come out yet. Or worse, they might close the door to keep from losing too much cold air. Either way, she had to do something – soon.

And then a wicked little pony in her head whispered a wicked little idea into her ear. Being a wicked little pony herself, she grinned.

“Mister Rubyk,” she purred into his ear. “I hate to be the pony to tell you this, but your grandmama is brawling with ten stallions in the town. Right. Now.”

Rubyk’s eyes snapped open and his body jerked up, shock-straight, with a sound like shattering ice. The sound that came from his throat as he filled his lungs properly would have fitted a dragon (or an avalanche) far more than a pony. Madeleine took a step back as he fixed an eye ablaze like an arctic horizon on her and rasped like the howling wind:

“Where?”

Being at the receiving end of a Rubyk-stare was not a place that Madeleine wanted to stand in for long, but she supposed that she had brought this on herself. At least they had moved out into the garden, where she didn’t have to endure the cold of an icebox and the stink-eyed stares of kitchen deer just trying to get the dinner prep done.

“You lied to me, friend Madeleine,” said Rubyk, looming tall over the hibiscus. There was a dark undertone of something less wholesome than anger in his quiet voice.

“I… did,” replied Madeleine. “But I only did it to get you out of that freezer.” She breathed deeply, trying to ignore the fact that this did nothing for the prickly scrutiny she felt crawling all over her coat.

“I do not like being lied to,” said Rubyk, who turned his eyes off somewhere in the distance beyond Madeleine’s head, so that he was not looking at her directly. His eyes narrowed to slits. “Why?”

“I… I learned something, Mister Rubyk – something that, no matter what happens or… or whatever did happen that night, I think you need to know about.” Madeleine gulped. This was beginning to feel like a mistake.

“Tell me,” he said, all imperious coldness. Then he blinked and turned toward Madeleine, as if seeing her there for the first time without the thrust of a spear behind his face. He smiled like a lamb. “Please?”

…and, once again, Madeleine didn’t know what to make of this pony. She took a breath.

“Mister Rubyk, I believe that, despite his claims to the contrary, Bergamot Orange did go out of his room on the night of the murder,” she said, waiting for his response

Rubyk regarded her with what she thought was a surprisingly blank expression. “You are certain of this… friend Madeleine?”

“I am.”

“How certain?”

“As certain as that oysters make pearls, and not the other way around.”

“That is quite sure.” His eyes went a bit misty as they seemed to turn inward. “But, I ask, and I ask again, for it puts the lie to all that has come before: why the lie at all?”

“What?” said Madeleine, almost involuntarily. The mare moved closer as Rubyk’s voice dropped off again to one of its low ebbs.

Rubyk frowned. “But, friend Madeleine, how did you come by this evidence? It is strange that good stallion from Manehattan would have told you directly. I knew that he was lying already; I hardly thought that he had it in him to attempt a double-lie. His brain is hardly a training-dummy for a Trotheim logicmaster.”

“Oh,” said Madeleine, flashing a sparkling grin, “he didn’t tell me.”

“Whom? Mrs. Orange?”

“Yes. But… not in so many words.”

Rubyk’s eye flashed bright again, and he turned it on her. “In so many words… was it perhaps in no words?”

Madeleine nodded again. Rubyk drew himself up straight, and all at once, the cold sluggishness that had rested upon his frame seemed to melt into the steaming air. A nervous energy was welling up inside that massive specimen of a pony – Madeleine’s eyes followed his musculature and traced the tendons like coiled springs that he seemed to keep barely held down as he began to pace and talk to nopony at all but himself.

“At last, I think that I begin to see the light. Ah! But that the Lonely Heaven would give me but a glimmer of understanding to confirm my suspicions! But such a grace is not given me now; therefore, we must be subtle. I may know; but I need the evidence to prove what I know. But how to get it?” Rubyk fell silent as an hunting wolf as he stalked around Madeleine, shoulders low and tensed. The cube that depended from his neck pulsed with magic like an heartbeat, shedding flecks of puffy, white snow that melted on the grass beneath his hooves where he walked.

“Trickery…” said the stalking pony suddenly, stopping shock-still with an hoof still poised in the air. Rubyk sighed, deep and frustrated.

“Erm…” Madeleine mumbled, taking a step in his direction. “Beg your pardon, Mister Rubyk, but… that’s about as clear as cryolite. What do you mean by ‘trickery’?”

“That I must resort to it,” replied Rubyk. There was a sad undertone in his voice that vanished as the Aktur of Trotheim rested his hoof on the ground and drew in a deep, deep breath. Another page of her old notebook flashed before her mind’s eye.

Deep breath to diaphragm capacity following ambiguous statement: following statement will be intentional deception.

“Friend Madeleine,” announced Rubyk, proud and booming in his official role. “I should very much like to have the use of your dictosprite again for a few hours.”

Madeleine blinked. Maybe not such a reliable tell, then.

“You certainly may,” she said, curiosity edging out caution. “But whatever for?”

Rubyk waved an hoof vaguely, reminding her quite strongly of a certain somepony who liked to keep her secrets to herself. “I have some letters that I must write and see to sending myself,” he said, flashing her a warm smile that belied the flinty and calculating look in his jewel-cut eyes. “And I would encourage you to see to any ‘business’ you may have in yon town until the evening. I understand that there is a fine watering-hole for coladas and stallions that you prefer while moored in Currycape. This afternoon would be a fine opportunity for you to see to your preferences.”

While her eyebrow went up, her jaw went down, leaving Madeleine looking (as she well knew) more than faintly ridiculous as she stood, gawping and trying to process what the tall stallion had just told her. “Mister Rubyk, just… just what are you planning?”

“I plan to see this through to the end.” He paused and added, “by Heaven.”

What a strange pony, Madeleine thought, as he resumed his pacing with half-lidded eyes. Dangerous? Oh, yes.

But dangerous was still interesting.

Madeleine had given Rubyk the dictosprite. Oddly, and whether because of the crispness of his inflections or because he was an intimidating mass of teeth, magic, and muscle even to a soulless winged ball, he was somehow able to make its commas and full stops behave in a way that she had never quite mastered. She made a mental note to ask him what the trick was when all this… this was blown over.

Madeleine had gone into town, found her favourite cantina, and ordered a colada. And a daiquiri. And a nasty olive-juice thing when the sweetness started to coat her tongue. She had talked up the locals and the tourists out for an early afternoon-cap, the brawny pearl-trawlers coming back from their dives, who were only too happy to find some feminine company with an eye for their wares, and even found time to meet with a doe client who was all sweetness and solicitude and apologies – as they always were when behind on sales. But she had a new fawn, and family off on one of the nearby islands that wasn’t doing so well, and – well, Madeleine had sent her away with a nice, fat diamond in her little silk drawstring bag. Madeleine Crumpet was nothing if not a sympathetic ear.

Madeleine had returned to her room after the dinner hour, happy as a kelpie at a seaweed buffet and grinning like a school filly from the lingering tingle of hooves running down her shoulders – with half a dozen addresses of well-muscled ‘interests’ to call on later in the week tucked under the assorted gems and oddments that made up her bags’ contents.

Madeleine had seen the two letters pushed under the door of her suite before she even stepped over the threshold into her suite. The first bore the aggravatingly neat print of a dictosprite; the second bore a blocky, but joined mouth-writing bearing the inscription, “My Dear Madeleine Crumpet”.

Madeleine had opened the letters. The first was also written on the inside in dictosprite print, running quick and clipped, its speaker clearly used to a subordinate or secretary taking down dictation. It had run:

You are hereby summoned to appear at the inquest for the murder of Calvados Apple in the dining room of the Clavia Hotel at 9:00 AM tomorrow morning.

The Pride of Trotheim hereby claims authority over this establishment until this crime shall reach a resolution.

You are forbidden to leave the island until this order is lifted.

I, Rubyk, Lord Aktur of Trotheim, stamp this letter in ink by my own hoof.

And he had. It was a relatively small imprint compared to the pony that it supported. Below it, in a more personal, magical script, was added:

Friend Madeleine,

I pray that you will forgive my brusque mien in this summons. The events of the day demand this heavy-yoke approach.

I shall do you the honour to inform you that I intend to call you for a witness when I shall convene this court. While you may not fully trust me, I thank you for your aid in this case.

Whatever the case, I will come to the truth.

-R.

The second was filled with a single sheet of parchment. Its lines began in neat and uniform ranks, but as it went on, its neat edges began to shake and fray as if its owner was trying, and failing, to write under the weight of some intense agitation:

My Dear Crumpet,

I have been informed by the Aktur, in his “official capacity,” that pursuant to your late discussion with him, he now has sufficient evidence to conclude his initial investigations into the late unpleasantness that, naturally, I wish to see ended as soon as possible. I was understandably surprised to see you still in congress with the good official of Trotheim, even after my remonstrations. I am not hurt at all, Crumpet – only puzzled as to why you seemed to change your mind again so quickly. It hardly seems like you. I did look for you, but my staff informed me that you had left on some errand in the town. (Was that why Rubyk had sent her away, she had wondered – to keep Largo from coming across her on one of her “casual walks” around the hotel grounds?)

My only regret is that it seems that I have done something to diminish myself in your eyes. I only ask myself: why? Crumpet, what have I done that you would put yourself again in the path of a pony you know full well to be a danger and an unknown quantity? Have you so little regard for my love?

Perhaps the years have made us more distant than that, but you were not so reckless in our days at the palace in Canterlot. What changed? Or perhaps it is – I? Am I the same pony that you once knew? The same pony that took tea with you under that stolen chandelier and the pilfered treasures of your Princess strewn all about? Are you, too, going to slip away from me?

The next few lines were angrily scratched and blotted so badly that it was impossible to read what was once written underneath. When the lines resumed once more, they once again lined up neat and crisp like soldier-colts at a muster-call.

Of course, you are a grown mare, and you know your own mind better than I. Although one may proffer advice and an helping-hoof to an old friend, the company that a pony keeps is ultimately her own concern. I regret that this visit has turned out so miserably. I expect that I will see you at the Aktur’s kangaroo court in the morning.

What a farce.

Largo of the Deer

Madeleine had read over both of the letters, three times each. Then she had put them both into a drawer in the writing-desk and poured herself a rum.

Sour, she thought, and grimaced.

“Aktur, will you do me the courtesy of telling us all the reason you have seated us like this? Your designs are - you will pardon my frankness - as plain as a mule’s muzzle, but it would be nice to hear it from the horse’s mouth.” The proprietress of the Clavia Hotel looked down on Rubyk, seated at the head of the dining room’s high table as she was, regarding him with detached coolness. Madeleine knew that look: it was the face of seething anger under glass.

Rubyk blinked at her. “What manner do you mean??”

“Like we are all parties at a Canterlot inquest, and me your judge and Princess,” said Miss Largo.

Rubyk shrugged. “Because you are.” The Aktur of Trotheim gestured grandly around at the ponies and Clavia deer seated in an arrangement very much like a courtroom in Canterlot, or Manehattan, or very nearly anywhere else under Celestia’s bright sun and rule. Miss Largo sat at the high table on the dais surrounded by four cummerbunded bucks each as large as a colt, an heavy, engraved silver spoon before her like a gavel. Below the dais, tables had been shoved about by strong magic, and chairs had been stacked one upon another, forming a sort of open gallery in front of a makeshift bench and witness stand. On one side of the cleared floor sat a number of guests of the hotel behind one of the hotel’s long banqueting tables covered with a white linen runner. There were Bergamot and Mandarin Orange, he with a dour, pinched look upon his snout, she wearing a pale expression near to nausea. There was Pome Apple with a greasy, sweat-soaked mane, eyes sunken deep, and smelling (how apropos) of unwashed stallion, but looking somehow more intact, more lucid than Madeleine had yet seen him. There was Jett Black, back straight as a reed, looking like a statue of some dread thing of Old Equestria carved out of a block of glossy-dark obsidian, the pegasus’ face a mockingly perfect mask of expressionless stone. Frost Pane’s presence in furs, her ears and body decked in gems as grand as the dame she was, clashed with the black pegasus for dominance, and her jewel-cut aquamarine eyes sparkled with pride behind the black blood-spots as she looked on her grandfoal defying his adversary at the high table. Madeleine herself was last in line and felt her side rather exposed for it.

At the other table were gathered mostly Clavia and hotel staff, with several exceptions. Doctor Leaf peered over his spectacles at a sheaf of papers spread out before him, reading and rereading the same lines as if desperate to find something he had missed. Limon and Mangosteen and Frond sat close together, trading whispers. There was also the elderly and rickety Seamoss, busy even now at some little tasks of mending and patching a frayed dinner jacket belonging to some guest or other who had ripped an hole in the breast. Beyond her was Rock Skipper, the grey pegasus fidgeting as he fought the primal urge to spread his wings and fly from the cramped, crowded space. There were even some townies that Rubyk had managed to recruit for this… whatever this was. Piper Chai was nonchalant as she sipped from a flask strapped over her flank that Madeleine suspected was only mostly full of her own top-flight coffee (though that, of course, was her own business) – and the mare was keeping two good breath-lengths away from Hodgepodge cringing at the far end of the table. The black unicorn looked miserable, shoulders slouching in on himself under such bright lights and so many eyes outside the canvas walls of his eminently respectable businessplace. He appeared dirty and grimy because he was those – but by Celestia, he looked old in the daylight. The pawnbroker’s knee joints were starkly knobby, his mane flecked with streaks of shame-faced grey where it stuck out like straw under the brim of his slumped stovepipe hat. A few hotel staff with aught else to do stood aloof at the fringes of this strange gathering, but all other guests had been cleared out and the doors sealed tight with glassy golden chains that glimmered like the night sky.

The air was still and stifling in the dining room as the sun climbed on in its daily course. Aside from the softened pomf-pomf of Rubyk’s hoof-falls on the well-trodden carpet and a few wheezing breaths from Hodgepodge, the only other sound in the humid tension was the incessant scritch-scritch of Madeleine’s dictosprite on a long scroll of yellowed paper as an acting court reporter.

Rubyk slowly turned back around toward Miss Largo, who met him with an impatient glare. “I gathered everypony and everydeer here whom I judge to be a witness or party in the unpleasant business that concerns us here,” said the Aktur of Trotheim, taking high, stamping steps as he stalked the enclosure like a predator of the wild North. “You set me a time limit, Miss Proprietress Largo. You were the one who bid me see this bloody affair to a close in three days for the sake of your sacred propriety, and I have done it, with or without police at my side, as is custom in all places where the light of civilization touches. So now judge for yourself whether I have been able in my sacred charge – I am ready for justice to be served here today and let all become known.” Rubyk trotted toward the “bench,” grinning in broad triumph at the mare sitting in place of a judge – and showing every wolfish point of his teeth at her. “That is the charge that you gave me, Largo. But is it what you really wanted?”

The four bucks behind the proprietress, as one, took a threatening step forward. Rubyk did not flinch as stars danced on their antler-tips. Miss Largo merely looked away and began to turn the great silver spoon in her hooves idly.

“Of course it is, Aktur. Stars above know what you must think of me, but you will find me a mare of my word. Let us then hear what your investigation has run to ground,” said the proprietress, regarding herself in the back of the spoon. “However, since you have seen fit to cast me in the rôle of an arbiter, and because this is still my hotel – and, frankly, because I find I like you very little, Rubyk of Trotheim - I will reserve the right to put an end to these proceedings if I am in any way convinced that justice – real justice, Aktur, and not the mockery that ponies make of it – will not be served by your accusations and ‘evidence.’ Is that understood?”

Rubyk nodded. “You tell me only to do my job. I intended to do it anyway.”

Then Miss Largo snorted, scorn dripping from the mare. Madeleine stared at the mare up on the dais as if seeing an altogether different pony in the place of her old friend – one that she did not at all like. “Just get on with it, Lord Rubyk, if you please. Aside from you, we are all being kept from our jobs here. I and these fine deer would like to get back to those as soon as possible.”

“Be patient, patient if you please…” said Rubyk, the two ponies dancing about each other like verbal fencers. “For ‘the mare who waits for good things builds her home of brick and copper, but to the colt who rushes headlong, the grass alone shall be for meat.’”

Rubyk smiled again; that never really ceased to be the most unnerving thing Madeleine had ever seen in a pony. “Mares and does, bucks and gentle stallions of Equestria, and of these jeweled islands, and wheresoever the Providence of the Lonely One has placed us in this world…” began the Aktur of Trotheim as Rubyk stepped into his role like a suit of plate-amour, voice swelling in the theatrics of recitation. “You are each brought here today from your callings in life to bear witness that a most inequine depravity was performed here. For not three days hence, a pony was killed in blood cold, so very cold, here in this very Clavia Hotel you all cherish so well. But that is not the wickedest thing you shall yet hear today. For at least one of those in this room was responsible for the death of the very late Calvados Apple – a death that one must call murder.”

Somewhere in the audience, Piper Chai gasped and began to hiss to Limon, whom she knew, in the gossipy simple pleasure of a fresh scandal. Pome and the Oranges received what was old news to them without a change in their hard-set eyes. Doctor Leaf, who was never a deer given to much levity, was as grave and lifelike as a block of lead in the wake of Rubyk’s oration. Mangosteen and Frond gave a low moan, the idea of murder striking the young deerish constitution very hard. Hodgepodge looked sick. Rubyk’s faceted eyes fixed each of them in turn like a fly on a pin as he circled and stalked some invisible creature in the center of the cleared space.

Mr. Orange cleared his throat and said, in a slightly unsteady voice, “do I hear you rightly, sir, that when you say ‘at least one’ of the ponies – er, et cetera – in this room killed my cousin, you mean that there might have been two?”

Rubyk rounded on him, and the earth pony flinched. “In fact I did not say that, Bergamot Orange. I said that at least one of those gathered in this room was responsible for the death of Calvados Apple. The death, do you understand? You will judge for yourself if my series of events best fits what I shall presently put before you. Only know this –” The atmosphere in the impromptu courtroom seemed to suddenly chill several degrees. “Whatever the outcome of this meeting will be, I will not allow a murderer to canter out of this room with the blood upon him unavenged.” Rubyk turned from Mr. Orange, who let out a breath.

“When all came to a sudden boil two nights ago, I knew that everypony would be quick to make known where they were at the time of the murder. Everypony always has an alibi proof against air and water and the searching blade of a truth-spell, if necessary – such is the case in the two-bit dreadfuls, and so it is in the stark reality of bloody muck that is real crime. Each of your alibis was as solid as a salt-lick. It seemed certain that none of you could have been responsible for the murder of the victim – even you, Pome Apple, for all your many protestations to the contrary. It is also true, trivially true, that each of you came forward with your perfect alibis in your own time. Now, why was that?” Rubyk spoke the words just loudly enough for the pony and deerfolk gathered in the dining room to hear their whispering import, hissing threateningly on all of their ears like winter sleet.

“Why did some of you wait and bury it in your testimonies deep enough that a Diamond Dog could scarcely tunnel down to it? And why did others place it at the fore, making sure that it struck my ear like the blare of the last trumpet?” He turned and regarded each of them in turn, and though she knew herself to be absolutely innocent, Madeleine felt a chill run from her spine to her tail. His eyes finally came to rest upon the Oranges, and Mandarin quivered as he opened his mouth and seemed to address his words directly to the Manhattan couple. “Another quandary: why did some feed me lies upon lies - little lies, big lies, half-truths and great lacunae of omissions – and so bury their own pleas of innocence so deep in their words? Did they not trust me to sniff them out? Did they hope to mislead me in some way, knowing that I had so little time? Or was it not their own good that they sought, but that of another?” Rubyk’s eyes rested for a moment on Pome Apple, who gruffly met his gaze before the Aktur of Trothheim shook his head and continued to stalk, addressing the whole assembled court.

“Consider first this series of events: A prophet in far-off Trotheim, moved by the truth-drunk madness when one touches the Aurora, has a vision of a murder in what are to him far and sweltering islands under the tortuous sun of Celestia’s blackest moods. He gabbles it in the hearing of the one noble of the Pride of Trotheim with the ability and authority to avenge blood for blood, who by the hand of Providence is moved to that very island town where the crime portended is to be done. Can it be, can it perhaps be true that all this was fated beforehand? That I should be there to be the one pony to suss out which from among these ponies and deerfolk, each with their own motive to murder a pony, one whom they hardly knew, and all of whom came to the same place, at the same time, all staying in rooms a few trots from one another?”

He paused, surveying their faces. Only Frost Pane seemed to be anything but confused, the muzzle of the Freiof Trotheim curling in disdain. “Coincidental, is it not? But it is the sort of mad coincidence that only conspiracy can bring to fruit and bud. But, mad as it was, I had to consider it. Or perhaps another series of events is more likely? What if instead, the truth were far simpler – and darker?” He paused, evidently relishing the moment. “What if, rather than murder, there was no crime against life done here at all – only many little accidents and petty crimes, fanned to flame by old grudges and the impulses of our lower natures, that the overwrought mind, even my own, insisted on seeing as one concerted act, one expert plot of murder? Was it all just an aimless tragedy, this grisly, bloody mess we have made for ourselves these last three days?”

“What?” roared Pome Apple, kicking his chair down and rising suddenly. His face was a study in shock and anger and a faint flicker of hope. His accent came out thickened by raw emotion. “Y’all mean that my uncle weren’t killed by nopony after all? What does that mean? What all happened t’him, then?”

“Order, please,” said Miss Largo, rapping the end of the large spoon on the high table. One of the bucks wrapped Pome and the chair he had upset in a cloak of starlight and set the one forcibly upon the other again, earning a poisonous glare from the half-unicorn. She looked to Rubyk with a mask of unconcern that could not quite hide the urgent curiosity just behind. “I admit, Lord Rubyk, these two possibilities are interesting. The second solves a great difficulty that I have been harbouring a murderer and a criminal in my hotel – however unwillingly. You believe one of them to be the truth?”

“I am sure of it.”

“Good. Then be about your business and let us know if we may all part from here on better terms,” Miss Largo said.

Rubyk turned to the seating gallery. “Friend Madeleine, will you approach the stand?”

Blinking, Madeleine rose before her mind had fully caught up to her body. “All right…” she said, shrugging her saddlebags onto her back. She trotted over to the table with stacks of chairs before it serving as a witness stand and lifted herself onto the white tablecloth. Rock Skipper shot her a supportive smile, which she returned before she quite got the reins back from her little pony.

“Madeleine Crumpet,” Rubyk began, “do you swear by Princess Celestia, her serene sister Luna of the Night Sky, and by all other powers the Lonely God has set up in this world to tell the truth before the eyes of those gathered here today?”

“I… do,” said Madeleine, feeling as though she had swallowed sand. “But… excuse me, may I please have some water?”

“Of course, dear,” said Miss Largo, motioning toward one of the bucks behind her, who obediently bowed and winked from view.

“You have no need to fear these proceedings, friend Madeleine. I only wonder if you might tell us what your relationship to the apparent victim, Calvados Apple, might have been.”

“I did not know him at all, Mister Rubyk. I would not have cared to even before all… all of this happened of a sudden.”

“Why was that?”

Madeleine sighed. “Must I really say this, Mister Rubyk?”

“If you please, witness.”

“I disliked Calvados as soon as I laid eyes upon him. I have seen many stallions like him in the course of my travels, but none to quite that degree. He was of the kind that act like an overgrown colt just coming into all the powers of his body, and all the hormones to go with them. Most stallions eventually come to put a bridle around those impulses, but I suppose Calvados Apple was the rare exception that proves the rule. Me, I like my stallions with a little less bulk and a lot more suave – but, then, who doesn’t?”

Rubyk blinked. Twice. “Er… thank you, friend Madeleine. Having somepony say it for the record is all that I needed,” said the Aktur of Trotheim. “Now, you were the one who apparently discovered the body two nights ago a little after 11:00. Please tell the court what happened that night and how you came to be in that area.”

Madeleine took a deep breath, putting her mind back to that horrible night…

The door slammed behind Madeleine Crumpet with an angry flash of her horn, as if she were trying to shake the foundations of the old stone fortress now become the Hotel Clavia.

“Pah!” spat Madeleine, hurling her saddlebag into the corner of her suite without even bothering to use her magic. The leathern clatter as the bag struck the far wall felt distinctly satisfying after the day she had just had. “And, pah again!” she added for good measure.

Then she did use magic, throwing it against the other wall, just to hear that cathartic sound again. A stack of blotting paper from the writing desk, several unfinished letters crumpled in the waste, and anything that was not nailed down in the sitting room was caught up in one angry unicorn’s magical grip, whirling above her head as she contemplated sending all of it through the open balcony window. Only the thought of meeting Largo in her dressing gown in the garden… in the rain… explaining why her sofa cushions, complimentary fruits, and wicker chairs were sitting out in the elements… again… gave her pause. Disgusted, and starting to feel the magical drain upon her body, she lowered the odds and ends to the ground with a more or less (mostly less) graceful assortment of whumphs and thuds against the thick carpet.

“I need a drink!” Madeleine said to nopony in particular. She cantered over to the kitchen wall and ran her hoof over the bright-patterned wallpaper. If she remembered rightly, there should be a groove that would yield to just the right amount of pressure right about… aha!

The wall panel slid down, displaying a tall, slender bottle of dark rum and a snifter glass. A mouth-written note was attached to the neck of the bottle by a coarse bit of white thread.

“‘My Dear Crumpet:’” read Madeleine, a wry smile creasing the corners of her mouth. “‘For you and your gentlestallion of choice if fortune and female charms should favor. –L.’ Well, you got one of them, you old deer-lover, but it wasn’t for lack of trying this time! I’m starting to think I may be losing my touch.” She shook her head and took both the glass and the bottle, kicked fallen cushions and paper detritus out of the way, and threw herself onto the sofa. Even with the kick to magical ability that a foul mood could bring with it, there was no way she was going to be shifting that.

Madeleine sipped at the dark, dark rum, savouring the burn on her tongue. Where did it all go sideways? The morning was a whirlwind of business and buttering her clients, and she had even left off before the lunching-hour two gems lighter, courtesy of two belles dames from Prance on holiday during the rainy season. Madeleine chuckled, remembering how easy it had been. Always compliment the eyes; it never fails. Then there had been that very fruitful talk over lunch with Coralstone, who seemed to understand her position much better and how dreadfully important meeting sales quota was after that little heart-to-heart.

Madeleine’s smile faded. Right. It was right after lunch that the day had fallen over its own four legs and landed in the drink. Madeleine recalled Rock Skipper’s usual blushing and cringing and adorable forced conversation as he carried her back to the hotel after the tide-swell, and the luscious, boozy thing she had enjoyed poolside not long after.

And then… Calvados Apple had happened.

“Pardon’ me, darlin’, but if you don’t look the plum most scrumptious thing on four legs I’ve seen today, stick a’ horn on me and call me Luna.” Madeleine had actually fallen out of her lounge chair, and a wave of startled panic-magic had upset that lovely tropical slush-thing Mangosteen had made up for her. And Calvados Apple had stood over her and just chuckled.

“I have that effect on all you ladies,” Calvados said. The overgrown colt smirked, which made for a grotesque effect on his uncovered body of sinews and cord-muscle. “What’s yer’ name, sugarcube?”

“M-Madeleine Crumpet. Charmed?” said Madeleine before she could put a proper bit in her mouth.

“Indeedy-so! Sorry about yer’ drink. Mind if I join you? I’ll buy you another,” said Calvados Apple, leaning his weight on the arm of the lounge chair and throwing a toothy look that was half-leer at Madeleine.

In truth, she would rather chew glass. He was nearly as far from her type as it was possible to be and still be organic. But coladas of any sort didn’t come cheap, and so, once again, she found her mouth racing ahead of her brain, saying:

“Sure.”

The next fifteen minutes were time enough for the barmaid to mix up a new cocktail and for Madeleine to drink it down to the dregs, because if there was anything Madeleine had learned in her years of travel, it was to never turn down a free drink. They were also the most taxing to her social graces in as many years. Where moststallions had at least some innate sense of what to do when it came to the thrust-and-parry, weave-and-dodge of the game played with mares, Calvados Apple simply ran through any defenses with all the grace of a yak with a full head of steam. It was a thing of almost grotesque beauty, and Madeleine watched herself like a fascinated third party outside her own body as her mouth opened and closed in silent apoplexy. It scarcely seemed possible for a pony to be that much of a boor and not turn himself into a pig, but there he was, in whip-cord flesh and sinews!

Her drink over and done, Madeleine got up and spluttered and half-bolted from the pool, feeling Calvados Apple’s grin nipping at her haunches as she flew. She returned to her suite and lay down and tried to enjoy a bit of well-deserved sleep on silken sheets.

She dreamt of leering eyes and lewd words.

Had that been the end of it – had Madeleine only awoken feeling faintly grimy and unrested – that would have been alright, and she could have accepted one blotchy flaw in an otherwise pristine gem of a holiday.

But that hadn’t been the end of it. Wherever she seemed to go, there the traces of the old boor followed her. His wink from across the Grand Foyer; his raucous laugh and bawdy jokes heard just around the corner; his musky, vinegar scent left lingering in by the doors of the dining room, all making the hair of Madeleine’s tail stand on end in protest. By Celestia, she didn’t know why the old lech got under her coat, but he did!

She had thought that, maybe – just maybe! – she might find some relief at the gaming-tables in the casino. But no. There was Calvados Apple, yet again, feeling up some young thing who may have been mare or doe – oh, bother it all, did it matter? And then he had caught her eye as she stood beyond the banks of slot machines and smiled, and – ugh!

Largo’s gift went down smooth and sweet, and it was almost enough to scrape the taste of Calvados Apple from her mouth.

Then a peal of thunder ripped through the suite, followed by another sound, distant and sharp. Madeleine jumped at both.

“What in bright carnelian…?” muttered Madeleine, crossing over to the open balcony window. The rain from the sudden squall that had come up out of the sea about an hour ago beat impotently against the old enchantments warding the hotel. Drops of rain hurled down like bullets rebounded off the unseen barrier, spraying the balcony outside, or slid languidly down an unseen surface like oilskin. She didn’t dare go out in that kind of untamed weather. But there had been something.

Another set of sounds came in through the open windows, muffled both by the rain and the enchantment’s distortions. Although diffuse and indistinct, Madeleine heard the jagged, angular sounds of ponies’ voices raised in hot anger though the words blurred out into a murky drone. Then, all at once, they were cut off by the wind and lashing rain.

Where do I know those voices from?

Madeleine magicked the dregs of her drink over to the sideboard. Her tail swished idly as she thought. Whatever was going on between other guests of Largo’s hotel, it certainly had nothing to do with her. But, to drop the other hoof, she had just spent the afternoon stalked by the unpleasantest stallion in all of wide Equestria. She owed herself a little diversion.

Slipping on her saddlebags from where they lay in an heap by the wall, Madeleine moved into the fifth-floor corridor, ears cocked for any hint of scandal creeping through doors. Her ears swiveled in the direction of the other suites; the tailing patter of hooves not quite silenced by the deadening spells on the carpets struck her ears before it was completely lost to rainy white din.

Did I only imagine that? Or…

“Or” and curiosity won out in the end. As if by some cautious, feline instinct, Madeleine crept down the corridor on soft-treading hooves, ears swiveling this way and that for any more hints of stray voices. As she approached, she saw that the door to suite 505 had been left ajar. The amber-studded key had been left in the lock.

Curiouser… thought Madeleine, the thrill of novelty running through her; and a little bit of liquid courage, compliments of the house, also probably had something to do with it. Surely one little look-see couldn’t hurt?

She was through the door before she had finished thinking.

She gasped. Her knees went weak; her four legs shook like jam. But the sight in the sitting-room drew her on, and she placed one hoof in front of the other with mechanical detatchment. Like an art gallery funneling the crowd toward its prized Neighples sculptury, there was the body – and it was most certainly a body and not an he anymore – of the same pony who had dogged her all the afternoon. Calvados Apple was dead. Quite dead. Mockingly dead. Feeling her head going swimmy, Madeleine stuck a fetlock in her mouth, bit down until the skin broke, and laughed, weakly.

It was perverse, but her only thought was: Now I’ll never be able to tell off the old creeper properly!

“…and that was when I came to find you,” Madeleine finished. She licked her dry lips and gratefully accepted a tumbler of ice water from the buck who had vanished a few minutes earlier.

“Thank you, friend Madeleine,” said Rubyk, the Aktur of Trotheim nodding as if all this was exactly what he had expected to hear. “Though you may not know it, you have lighted much that lay in darkness still. This court owes you a debt.”

“I do wish you had let me know that one of my guests was bothering you, Crumpet,” said Miss Largo. The Hotel Clavia’s proprietress sounded more put out at Madeleine’s holiday being disturbed than at the account of bloody murder. “I would have made sure without going to these ghastly extremes that he would not bother you again. But, let us return to business. Perhaps you can clarify something, dear. Those hoof-steps that you say you heard, they were going away from 505 after you heard the gunshot?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Rubyk looked up at the proprietress with an hard expression. “I do not believe witness Madeleine Crumpet made any reference to a gunshot in her statement, madame proprietress. How is it that you come by that word?”

Miss Largo gave a dismissive shrug of her shoulder. “It ought to be obvious,” said the proprietress. “I saw the body of the victim for myself, as have you, as did my own staff physician-in-residence. There was a bullet-wound in the shoulder given shortly before the time of death. What else could it have been but a gunshot? Clearly it must have been something small that the killer took with him when he bolted from 505 – which must be the patter of hooves that Madeleine heard as she stepped out into the hallway. And how long were you in the corridor, dear?” Miss Largo’s tone of condescension warmed as she addressed the last question toward Madeleine.

Rubyk’s expression did not soften. If anything, it only grew more flinty. “How is it,” he began, with icy intonation, “that this pistol belonging to Miss Madeleine Crumpet was found outside the hotel the morning after the murder and appears to be the tool which gave Calvados Apple that very shoulder wound?” Rubyk stamped his hoof once, making a sound like distant summer thunder. The little mousegun with the mother-of-pearl insets appeared with an answering crackle, suspended in the air and covered with steaming frost on the short barrel.

Madeleine gasped and covered her mouth with her forehooves. “Is… is that where it went?” she said, bloodlessly. “I realized that it was gone last night in… in the Withers. Rock Skipper and I were alone, and three Clavia from the town came on us suddenly, and I… I went for my gun in my bag, but it wasn’t there. Oh, Mister Rubyk, what must you think of me…?”

“Just at the present, Madeleine Crumpet, I cannot say,” said the Aktur of Trotheim. His tone was crisp, all business. “What I can say with all knowledge and authority is that all but one of you here lied to me in some way over these late three days. Let us say, for sake of argument, that I am not yet convinced you are the ‘but one.’ What would that do to the case now before this judgment-seat?” Rubyk looked gravely at the faces scattered around the dining room.

“The evidence of this pistol is loud enough to speak for itself. The trigger takes only a feather-touch of a pull, but both it and the safety mechanism are completely internal. There is no mouth-grip on the stock, nor any way for earth ponies or pegasi to easily hold it on these smooth surfaces. Only somepony with some magical aptitude who knew the piece well would be able to carry it and wield it, let alone fire it. Miss Crumpet fits all of these, perhaps exclusively.”

Miss Largo’s eyes made a motion toward one of the Clavia bucks at her side, who made an almost imperceptible head-movement and stood at rigid attention. The proprietress picked up the silver “gavel” in her hooves. “I remind you that I hold the power to end these proceedings and let justice take its course if I judge you to be flailing aimlessly. I am not far from there now. Is there a point to this speculation, Aktur?”

Madeleine wondered if, maybe, just maybe, the inscrutable look Rubyk shot to her was meant to be reassuring. “There is purpose in everything that I do, madame proprietress,” he said. “We are here to consider all sides, all possible angles of the crime that was thrown down here as a gauntlet to us – to me – that all justice may be done. If it means that we must think on the ludicrous and entertain the scarce-possible, then so be it.”

“We are here at your demand to give you an hearing, and that at my sufferance,” Miss Largo snapped back. “Now I will ask you directly, and no more dancing: just what are you driving at?”

Rubyk’s gaze lingered on Madeleine, and the tall unicorn gave a tiny nod. In truth, she would like to know the same; was that look meant to be reassuring?

“What if, just perhaps, this gun were not carried away from suite 505 by the owner of those pattering hooves the witness claims that she heard? What if Miss Madeleine Crumpet happened to be a much closer observer to the events of 505 than this testimony now before us would suggest? In other words, madame proprietress, honourable guests of the Clavia Hotel, what if the witness were inside Calvados Apple’s rooms at the time of the murder?”

A cold silence descended upon the dining room. The effect on the Clavia in the gallery was frightening to watch. Mangosteen and Frond looked at the giant with identical expression of betrayal. Many of the deer at the periphery snorted loudly and did not restrain themselves from pawing at the ground. Doctor Leaf looked up from his papers with a start. It was the only time Madeleine had ever seen the little physician baffled.

Miss Largo sat high and upright in her chair, a thin smile creasing her lips. “I think this farce is now at an end, Aktur. I gave you fair warning, but perhaps – oh, that is a fine word – perhaps you took me to be only jesting. Well, it is a loss for you and all the ponyish kind of ‘justice’ today, Rubyk; I never jest. And I have always wanted to say this. By the powers you invested in me…” The proprietress raised her gavel.

“Wait!” The single word ripped from Madeleine, raw and untamed like a shriek. Stunned, Miss Largo (and every eye in the “courtroom”, realized Madeleine with an hot flush) turned toward her. Madeleine swallowed once. It felt like swallowing gravel.

“Largo, don’t end the inquest on my account,” Madeleine said, half-believing the words coming out of her mouth. “Mister Rubyk is right: we do need to turn all the angles of this thing, the same as when a jeweler turns a diamond to cut it. I nearly saw a pony murdered in front of my eyes these last three days. I can’t simply forget that and go winging off on my travels selling bangles again as if nothing ever happened.”

The proprietress of the Hotel Clavia stared at Madeleine, wide-eyed. “Crumpet, I am only trying to do what is best for you. The Clavia look after their own first, and so do I. Are you saying that these… these beastlyaccusations are true?”

Madeleine shook her head. “Mister Rubyk hasn’t made any accusation, Largo. And he hasn’t done anything that you have not already. And in spite of all that, I… I trust him.” Celestia only knows why! “And you were right, too. He is dangerous. But I still trust him that he knows what he is doing with all of us in here. Please, hear Mister Rubyk out!” She shivered.

And may Princess Celestia and the Lonely God of Trotheim help me if I’m wrong.

Miss Largo looked down on Madeleine with a new expression contorting her muzzle, one that the other mare had never seen on that face directed at her before: it was disgust. The proprietress turned away and looked out into the gallery at nopony and nodeer in particular.

“As you like, Crumpet dear,” Miss Largo said, the words coming out thin and full of a strained warmth. “Well, Aktur. It seems that we will play your game after all. It is your move. I am still unconvinced that this is not a waste of your dear time. So play it well.”

Rubyk smiled wolfishly. “Thank you. Trotheim has no further questions for the witness. You may step down, friend Madeleine.” He turned toward the gallery.

“Trotheim calls Mandarin Orange to the stand.”

Mrs. Orange was a consummate fidgeter. She shifted her weight unevenly on her haunches and moved her forehooves shyly under the pricks of so many eyes, as if she were trying to hide one behind the other.

The butterfly brooch that Madeleine had fobbed off on the Manehattan mare seemed to dance gaily on the collar of the pink taffeta that hung too loose from her shoulders. It was not a dress normally worn in sunlight, or even under close observation. Madeleine’s jeweler’s eye easily found the hidden creases where tears had been repaired from the inside with fine thread. The hem was well-sewn, but higher than one on such a dress should have been. It was either a dress that belonged to a more ambly-bodied Mrs. Orange in time past, or else a dress that had belonged to some other mare for whom the Manehattan social life had not been kind.

Off in the gallery, Bergamot Orange watched his wife with anxious eyes.

“Mandarin Orange,” began Rubyk, speaking softly to the mare, “you should know that no matter what happens here, nothing ill will come upon you or your Bergamot from what you tell me now. Although I understand nearly all, there are a few things that only you can make clear to me.”

Mrs. Orange watched him with the same anxious eyes as her husband, flashing a nervous smile for them both. “I… of course I’m happy to help in any way that I can. Calvados Apple was my family, too. By marriage, of course, but… oh, of course I will help you. And yet…” Mandarin’s voice trailed off, but the rest of her words were easily read on her face.

“And yet I might have handled this differently than making a public spectacle out of you,” Rubyk agreed. Mrs. Orange replied with a short, nervous laugh.

“You have a very blunt way of speaking when it suits you, Lord Rubyk. My husband and I like that in you.”

“I promise, then, that I will take no more of your time than I must, Mandarin Orange. The reason that I asked you to testify before this court today instead of your husband Bergamot is because I want you to confirm one thing that you said to Madeleine Crumpet. Perhaps you did not even mean to say it.”

“What… are you thinking of, particularly, sir?” said Mandarin Orange. Her smile strained at her cheekbones.

“I am mainly interested to know your husband Bergamot’s whereabouts twenty minutes to half an hour before the confirmed time of death. Can you enlighten me on that point?”

Mrs. Orange’s smile grew, if possible, even more strained. “He was… he was in our suite, sir, with me. We were together in our rooms all the night long until your summons came.”

“You did not go out all the night long?”

“No, sir.”

Rubyk sighed. Madeleine heard him mutter: “Why? Why this lie, and of such a flagrant stripe?” He trained a stare on the mare in the witness stand. Mrs. Orange drew her hooves in close, protectively close, as if huddling for heat, and tried to show the warmest smile that she could.

A touch sadly, Rubyk said: “Mandarin Orange, I would that you made this easier for me. For I happen to know, upon an authority most worthy of trust, that in this you lie – or you tell an half-truth to deceive, which is worse.”

“B-but… how… somepony saw Bergamot go out?” Mrs. Orange blurted. She was not sure whether to point to herself or genuflect toward her husband, and so she nearly fell off the witness stand trying to do both at once. Mr. Orange groaned, burying his snout under his hooves.

“No. But it is no great leap from a wife biting down on her words when she speaks of her husband, even while she groans and burns to talk of that horrible night, to there being something she keeps in what she does not say, for his sake.” Rubyk shook his head. Madeleine suspected that the giant was trying very hard to keep himself from patronizing.

Mrs. Orange glanced toward the gallery. Her mouth formed an ‘o’ of sudden comprehension as her eyes found Madeleine, and she looked down at the butterfly on her bosom in disgust.

“So your husband did go out on the night of the murder. Will you tell me why, or shall I call him up to testify?”

“No, Mister Rubyk.” Bergamot Orange rose like a pony bound for the scaffold. “It was a long shot that you would not figure it out. You have me at the point of your horn. I will keep nothing more from your graces.”

Rubyk’s lips curled back into a snarl. “See to it that you do not.”

Mr. Orange took the stand. The Manehattan stallion sniffled and daubed at his snout with a kerchief monographed with an ‘O’ from the inside of his tawny waistcoat. It was, rather like his wife’s dress, rather frayed under the daylight. The citrine wedding-band on both of their ears were easily the costliest bits of their attire and were the only pieces that seemed to be kept well.

Rubyk paced the open gallery in front of the witness stand, his bare flanks and shoulders showing spring-tensed muscles beneath, like a wolf about to pounce. “So. You kept back from me some very vital information at our first meeting, Bergamot Orange. But of all the lies swirling around in this courtroom now, yours was easily the most simple-minded – and a pony must wonder at how little you must regard the Pride of Trotheim to do so.” He stopped and smiled, and Mr. Orange shuddered. “But I am sure that you had an excellent reason.”

“Yes, if you will hear it,” said Mr. Orange, wiping at his eyes.

“Oh, I would. Humour me.”

“You know that I was not on good terms with my kinsfellow, Calvados.”

“Anypony with eyes might have known that. You are, excuse me, not a very subtle stallion, Bergamot Orange. One wonders how you manage the mangle-fields of Manehattan carrying that sort of temperament.”

“But I assure you, I am!” Mr. Orange protested. “Mister Rubyk, I admit without qualm that everypony here has seen me failing to put my best hoof forward in these last few days. But there is a world of difference, as broad as the gulf in kind between our two Sovereigns, between Calvados Apple compared with anypony else. I am afraid that I lose my head – lost my head, I mean to say – when I dealt with him. But I had rather hoped that this visit might be different: that I might finally be able to keep bit and bridle on my temper when it came to the old mule. I thought that I had grown enough callouses in the right places, hardened my hooves a bit so that he would not be able to goad me so anymore. I but regret to say that seems not to have been the case.” Mr. Orange hung his head.

“That is a very eloquent apology for a few bursts of temper,” Rubyk remarked, dry as dust. The Aktur of Trotheim flashed his horn, and a long scroll bearing rows of tight, too-regular dictosprite script was suddenly floating before him, crackling with frost. “According to a record of that last interview between us on the night of your kinsfellow’s death, you said: ‘I even had one of the deer bring up room service for us so that we did not have to come to the main dining room.’ Again, you leave out a key detail. Why did you try to imply that you had not gone out?”

“Because I was afraid!” Mr. Orange half-laughed, quiet, with a distant look in his eyes. He tapped a rhythm nervously on the wood in front of him with a well-scrubbed hoof. “I knew that everypony who knew about the murder would think of me in the space of a moment. I only wanted to do for Mandarin and myself what I ought to have done from the first and flown these islands as soon as possible, and so leave my name as clean again as when I came. I should have left on that first ferry after your three days were over and done, Lord Rubyk.” He met the challenging eyes of the same.

“My name is clear, sir. Let it be said as clearly as possible: I did not kill my cousin, even if it seemed to the eyes of ponies and angels alike that I wanted to.”

There was silence from the gallery, and even Miss Largo looked expectantly from Bergamot to Rubyk and back again, as if some response was demanded by this challenge. Rubyk tapped at his muzzle in thought.

“No,” answered the Aktur of Trotheim, “you did not. Seeing you here now, without so much as a whimper of resistance before you tell all, I well believe that you are a coward, Bergamot Orange. But you lack the comfortable digestion of a pony who might put away his own blood. You will go away from here in disgrace, but not in shackles. But there is still that which I do not understand.” The scroll with the dictosprite scrawl was lifted up to Rubyk’s eyes. “The fact that you did leave your rooms half an hour before your cousin’s murder and made every effort to conceal it can only mean that you went to suite 505 at that time. Why?”

Mr. Orange sniffled again, blowing his nose rather more noisily this time. “Mister Rubyk, if that was not the sunlit truth, and were not meeting under such… unfortunate circumstances, I might have protested rather corporally, as long as the odds may have been for me. But you said it well: as ponies go, I am a coward. Mandarin and I met with Calvados and his nephew at the café my cousin fixated himself upon. When he did finally come to talk business, it was easily three-quarters of an hour before we even broached the subject that brought us all out here in the first place. And when we did broach the matter of the contract that I proposed… suffice it to say, the resolution was less than ideal.”

Rubyk did not immediately answer these vague generalities. He cast a glance toward the other side of the gallery where Piper Chai was still whisper-gabbing with the hotel staff. At length, with eyes half-lidded, he spoke softly, as if for the sake of his own ears and he only suffered the others in the dining room to overhear: “I see… the lie was not a deception of the will at all. It was merely the invariable outcome of a coward seeking to keep his face from growing long in the mirror.” Then the Aktur’s eyes snapped wide and he said with clear authority:

“Piper Chai of Currycape!”

“Oh?” said the barista, unflapped; in her trade, Madeleine knew, a pony could not go far if she had a nervous disposition. “Wossat then, Act-Lord?”

“I believe that in recent statements taken by Madeleine Crumpet, you indicated that there was no altercation between the witness on the stand and the victim of the murder. Can you confirm this?”

Piper Chai gave one of her echoing belly laughs. The glass in the windows rattled. “Cor! You all in the courting-business do get on your pompous way, don’t ya? Nay-on, there weren’t no scuffle in my dinky shop that mornin’, and no to-and-go lashing with tongues or fetlocks, neither. It was all done civil as I’d seen it or I’m Princess Celestia in a bonnet.”

“Thank you, Piper Chai. That will be all; you may stay or go as you please. Bergamot Orange, until now I did not understand why you had lied to me at that first interview. You insisted that you had acted violently then. You were eager to tell it to anypony who would listen. But the contradiction was trivial to see – surely you knew it of all ponies! The only reason that you might then have had to say that an argument between you and your cousin took place at that morning meeting, when plainly there had been no such thing, was if you felt the need to confess something like it.” Rubyk stopped for a moment, perhaps to observe the effects of these words on Mr. Orange. They were profound. The Manehattan’s stallion’s breathing became ragged. His eyes welled up, and his whole manner again crept close to the edge of tears.

“Yes,” said Rubyk, softly. “I think that it must be so. You did act out in violence, but it was not at Piper Chai’s café.” The Aktur of Trotheim raised his voice to booming volume. “Bergamot Orange, you struck your cousin Calvados Apple on the night of his death. This court demands of you an account of yourself!”

Mr. Orange’s cry was small, stifled, pathetic, like the little agonies of a sick foal. “I did not mean for it all to happen like this!”

“Start at the beginning. You went to Calvados’ room because you were angry, or because you desperately needed to change his mind about your business dealings following the events of the morning. Which was it?”

“Th-the latter, Lord Rubyk. It is true that I was angry with him almost beyond words. I might have acted upon that if I did not need his help so badly. By Luna, the fact that I needed Calvados only made me angrier!” He choked down a neighing sob and continued on.

“My business has not been good in recent years. There have been too many lean harvests on the plantations I contract with for any number of reasons: mana drain sapping the land and the earth pony tenants on it at planting time, a Parasprite swarm sweeping down from the mountains just before the harvest, rogue zebra outlanders raiding the farms – even a volcanic eruption in Marepore that ruined an entire banana grove. It is the very reason you have all seen your prices rising in the city markets lately.”

“I would not know,” sniffed Rubyk. Mr. Orange looked at him, coughed, and cleared his throat.

“It… is almost as if Discord returned to torment me – and my finances – personally. My funds are and have been lean. I am even now borrowing bits against the day when my fortunes may change to keeping paying the ponies in my employ, and to impress the ponies I need to impress. The contract that I had my solicitors draft was meant to be a win-win agreement for Calvados and myself. It would have given me the immediate funds that I need as an advance to expand my distributive power and for him to gain a larger market share for the harder side of the Apple clan’s offerings.” He heaved a quivering sigh. “Unfortunately, Calvados did not see things in that way.”

“So you have said. So you always say when you gloss over your actions. What happened once you went to your cousin’s suite, Bergamot Orange?”

“To begin, I found the door already open…”

“Was the key in the lock at that time?”

Mr. Orange frowned, puzzled, behind his haze of snotty sorrow. “No, I do not believe so. It looked to me as though the door had been left like that intentionally.”

“Thank you. Please, continue.”

“I knocked, of course, but given that the door was already open, I let myself in. Calvados was in the sitting room lounging on the divan. Pome was not in at all so far as I could tell. My cousin was just sitting still, watching the first beginnings of that miserable rain beat against the closed balcony window. When he heard me enter, Calvados turned about to face me with a punch-drunk grin on his muzzle. But when he saw that it was I who stood in the doorway, that changed in an hurry. He looked… I should say disappointed. Or perhaps angry might be closer to the fact. He looked as angry as I felt, and that only fired my temper even warmer.”

“Can you describe the sitting room as it was when you entered?”

“Let me think… yes, I think so. There were short glass tumblers on the table as if Calvados was expecting somepony – who was obviously not me. I do not recall ever seeing a liquor bottle or cabinet in the room, so perhaps he intended to fill his own and his guest’s glass out of his own private flask. Or, perhaps Pome was simply en-route with a bottle of something from the downstairs bar if Calvados wanted to do his tippling in. The writing desk was closed and had a few paper-corners jutting out of it, as if it had been closed in some great hurry, and I remember that the wastebasket was full of wadded, half-finished drafts of letters in Pome’s writing.”

“How did you know that it was Pome Apple’s writing, rather than his uncle’s?”

“You like proverbs, I believe. ‘How do we know to eat the green grass, and not the toothsome gem?’” Mr. Orange said, making a thin, nervous laugh in his throat. “The difference between a unicorn’s script and even my mouth-writing is a difference as wide as that. I read much correspondence in my work, Mister Rubyk. The writer of those letters was a unicorn, or else I am.”

Rubyk blinked. “That is most perspicacious of you, Bergamot Orange. And I may trust this testimony?”

“Oh, absolutely.” Then Mr. Orange turned his head and coughed. “Also, at least one of them was signed and chanced to be lying at the top of the heap. I just happen to be a quick study of my surroundings.”

“I… see. You are of course most laudable. Please now tell us what else your powers noted.”

“Really, aside from the hotel’s own decorations, I cannot recall any other – no! No, hold that!” Mr. Orange bit his lip. “There was something else. I am astonished that I did not remember it before now. There was music playing in the suite. It was a mare singing, naturally, warped vocals over thrumming baselines, very low. A Countess-Somepony, I do believe. It is nothing that I know about myself, you understand, but I know enough about my cousin to tell you at least this much: Calvados was upset by something. He only put music on when he was in exceptionally low spirits.”

Rubyk tapped at his muzzle. “I heard no music when I was summoned to your cousin’s rooms. This is the first I have heard this evidence. Were circumstances different, I might dismiss the detail as spurious. But given the strangeness that surrounds this case…” The Aktur of Trotheim sighed. “There is nothing else for it; let the court decide if there is anything in this music. What was the source?”

“There was a sounding-gem over on the mantel – one of those new spell-recorders available in Canterlot that wrap a song up into a gemstone and play it back when somepony hoofs it into the enchanted base that comes with it,” Mr. Orange said.

“I know those things,” Madeleine cut in. “They’ve an awfully tinny sound that always seems to be screaming right into your ears. But I don’t recall seeing anything like that when I came upon your cousin, Mister Orange.”

“That is more fascinating than you know, friend Madeleine,” said Rubyk. “And yet this very pony, who has been caught in his own lie but a few short minutes ago, avows it. Perhaps he knows that we would not have seen this item and thus wishes to place the phantom of another pony in those rooms between us and himself, besides the murderer?”

Mr. Orange groaned and laid his head down upon the witness stand, but Miss Largo cleared her throat, loudly, cutting through the heavy air in the dining room with a polite knife-edge. “I believe that the Aktur will find that such a stand and gem were delivered to suite 505 by the request of Mister Calvados Apple on the day of his arrival. I keep a supply of popular artists on hand for the comfort of my guests. Trotheim may consider this detail relevant to case if they wish, but its representative will kindly keep to his evidence and refrain from vaulting speculations.”

“Ah.” Rubyk grinned thinly, hiding his teeth as he nodded in the direction of the proprietress. “Vaulting? Perhaps. But neither Madeleine nor I saw this gem nor heard this music, if there was indeed music. Does the court not see the implications of these facts?”

“It implies that there was somepony else in that room between the time that Mr. Orange left and Miss Crumpet arrived, and that they took the gem and stand with them when they left,” Miss Largo answered. “But you have said so yourself: you intend to prove that there was a witness in 505 at the time of the murder. It seems that this only helps your case, if it is true.”

Rubyk shook his head. “I would that were the case. It is Providence that shows forth this truth now, but it is an hard Providence, for it raises more questions than it answers.”

“Namely?” said the proprietress, leaning forward.

Rubyk stamped his hoof, once. “Firstly: why did the witness flee the scene, if he were not the murderer himself?” Twice. “Why did the witness or the murderer take the gem with them when they left?” Thrice. “Why has the gem not been found, but the gun has?” Four times. “ Finally: why did Madeleine Crumpet not hear the sound that she describes as so very tinny and oppressive when she heard what you yourself called a gunshot?”

The Aktur of Trotheim turned to the witness stand with a labouring look on his face. “Mr. Orange, you must help us to clear up these difficulties. Pray, continue your testimony, and I will pray for light that I may better understand these dark things. What passed between you two then?”

“I greeted him calmly, and I will swear that by the Unconquered Sun. But he rose up and looked and me in… in hate. It was as if he had just placed his hoof in something vile and wanted to scrape it off as soon as possible. Whatever simile I can call to mind, it does nothing to change the fact that my peace was not welcome,” Mr. Orange said. He grimaced, a scene playing itself out before his eyes.

“Buck a salt-lick, Bergamot, what do you think you’re doing here? I done told you and the other half of that bit of gold on your ear to git. How loud I gotta’ to say it? I ain’t interested!” Calvados Apple’s face was a snarl made flesh, stretched over a muzzle contorted in an inequine anger. Bergamot Orange flinched back at the sight, every inch of his nerves urging him with the prods of unconscious instinct to back out! Run away!

Instead, the Manehattanite took a step into the room, shouting down the screams and hot flushes of his own body. Then, boldened by the ease of it, he took another.

“No, Calvados. I want a word.” Calvados stomped over to give it to him. In a moment, the two stallions were standing muzzle-to-muzzle in front of the divan.

“Y’all city ponies done lost all the grit in your craw. Your kind think they want to make a day trip, trot out into the country, see how what I do is done. They only see the bottle of pretty brown stuff that smells like apples. And all of ‘em leave with mud on their hooves and fake little smiles on their faces. It’s all just a span too rusticfor your kind once they start poking around. Here’s the funny thing about city folk: they don’t never come back for a second look.” Calvados’ voice was quiet, but it held a dissonant undertone. The muscles under his coat tensed, as threatening as serpents.

Bergamot drew himself up taller. “I came here to talk business, Calvados, in good faith. But I can play your game, too. Is that supposed to impress me, cousin? Do you think that I am nothing but a penthouse reveler who has forgotten his roots? I assure you, I have not forgotten how to scrape in the dirt when I must.”

Calvados spat, his saliva slowly leaching into the thick carpet. There was a thin strand of blood in it that floated on the surface for a moment. “Business, huh? You think I’m in any mood to talk about bits right now?” Calvados laughed. “You know how I got to the top of where I am today, Bergie? I’ve learned how to say no when I need to not say yes. When Grandpap Poire said that I’d run the farm into the ground by stilling the cider, that nopony wanted to buy that muck, I said ‘no’ and I was right. I’ve learned how to say no when something don’t smell right. This whole thing that y’all have thought up, even this trip to butter up my belly and tickle my ear all nice-like, it’s all just pretty white snow on a’ heap of compost. And the more you beg and whinny, ‘oh, please, cousin – if it pleases you, cousin!’ just makes me retch. So dig the street gunk out of your ears, city boy: ‘no’ really does mean no.” Calvados grinned and blew a stream of hot, sour air into the other stallion’s face.

Bergamot ground his teeth hard enough to hear a tiny crack through his jaw. “Calvados, Mandarin and I are not trying to swindle you! That… that is the most ludicrous thing that I can conceive! Please – I have been waiting for a very long time now. All I want is a proper conversation about the contract. Surely you can spare a few minutes to go down to the bar and go over the terms? You will find that everything is perfectly on the level if you actually take the ten moments it will take to read it.”

Calvados snorted and turned abruptly, flicking the end of his tail at Bergamot’s nose. Bergamot rubbed at the spot and Calvados snorted again – in laughter. “I don’t like ponies who beg, little colt. I’m giving you one last chance, since I’m a much busier stallion than you seem to think I am. Git, or I’ll do it for you. Your call, Bergie.”

“Calvados, we are family! Please – I need your help! I… I do not know what Mandarin and I are going to do if I do not have this contract. If you will not do it because you love me, do it for the sake of the name of Apple!” Bergamot was almost shouting. His gorge rose with a welter of hot emotion. He felt as though he were breathing steam. Bergamot had to move. He had to do something!

Calvados cast a cool eye back toward him and turned away. His glance lingered on the writing desk for a moment. “Family? Grafting Diamond Dogs, all y’all. I ain’t the bumpkin you think I am cousin. I see the shadows y’all think I’m too blind and too dumb to notice. You think I don’t have my ear to the ground? You think I don’t know, cousin?”

Bergamot’s mouth hung open. “You know… what? Calvados, what are you talking about?” The Manehattanite looked around the room, searching for some clue, some direction – anything to make sense out of this sudden turn. His gaze focused on the writing desk and on the papers crumpled in the wastebasket.

“Have you… has somepony been threatening you, Calvados? Is that what this is about?” Bergamot said, voice soft. For a moment, Calvados looked back, the old stallion’s bushy brows raised in surprise. For a longer moment, he regarded Bergamot uncertainly; the question seemed to hit a mark.

Then, without warning, Calvados rounded on Bergamot and struck him with the side of a forehoof. Bergamot fell and gasped, the breath forced from his lungs as he struck the floor.

“Think I’m stupid? You think I don’t see the double-bluff?” Calvados’ eyes were wild, blazing. “Awfully convenientfor you to just deduce all you need to in the nick of the moment, ain’t it, cousin? It’s like you Manehattan folk all just turn Shadow Spade when you need to! Well, I’m not falling for it!” Calvados bellowed.

Bergamot lay still, breathing ragged. He opened his mouth as if about to make some reasoned reply.

Then he looked at Calvados’ smirking, triumphant face.

Then the world went red.

“Oh, sod this, and sod you, cousin!” Bergamot’s back hoof lashed out as he bucked as hard as he was able. There was a dull impact of hoof on flesh, followed by a scream, more of shock and anger than of pain. That scream struck Bergamot’s ears like an hammer-blow. The Manehattanite righted himself, bolting out the open door as fast as his four legs could gallop. He felt the heat of pure rage burning at his tail.

Bergamot did not look back.

This narrative was not without its own tears, and by the time it was done, the pony on the witness stand was in an obvious bad way. Madeleine looked with pity on the bloodshot eyes and sniffling snout of a stallion weighed down with regret. But the act of confession seemed to lift some of the weight on his shoulders, and he sat a little higher in his seat. The burden on his back was still there, to be sure, but he looked to be bearing it better.

Rubyk, for his part, did not seem so satisfied. The Aktur of Trotheim growled softly as he paced the gallery, looking to his own hooves. A trail of frost followed in his wake. “This is new. New evidence, new data, and I have no time to think… Calvados was being threatened enough to effect a change in his manner on the night of the murder? By whom? For what ends? And what has all this to do with the theft of a gem-stand, locked doors and keys, and a death by poisoning?”

Rubyk raised his head, and the tension of the whole courtroom was written on his muzzle in craggy displeasure. “Yet still must Trotheim thank you, Bergamot Orange. You madden me. I have not the faintest idea what any of this yet means, but that it holds the key to these locks within locks, I have no doubt.”

Mr. Orange smiled nervously down at the contorted face of the giant stalking the gallery in front of him. Miss Largo cleared her throat.

“Am I to take it that you have no further questions for the ‘witness’, Aktur?” said the proprietress.

“None. I would that I did, but I do not,” grumbled Rubyk.

The silver “gavel” struck the high table with an heavy finality. “In that case, kindly allow us to move things along. Call the next pony to be privileged by your ministrations.”

Rubyk scowled, but nodded and turned, his eyes moving slowly along the gallery. Some huddled together at the tables exchanged nervous glances as the Aktur of Trotheim regarded them with raised hoof and a chilly glance that was not mere simile; Madeleine shivered as the chill of his perplexity washed over her in waves.

The upraised hoof struck the ground.

“Pome Apple, you will now approach the stand.”

Madeleine had expected some show of resistance from the coltish unicorn, but aside from a few token gestures, Pome was surprisingly compliant. He was a guarded mass of pudge and muscle where he sat, and he looked down on the gallery with an almost perfect morosity.

“Pome Apple, perhaps you can explain –”

“Why I killed my uncle?” Pome said, giving a mirthless smile. There was an heavy stillness that followed these words. Rubyk heaved an agitated sigh.

“Enough of that. You still insist on this impossible tale? Then your lie is as simple to detect as that wreck who went before you. Why, why does everypony wrapped up in this business cling to their own little lies? What have you to gain from it, Pome Apple? Why keep at this impossible lie even after what you have already told me?”

“But I am keeping nothin’ back. ‘s’called ‘atonement,’ if I’m not mistaken. I say that I killed my uncle: as I see it, that’s the only way it could have happened,” Pome said. His stumpy neck raised in defiance.

“And I say that you are wrong!” Rubyk screamed. Even the hotel’s proprietress winced at the volume. Frost Pane, however, gave a nickering laugh. Rubyk’s breaths grew ragged as he made a visible effort to control himself.

“Prove it, then. ‘Cause otherwise, I think I just confessed, Mister Actor. And if I done confessed, well… there’s no need to hold anypony here longer than we have to, right?” Pome’s smile was oddly serene for a pony who had just confessed to murdering his own kin. Miss Largo looked from him to Rubyk in some bewilderment.

“I judge by the standard of pony justice that you desire, Aktur, but even given that, I find myself at something of a loss. Am I to take it that you have positive proof that the younger Mister Apple is innocent of his uncle’s murder? Because I confess that unless you can provide this to us now, I can see no reason to drag out these proceedings even further.”

Madeleine had to admit, she had never seen the giant from the North look so lost. The fury drained from his face, and he cast his eyes down to his hooves.

“A moment to think, if you will – I beg. I must… I must think.”

“Of course,” said Miss Largo, and smiled.

Rubyk seemed to collapse in on himself as she watched. The stalking giant simply sat and closed his eyes, gnashing his wicked teeth and furrowing his brow with deep, vicious gouges. Twice, he drew blood from his own lip. The cold that came from him was terrible. A thin casement of glassy ice formed from the tip of his blue horn downward, and drops of moisture in the air around him actually began to condense and make for an indoor snow-flurry as Madeleine watched. Frost Pane stared at her grandfoal with a curious expression. Madeleine leaned and whispered into the old mare’s ear,

“Is that… as dangerous as I think it is?”

Frost Pane angrily drew her furs more tightly up around her neck. “Yes. The cold makes a clear mind – as every fool and foal well knows. But the fool-boy will throw himself on his own sickbed if he does not come out of himself!”

“And does he do this… often?” Madeleine shot a glance at the rimed unicorn, who was as motionless as a stone.

“Yes! Too!” Frost Pane would say nothing more after that. The old mare’s face bore a curious, pinched expression around the eyes. It looked strangely like worry.

The seconds stretched out like hours, with nopony willing to break the tense stillness like a treacherous sheet of ice on the surface of a pond. It could not have been more than a minute or two at the most; it felt like a year.

Then the Aktur of Trotheim made a harsh gasp for breath as fresh breath rushed into his air-starved lungs. As he rasped and coughed, shaking the ice and cold from himself and moving his massive limbs experimentally, as if to ensure that they were still under his own power, Madeleine realized that he had not even been breathing! But as he raised his head up to the witness stand, the giant from the North no longer looked lost: he looked ready to commit a murder.

“I see now…” the Aktur’s voice was a whisper in the ears of the silent gallery. It sounded like the scraping of monstrous claws on the floor of some far-flung stone cavern. “I have been wandering in a maze of mirrors, lost in diffractions. But I am not the only one who has been so deceived.”

Rubyk pointed an accusing hoof toward the stand. A chunk of steaming ice fell from the limb. “Pome Apple, you have not sought to deceive me and this court, but you could not have avoided walking the way that you chose. I will show you, all of you, that it was impossible for Calvados’ blood to slick your stump of an horn. I will forceyour innocence upon you, you recalcitrant fool. But you will first answer me two questions.”

Pome glared a look that, if it had the force of a buck behind it, would have knocked the Aktur of Trotheim through one of the dining room’s picture windows. His stump of an horn sparked a threatening gold and red. “I’ll answer, but y’all and I are going to have words later. I don’t much ‘ken your pomp, Mister Actor.”

“Please just answer the Aktur, Mister Apple,” said Miss Largo, a hint of a sigh weighting her words. “I will not hesitate to remove you again, if necessary.”

“Fine. Everypony pile on the bumpkin. I see how it is.” Pome Apple crossed his forelegs over his chest and closed his eyes.

“Pome Apple,” Rubyk said, with frigid clarity, “did you at any time see the pistol of Madeleine Crumpet shown to this courtroom before this morning?”

“No.”

“Did you ever purchase an Earthsbane preparation either before coming to this island or once arrived upon it?”

“No. I’d never do that even to Uncle Calvados.”

“I did not say that you poisoned him. I asked only if you ever purchased or obtained it in any way.”

“I knew what you meant. The answer’s still no.”

“As I thought…” said Rubyk, narrowing his eyes. “Pome Apple, will you now then tell this court exactly how you propose to have killed your uncle?”

“Dunno. Y’all tell me if you’re all so clever as that.”

Rubyk’s jewel-cut eyes flashed with a pale, angry light that was mirrored around his horn. The light was mirrored in the cube depending from his neck and flowed outward, washing the ponies and Clavia in the gallery in the same light that prickled with the promise of magic.

“Tell you? Pome Apple, I intend to do better than that,” said Rubyk.

The dining room went white.

Madeleine stood at the edge of a long platform that looked down upon a large, circular indentation in the… ground? And what was she standing on? It seemed… hard? soft? white? maybe grey? Little details like that seemed fuzzy, but unimportant. Everything beside, beyond, above, behind her was grey, indistinct, unimportant – the impression being forced upon her with the force of impulse. She tried to focus her eyes on a point where she was not meant to look, but by dint of whatever magic brought her here, her eyes simply goggled. Being seen like that would be... rather unseemly, so she abandoned the idea of getting a better look around.

She cast her eyes around the circumference of the pit, seeing the others from the dining room also glancing about and coming to the same conclusions: whatever they were meant to see in this… place? It was down, and not out.

So Madeleine looked down into the pit. Then she gasped.

Well, that’s impressive.

Below them all was an image of the Hotel Clavia’s suite 505 seen from above as if it were carved out of ice and moulded in delicate sculptile snow. It was similar to the reconstruction that she had seen Rubyk conjure many hours earlier in the library, writ large. It was accurate down to the wounds on the snowy-white image of a pony lying just where she had herself found the body of the old lech. Seeing it all again in this way made her shiver for reasons quite apart from the hungry cold that came from the pit, which seemed to draw the heat from her phantasmal body. How a vision (she assumed) was supposed to make her feel the cold in bones she did not have while in it, Madeleine had no idea – but, then, there was very little that she understood about the strange stallion who had walked into her life three days ago...

…who was striding out over the open expanse of the pit on his long legs as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Of course, thought Madeleine, and she did not suppress an eye-roll.

Rubyk said nothing. Instead, the Aktur of Trotheim stamped his hoof on… something, and the scene in the pit shifted like a storm in a snow-globe, showing Calvados on his four hooves and laughing. There was another snowy-white pony in the sitting room facing Calvados, with his tail toward the door. Pome Apple, she realized: the two figures had the same stocky cast to their frames that was not only from the crudeness of the materials of which they were formed. No words came from the figures in the pit, but the contour of their argument came wafting up to the onlookers.

For an argument it was. Even without the exact words used, the spectators of the vision needed none to know a row unfolding before them. The impressions drifting up intensified like the volume of an instrument being played all the louder as the quarrel went on. The Pome figure reared, bringing both its forehooves down on the icy floor in a silent stamp. Calvados tossed his mane and gave a statuesque sneer. The snowy Pome charged at the other. There was a brief struggle of shoves and shoulder-pushes; then Calvados gained the point with a brutal throw that sent the unicorn hurtling toward the door. Pome’s double lay on the floor by the door, stunned. With a wicked smile on his muzzle, Rubyk’s Calvados-figure began to advance on his nephew… closer and closer he came, until he stood with an hoof raised to stamp down upon the prone figure.

The snowy Pome snarled and shot a spell from his horn at his uncle. Calvados staggered back, lost his balance, and fell to the floor. The snowy Pome did not waste the opportunity. He rose, wobbling, and his icy horn gleamed bright to throw the door open before he dashed out into the hallway. The Calvados-figure did not pursue. Instead, the stallion paced the sitting room, setting out tumbler glasses on the table from where they sat on the sideboard with a decanter full of some manner of liquid. It seemed to be water in the vision Rubyk was feeding to them… somehow… but decanters generally had stronger stomachs than that.

Rubyk nodded his head, and an orb glowing purple like a twilit, frosty horizon emerged from his horn and hung over the scene. Then the snows whipped themselves up again, and Madeleine watched as a new figure of frost, this one a perfect replica of the slender form of Bergamot Orange, pushed his way through the door. The scene played out almost precisely as she envisioned it in her head. She turned a glance upward to watch the face of Mr. Orange. The Manehattanite bit his lip in a way that made it clear that, yes, this was, if not perfect, somewhere uncomfortably close to his own memory of the events.

The blizzard stirred the scene again as Mr. Orange rushed out of 505. When the rooms in the pit came into focus once again, they seemed to Madeleine somehow less solid, less certain. The snowy figures moving within were wispy about the edges, and Rubyk’s muzzle curled back slightly to show the tips of his teeth as he concentrated on the vision.

The white facsimile of Calvados was seated on his haunches at the table. The door of 505 eased itself open, and a new figure entered about which it was impossible to say much. Like the indistinct greyness that surrounded all of them, Madeleine’s eyes slid off of its surface. Whether pony or Clavia, mare or stallion, buck or doe, the only thing certain about it was the horn – or antlers – upon its head. Calvados rose to greet it, grinning broadly, and the wispy figure closed the door behind it. But as he rose, an eddy of snow swirled in the bedroom, and a small, deerish figure shimmered into the onlookers’ view, warped as if viewed through a pane of ice. The second figure magicked the decanter over from the sideboard and poured drinks for the both of them. As Calvados and the murky figure talked in the sitting room, the Clavia moved out of the bedroom on hoof-tips. The others did not appear to see it. Invisible… Madeleine realized as another of those purple lights flickered into being over the scene. Deerish discretion was never put to so foul a use, though, as the little figure crept behind Calvados and poured a few drops from a vial into Calvados’ drink. A wave of nausea carrying the cold malevolence of that act washed over Madeleine as she looked on.

Calvados and the other figure drank, then fell to talking. But Madeleine’s cheeks flushed with blood as tempers flared again. Calvados pounded the table with his forehoof even as he seemed to sway unsteadily. The other figure produced a gun – the very image of Madeleine’s own little pistol – and fired a steady shot into Calvados’ shoulder. Calvados’ double collapsed, and Rubyk (thank Celestia!) made no effort to transmit his obvious pain to the gallery. The murky second figure galloped to the picture window and threw it open, hurling the pistol out into the dark night before it paused and slipped the sounding-gem on the mantel into the bag slung over its side. Then it flickered, winking out of their sight entirely. (Two more purple lights flashed on.)

The scrape of an ivory key in the lock of the door sounded through the room, much louder than the sound had a right to be. The deerish figure’s ears turned toward the door in alarm. It made a quick dash for the bedroom, and Pome Apple entered just as its flanks moved out of the sight-lines from the door of the suite. Pome’s double seemed to gasp and ran to Calvados’ form, shaking it at first gently, then softly as it writhed weakly on the ground. The onlookers felt the sudden tearing absence in their gut as the snowy Calvados expired before their eyes. Pome’s double bent over his uncle – his former uncle – shaking with anger and grief.

Then he reared up and drove both his forehooves into Calvados’ head in a single, savage blow. Madeleine gasped, and her breath left her as she fell back onto her haunches.

It’s not real, she thought, frantic to make her quavering legs believe it. “It’s just a reconstruction…” she whispered as Pome Apple’s double ran from the room. Then the blizzard covered over everything beneath them, and the view of the suite in the pit dissolved entirely in swirling white.

Rubyk shook his head, and the onlookers felt, rather than heard the sigh that he gave. He lowered his head, and the blizzard breached the sides of the pit.

Again the world went white.

“If that is not quite the truth, I say that it is something very like it,” said Rubyk, soft and sad as a sigh. The whole vision had taken the span of a few breaths.

For a long moment, nopony at all spoke. Those in the gallery, hotel guests and townies alike, exchanged shivering glances with one another, just breathing into air-starved lungs.

Miss Largo took a sip of water to steady her shaking hooves. Then the proprietress of the Clavia Hotel cleared her throat and said in a voice that masked most, but not quite all of the quaver:

“A most fascinating theory, Aktur. You have managed to violate all laws of mirabilent consent by presenting your views so forcefully, but I can overlook that for the sake of our goal here.” But Madeleine saw that the seafoam mare did not quite meet the Trotheim noble’s unblinking stare. “Only answer me this: what were the lights that you showed to us?”

“Each represents a spell cast in the room around the time of the murder. I counted the imprints on the world that had not decayed when I investigated the crime scene.”

“Ah,” Miss Largo replied, sounding pensive. “That is, I grant, a possible version of events. How do you propose to prove it to us?”

Rubyk turned toward the witness stand. “Pome Apple, you have seen what I say did and did not happen in your suite three nights ago. Calvados Apple died of Earthsbane poisoning. You did not have Earthsbane on your person at any time, in any form, before the murder. I have done exactly as you asked and told you exactly howit was impossible for you to kill him. Now…” Rubyk stamped the ground with an hoof and snorted. “Kindly balk your mulish character and tell me what I got wrong.”

Madeleine glanced up to see that the red colour had drained out of Pome Apple’s face. The stocky unicorn sat still, looking ashen and anaemic, his eyes focused on some far-distant point.

“But I… I couldn’t have…” Pome stammered.

Rubyk challenged: “You could not have what?”

“I couldn’t… I didn’t do what you showed me doing! Sweet Celestia, y’idiot, I’m a pony, not some animal!” Pome half-shrieked, his voice breaking. His eyes darted this way and that, searching for some fixed point or life-raft to cling to in the rising tide of panic.

“What could you not have done?” Rubyk repeated, implacable.

“Look, you got flesh and blood, same as me. What y’all showed me doing at… at the end, there… when that puppet of me you thought it was all fine and swell to fling at all of us did what you made him do to Uncle Calvados… I never did that! I’ll swear by Celestia and Luna and all the stars that’s no lie!”

Rubyk crossed the gallery until he stood at eye-level with the unicorn on the witness stand. His jewel-cut eyes, unblinking and half-lidded, met the other’s, wide and staring with contracted pupils. The Aktur of Trotheim tapped at the floor in silence as the two stallions just… stared at one another. It made the hair of Madeleine’s mane prickle.

“Trotheim will accept this testimony,” Rubyk announced suddenly. Then he flashed a warm, even sympathetic smile at Pome Apple. “You make things still more difficult for me, friend Pome. I am sorry that I was forced to break you, but you brought this upon yourself.” He sighed.

“This case would have been so easy had my solution been the right one – a fit of brutal vengeance from an gelding when the object of his hate could no longer answer back nor do anything to stop him. Oh, yes: the dead make easy targets. But I see that I was in error. I need time to think, to eat, and to rest.”

Miss Largo tapped at her chin thoughtfully. “It seems that we will not soon finish this affair, Aktur Rubyk. Unfortunately, my dining room has other, quite more necessary uses than a courtroom, and my staff will require time to fit it to those ends.”

“What do you propose, madame proprietress?” Rubyk said.

“That all those in this room reconvene in the library following the lunch service – and I believe that you are scheduled for table service, Doctor Leaf,” said Miss Largo, glancing down at the little buck in the gallery, who nodded meekly. “And in the meantime I will be in my office. There is something about this whole affair that troubles me.”

The proprietress shot a glance into the gallery. It was only for a moment, and Madeleine could not tell what pony it landed upon, but that one small gesture held a world of suspicion.

Rubyk nodded. “Understood. I would rather have your aid than you for an enemy, Largo. But I will come to the bottom of this case.”

The proprietress smiled thinly. “You will, Aktur. At this rate, you surely will.”

Pome Apple just shook.

Rubyk shook with rage as Pome Apple charged at him again. The shining marble of the Clavia Hotel’s frontside walk shook with the clatter of their hooves beneath them. Rubyk braced his huge, lanky frame and stamped his hoof, throwing down a patch of glassy ice in front of him. Pome lost his footing as his front hooves struck the ice, and he fell down, heavy, shoulder-first. Rubyk caught his weight and momentum on his own shoulder and, with tendons straining mightily, hurled the stocky Pome Apple into a triumphantly rearing topiary. His lips curled back into a rank snarl.

“Is this how you repay your benefactors, friend Pome Apple?” Rubyk said, twisting the words with a vicious sarcasm.

“How… dare you?” Pome spat a gob of sputum and quickly righted himself on his four legs. He pawed at the soft, grassy turf. “I don’t know what passes for kin-bonds where you come from, but there ain’t never been an Apple who’d do what you made me out t’be to one o’ his own family!”

Rubyk frowned and raised a foreleg in a defensive posture, but said nothing. A howl of animal fury and an hissing constellation of crimson sparks burst from the half-unicorn, and Pome Apple threw out the full force of his stumpy horn’s magic in a crude, serpentine trail of sparks that, fueled by rage, swelled and spiraled up, higher and higher, swarming like locusts. Rubyk’s eyes widened as Pome turned his horn down toward him, the sparking mass rushing down upon him at the command, and the proud Aktur of Trotheim galloped for the fountain with leaping strides. His horn flickered frantically, raising a wall of frosty ice out of the fountain spray.

Pome’s spell hissed and clawed and boomed dully at Rubyk’s shield like muffled thunder. But the tall unicorn’s spell was quickly outmatched, and he pulled his limbs and as much of his frame as possible behind the cover of the fountain itself with a grimace as a few sparks singed his mane and shoulder. The rest hissed and died in the waters of the fountain, throwing up a cloud of foul-smelling steam into the torpid tropical air that hid the two unicorns each from the view of the other. The steam condensed and mixed with the remaining spray of ice, forming a mist over the pavement that threw the light of the sun and made it impossible to see farther than a squinting-distance away.

Rubyk stood, ears swiveling all around for any hint of an hoof on marble. The Trotheim unicorn’s tail lashed the air as he bent his forward body in a runner’s crouch, flanks and haunches ready to shoot him forward on an hair-trigger.

For a long moment, nothing at all seemed to happen. The sun kept to its appointed course in shining, the fountain continued to burble pleasantly – and though there seemed to be equine voices of some kind nearby, those were for Rubyk a distant concern.

Clop.

Rubyk whirled around, horn ablaze with hoary fire. A blade of dread-cold magic clave the air before him, cracking the marble and blacking the grass where it struck the earth.

Pome was not behind him. Confused, Rubyk squinted through the curling mist that was just beginning to thin out, looking for the movement of a red coat that should have been there. He toppled and fell, hard, as the owner of that coat rammed into him on his unguarded left side, horn and hooves lit with the violent light of battle-rage seeping out bodily as raw, untrammeled magic. Rubyk’s right side struck the marble pavement.

There was sickening crunch of a rib that Rubyk heard loud in his ears. He howled in pain, a sound no equine, nor deer, nor any civilized creature in all of wide Equestria ever made tearing from his throat.

It was the warning to all prey – the hunt was on.

For just a moment, Pome Apple froze at the chilling scream. It was a moment too long. Rubyk’s long hind-leg lashed out and swept the half-unicorn’s fetlocks, knocking him off balance and throwing his rump to the ground. Pome swore and in a few seconds righted himself, but it was long enough for Rubyk to roll himself to a sitting position on his haunches. Before the half-unicorn could mount another charge, Rubyk had enveloped the entire fountain in a gleam that seemed to draw all other heat and light around the fountain in on itself. The brilliant marble darkened to a stormy grey. As Pome tensed his muscles to spring, a spear of jagged ice lanced out of the fountain and struck the ground in front of him, skittering on the marble pavement like glass shards.

Another spear of ice, then three, then a hail of frozen arrows rose from the fountain, each marking its prey. But Pome was ready for this and leapt sideways from the pavement and into the grass, rolling as he struck the soft earth.

“Haaagh!” The half-unicorn cried from his belly as he stuck the landing onto his four hooves, planting them deeply in the soil beneath the plush grass. A red glow that flickered like fire was kindled around his hooves and grew brighter as he took strength from the earth, until his body and hooves blazed like an oven. Rubyk growled and again held up a foreleg defensively, the spark of a spell screaming for release straining at his horn-tip.

With a snarl that showed every stained tooth in his mouth, Pome lowered his horn slowly to the earth, the veins and tendons of his neck bulging as if under the strain of an iron yoke. A single spark, clear and cherry-red, leapt from Pome’s horn and was sucked up into the greedy earth with a whip-crack and a whiff of ozone.

For a dreadful moment, nothing happened. Then the seagulls, for whom not even the threat of a magic duel could keep from their scavenging, turned away from the island and out to sea, raising an alarm to anypony and anything that would listen.

Rubyk felt the pulse beneath him before there was any quiver of a twitch in the ground, but he threw his forelegs over his head not a moment too soon. A limb of earth, grass, and blue-streaked marble stone shaped like a massive foreleg of an unseen and monstrous golem tore itself from the ground and stamped at the spot where Rubyk had stood but a moment before. The Aktur of Trotheim threw himself by his gangling hind legs onto the same patch of grass where Pome stooped to wield his spelled weapon, while the massive earthen foreleg continued its stamping search for his blood.

Pome’s grip on his spell was broken as Rubyk contorted himself and kicked hard at the half-unicorn’s shoulder where it joined his neck. Pome screamed as his strained muscles tore, and his earthen weapon crumbled and fell to the ground, as if the pony to whom that monstrous limb belonged were struck by that same blow. He spat, raising himself up to charge again, but he yelled in pain and collapsed to the earth, debris and clods of earth still raining down around their ears.

Rubyk laid an hoof on Pome’s injured side, pressing down until the prone stallion yelped a cry that had none of the heat of anger. The two bared their teeth at one other.

“I expect atonement from you, Pome Apple. You will answer my questions now.” Rubyk growled and placed his horn within a breath of the other’s stumpy own, his eyes ablaze with a fury scarcely contained.

“Fall into Tartarus, for all I care!” Pome spat in Rubyk’s face. The proud Aktur of Trotheim’s eyes became slits of anger, and with a snarl he drove his horn down upon Pome’s.

In the span of moments, Pome Apple went from violent, wailing screams, to sobs, to weak and pleading whimpers. Frost formed from the tip of his horn; the half-unicorn could feel the terrible cold biting at the corners of his eyes.

“Do you yield to me, Pome Apple?” Rubyk demanded.

“I… don’t… for all I care, you can…” Pome wheezed. It was the wrong answer. Rubyk increased both the pressure on the half-unicorn’s shoulder and on the magic that flowed through their ice-locked horns. Pome’s hooves, blazing with power only a minute earlier, scaled over in fragile plates of fine ice. He wailed weakly as cold bit at him from the inside-out like a merciless winter’s gale, running from his horn down his spine, and from there into each of his bones.

“Do you yield?” Rubyk insisted. There is a note of pleading in his voice.

“I… y-you…” Pome stammered, lips numbed too far to speak clearly. “Y-yeeesss…” In that very instant, Rubyk jerked his head up and pulled his magic back into himself. Pome fell down weakly upon the ground as a pony exhausted, curling upon himself for warmth. Rubyk threw himself down by Pome Apple’s chilled frame, pressing himself close to force as much heat as possible into the other stallion’s body.

“You will require healing and brandy soon. But first, you will tell me what I want to know, Pome Apple. Then, and only then, I will see that you receive all care and a place to do your quiet grieving,” said Rubyk, whisper-soft and as gentle and genteel as ever his manner was.

“F-f-fine…” Pome sputtered, but he did not push the other pony off. “W-what d’you want to know? N-not like I got… any choice now, is it?”

“No,” Rubyk agreed. “You do not.” The Aktur of Trotheim tapped his hoof on the ground without any apparent concern, or even recollection of the combat only just moments passed.

“You will tell me the spell that you cast in your rooms when you returned and found Calvados upon the floor.” Rubyk showed his teeth, but not in malice – it was a warm smile that he showed to his downed opponent. “You are, by the way, a most impressive magician. Bear it in mind if your uncle’s line should come to be a stench in your nostrils.”

Pome’s body shook, but not from cold. “D-didn’t I already say?”

“You told me that you cast a spell upon your uncle, which I could have told you from my own eyes,” Rubyk said. “But I have seen the cut of your magic now – first-hoof, one might say. You are not a subtle pony. Your spells are not subtle spells. Just what were you trying to accomplish?”

“He… my uncle wasn’t dead when I returned… back to our rooms. I… I weren’t sure if there was time to do anything, seein’ as I knew Earthsbane when I saw it. Sweet Luna, though – I had to try to do somethin’. So I tried to… push all of the poison out of him.” Pome hung his head. “It was all I could think of to do.”

Rubyk looked down sadly and put his foreleg across Pome’s shoulders. “We have little time until the proprietress comes to take us away once again, but I should be glad to lend you an ear if you need it.”

“I ain’t that soft,” Pome snapped, sniffling. “But thanks all the same. He… moaned when I did it to him. It was the sound a pony makes when the entire world is pain and the world just gets a little smaller. The pain doesn’t get any worse, but you can feel it sharper.”

“I know it,” Rubyk said in a voice quiet and full of regret. The two stallions sat in silence for nearly a minute. The sheepish voices of deer nerving themselves to confront and restrain the two of them, criminally dangerous magic-users both, struck their ears with a quiet urgency.

“One more question,” Rubyk said, speaking quick and low. “What was the nature of the title deed Calvados brought with him?”

“I wondered when you would get around to that. Figured you’d have the whole thing pegged as tiff over the will by now.”

“It was not?” Rubyk queried.

“No.”

“What, then? What was it about?”

“Wrong question, Mister Actor.”

“Come again?”

“Uncle Calvados didn’t bring the title deed with him. He didn’t have any reason to.”

“Then…” Rubyk blinked. “You? You brought the deed?” The unspoken why hung in the air like a dust-mote.

“I wanted to confront Uncle Calvados with it. It was one of the things that the notes talked about, and when I went digging through the moldy old papers in uncle’s office, the truth ended up being worse than even what the notes would have me believe. Uncle Calvados never owned a board or a square hoof-span of our plantation after old Poire Apple passed on; he just buffed and bullied his way into making everypony think that he did. Trouble was, he found where I stuffed the deed into my suitcase. I never got the chance to confront him: hecame after me.”

The scowl that formed on Rubyk’s face seemed to well up from a deep wellspring of disgust for injustice and false dealings. “Who owned your uncle’s plantation, Pome Apple?”

“My mother.” The half-unicorn said it with a numb anger that made Rubyk glance at him, disgust turning to surprise.

“…I see why you hated him.” Rubyk rose to his hooves. “Can you stand?” Pome tested his wobbling knees and nodded. Leaning on the taller unicorn, Pome rose also, and the two together turned to meet the group of dark-clad Clavia approaching them from the great front doors of the hotel. Pome bent his neck as if to accept the noose, while Rubyk turned his eyes up to the skies, proud righteousness holding him erect.

“Mister Rubyk!” The pony at the head of the pack of Clavia was not the hotel’s cool proprietress bringing a rebuke for the ill-use of her property. Instead, it was Madeleine Crumpet. She was followed closely by an ashen-faced Mangosteen, a sick-looking Frond, and a group of five other deer moving shoulder-to-shoulder, trembling, as if afraid to break physical contact for even a moment.

“Friend Madeleine?” Rubyk peered at the mare and frowned, taking in the sight before him. “I fear you bring the worst kind of news. Where did it happen?”

“Largo’s office. Please… I think you need to see this for yourself.”