“Get up featherbrain!”
“Rainbow Dash, stop being insensitive. She almost died!”
“Yeah, and then she got better in, like, ten seconds after Amber did that spell thingie on her.”
“Um. I don’t think we should be fighting right now.”
“And the fact that she still hasn’t woken up hasn’t clued you in to the face that she’s still healing?”
“I know Gilda. You don’t. She sleeps almost as much as me. Trust me, she’s just being lazy.”
“And you’re basing that off...what, exactly?”
“Guys...”
“I just know, okay?”
“Guys!”
A pause.
“She’s awake.”
“Wait. Stop. You’re avoiding something. Tell me.”
“I don’t think—”
Gilda jabbed a talon into Rainbow Dash’s shoulder, ignoring the stabbing pains in her own chest. “Tell me or I gouge your eyes out.”
Rainbow Dash pranced back, hooves out before her in a placating gesture that Gilda had seen her use maybe twice in her entire life. “Jeeze Gilda, you’ve gotten—alright! Alright. No need to be pushy. So. More griffons came right after you got, uh, shot. Then the guy who did the shooting flew past us and started yelling stuff about traitors and beheadings and stuff like that.”
“And you couldn’t stop him?” Gilda said, half mocking and half teasing.
Anger flashed across Dash’s face. It wasn’t irritation or annoyance, but real, deep anger.
“No,” Dash said, sounding as if she was trying to bite the word.
“So—”
“He started flying.”
Gilda looked Dash over closely. No metal wings or apparent injuries, but just because a unicorn healer closed a wound didn’t mean it wasn’t still there. And signs were all over the pony’s body. Feathers flattened away from an area. A blunt object had hit there. A wing was kept from folding by just the tiniest amount. Her mane was just slightly out of place. Whatever had happened had led to violence.
“So, anyway,” Dash continued, forcing her voice close to her normal cheerful register, “the new griffons all started arguing about you. You’re not a traitor, so I went up to them—well, as close as I could, anyway—and told them that you were all set to fight us.”
Gilda leaned forward, cot now entirely abandoned. “That was the stupidest thing you could’ve done.”
“What? But—”
“Think, Dash. Try it for once in your life. You tried to convince them that I was your enemy so I could keep being your enemy. See the problem?”
“Oh…”
Gilda sighed and settled onto her haunches. The pain was still there, but it wasn’t bad enough to cause her to show it. “Moving on. What happened next?”
Rainbow Dash gave her an odd look before continuing. “Well I couldn’t really hear much beyond what I told you already. They talked some more and then dumped you on us. And then they, well, attacked. I couldn’t just stand there. Luckily they just wanted to scatter us, so no one died. They knocked a lot of the unicorns unconscious though. The professors and a few other unicorns made another shield and blasted any griffon that came near, which was pretty awesome. I wanted to see more, but I was kind of fighting by then. I got three of them before they knocked me down.
“And right now, we’re all sort of….deciding what to do. All the port cities are supposedly wrecked, but every pony here will probably want to go for one of them anyway. Cowards, the lot of them.”
Griffon blinked. “You only got three? What kind of sad style did you have to use to do that badly?”
Dash gritted her teeth. “The Everfree got me. I’m not at my best.”
“Yeah, and? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What’s that supposed to—you don’t know. Fine. That’s fine. Any pony who gets caught in it is never seen again, unless they’re a pegasus. For us it just sort of...sucks on us. It hurts. A lot.” A full-bodied shiver traveled through Dash from head to hoof. “And then we don’t have magic anymore.”
“What? But then how do you fly—oh.”
“Yep.” Dash’s voice was so flat it could’ve come from one of those ancient golems in the north.
“Great. Now I’m going to set every griffon straight. I’ll catch up with you guys after to talk about payment.”
Rainbow Dash looked like she was struggling with something, then blurted out, “There! Right there! Did you hear yourself just now? You’re being...nice. And business-ey. You hated anyone thinking of you like that. You wanted to be a pro at doing stuff, remember? What happened?”
“My House. Now, I’m leaving. I have stuff to do.”
Gilda moved to leave the small and obviously hastily erected but still garishly overdecorated tent.
“Gilda, you can’t go yet! You’re not all the way fixed yet,” Dash said, hastily stepping in front of her.
“Oh?” Gilda raised an eyebrow. “And what was that I remembered about me just sleeping because I’m lazy?”
“You heard that?” Rainbow Dash said, then backtracked. “I mean, probably a dream. Er, that’s not going to fly, is it?”
Gilda shook her head.
“Right. I was just trying to get Twilight—she’s that weird purple unicorn—and the other guys to leave you alone. I know what it’s like to be stuck in a bed and have other ponies near you, just talking and talking so you can’t sleep, but not about anything interesting enough that it would be worth hearing, and all that time just being stuck and not able to do anything because you’re not healed up enough to talk…um.”
Gilda’s eyebrow climbed even higher.
“So, yeah. You can’t go because you’re not better yet. Also we don’t know where any of them went.”
“I can find them,” Gilda said with a wave of her claw. Then she froze. “Wait. After that guy shot me, how long did it take for the reinforcements to show up?”
“It was actually pretty quick. Like, five, ten minutes tops. Fluttershy started getting you all bandaged up and out of the way by then.”
“Where’s my armor?” Gilda said. She pushed past Rainbow Dash, who stumbled back, and exited the tent. There were only two other ‘tents’ around. The patchwork of different fabrics on the smallest one made it look like a child’s art project.
Rainbow Dash emerged behind her. “About the armor...if it was important to you, it’s kind of broken right now. Fluttershy had to kind of...cut it apart to get you out of it.”
“The armor isn’t important,” Gilda said, limping to the next tent. “What is important are the tracking runes my oh so loyal lieutenant might have put on it. My House kind of threw me out here because I was rude or something like that.”
“Rude? You? You’re joking,” Dash said.
“Hah. Anyway, if they were willing to put tracking runes on me, my House most likely wants me dead.”
“Really? That seems kind of...cynical. They could just be to look after you. I mean, the cavalry came after you got shot!”
Gilda snorted as she continued walking. “You may know some stuff about us, but you will never get griffon politics. But speculation does me no good until I know they were tracking me, which is why I need to find my armor.”
“Oh. In that case, you’re going in the wrong direction.”
“You idiots left my armor exposed to the elements?”