The ocean's breeze pushed the ship towards the coast, a steady stream blowing from behind them that curved the sails and gave birth to the waves they travelled on top of. Sassy was more concerned with the way it messed her mane up or threw salt water on her clothes.
Fluttershy didn't appear to share her worries. She just stared at the promontory they were heading towards, rocking from side to side along with the movements of the boat itself. Of course, wearing no clothes and paying no particular amount of time to care for her mane did mean she was unlikely to be concerned by either.
Twilight, on the other hoof, looked nervous, even more so than Sassy. But hers was a different kind of nervousness, clearly. Excitement for the shortly approaching future, and worry for what it might bring. But not too much, not too visible. A far cry from the outbursts of her past the unicorn had been told about. Equestria's only princess was moderately, appropriately nervous.
She was also looking towards Sassy. That kind of looking that tried to make it seem like she wasn't, and as a result made it obvious she was. And she was swaying from side to side, while her lips twisted up and down. One could almost see the words trying to claw their way out of her mouth.
"What is it, Princess?" Sassy asked, turning towards the alicorn.
The smile on Twilight's face was almost guilty. "Well... You know how that is the capital, right?" She pointed a hoof to the red ring of walls barely visible on top of the headland.
Sassy nodded. "Our destination, yes. I haven't forgotten about the briefing yet." It would have been quite a bothering assumption on Twilight's part, after she'd had to endure that without falling asleep. Rarity had conveniently avoided mentions of Twilight's lengthy explanations when telling tales of their adventuring.
"Right, right, of course!" Twilight ran a hoof down her mane and gave a small laugh that could have been a cough. "But, as you can probably guess, that's not where we'll be landing. We're landing right there!" She pointed, again, this time straight in front of them, at the shore the ship was heading towards.
Sassy blinked. "I had no expectations of the ship growing wings, if that's what you are trying to imply."
Another cough that could have been a laugh. "Of course not. But how do you think we'll get from there all the way up to the city?"
Twilight had on her face the wide-eyed look of a filly who's just learned a secret, but hasn't learned to keep one yet. But the unicorn had no guess as to what she was about to reveal, and so after a pause she simply tried, "By walking?"
She then shook her head. "No, obviously not. It would take too long and be terribly taxing. Ponies don't walk up to Canterlot. Is it by train?"
Twilight's face lit up even brighter. "But the climb is too steep. In Equestria we use gravity-bending spells to let trains climb up mountains, but they don't have magic here." There was tremor in her body, like some clockwork contraption on the verge of breaking apart.
Sassy was at a loss. The alicorn clearly expected something, some kind of revelation, but she had no clue what. "So..."
"So, they invented cog trains!" The tension inside Twilight's body was released, and she almost jumped as she said that.
"Oh." To Sassy, it was exactly as interesting as knowing how regular trains worked. All that mattered was them taking her from point A to point B in a short enough time. The inner mechanisms were irrelevant. She wasn't even actually sure how the regular ones worked. Still, she reasoned she should probably try to be polite. "Interesting," she forced out with an unintentional dryness that not even the ocean around them could solve.
Twilight nodded with increasing awkwardness. "You don't care about that nearly as much as I do, right?"
Sassy gave a little reassuring smile in response. She succeeded only halfway.
Twilight stepped back, still nervously almost-twitching, and went back to the front of the ship. There she began to repeat the same series of events with Fluttershy, starting with the faux non-staring.
"Nervous, isn't she?"
Sassy didn't turn. They'd all learnt trying to look at each other while talking led to nothing more than sore necks, so it wasn't worth doing most of the time. "I'm sure she will calm down when the time comes. From what I've been told, this isn't even that bad."
Fluttershy followed Twilight's hoof and stared at the approaching coastline in front of them, and the minotaur at Sassy's side stepped forward as Twilight asked how they'd get from there to the city. "We'll arrive in a couple minutes," he said. Then he called to another member of the crew, "Bronze, stop slacking there!"
His shout had covered Fluttershy's guess, but he walked away just in time for Sassy to hear Twilight explain how Equestrian trains used magic, meaning the pegasus had thought of those too. It made sense, Canterlot was the closest thing they knew to the city they were about to visit.
Truth be told, Sassy was nervous about the future as well. The wind and seawater were distractions, lesser things it was easier to focus on. Like the very short jump Twilight gave in front of her, blurting out about cog trains to a confused Fluttershy. This could be a pivotal moment in Equestria's history, and Sassy'd never taken part in anything similar.
The sound of a horn being blown took her mind out of her train of thoughts. They had approached the coast faster than she had realised, or maybe she'd gotten too distracted to notice. Another horn responded from the shore, where she could already spot a few other minotaurs waiting for them.
Taking a deep breath, the unicorn joined her companions up ahead. They were all silent now staring ahead. Finally, the ship entered the promontory's shadow and came to a stop as it touched the shore. And the three walked up to its side and stepped down behind the captain, setting hoof on the minotaur lands for the first time in their lives.