It was often easy to forget, living as she did in the wing of the castle most isolated from the bustle of life that tended to swirl around the running of the government, that Castle Canterlot was not only a school, but a place of business, the seat of government for a continent-sprawling nation, and at the center of a city of almost a hundred thousand ponies. Sure, it wasn’t as populous as Manehattan or Los Pegasus, but even the ancient lost cities of pre-Equestrian times had been bustling. Cantercourt and Mareopolis had especially been bustling cities.
Which made it all the more confounding to her why nopony could ever seem to get a taxi pony to take them someplace in her books, or, as it turned out, in real life. For a moment, she considered what it would be like to follow a course study program in traffic dynamics. I’m sure there’s somepony out there with a cart for a cutie mark who’s fondest dream is to direct traffic and organize all this mess. But, as she considered it further, even they would probably balk at trying to direct traffic around the castle right now.
“Add in the holidays,” Twilight muttered, frowning. The driver she’d spent the last minute trying to entice with promises of bits had given her calls for attention no more mind than it seemed he did the empty bed of his cart.
She stuck her tongue out at him when he passed, but he was busy talking to the mare at his side, and his eyes never even came close to meeting hers. She sighed. She was sure the mare was perfectly enrapturing, with those big blue eyes and shimmering orange mane done up in a fashion Twilight didn’t think she could pronounce properly even if she’d known what it was called. She pulled at her drab bangs, sighed again, and sat down on the warmed sidewalk.
Just as she did, another cart and a pony with mane streaming flew up the road, a glow of unicorn magic sent a parcel flying to plop in front of the gate, and then he and his cart were gone.
“You could have stopped!” She called after him.
His ears didn’t even twitch.
A guard came out, took the parcel, and disappeared inside again. The wind skirled down to tug at her bangs. She shivered.
“Maybe this was a bad idea,” she whispered, glancing at the trunk beside her. It had been a small miracle that it had survived the trip down to the front gate. It would be a larger one to get it back inside. Two of the wheels were sagging alarmingly, creaking each time Spike kicked the trunk. “Stop that.”
“Stop what?” Spike looked up from his comic. She caught a glimpse of a full moon and part of a ship’s rigging.
“Stop kicking the trunk.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Spike stopped moving his legs. “It’s just this is a really good story.”
She lifted the corner to peer at the title. Seraph of the Silent Seas. Below a full moon, without the mare’s head craters, a ship full of swashbuckling pirates lifted cutlasses and hung impossibly from rigging as they sailed towards a unicorn skull island, the tip of its horn spouting lava into the sea.
“It’s really good,” he said, “like, really super awesome amazing!” He folded the comic closed, a claw stuck in between two pages, and pointed at the pony with the wild mane at the helm. “That’s Seraph Seaborn, she’s a wizardess of Skull Island. She just got together this huge crew of pirates, buccaneers, and even some gryphon mercenaries to take back her island from the evil seapony witch who threw her out four issues ago. It’s a huge arc, starting back when Seraph stole the…”
Twilight bit back a sigh and tuned him out, letting his description of the plot, characters, and improbable acts of heroism drift by. Depressingly few carts were coming and going. If only she’d had more time to plan. But the thief was going to strike in two nights. The cake was almost done. The perpetrators might even now be surveiling the castle, making their own plans. There hadn’t been time for her to plan. There’d barely be time to ask her mother and return. Not because it would take long, but because there would be family night, morning, lunch, and then explanations, warnings, more questions…
The sigh came out as a yawn, and she clamped down on it before it got further.
The sun was already well on its way towards night, and Princess Celestia would be close to wrapping up afternoon court and getting ready to raise the moon. If the thief struck early, before the cake was finished, she’d be left trying to piece together the mystery from clues left behind instead of trying to solve it before it happened and stop them. But Sable Sleuth always managed, somehow.
The courtyard was empty of carts for the moment, but ponies with laden saddlebags came and went at regular intervals. A few other ponies sat farther down from her, piles of luggage perched precariously on the edge of the walkway.
Another cart came up, and Twilight stepped down, raising a hoof to signal the driver. But he had eyes only for the mare prancing excitedly a few meters farther down the lane. They hugged, kissed briefly in the wintry cold, their bodies giving off a faint steam, and loaded her luggage while she told him all about life in the castle. In the entire minute they were loading his cart, Twilight learned that she was a cook from one of the smaller kitchens that served the staff of the castle. They had all been busy getting ready for the celebration too, she learned, and were just wrapping up the final preparations.
She sat back down when they left, shaking her head. Just two days before Hearth’s Warming Eve, even less time before the thief struck. It would have to be tomorrow. If the thief steals the cake, that will make what I have to do easier. The thought felt wrong, though. To just give up and let them win. Sable would find a way.
“You know, we don’t have to bring all these books,” Spike said, looking down at the trunk. “We could be home by now if we left them behind.”
“I know.” She shook her head. It had seemed like the logical thing to do at the time. Her mother’s library was all fiction, histories, and biographies, nothing about the stars and myths. There were so many myths and legends around Nightmare Moon that she could have filled two bookcases with all of the books recording them, and she’d had to pare down her selection to the most pertinent. If only the ponies of the old days had been less effusive in their writing, and learned to write smaller and less elaborately, more could be packed into less. “But...” She tried to put it into an argument. “But what if...” She nudged the trunk, half hoping it would give her an idea.
It sat there, obtusely remaining an inanimate trunk.
Spike flipped another page, shrugged, and settled back to silence.
“We could try walking, I suppose,” Twilight said. “It does have wheels for a reason.”
“I’m not pushing that thing around.” He rapped on the lid with a knuckle, not looking up from his book. The trunk groaned piteously. “I know buddy, I know.”
“I could try lifting it?” She asked, not really sure if she meant it.
Spike just gave her a raised eye ridge and slid to the ground. “I guess.” He didn’t sound enthusiastic. He pulled his backpack down from the top and backed away, glancing at the setting sun. “Whatever we do, can we do it quick? I don’t want the Mare to see us outside. I mean, what if she comes for us?”
“Ridiculous, Spike. She’s no more real than... than...”
“Pickled bug snouts?”
She snorted. “Sure. I guess we’ll have to wheel it home. Maybe.” She bent to inspect the wheels. They still held, even though she could see a few bright spots where the brass spokes had bent, flaking off the tarnish of long years. She frowned, mind flicking over her repertoire of spells. Nothing seemed to be more effective than a simple telekinetic cantrip. She cast it experimentally at one of the bent spokes. It straightened.
Three more bent immediately. She cast the cantrip at them, straightening them before they could snap.
More spokes failed, popping free of the wheel and springing away like crooked arrows into the lengthening shadows of evening.
She didn’t have time for even a gasp as the other wheel on that side collapsed completely, dumping the trunk to one side and sent it rolling towards her.
She didn’t even have time to think as she called on the strongest telekenetic spell she had ever cast to halt the roll before it crushed her. The motion halted, reversed, and settled the entire weight of the trunk on its remaining two wheels, a mistake she recognized at an autonomic level. Before she could correct her error, those two wheels snapped off entirely, taking a chunk of wood each with them. They spun away down the lane.
Momentum carried the trunk towards a knot of ponies just starting to look her way when the commotion started. The side of it smacked the pavement, sending chips of stone flying everywhere and rebounded, still lightened by her spell.
“No!” She screamed, her panic fueling the spell to even further heights of power. More than she had wielded since her magic surges had stopped.
Creak. Crackle. The weakened base, held to the top only by two slim iron bands, buckled under the surge. She cast another spell, bleeding some energy from a reserve she hadn’t realized she had, and directed that spell to hold the bottom planks together. In the moment of distraction, her overpowered spell had continued trying to lift the trunk by its top.
“Um, Twilight...” Spike was backing away.
The iron bands holding the trunk to its base sounded out one tortured shriek and parted in twinned thunderclaps. In desperation, she canceled both spells, attempting to bleed their energy away.
Too late. The top of the trunk caromed off in a wild spin as the uneven spell dissipated too slowly. It missed the walls of the castle by a wide margin in a high arc as she felt the last of the energy of the spell flickered into the wind, leaving behind purple sparkles and whorls to fly aimlessly away. The books thumped onto the base, splintering the remaining boards into flinders and kindling. They shifted restlessly for a breath, then stopped, still roughly in the same order she had packed them in.
The trunk made a whistling sound as it flew, and left a trail of splinters glowing with her spell power, and dust fluttered loose behind it, almost like a comet’s tail. The whistling faded as she lost sight of the trunk. It wasn’t the most aerodynamic thing she’d seen flying, but with even the fading remnants of her spell keeping it aloft, it didn’t need to be.
For long seconds, she held her breath, only able to track its arc deeper into the castle grounds by the tenuous tingles of magic against her horn until even that faded. But the flickers of orange light off the buckles and iron bands as it sailed down again showed her exactly where it was headed: a tall white tower visible even over the walls and the tall pines behind it, and its windows glinting in the sun.
“Nononono!” She wanted to cover her eyes, close them, but she watched, breathless as what she was certain was the black dot of her chest followed an almost perfectly described parabola, only shifting slightly in gusts of wind. A diabolical wind, it must have been, for it guided the black speck unerringly towards one of the gleaming windows.
A moment later, the glittering light of the window shattered, marking the arrival of the chest. There was no tinkling crash from that distance.
She glanced around, noting all of the eyes on the distant tower turning towards her, every jaw dropped. She looked away, eyes stinging.
“Well.” Spike said, staring up at the tower, claws shading his eyes. “It’s no spaghetti bomb, but somepony just got a trunkful of surprise. Quite an elephant of a surprise!” he barked a laugh, slapping his claws against his thighs as he doubled over.
She sat, shaking her head slowly, staring at the window. In her mind’s eye, she saw an elderly professor, maybe even one of hers, in the middle of some grand experiment she could only imagine the complexity of. Maybe an astrological experiment, divining the next movements of the stars, or the precise position of the moon and its shadow as it would appear that night. Or...
“Elephant of a surprise!” Spike slapped her flank. “Get it? Because—”
She sat down heavily, letting her hooves slide out in front of her until her chin was laying on the ground. She did cover her eyes then.
“Twilight? Come on, nothing blew up. It’ll be okay.”
And then, at the apex of the spell, her trunk landed in the middle of the chamber, spraying glass and wood everywhere. Maybe it had hit somepony, and they were laying on the ground, unable to get up. Maybe it was a chemistry experiment, something so delicate and potentially dangerous that it had to be done in a high tower so nopony was at risk. She could hear it already, a rushing thunder in her ears.
There would be an explosion. A puff of smoke? Flash of light?
She leapt to her hooves, pulling her mane into her mouth. The tower was still intact. She chewed as she had when she was young and anxious in the new castle dormitory, hardly knowing anypony. She kept her eyes open, fixed on the tower, as though her stare were the only thing keeping catastrophe from happening, even though the cold was making her eyes ache. She would have to blink soon.
She chewed more vigorously, gnawing on the edge of a hoof now, willing disaster not to happen, dreading that it would. Vials turned over, volatile chemicals mixing...
Nothing happened. She stared harder.
Nothing continued to happen as she stared. Nothing. Not even a muffled shout. Not that she thought she would hear something from this distance. She blinked, shook her head, and looked away, then back. The tower was still there. There was no cry from the guards, no blare of trumpets announcing the royal guard mobilizing.
Twilight let her mane drop, and let her eyes sink to the ground. Splinters littered the sidewalk, and one of the wheels lay by her hoof, bent in half. She kicked it back towards the broken trunk, and sighed. Myths and stars. That was why she brought the poor thing down. It carried myths and stars to help her chase down thieves and mysteries.
Who am I kidding?I’m not going to make a difference if cake has been stolen for a thousand years. Tears trickled down her cheeks, spattering the ground and freezing in tiny domes of ice. She watched them pile up, shaking her head slowly.
“Twilight?” Spike pressed against her flank, patting her shoulder. “It’s okay. Come on. Nopony got hurt.” He pulled open his backpack and showed her the little jewel-like sugar confection sitting in its nest still. “This didn’t even crumble a bit.”
She tried a smile at him, and sniffled. “You’re right. But…”
She'd let her magic get out of control again, and almost hurt some ponies, and definitely caused damaged to a tower. Celestia’s tower, maybe. She couldn’t just let that go until she got back. She would have to tell Celestia, and do what she could to correct the situation.
She clenched her jaw, decision made. She swiped at the frozen trails on her cheeks and took a deep breath, then turned away from the window, returning her attention to the small gathering on the sidewalk.
Almost everypony was staring at her.
Twilight cleared her throat and cast her gaze about for somepony who didn’t look quite dumbfounded. “Can somepony look after these books, please?”
A male pony in the lane cleared his throat. Twilight glanced at him, then past him to the cart attached to his harness. It was empty.
He folded his hat down to his chest in a little awkward bow, then resettled it haphazardly on his head. “Well...” He glanced in the direction her trunk had shot off in. “I suppose I could take em someplace. I’s headed outta town tomorrow, and s’long as it’s not too far off the road, I suppose I could drop em off on my way to, er... where I’m stayin’. Where were you takin’ em?”
The pony’s buck teeth made his speech a little hard to understand, but the friendly tone was hard to mistake. He wore a warm looking brown coat over his pearl gray pelt, but nothing else, and didn’t seem bothered by the cold cobbles. His cart was sturdy, dark wood and looked heavy enough to have outweighed the trunk four times, even loaded with books. “My parent’s house. Night Light and Twilight Velvet. They live on Eleven Canter Circle, down near—”
“Ms. Velvet? Can do! My son loves her work. Can’t hardly get him to stop talking about meetin’ her one day. Somethin’ called, what was it? Some kinda convention. I told him, I says, ‘If’n you get good grades, then sure.’ Regular little scholar he is now.” He laughed and scrubbed at a not quite well-groomed beard, shaking his head. “Heck, just pile em in here and I’ll take em down straight away Ms... Velvet?” He glanced at her expectantly.
“Sparkle, actually. Twilight Sparkle. It’s my great-grandmother’s name.”
“Suee!” He whistled through his teeth, somehow managing it. “Well, nice ta meecha, Ms. Sparkle. Name’s Turnip Road. Heh. Can’t wait ta tell Lil’ Truck just who his pa met. Oh, it’ll drive him nuts!” He stamped all four hooves in a quick staccato, laughing. He stopped and sucked his teeth. “Say, d’ya think she might, er, sign, uh, somethin’? Y’know, for my boy?”
Twilight smiled weakly, blushing. “Um... I, uh, don’t see why not.” At a loss for words, she moved the books in manageable chunks into the back of the cart, which she noticed had several empty bags that smelled like turnips and old dirt. “Where are you from?”
“Oh, noplace special, really. Little town called Berry Mead, down a couple stretches past the mountain and the railroad. Betcha hain’t heard of it.”
Twilight shook her head, backing up as she settled the last book in the bed. “I, uh, have not, no.” She glanced at Spike, still cautiously standing over his backpack, then at her saddlebags. She sucked on her lower lip briefly, then drew out a nearly pristine Daring Do novel. She held it up, the book trembling slightly. “Please, give this to, er, Truck. I’m sure my mother would be happy to sign it.”
He blushed, pulling his hat down to his chest again. “Gollee, Miss Sparkle. I’s just happy ta help. That was just a bit o’ funnin, really.”
“Well, I insist. You’re doing me a great service.” She slid the book on top of the pile, underneath one of the lashings. “Thank you, Turnip Road.”
The hat went back on his head, the flush still on his cheeks. “Thank you, miss.”
They stood awkwardly for a long moment, staring at each other.
Turnip Road broke the silence first, sucking in a breath and smiling broadly. “Well, you ever come down that way sometime, me an’ the missus will cook ya up somethin’ right nice. S’long as it’s turnip stew.” He laughed and winked at her, tipped his hat, and trotted down the road with a casual “Later!” tossed over his shoulder.
“He seemed nice,” Spike said, waving after the wagon.
“He was.” Twilight’s attention lingered on the wagon and its driver for some time after it rounded the bend on its way down the road towards her home. She shook her head, wondering if she was making a mistake. She ought to talk to her brother. To her mother and father. They would know what to do, even about the window, and Shiny would definitely be able to get her to the top of the tower.
“Spike,” she asked after another long pause, “is this the right thing to do?”
He shrugged into his backpack and looked up at her, frowning. “If you want to get in trouble, I guess it is. Just remember, I was sitting here the whole time.”
“I know. It was my mistake, and I’m going to get in trouble anyway.” She tossed her head at the distant tower and started back up the walkway towards the castle. “The longer the trouble has to gain momentum, the more trouble it’s going to be when it finds me.”
He snorted. “That’s because you don’t sleep through the trouble. Really, Twilight, you should try being a dragon. It’s very relaxing.”