This time, Valey and Felicity traveled along the mountainside, trying to skirt around the pony encampment and get a better view of the cove they were building on. It required a lot of elevation gain, since the building with the watchtower was nestled into the foothills and they wanted to give that a wide berth, but between shadow sneaking and a short rest they eventually reached an outcropping similar to the ones they had stopped on during the flight in.
Their new vista looked out over the shoreline, a steep drop from it to a beach that looked like it had been recently scoured for driftwood. From this far out and high up, it was easy to tell their lake was connected to the sea: a gap in the shoreline to the right, mountains sinking down to sandbars and then open gray. By squinting, Valey could even see the end of the misty cloud cover, light tinging the distant horizon.
Felicity tapped her. "You're watching the sky, yes, darling?" she breathed in Valey's ear.
"Got my cutie mark," Valey whispered back, though she took the hint. Below, they could see the encampment on the river mouth, partially obscured by trees but largely revealed due to the logging for timber. But up the mountains... Her eyes scanned the ring of peaks. Several more river valleys like theirs opened up periodically into the cove, and most of the mountains lost their heads in the low-hanging clouds. In fact, the clouds were almost jumping distance above them.
"...What's up?" Valey frowned. "Literally."
"I can't see," Felicity murmured. "As long as you've got us covered from an ambush. I can't explain why, but this whole valley has a very slight sensation that's making my fur crawl. Probably just nerves. Silly Felicity..."
"Yeah, well, now that you mention it, we are a little exposed." Valey pulled her back toward the trees, dropping off their outcropping and taking shelter against its earthy side.
Felicity gratefully followed. "Well, we're getting a good lay of the land, at least," she said, still keeping her voice hushed. "One way or another, though, I think we'll have to be more bold than just lurking if we want a better idea of what's going on here."
Valey bit her lip. "You know, I've actually got a halfway decent idea. These dudes? I'm guessing they're stranded. Since they seem used to airships and don't have any griffons, I'm gonna guess they're not from the empire. And I actually know about a group of Varsidelians that was supposed to be getting a lift home and probably... maybe passing within shipwreck distance of here. It could just be a coincidence, but what if these are those poor dudes who got their merchant ships stolen way back when to send Stormhoof's army to Ironridge and then got abducted and freed from pirates?"
"I remember that..." Felicity drummed her wingtips, fidgeting.
"Doesn't explain everything," Valey continued. "Mainly, why the batponies thought we wouldn't leave if we knew what was down here. Like... what did they think we'd do? Come try to rescue them? Bananas, our ship would be packed. Still, they seem to be doing alright for themselves. Unless there's something urgent we don't know about, I'm fine with just going back to the ship and-"
A loud yelling split the air, and above the camp's clearing, the clouds flashed. Multiple voices shrieked, and then the mist fountained downward, ejecting a tangle of several ponies. Some were batponies, carrying others who appeared to be limp. One cluster was tangled in a falling brawl, until a periwinkle pegasus broke free and zoomed ahead, streaking toward the ground and leaving two batponies left behind. Yells from the camp answered, and with a satisfying creak of timbers, a small boulder was launched flying at the sarosians.
It had no aim whatsoever, and all the batponies easily dodged, but was enough of a deterrent that they broke off their pursuit. The message had been sent: the camp was armed and ready.
"Scratch all of that," Valey muttered, beckoning Felicity and slithering further down the mountain. "I'm really, really curious again."
"Seven! Whole! Batponies!" a frustrated, high-pitched mare's voice whined as Valey and Felicity crept closer, daring to sneak up in the main building's shadow to get as close to the action as possible. "I can't believe after all this fighting I haven't worn them down enough not to send that many. Who do they think I am, Admiral Valey?"
Valey and Felicity already clung to each other for stealth, and Valey drew back heavily at the mention of her Ironridge title. In the clearing, at the center of everyone's attention, a pegasus mare with storm cloud purple fur and a green-gray mane sat on her haunches and complained, an earth pony tending to her with a few improvised bandages and herbal poultices. Shifting a little, Felicity put the tip of her hoof on Valey's side, starting to stroke her in strange patterns.
Instantly, Valey felt her cheeks light up again, and her tail lashed in the shadows... until she thought about why Felicity would do that, and realized they were letters. KNOW HER?
She watched the pegasus, thinking. Did she? She was almost cute, but the look was ruined because she also appeared to have been punched many times in the last few days without being given time to recover. It hardly cowed her, though, and was probably the outcome of a lot of fighting. Pegasus, fighter, vaguely familiar... And then everything clicked in her head at once. Kero's mercenaries. She didn't know which one, but this was a mare from the Flame District tunnels.
YES, Valey wrote back in Felicity's fur, feeling like there had to be a less-distracting way to silently communicate but entirely unsure what it was.
"Couldn't reach the ship, Boss?" a stallion sighed. "They didn't come down for our signal, either. Oh well. At this rate we'll stay here until the boat is finished, and then we'll get one more shot at this same song and dance..."
"Aww, cheer up!" The pegasus winced, feeling her bruises. "It's not... ow. A total loss. The batponies don't like it when we try to go above the clouds most of the time, but they went really ballistic today. That means that shadow we saw must have been an airship."
Another stallion with a droopy face looked at her forlornly. "Unless it's all a part of their plans, getting our hopes up and pushing us to overextend..."
"Or wear you out," the bandage mare added in a concerned tone. "Up until you showed up, we were always on the back hoof fighting them. Even the old boss can't hold them off, so we were never making any headway on projects. And you've been taking too many fights with too little time to recover."
"So what?" the pegasus countered with a pained smile. "You've seen how great I fight. I'm getting them tired out too. And I'm doing it for a good cause. I'm practically a one-mare army."
From the sidelines, a stallion floated a small, sparking piece of metal to her hooves. "She's right, you know. You think you can repair your taser after this? Even if you keep going, you're running out of tools. We need a new plan before you give up or die and they raid our construction again! Else we'll never get out of here!"
"Look, I'm trying my best and I'm not giving up!" the pegasus snapped. "Maybe you'd like to try fighting seven punchy batponies at once? I'm the one risking life and looks for this, and they're almost vanquished! After how much I've beaten them up, they have to be! There can't be more batponies than this in a village."
A mare in the audience looked up. "We always could do more to fight, ourselves..."
"After how many we lost escaping from that pirate ship?" A muscular unicorn glared down at her. "I still have a limp in two legs from that fight. If we challenged them openly anywhere but our base, they'd just finish what they started."
"Hello, rude!?" The pegasus cleared her throat. "You'd get a lot less stomped than you would without me on your side. And I fight all of them solo! Hmmph." She swung her short mane and got shakily to her hooves. "I'm going to take a nap and recuperate. No one bother me if you want your best and only fighter in as good of shape as she can be."
She trotted off, backside turned to the camp and tail flicking.
A few worried murmurs began to break out, and before they could intensify Valey suddenly felt her head and thoughts still considerably. Felicity held them in place for a full minute longer until the ponies started to disperse, then finally relaxed her talent, tugging Valey along toward the hills. Valey was happy to follow.
"Okay," Valey breathed, hoping she was out of earshot of the camp and keeping her voice as low as it would go. "I'm really tempted to back off and call our friends on the ship, but first I wanna talk to that mare. Because there's two things I know about Kero's pegasi: they'll never work for him, since he abandoned them after sending them on a mission that was a death trap, and they're all really cool with me."
"Are you certain, darling?" Felicity murmured, muzzle to Valey's ear.
"Yeah. Well... yeah." Valey hesitated. "Maybe she wouldn't be cool if I snuck up and surprised her, but this is someone who knows what I can do. Explanations, here I come."