XV
The Prosecution of Clover the Clever
XV
The Prosecution of Clover the Clever
Captain Winterspell seemed to have a telepathic command of his crew. Never in my life have I seen a group of ponies exercise tighter coordination, yet Winterspell himself hardly spoke. He issued an order perhaps twice to the crew as he watched them set about their work. Instead, his focus was on the hospitality for our little trio. At his offer, Gale and Graargh were shown to the cramped space of the crew quarters to catch up on the sleep my rescue had interrupted. I, however, was in no fit state to sleep.
It had only been a few hours since I woke up in a Lübuck jail cell, and the ensuing intrigue had gotten my blood pumping. Instead, with the blessing of the captain, I wandered up to the front of the ship and leaned against the railing, well out of the way of any of the sailors dealing with riggings and anchors and whatever other nautical terms your imagination feels the need to insert here.
Angel hovered by my side, but for perhaps the first time in his existence, he didn’t feel the need to speak up. Content with the quiet, I rolled over onto my back and rested my head on the bowsprit, just above the figurehead of the Little Conqueror. Though the wooden beam made for a hard pillow, I was left with an amazing view of the stars. I whispered the names of the stars and constellations under my breath, hoping the rote memory would help me think.
“Amethyst the Lightbringer, who gave us civilization.” The first king, writ large across the night sky by the grace of the Lady of the Night.
I could almost hear Wintershimmer’s derisive snort.
I felt the ship rock gently and listened as it creaked underneath me. The sea carried a gentle foam, but my mind was roaring. There was the oppressive fear that Tempest would somehow realize I’d made off with Gale, and show up at sea any minute. As the hours passed, that fear grew less pressing. I knew he wouldn’t try to organize a search for a boat three hours out to sea, where a bad turn of the weather could kill his fellow scouts. But as that worry vanished, others rose up in my mind.
Desperation for a moment of calm turned my eyes skyward once more. “Tourmaline, the first Archmage.” My mental recitation of the great wizard’s accolades did not last long against the turmoil of my present state.
I’d kidnapped Princess Platinum’s daughter. It felt so right in the spur of the moment, when I hadn’t let myself take the time to sit and think for fear of losing my chance. And it still felt right, even if I couldn’t put my hoof on why. My mind jumped back to Gale’s rushed hug over and over again, only leaving my thoughts more muddled.
Another constellation, I forced myself. Another lesson. “Electrum the Omniscient.”
The name tripped up my thoughts, finally providing my blessed relief. Electrum had been one of the ancient unicorn kings, before ponies stopped expecting the royalty to also be wizards. The legends said he’d brought a curse on The Diamond Throne, sent by Lady Luna for the pride of looking too far into the future. I knew the disease was real; the ‘scourge of kings’ haunted the royal bloodline. Queen Platinum’s father, King Lapis, was dying of it even before the Windigoes attacked. I’d heard the Queen had it as well, although it hadn’t yet set into her horn. Did Gale have it?
Or was that the point of the Queen choosing a pegasus for a husband? Trying to spare Gale the disease? I had no real way of knowing, but the question lingered in my mind regardless, and it only led to further questions. Who was her father?
I let my eyes roll to the moon. Ponies said that if you whispered a question to the moon, you’d get an answer in exchange for a favor that Luna would some day come to collect. Under Wintershimmer it had always seemed like a pointless bit of superstition attached to a terrible deal. Without a place to call home or even a country to protect me from the ponies chasing me, suddenly the deal seemed a lot more reasonable.
I shook my head. Reasonable or not, Gale’s parentage wasn’t any kind of a question worth asking. I almost certainly didn’t know the pony, so a name wouldn’t do me any good. At best, I could guess it was the infamous Private Pansy—assuming he was younger than the Butcher, and thus even remotely close to the Queen’s age.
I set aside the question and turned back to the stars.
“Cunning Cap, of…” The title wouldn’t come. Something far more pressing had entered my mind.
Wintershimmer claimed that Clover had killed a hundred thousand ponies?
I knew basically nothing about Clover beyond the popular fable you almost certainly have enough about Clover to know that Wintershimmer knew something I didn’t, but nothing I did know of the mare would justify murder. Without considerably more divination magic than anypony alive could cast, or a direction interrogation of Wintershimmer, I had no way of getting an answer out at sea.
I set my mind to the task of sleeping, but putting my mind to sleep took far longer.
The next morning, Gale and Graargh rejoined me on deck. We were treated to the first of a great many identical meals of thick, sticky gruel and stone-like biscuit. Graargh made quite a show of protesting; fortunately, as a nine-ish year old colt, that was mostly to be expected by the crew. An adult bear making the same protest would probably have been much more inconvenient. I found myself hoping that we didn’t need to explain his “condition” to the whole crew, though I resolved to tell Winterspell the next time I had a chance to quietly pull him aside.
After breakfast, we sat and talked. There really wasn’t anything else to do. Gale took every opportunity to volunteer her services to the crew, and from time to time they let her up in the rigging to undo some knot or fiddle with a stubborn bit of sail. Largely, however, the ship was simply too well organized for even her to have much work. She and I worked together teaching Graargh Equiish, quickly producing wonderful results in the forms of the words ‘I’ and ‘A’. The sentence ‘Am bear’ was given a lavish burial at sea, if only in my mind.
By the time the sun sat directly above the mast, I was feeling enough energy back in my horn that I was ready to talk to my mentor. The captain was comfortable enough letting me down into the belly of the ship with the cargo, so long as I refrained from helping myself to any of it—not that I was about to try. It is annoyingly difficult to escape the scene of a crime when one is already on a ship at sea.
When I actually descended the narrow stairway into the cargo hold, I found the place decidedly unhappy. The air was hot, thick, moist, and stank to the high heavens. The rocking of the ship felt stronger here, and the creaking of wooden beams was an almost deafening companion, despite Angel’s presence. I resolved to keep our discussion as brief as possible.
The chalk circles and septagrams you may recall from my previous seances were a showy touch, intended both to make the process easier for me through focus and stability, and to impress uneducated ponies far more than a simple flared horn usually would. Alone and consumed by curiosity, I couldn’t bring myself to bother. It took only a single flash of my horn for Wintershimmer to fade into translucent being, no more than a stride in front of me.
“Coil,” he greeted flatly. “I’m glad you contacted me again quickly. I was beginning to get worried, since I’ve seen neither Silhouette nor yourself here in the Summer Lands.”
“I couldn’t kill her,” I told him in a brief, factual tone. “She had your candlecorns with her.” I deliberately refrained from mentioning to him that I still had no intention of killing Silhouette outright, or that I had at least one perfectly solid opportunity to crush her with a church bell instead of using it as a shield.
“At least you survived that encounter. Is the filly I advised you about still traveling with you?”
“Princess Platinum, you mean?” I asked.
Wintershimmer smiled, though he cocked a brow. “You discovered that yourself? I thought your strategy was deliberately not knowing.”
I shrugged. “I stumbled into knowing. I’m not going to tell her I know though, since that seems to make her happy.”
My mentor turned around for a moment, taking in the surroundings. “On a ship, I see. Are you bound for Starport?”
“Neighvgorod. It’s a little bit of a longer journey to get to River Rock from there, but it’s what I could manage on short notice. I didn’t want to spend any more time in Lübuck.”
“Wise. A ship is sooner than I had requested you contact me, but it will suffice for now. It seems as though this time you have your affairs well in order, Coil. That is good. This next lesson will require your total focus.”
I shook my head firmly. “I didn’t seance you for a lesson, Wintershimmer. I called you because I need to know why you think I need to kill Clover. And, for that matter, how you think I’m supposed to manage that.”
The ghostly spirit of my mentor cocked a brow. “And you believe that answering those questions will not provide a lesson? As your road grows increasingly more treacherous, Coil, I cannot refrain from giving you this power any longer. I was saving it for the day you showed that you could act above your foalish impulses of fairy-tale glory, and it seems this journey has at least taught you something. So today, my student, you are going to become the most powerful unicorn alive.”
I cocked a brow. “Is Star Swirl dead then? Have you seen him on the other side?”
Wintershimmer shook his spectral head with visible irritation. “Star Swirl continues his life for the moment, and I suspect it will be a lifetime yet before you can claim to be his equal in knowledge. But power only exists when it is used—whether as a threat, or in actual exercise. Unlike Star Swirl, I do not expect you to sit idly on your knowledge waiting for death to take you. Even your ‘heroism’ is better than his idleness. And yet I am called ‘the Complacent’.” A snort escaped ethereal nostrils. “I assume you have already gathered, but to begin formally, I am going to teach you my greatest work of magic: how to rip the soul out of a living body.”
I nodded grimly. “And you want me to use it on Clover the Cruel?”
Rather than explain his motivation, Wintershimmer interpreted my concern as being focused on tactics. “Star Swirl knows how to defend against my spell. However, to my understanding he has not taught it to either Clover or his more recent pupil, Diadem. They are both incompetent necromancers, and I doubt they could learn this magic even if instructed. But beyond that issue of talent, my old rival has a strong motivation not to teach my spell to a new generation, or to write it down. He does not know about your existence, Coil, so he assumes my spell will die with me. He would rather live in a world where my power was lost.”
I nodded my understanding. “So you think whatever Clover did was bad enough that it’s worth letting Star Swirl know about me?”
“Yes. And patience, Coil. I do not expect you to deal with Clover on blind faith. I will explain after you learn. Let us begin simply. What cantrips do you believe go into my thesis spell?”
The question he asked aloud was one I had been pondering for years, even if I never dared ask it. After all, ‘please teach me to rip out the souls of my enemies’ is a sentence with some fairly conclusive moral implications.
Well, the obvious first step is necromantic binding.” The old stallion’s eyebrow piqued, though he held his tongue. “We can’t directly affect the soul from the physical world while the bond between body and soul is still intact—I believe that’s Morbid’s Law?” I received no correction, and thus continued. “If you used Torque’s Principle of Supplementative Disenchanting, then casting a binding cantrip should
My little pony, first let me apologize for interrupting Morty’s narrative. The page you see ripped out immediately opposite this one was torn by my horn. You see, in recording this portion of his story, Morty did feel the need to be very, very thorough. While the formula for Wintershimmer’s thesis was not written down as formal instructions, at least one reader of this text was able to piece together enough of the spell to produce a working (if crude) facsimile.
I hope I do not need to explain why the ability to sever the soul of another pony from their body is forbidden magic. I do not teach it to the Royal Guard. Even my personal students are forbidden to learn this spell. Both Star Swirl and later Morty himself agreed that it was best to keep this knowledge under tight control.
I apologize for denying you a piece of the narrative. If it is of any consolation, I promise you that Morty refrained from any amusing insults or jokes at Wintershimmer’s expense, and that the dialogue you are missing is an exceptionally dry piece of discussion on high-level magical theory.
The next page should start you off with enough of an understanding for Morty’s subsequent dialogue to make sense.
Please enjoy the rest of Morty’s story.
— Celestia
hasn’t been an archmage in six hundred years gifted enough at sympathy to gain anything useful out of it during a duel. Reading a mind is a slow process, and dedicating mana to guarding against it is an intrinsically taxing proposition. Thus, most ponies who would think to enter into a duel with me would fear my reputation, and dedicate themselves to some foolish attempt at guarding against my necromancy at the expense of guarding their minds. And even if somepony knows the principle, like my hairy Equestrian rival, I can still pick at their defense. Remember Estoc’s third principle of dueling?”
I nodded curtly before reciting the ancient theory. “To be effective, a sword must only be present at the moment of the strike. In contrast, a shield cannot ever be lowered or it ceases to serve a purpose.”
“The spell I’ve just taught you, Coil, is the most powerful ‘sword’ in the world. If somepony defends against it, you’ve forced them to carry an extremely heavy shield. Don’t test that shield; simply attack them more traditionally. No mage alive can defend both fronts at once. I suspect even the so-called ‘Divine Sisters’ would fall before such a strategy. The moment they drop their defense of their mind in the interest of saving their body, you snatch out their soul.” Wintershimmer nodded slowly. “That is how you will kill Clover.”
I sat back onto my flanks on the creaking beams of the solid cog. “Which only leaves your explanation of why I should approach a pony who has never attempted to hurt me personally, and kill her in cold blood.”
Wintershimmer’s ghostly form snorted. “Foals these days… No proper wizard ever needed a moral excuse to kill off a rival…”
I should clarify here that Wintershimmer was not making a self-aware joke about his own age or perspective; the ghost of the old stallion was entirely serious in his irritation.
“The last time we discussed this, Wintershimmer, you avoided the question. Do you have a good reason why I should kill Clover? Or any reason at all, for that matter?”
Wintershimmer glared at me in reply. “Do not presume to question me so casually, Coil. Or do you think that knowing my spell would let you best me? Do not forget, my soul is already unshackled from a living body.”
“It’s a little hard to forget, to be honest.” I smiled, and let my grip on the seance spell weaken just enough that Wintershimmer’s form rippled in the air. He scowled at me, to which I nodded. “Now, can we get on with this?”
“Very well…” Wintershimmer took a completely unnecessary breath. “As I explained previously, Clover is responsible for the permanent loss of the ancient capital of River Rock. She’s the reason River Rock is still a frozen wasteland, and its Windigo is still alive. And I have every reason to believe that she has exerted control over the creature as a means to wield it further in achieving her goals.”
“With apologies for the trite reaction, what?! How can you possibly claim Clover is responsible for the windigoes?”
“I did not claim that, Coil.” Wintershimmer sat and steepled his hooves. “Only that she is responsible for the one of them that still remains alive. I know you haven’t suffered through the Equestrian ‘pageant’ on the subject of the Windigoes, but you are most likely still aware of the narrative it suggests. That the three tribes somehow united and vanquished the Windigoes through friendship. This is, in a sense, a lie.”
“I know enough magic to know a fairy tale when I see one, Wintershimmer.”
“Save when you look in a mirror?” The ghost chuckled as he shook his head. “Clover wrote that pageant. Specifically, she wrote it to deceive the public about what actually happened in that cave. There was a magic of ‘friendship’ in a sense. The bonds between the ponies—most especially Hurricane’s secretary, Smart Cookie, and Clover—contained enough magic to free them from the Windigoes’ ice. However, on its own, friendship is just a source of mana. It would still need a horn to disperse the Windigoes, and in that regard their friendship went to waste. It was the pegasus leader Hurricane and his enchanted sword that slew two of the spirits, not some glowing magical heart.”
“...and this condemns Clover because…” I drew a circle with my hoof in the air as I let the question hang.
“Clover stopped Hurricane from dispersing the third windigo. She spared its existence.”
I actually felt my jaw go slack—and believe me when I say that in my life, I’d experienced more than enough insanity to be a difficult pony to surprise. “You’ve got to be mistaken. She’s a trained archmage, isn’t she?”
“She is.”
“And she knows that Windigoes are evil spirits? Intrinsically evil?”
“I have every reason to believe she does.”
I frowned. “How could you possibly know this? You’d need something as powerful as Electrum’s Orb to look back in time that far, to say nothing of the magical interference that the windigoes’ blizzard would cause.”
“I needed nothing of the sort. I had an eyewitness.”
“An… eyewitness? You’ve spoken to one of them?”
Wintershimmer snorted. “No speech was involved, nor was there any risk that I was lied to. Have you forgotten Smart Cookie?”
I blinked. “You read his mind?”
“Saying that I read his soul might be a more accurate description, but the premise is the same in the end. Truly formative memories are engraved on the soul, and that day was as imprortant as any to Smart Cookie. I’ve seen what happened in that cave. I know Clover lied to Hurricane to save that Windigo.”
“Lied to him?”
Rather than answering with a nod or a terse ‘yes’, Wintershimmer rose once more to his ethereal hooves on the ship’s wooden planks. “Coil, may I use some of your mana?”
“If that’s what you need to do to answer my question, sure.” I sat down, bracing myself against the dizzying drain of my seance spell growing harder to maintain. “It would have been nice if you had asked when you choked Gale too, you know.”
Wintershimmer sighed for what was obviously dramatic effect. “Apprentice, may I borrow some of your mana, so that I can telekinetically choke your romantic companion? I was establishing my reputation, Coil. I could neither afford to ask you politely, nor to delay my response. Besides, compared to the mana you use flaring a spell, I doubt you noticed my drain.”
He was right; in the heat of the moment, I hadn’t. “Then why ask now?”
“Courtesy among necromancers,” he replied, as the magic on his horn grew more pronounced. “In case you have forgotten, Coil, the dead cannot cast magic alone. We need a physical horn. Thus, you are providing me a service.”
Wintershimmer’s horn ignited fully, and then the drain from my spell faded away into a dull throbbing in the back of my mind. As my attention returned to my mentor, an orb of magic appeared before him. Unlike his usual sickly golden yellow or my pale blue, the sphere was a dusty red, visibly oozing raw mana. “I appreciate your academic skepticism regarding Clover, but it grows tiring. Obviously, I did not carry Smart Cookie’s memories with me into the Summer Lands, but what I’ve given you here are mine. You are welcome to inspect them as you see fit, to do whatever tests you feel necessary to ensure I am not deceiving you. Whatever it takes, Coil, realize the truth. When you have, conjure me once more.”
Wintershimmer vanished. I stared at the orb of memories he’d left behind, floating in the air. It would be a project, testing his claim that he hadn’t tampered with it. Something to distract my racing mind as the Little Conqueror sailed along toward the icy wastes of Neighvgorod.
But for now, I simply wanted to see.
There they were. The windigoes that had frozen him solid. The demons that had killed thousands, tens of thousands, a million ponies with their cold and cruel winter. They were weak, helpless, and whimpering as they lay against the far walls.
Before my eyes—or rather, before Smart Cookie’s—I saw a glint of black. Hurricane’s armor, beneath which I saw the honed bloodlust of a stallion just beginning to show the signs of age. He drew his sword and drove it straight through the heart of the first windigo, all in a single fluid motion. The creature writhed in pain, but Hurricane’s motion was graceful.
Only a moment later the windigo dissipated into an ethereal mist and a shower of cold water. The other two windigoes saw this, and they struggled backwards in response.
As Hurricane marched over to the second, I saw a mare who could only be Clover. Clad in a rough cloak, the green-on-green young mare took her attention away from the mostly freed Chancellor Puddinghead and galloped over towards the Commander.
“Stop!” she shouted, even as Hurricane impaled the second windigo. “Commander, stop!”
As Hurricane pulled the sword from the mist of what was previously another demon, Clover tackled him (or tried to) and struggled to wrestle the sword from his grasp with her hooves. With an expert roll and a kick, Hurricane easily rebounded from the grapple and turned to face her, the sword still in his mouth.“What the hell?!” he shouted at her. “Clover, what are you doing?!”
Clover placed herself between Hurricane and the last windigo. “They don’t need to die, Commander! They’ve learned their lesson! Can’t you see?!”
I couldn’t believe my ears. No mage would ever say that.
The windigo behind her whimpered and scooted backwards several inches. I’d been raised on stories of the beasts as powerful, near-deific fiends. Compared to those stories, the spirit seemed so helpless, so petty.
Hurricane advanced towards it until he was nose to nose with Clover. “They have learned nothing. They are demons, spawns of Grabacr himself, and they must die. They have killed too many. Who knows how many more will die if we let it live.” Lowering his sword so that the tip brushed against Clover’s shoulder, he hardened his stare and leaned closer. “Stand aside, and let me finish it off.”
I knew next-to-nothing of the legends of the pegasi, but it seemed that Hurricane knew more about fighting spirits than Clover did. Either that, or Wintershimmer had been telling me the truth.
Clover gulped and put a hoof to Hurricane’s chest. “You will not kill it. It’s not a demon, it’s a living thing, just like us. Every life is precious. Don’t take another when nopony else needs to die.”
A living thing?! I think those were the words that made Wintershimmer’s story finally set in. To claim that the spirits had learned was foolish. To claim that they were living beings deserving of mercy was beyond reason. There could be no mistake. Clover was lying. But why?
“It’s not a pony!” Hurricane snarled. “And how many lives did you take in Onyx Ridge?!”
“None!” Clover protested. “I simply loaded the ballista! I killed nopony!”
“You still put rounds into a machine that killed others!” Oratory, it seemed, was not Hurricane’s strong suit. The black armor clearly was.
“I tried to save whom I could! When I broke out of my cell, I could have killed the guard that was there! Instead, I spared his life!”
“Enough of this!” With an angry hoof, Hurricane practically threw Clover to the side. The strength conveyed in the motion was impressive; Hurricane may have been tall for a pegasus, but the hollow boned tribe generally lacked the strength to pick up an hurl another pony. His path unblocked, the soldier advanced on the windigo, his sword raised to deal the deathblow. Or rather, the dispersing blow; dealing with spirits really does interfere with so many idioms.
It was too late.
With a scream of anger and fright, the windigo dispersed into mist and fog that simply slid past Hurricane and flowed upwards. The stone ceiling hissed, and the windigo returned to its equine shape. With one final howl of anger, it fled through the rock towards the east.
Hurricane watched the spot where it disappeared for several long seconds. During that time, Clover slowly backed away towards myself (Smart Cookie), Pan Sea, and the mostly freed Chancellor Puddinghead. They were all quiet when Hurricane screeched in rage and slammed his sword into the ground.
A gash of bedrock nearly a foot long surrendered to the familiar blade of Procellarum.
Clover took a cautious step closer to Hurricane and raised a pleading hoof as a desperate apology. “Commander Hurricane, I—”
“Damn it, Clover,” Hurricane whispered. The tension and emotion in his voice was so powerful that it immediately silenced the mare. “We could have ended this. Right here. The blizzard over the Compact Lands would have been gone. And we wouldn’t have had to leave after all.” When he looked back at her, his eyes were haunted and angry. “The pegasi wouldn’t have had to run. Not now. Not later. Never again.”
Clover’s ears flattened against her skull and she lowered her neck in shame. Was it real? I didn’t know the mare well enough to read her, but the emotion seemed sincere. “Please, Commander, I’m sorry—”
“You know nothing. You couldn’t have. But it’s okay. Soon, you’ll find out. You’ll know what it feels like.” Then he turned his face away and sighed. “Remember this, years from now. There’s a price we pay for mercy. There’s a price we pay for loyalty.” He looked at her one last time before moving towards the frozen mouth of the cave. “In a few months, ask yourself if it was really worth it. Ask yourself if you still would have stopped me from killing the demon.”
With a flick of his wings, Hurricane summoned sobering flames across his wings and leaned against the ice wall covering the exit to the cave. Clover, meanwhile, collapsed onto the floor and stared into space.