Hearthfire woke to find herself very warm. It was almost painfully bright, and a single beam of morning sunlight was baking her through the thin blanket thrown untidily over her. Cas was a welcome weight on her side, basking lazily in the sunbeam. She was pleasantly dry, and spent a few minutes enjoying the heat as the feeling of the cold waters of the bay closing around her faded to its proper place as an unpleasant recollection.
Eventually she made herself get up. Hordes of questions were starting to intrude into her contentment, and she no longer felt the attraction of idleness. Stonefeather. Blossom. Rainbow Plume. Arbor. Dancing Pinion. Swift. She was intensely grateful to Cas for being here; it was one less person whose fate she had to worry about.
From the window, she discovered that she was high up, on the east-facing side of a large building, and it was a morning sun which was warming the bed. She took in the city. The skyline was different, of that much she was sure; but she had not been familiar enough with the old Whinnycia to appreciate what had really changed. The damage from the storm was obvious, however. The most obvious change to the city was the new abundance of scaffolding as engineers and builders worked to shore up the structural integrity of weakened buildings.
“Good to see you up and about finally.”
She hadn’t noticed the door opening; Stonefeather was walking carefully backwards into the room, pushing the door with his flank as he balanced a breakfast tray on one hoof.
“Stonefeather!” She had to restrain herself from leaping at him and upsetting the tray. “Thank Heavens you’re okay! What about everypony else? What happened?”
She watched his face carefully as he turned around, watching for any sign of bad news with baited breath.
“Everypony made it,” Stonefeather grinned. “Even Rainbow Plume recovered faster than you did. You were in and out of consciousness for nearly two days.”
Flood of relief.
“Thank heavens. So, what happened?”
“Well, let’s see... It turned out that Rainbow Plume was okay, more or less. She got blown off course by the storm, and couldn’t find her way back. Any pegasi who could be spared went back out to look for her once they managed to finally break up the second storm. She showed up miles and miles in land, completely lost. So after that, they pretty much had to let Blossom go. Dancing Pinion heard, and was out of his hospital bed right away, trying to fight against it like an idiot for about thirty seconds before he worked out there was no chance.”
“So there really wasn’t anything for them to fight over, huh? How badly hit was the city?”
“Pretty bad. You probably can’t see the worst of it from here. The bottom of the bay is littered with debris. The sea ponies are not even slightly happy; they basically lost one building for every one that we did, and there were some injuries down there, too. Of course, the sea pony branches of the families are trying to smooth down the ruffled scales, but neither of the families is popular, anywhere in the city, right now.”
“What are the families doing about this whole affair?”
“They spent a while accusing each other of wrecking the city. But as I said, no pony is listening. With the two most hawkish ponies out of the way, things have gotten better.”
“Wild Reed is out of the way, too?”
“Yes. I pulled him out of the hall before it went down, nearly in as bad shape as Pinion,” Stonefeather chuckled, shook his mane in amusement, but then sobered, “You owe a couple of sea ponies a drink, by the way. A couple of their strongest swimmers saw the light from your horn and decided to risk going in close enough to fish you out. They said it was touch and go for a moment.”
“...and what about Swift?”
“Huh?” Stonefeather gave her an odd look, like she’d been hit over the head and wasn’t talking straight. Hearthfire thought about it for a second, then smacked a hoof into her forehead.
“Swift is my plane. I suppose there’s nothing to be done but go and check on her myself... oh, sugar.”
“Pardon?”
“They moved the city around, didn’t they?”
“It was a complete mess, and there’s no official Plan right now - there’s a lot of talk about dissolving the Council, and working on a new system. So for now it’s just cobbled together as best we could. Never mind the fact that the city hall needs to be rebuilt, and huge chunks of the architectural records were destroyed. It could take years to sort it all out.”
“So... you wouldn’t be able to tell me where one particular boat shed ended up, would you?”
* * *
“In the end, I stayed two more weeks, long enough that the worst of the mess was cleared up, and I got to have a proper explore of the new Whinnycia. Swift got a bit knocked about, but she was okay. She’s well built. Getting her up and running again was easy.”
She waited, while the tail end of the translation made it around the circle to those ponies who did not speak Equestrian. Hearthfire wondered vaguely what meanings and details had been gained and lost in the process. Once the last pony had been brought up to speed, there followed a short round of hoof clapping. Hearthfire bowed her grateful acceptance, feeling that she perhaps could have told it better; it was not a story that she had told often, and here and there she had stumbled on details or the sequences of events, but it had seemed appropriate for the dry heat of the midday desert.
“That story, it was true?” Sandwhistler asked, after the applause had died down. His father cuffed him lightly, a reprimand for being rude, but he pushed on, “There is really a floating city? With water all around?”
“There is. It was just as strange as I’ve described it, maybe more so.”
She reached for the pack, where she had dropped it beside her two hours ago, when she began the tale, and dug around to find the Box. It was constructed of an unvarnished dark wood, its panels dovetailed together into a tightly sealed oblong, with a slight dome to the lid and a sturdy catch holding it shut. She worked the catch, and lifted the lid. Dima craned her long neck to see inside, but Hearthfire held it at an angle to hide its contents. Many of the things inside the Box were personal, and she preferred to choose which pieces she shared and which she kept to herself.
After a minute of carefully rearranging the contents, she drew out two slightly worn photographs, of a city in the middle of a bay, both taken from the air. She passed them to Dima, and indicated that she should hand them around to anypony who was interested.
“The one with the big circular building in the middle is the one I took as I first crossed the bay on my approach. The second I took as I left, that’s the one with all the pegasi in the foreground. You can see the change in the layout of the city; just judging from the waterways, they might as well be different cities, you see?”
As the photos went around the circle, a young voice piped up with something in Saddle Arabian. The unicorn filly had been hiding behind her big pegasus brother’s flank, although Hearthfire couldn’t see their mother anywhere.
“What did she say?” Hearthfire asked, even as half the traders around the circle shared a glance, and burst out laughing. Dima had a particularly obnoxious smirk on her face as she translated:
“She wants to know if you and Stonefeather got married. Because that always happens in her stories.” Hearthfire could feel the flush creeping into her face, but did her best to laugh along, shaking her head.
“No, we were never... an item. He was a very nice pony, but I’ve never been the settling down type. Hmm, oh, maybe another time, I’ll tell her the story about the closest I ever got to being married. How about that?”
“Haha, I think I will hold you to that promise, Hearthfire,” Dima chuckled, and translated her answer for the unicorn filly.
“For now, it is time to move again,” Sandborne announced, glancing at the sun and standing up, brushing grit from his robe.
“Uh, say, Sandborne, I’ve been meaning to ask...”
“Yes? If I can grant it, I’ll be happy to.”
“Sandwhistler mentioned you had some Equestrian books. Do you have any books I could borrow to practice my Saddle Arabian?”
* * *
Through the day, the ground became more rocky and uneven, with more and more outcrops dotting the landscape. The caravan was forced to wind around some of the larger protrusions, and Hearthfire was sure that they would normally make more progress than this in a day.
They camped in between two walls of stone. It was sheltered from the wind, but the sun had hardly touched it, and as the night closed in it was only the fading warmth from the air that kept the low temperatures at bay. Hearthfire watched closely as the camp was set up, with an eye to learning the ropes as quickly as possible, so she could stop feeling useless every time there was work to be done. Normally, in a strange place, she was happy to treat it as a holiday, but here she was an added burden in a hostile environment, who didn’t have the money to pay her way.
Once the worst of the evening’s chores were completed, Sandborne found her, bringing with him a small stack of books. He had produced an Equestrian-Saddle Arabian dictionary, a phrase book (aimed at a Saddle Arabian learning Equestrian, but still very useful), and three slim, colourfully bound volumes that looked to be children’s books aimed at a range of ages. She accepted them gratefully, and as soon as she had found a spot near the fire and organised her own space, she got to work.
Sandwhistler and Cloud Flower, with Cloud Flower’s little sister in tow, found her an hour later. They handed over a steaming bowl of stew, and sat with great apparent interest as she spooned vegetables with one hoof and pinned down the picture book with another.
“You are learning?” Sandwhistler asked after a while, once his own stew had been devoured.
“Yes. It’s better if I can talk to everyone, right? Though I don’t think I’ll be very good at it by the time we part ways. Um, by the way...”
She waved a hoof towards Cloud Flower’s sister, who was looking from one to the other in complete incomprehension, “What is her name?”
Sandwhistler translated for Cloud Flower, who did the actual question asking. Hearthfire flicked through the dictionary, trying to hold the unfamiliar sounds in her head as she worked it out.
“Um... Darling Bean?” Sandwhistler took the dictionary away from her, and quickly riffled through it, held it back out to her. “Oh. Darling Posy. Nice to meet you.”
Cas was watching Posy with intense distrust, but she did let the unicorn filly pet her without bolting. For her part, Posy was much less aggressive in her attention, and before long Cas was purring contentedly.
“Good evening, everypony.” Dima emerged into the firelight, looming astoundingly tall over the four sitting ponies. “Oh? Studying I see.”
“Mmhmm. Hello, Dima.”
“Does their mother know they’re hanging around with you?” Dima asked, her tone playful. Hearthfire rolled her eyes.
“Probably not. She doesn’t like me very much, does she?”
“She doesn’t like outsiders. Forgive her.”
“Well, I can understand where she’s coming from, even if she’s not really being fair.”
“Unless you really are bad news, no? If she is right, and trouble follows you everywhere you go, then she is the only sensible pony in the caravan.” For a moment, Hearthfire almost believed that she was serious, but then she winked. “I wouldn’t worry, maybe she will come around, maybe she won’t. You cannot do anything to change her mind.”