She ought to fight, Catskill knew. She ought to delay them, Catskill knew. She ought to make them work tooth and nail to take her down, Catskill knew.
But what was the point? It didn’t matter anymore. Amanita was gone. They couldn’t find her. Catskill knew that if she fought, she wouldn’t be doing anything with a point. She was cold, tired, and depressed. She didn’t want to be doing anything at all. So she didn’t.
For maybe half a second, she’d looked around the room, trying to find something worth using. But it’d been falling apart for so long, there wasn’t anything there. The boards would break the first time she hit somepony. The rocks weren’t large enough to do much damage. All she could do was make it easy for both sides and surrender. So she did. Didn’t mean she had to like it.
By the time the board holding the door shut had been broken, Catskill had taken off her blunderbuss and laid it at her feet. She’d put her goggles on her forehead and pulled the mouth covering of her balaclava below her chin. Once the door was down, she’d put up her hooves and said the words.
The pony who’d barged in, an angry-looking earth mare, seemed confused. “Eh… ’scuse me?”
“I said I surrender,” repeated Catskill. “One of your ponies. Your pegasus. She’s been hunting me.”
The earth pony blinked and turned around. “Oi!” she yelled into the blizzard. “Bitterroot! Were you chasin’ somepony? She’s givin’ up!”
A pegasus — the pegasus — skipped through the door around the earth pony. She stared at Catskill, then approached her. She put a hoof under Catskill’s chin and forced her head up. Catskill stared into her eyes unblinkingly. The pegasus stared back, soon releasing her. “It’s… complicated,” the pegasus said. “See-”
“I’m freezing my HORN and TAIL off out here!” somepony screamed from outside. “Is there something in there or what?”
The pegasus pushed the earth pony aside. Two other ponies, a unicorn and another pegasus with an arquebus, rushed into the mill and slammed the door shut. Catskill wordlessly got up, grabbed a board from the debris, and forced it beneath the crossbeam. She went straight back to her position on the millstone. “Latch’s broken,” she said.
Why was she helping them? They were just tracking down Amanita, ready to kill her. Maybe they already had. And they were willing to go through her to do it. She might as well have given them the rope to hang her with and tied the noose herself.
“If you’re looking for Amanita,” said Catskill, “she shot her-” She nodded at the second pegasus, the one with the arquebus. “-and she fell into the river. If she’s not dead already, she’ll probably freeze to death. But you don’t really care, do you?”
She waited for the order that would inevitably come. “Get on the ground.” “Put out your hooves.” “Close your eyes.” Something that would precede them doing something terrible to her. Yet the order never came. Everypony just stared at her. They were thinking, but Catskill didn’t care what about. When they decided to come for her, they’d come for her. Until then, she was just fine sitting on this millstone.
A few tiny gusts of cold wind blew in through the gaps in the doorframe. Everypony shivered, some more than others. “There’s a fireplace over there,” said Catskill unprompted, pointing. “It should still be good. This place…” She looked up at the remains of the mill. “Well, the stone parts were built to last. Stone doesn’t fall apart like wood.” She was babbling, desperate to fill the silence. Anything would do, including making herself look like a complete fool. “The wood should still be burnable, at least.”
The unicorn spoke up, seemingly also eager to fill the silence. “Is that, ah, dangerous in any way? If the wood’s rotting, and we spread whatever’s rotting it-”
Catskill scoffed at that. Talk about a flimsy knowledge of wood. “It doesn’t work like that.” She slid off the millstone and walked towards the fireplace. “Wood doesn’t rot easily in these conditions. Too cold and too dry. This place has been deserted for half a decade and it’s still fine.”
“Ah.”
“Furthermore…” Catskill threw a log into the fireplace. “Even if the wood was rotting, the fire would kill anything bad inside the wood. Burn it up.” And another. “It’s not like rotting wood releases poison gas.” She looked up. “Anypony got some firestarters and something like a flint and tinder?” She had some in her own bags, but she didn’t feel like digging around in them.
“Um.” The pegasus coughed. “I, I do.” She dug around in one of her saddlebags. Soon, a ball of paper and a box of matches were sitting next to Catskill. The pegasus looked at her one more time, then quickly turned away.
“Thanks,” said Catskill. Her brain must’ve slipped into autopilot, because she certainly wasn’t caring much for politeness at the moment. Both the paper and the matches were still dry. Magic, Catskill supposed. She spread the paper throughout the log pile and tried a match. She was shaking a little from the chill, so she broke the first match, but the second caught. Soon, a fire was burning merrily in the fireplace. The wood wasn’t too smoky, thankfully, and what smoke there was went up the chimney unimpeded.
Catskill slouched next to the fireplace and pulled her hood down over her eyes. “Better make yourselves at home,” she said. “We’re all gonna be here a while.”
The rush of danger had worn off not too long ago and Catskill was crashing. She tried sleeping, but every time she came close to nodding off, she remembered that there were strange ponies willing to kill her in the room and her unconscious jolted her back awake. The ponies didn’t seem to intent on killing her, though. All of them, bar the gunmare, got wrapped up in a conversation for a while. Catskill didn’t listen. She like to be eavesdropped on, so she didn’t eavesdrop. The gunmare, after laying her arquebus beside the door, sat down in front of Catskill and stared at her. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even open her mouth. She just tightened her scarf and stared.
“If Amanita freezes to death in that river,” said Catskill, “and spends her last hours suffering, it’s your fault. You know that, right?” It was a low blow, but Catskill was feeling low.
The gunmare didn’t say anything.
Of all the things Bitterroot had expected when entering the mill, the ranger patiently sitting on the millstone, her gun lying at her hooves, wasn’t one of them. She didn’t know what she’d “really” expected, but the ranger was being so quiet it threw her for a loop.
She’d entered the moment Artemis had said somepony she’d been chasing was giving up. And, indeed, there was the ranger. Definitely the one she’d fought. Definitely the one she’d almost killed. She pushed up the ranger’s head and stared into her eyes. Not a hint of necromantic flame, nothing out of the ordinary. She wasn’t a thrall. What was up with her? And just to make things weirder, the ranger propped the door shut and started a fire without any asking. Bitterroot had given her a firestarter and some matches, barely able to look at her without confusion and guilt swamping her brain.
But when the ranger decided to simply collapse by the fire, Bitterroot couldn’t be happier. She was tired, and apparently, the ranger also was, in spite of being an earth pony. Finally, a moment to just sit and not do anything.
So, naturally, Artemis dragged her and Trace aside for a talk. “So?” Artemis asked. “What d’you reckon?” She nodded at the ranger.
“I reckon I want to take a nap,” said Bitterroot. She couldn’t hide the weariness in her voice.
“I second the motion,” said Trace, sounding even more burnt than Bitterroot. “And I do believe that’s a majority, boom, nap time.” She started walking towards the fireplace.
Artemis bit on Trace’s tail and yanked her back. Trace’s yelp bounced around the mill like a superball. “I don’t mean like that,” snapped Artemis, “an’ you dang well know that. I mean ’bout ’er.”
“And I mean I’m too tired to do much thinking,” retorted Bitterroot. “Think machine broken and no do work good.”
“You’re tired?” snorted Artemis. “You’re tired. Pfft. How d’you think I feel? I-”
“Last time I saw you,” said Bitterroot quietly, “you were sitting on a cliff away from everything making snide comments to our sniper. I scouted, got shot at, chased two ponies through unfamiliar territory, actually got shot, and had the snot beat out of me by an earth pony, all during a sunblasted blizzard. And I’m not even an earth pony! How in Celestia’s name could you be tired?”
Artemis rolled her eyes. “Stop playin’ misery poker. It don’t-”
“You started it!” Bitterroot not-quite yelled, shoving Artemis away. “I just said I was tired, and you decided to one-up me, so I one-upped your one-up, since that was the way you were going.” She planted her face in her hoof, then pulled down and stomped on the ground. “I don’t care whether or not you’re more tired than me. But I’m too tired to deal with it now. Give me fifteen fricking minutes to rest, then we can talk. Deal?”
Artemis looked between Bitterroot and the ranger, her lips moving soundlessly. “…Fine, deal,” she said after far too much hesitation. “What d’you think, Trace?”
Trace wasn’t there.
“Trace?” Bitterroot asked, looking around the mill. Then she spotted Trace, on the opposite side of the fireplace as the ranger; not asleep, but definitely not thinking.
“Fifteen minutes,” said Bitterroot. She walked over and slouched down next to Trace.
Artemis was probably saying something, but Bitterroot didn’t hear it. She just sat, breathing slowly and deeply. The pain in her leg lethargically fluctuated between “barely there” and “strong but manageable”. She almost felt like she was still in the blizzard at first. But as the warmth of the fire washed over her, her heart stopped jackhammering inside her head and she could marshal her thoughts. She didn’t come close to falling asleep; she wasn’t that tired yet.
Next to her, Trace stood up and arched her spine. “Grah,” she groaned. “Still a mite sore…”
“Why’d you come down?” Bitterroot asked. “Was something up?”
“Not really,” said Trace. She wiggled her hooves one at a time. “Around the time you stopped circling, I simply noticed that the blizzard was getting awfully close and told Artemis it’d be best if we moved down into the valley. Good thing, too, because heavens was that one a doozy. Anyhoo, we reached the town not long before the blizzard hit, as in less than a minute not long. We spotted two ponies at the other end of the street we were on, tried to reach them, but it started snowing like mad before we’d gone twenty paces. We slowed our pace as we continued down the street, even though we knew the ponies would be long gone by the time we reached them. We came to a bridge and Artemis noticed a light downriver. She figured it’d be Amanita and had Gale shoot at it-”
“Hitting Amanita and sending her body into the river, right?” said Bitterroot.
“Evidently,” said Trace glumly. “And neither of them gave any thought to the difficulty of finding a body in a snowstorm like that at the time, regardless of what I said. The light went out, they celebrated, and then I asked where she was and reality hit like a… like a blizzard. We agreed to find some kind of shelter outside and I’d send up flares, hoping you’d see them and we could regroup. We gave you, ah, fifteen minutes to find them before holing up in one of the better buildings. You took six.”
“Good thing I found them when I did, then.” Bitterroot was a bit miffed that they’d only wait fifteen minutes, but she knew it was just a knee-jerk reaction. They couldn’t stay out in the storm too long and they had no way of knowing if she’d been killed or not. Ultimately, they’d sided with pragmatism, and she found it hard to disagree with them.
Artemis stomped up to them, scowling. “Fifteen minutes’re up,” she growled. “Feelin’ better? Or d’you need more naptime?”
“I was feeling much better before you came along,” drawled Trace. She flexed her back again. “Good enough for your discussion, at any rate.”
“Same here,” said Bitterroot. Her hooves were warm again and her wings didn’t feel like they’d been encased in ice for eternity.
“So…” Artemis pulled them to the other side of the mill. “Any ideas for ’er?” She pointed at the ranger, who hadn’t even noticed them. She was sitting so still Bitterroot could barely tell she was breathing.
“I don’t think she’s enthralled,” said Bitterroot. “Did you see her eyes? They’re normal.”
Artemis snorted gruffly. “Mebbe,” she said. “Ain’t th’only sign o’ thralldom. Glowin’ eyes jus’ means the work’s sloppy.” Her ears twitched and her eyes widened a little. She examined the ranger intently. “Although…” she whispered, “mebbe…” She shook her head.
“And if she was a thrall, don’t you think Amanita would have her fighting tooth and nail until she fell apart rather than giving up when she knew she couldn’t win?”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” said Trace, wiggling a hoof at Bitterroot. “It’d be such a waste to have a mind-controlled slave at your disposal and not make things easy for you in every conceivable manner. …Why are you looking at me like that? It’s true!”
“Changin’ the subject,” Artemis said, still staring at Trace, “let’s say she ain’t a thrall. Okay. Why’s she stickin’ with Amanita ’t all? Don’t she know-”
“I don’t think she does,” said Bitterroot. She’d been thinking this particular bit over ever since they’d entered the mill. “It’d be easy for Amanita to lie, and… Well, have you met any wilderness rangers?”
“I’ve known some small-town ecosystems managers,” Trace said thoughtfully, looking up. “But none this isolated.”
“My brother was one, and let me tell you, those ponies move to places like this because they’re driven like you wouldn’t believe.” Bitterroot stomped for emphasis. “If they weren’t, they wouldn’t last long. She probably thought Amanita was a lost traveller and took it upon herself to escort her back to civilization.”
“Really?” Artemis raised an eyebrow. “Jus’ like that?”
“What kind of pony lives out here?” asked Bitterroot, spreading her front legs wide. “Not just outdoorsmares, not just the best outdoorsmares, but the best of the best of the best. And nopony gets that good alone. They learned from others, they learned about helping others, and with a job like this, they’re required by law to offer the best assistance they can. Even if that ranger hated Amanita’s guts, she’d legally have to give her some kind of help.”
“Well, ain’t that just a load o’ giggles,” said Artemis. “Hate t’be one o’ them ponies.”
“So do you think we ought to interrogate her?” asked Trace. She kept switching her attention from Bitterroot to Artemis and back again. “Or, that’s a bit strong, question her? If she realizes she’s been duped, I’d hate to have to tie her up.”
Something inside Bitterroot squirmed. She’d been trying to kill the ranger during their fight based on a simple assumption. One that proved to be wrong. Did she really deserve to be a bounty hunter, doing things like that? Or was it just an honest mistake? Did-
“Y’think we can leave ’er out an’ about?” asked Artemis, glancing at the ranger.
“For the time being, perhaps,” said Trace. “Where would she go?” She gestured at the door. “Out there, where she’d be dead within hours? No, she’s stuck with us and we with her. She’s not our target anyway.”
“Think we can question ’er? She an’ Amanita were goin’ someplace. We might be able t’get their dest’nation outta her.”
“A fine plan, so long as you’re not the one questioning.”
Artemis stared at Trace and lowered one of her ears.
“No offense, Arty,” said Trace shamelessly, “but your pony skills, ah… Let’s just say they leave a bit to be desired. After a few minutes, she’ll most likely clam up rather than speak with you.”
Bitterroot expected an explosion of some kind, but Artemis chuckled gruffly. “Heh. Ain’t arguin’ wi’ that.”
“I can do it,” Bitterroot heard herself say. She didn’t know why. Maybe this was her way of forcing penance upon herself. “I’ve interrogated uncooperative ponies before.” She had, but not after nearly killing them.
Trace shrugged. “No complaints here.”
“Me neither,” said Artemis. “Need ’ny ’elp wi’ questions, or-?”
“No, no, I’m good,” Bitterroot said quickly. “I just- need a little while to… figure out how to phrase them. Get on her good side, y’know?”
“Sounds good.” Artemis grinned and slapped Bitterroot on the shoulder. “Go get ’er.”
Bitterroot pushed Artemis’s hoof away. “And I need space.” She started thinking, walking circles around the millstone as she thought. It was convenient and a decent length.
She knew what she wanted to ask; the biggest problem was getting the ranger to open up to somepony who’d tried to kill her and she’d tried to kill. Normally, Bitterroot would carry around some bits to loosen tongues, but she didn’t have any out here, and the ranger probably didn’t want any, anyway.
As her mind kept wandering, she glanced at the other ponies every now and then. The ranger was on the verge of sleeping. Trace was writing things out on a parchment (what they were, Bitterroot neither knew nor cared). Artemis was watching the ranger closely, occasionally muttering to herself or scratching some odd shape in the ground. And Gale didn’t do much at all.
In the end, Bitterroot finally decided to go as simple and direct as possible, nearly blunt. It wasn’t going to be nice, but it wasn’t going to be cruel, either. Really, the whole thing depended on how willing the ranger was to talk, which she didn’t know just yet. Here’s hoping.
She kept walking a little while longer. It delayed the talk.
Finally, after going around the millstone for what felt like the seventieth time, Bitterroot broke off and sat down in front of the ranger. In front of her near murder victim. Time for a little talk.
Catskill sat and waited. For the storm to end, for the ponies to rough her up, for Amanita to walk through the door sopping wet. For how long, she neither knew nor cared. None of them happened. Well, maybe the blizzard’s wind died down a little, but it was hard to tell. The fire kept burning and popping. Catskill stayed close to the fire, occasionally adding a log when it needed it. At this point, the fire was the only thing she could depend on.
The other ponies stayed in their group and talked and talked and talked before finally splitting up. Catskill hadn’t caught a thing, not even their names. She didn’t feel like asking their names, either. She didn’t even watch them as they moved around the mill. She’d never felt so alone. At least with Amanita, they could talk.
Her mind kept going back to Amanita, replaying the same “she might be dead, she might not be” information over and over. It was kind of hard to believe that just a day ago, she’d thought Amanita had been an intolerable idiot and she’d been dreading spending two days with her. Funny how things could change so quickly after some semi-friendly conversation.
But, still, these ponies… All this over a mare and a jealous significant other? Catskill knew Amanita hadn’t told all of the truth, but she wanted to think that everything Amanita had said had been the truth. Yet… arquebuses, organized groups, what looked like trackers, scouts, and who knew what else? These looked like mercenaries or bounty hunters. Had Amanita done something a lot worse than she said she’d done?
Or was the pony who’d hired them just that petty?
The ponies did a lot of nervous moving about. The earth pony walked back and forth in front of the door, muttering angrily. The unicorn sketched things on a sheet of parchment on the other side of the room (spell equations?). The pegasus walked around and around the millstone, glancing at Catskill every now and then. And the gunmare… The gunmare actually didn’t move. She just stared and stared and stared, barely even blinking. If Catskill had felt less torpid, she probably would’ve stared back.
Eventually, the pegasus stopped doing a circuit of the millstone and sat down in front of Catskill, staring at her with a haunted intensity even the gunmare couldn’t rival. Something reminded Catskill that she’d almost killed this pony, and this pony had almost killed her. She didn’t care. “Hey,” she said with a wave.
The pegasus didn’t respond. She looked back at the earth pony for a moment, chewing her lip. Then she looked at Catskill again. “Why did you defend Amanita?” she asked slowly.
“Why do you think?” snorted Catskill. “And why does it matter? She’s dead by now. I told you she went into the river, didn’t I? You know how cold it is?”
“You were shooting at me.”
“You started it.”
The pegasus twitched. “They…” She folded her ears back and averted her gaze. “…were warning shots.”
Catskill stared at the pegasus. “And I was supposed to know that how? A warning shot looks the same as a missed killshot.”
No response. Catskill sighed and turned to the fire.
“We thought you were enthralled,” said the pegasus eventually.
Catskill looked up. “Enwhatted?” She vaguely remembered hearing the word before, but couldn’t place where. Probably not in the past few days.
“Enthralled. Killed and had your will enslaved on your resurrection.” The pegasus was shuffling her wings and flicking her ears and suddenly looking very uncomfortable.
“My what?” They must’ve suffered brain damage in the blizzard. Or- something. The pegasus wasn’t talking sense. “I didn’t die! Amanita saved my life!”
The earth pony turned her attention to them. “Oh, really?” she said skeptically. “ ’Ow?”
“I ran into her in the wilderness,” said Catskill, “with a rabid bear chasing her. I saved her from the bear but got wounded in the process. I nearly died, but Amanita saved me with a healing ritual.” She was feeling contrary. Anything to throw in the faces of these ponies.
The earth pony snorted. “Uh-huh. Sure. And ’ow did this ‘ritual’ work?”
“I don’t know. I was out cold for most of it. When I say I almost died, I mean I almost died, not just hurt a lot.”
Silence reigned in the mill, with only the wind howling outside. Even the unicorn, Catskill noted, had stopped jotting things down. “You don’t know,” the pegasus said quietly.
Catskill got to her feet. “Don’t know what?”
The pegasus immediately whirled on the earth pony. “Artemis, don’t just-”
“Amanita’s a necromancer,” said the earth pony. Said Artemis.
Planting her face in her hoof, the pegasus mumbled, “And there she goes. Sun blast it, Artemis.”
Catskill blinked. A necromancer? No. No way. That was too crazy. Necromancers weren’t that… awkward. They were vicious and power-hungry, not the oblivious trust-fund foal Amanita had looked like, nor the traveling magical merchant she claimed to be. She tried forcing “necromancer” into her idea of Amanita, but it just didn’t fit. She burst out laughing. “Oh, what, you expect me to believe that?”
“She sicced a zombie bear on us!” yelled the pegasus.
“Oh, give me a break,” scoffed Catskill. “She couldn’t run from a bear if her life depended on it. And I know that from experience.”
Artemis’s mouth twitched. She opened her mouth to speak. The pegasus immediately raised a hoof and growled, “Don’t. Tact like yours, she’ll disbelieve anything you say out of spite.” Artemis briefly looked insulted, but stepped to the side.
The pegasus rolled her eyes. “What did Amanita say she was?”
“That she was a traveling wizard-for-hire,” Catskill said resolutely. “She’d run afoul of some mare by flirting with her significant other and the mare wanted revenge.”
“So this other mare wanted revenge so badly,” the pegasus said skeptically, “that she was willing to kill Amanita?”
“It could happen! How do you think hitmares make money?”
“…Okay, yeah,” admitted the pegasus. “But-”
“She was lyin’ through ’er teeth,” interrupted Artemis. “Amanita. She ain’t got no problems like that, not with anypony.” She crouched in front of Catskill, looming over her like some monster. “That ritual that ’ealed you? Did no such thing. She brought you back as a slave.”
“That’s insane!” yelled Catskill, bristling. It took all her self-control to not knock out Artemis right then and there. This was ridiculous.
Artemis shrugged. “It’s the truth. Ain’t my fault if y’ignore it.”
“I’m telling you, she saved my life!”
Artemis sneered. “Really?” She put a hoof to Catskill’s neck and waited. “That why your heart ain’t beatin’?”