The silence of the guilty reigned over the scene. Even the soldier bawling his eyes out had turned himself over to quieter sobs as he buried his face in his forehooves. The sound of crackling fire behind me as the home of the Medusita clan burned was faint and almost overwhelmed by the whisper of the faint breeze stirring the grasses by our hooves, but it only added to the sharp, tense atmosphere that had descended. I cast my eyes over the party, and few could return my gaze; I don’t know what face I pulled, but I believe it was likely one of pure shock, not anger or even disappointment. In truth, I ought to have seen this coming, but at the time I was thoroughly blind-sided by this revelation that somehow Second Fiddle had found a new depth to sink to in violating civilisation’s oldest and most sacred law. Each pony bore the signs of being culpable in this too, whether it was the crimson red that seemed to sparkle like dark rubies in the harsh sunlight on their armour and weapons, or merely the unmistakable look of shame carved onto their faces like marble statues.
The sobbing pony continued to weep.
Second Fiddle recovered his wits and was suddenly alive with nervous, frantic energy. He turned on his hooves, violently so, and the pale, drawn ponies with haunted expressions around him scattered as though he were a leper, except for the crying soldier.
“Will you stop that!” he snarled. Second Fiddle raised a hoof to strike the pony, but the anguished voice of the Corporal caused him to stop.
“We followed orders!” he roared suddenly. [Prince Blueblood does not give his name, presumably because he never asked, but archive research indicates that this was Corporal Quick Step of the Prism Guards.]
Everypony turned to look at the Corporal. He stood there, chest heaving not with exertion but with barely-constrained anger. Tears rimmed his wide, bloodshot eyes.
“Shut up,” snarled Second Fiddle.
I stepped forward, and the ponies stepped back. “What orders?” I asked, trying to keep my voice hushed and level with a super-equine effort. “Whose orders?”
“Don’t answer him!” Second Fiddle’s voice was louder, and he trembled in his boots.
The Corporal pointed his muzzle at the Commissar-General. “His.”
“He’ll send us all to the gallows!” shouted Second Fiddle with a petulant stomp of his hoof. His voice reached the shrill crescendo of a pony trying to ignore the sight of his life crumbling into ruin before his eyes.
“Do you think I can live with myself after what you made us do?” The Corporal swung his hoof at the ponies around him in a wide arc. “Can any of us?”
The sword stained with pony blood was by my hooves, so I picked it up. Blood soaked almost over the entire length of the heavy blade and ran down the fuller to smother the handle itself, and where it had fallen on the ground the grey and pale yellow dust clung to its congealing surface. It felt repulsive to hold even with magic, as though that drying blood was coating my horn instead.
“I want to know,” I said, turning this tainted weapon over in my magic. “I want to know now why there is pony blood on your sword, Second Fiddle.”
I was met with that guilty silence once again, though punctuated with the sharp sound of Second Fiddle’s increasingly panicked breathing. The Corporal looked as though he might say something, and despite an encouraging few nods from Yours Truly, he clenched his jaw shut tightly and looked at his forehooves instead. The others glanced around, hoping that another one of their number would be the one to puncture this conspiratorial veil and allow the truth to be revealed, if only to alleviate the weight of sin in their souls, but nothing was forthcoming. I suppose most ponies say that they would always do the right thing in such a situation, but the fact of the matter is that all but a tiny minority of souls rational enough to realise that admitting fault might lead to a lighter sentence will invariably cling to the fantasy that silence will make it all go away.
“If you won’t tell me now, then I’ll take a look over there myself.” I took about three steps before Second Fiddle called out after me.
“We did what was necessary!” he yelled.
“For Faust’s sake, tell me what orders involve killing ponies?”
“We had to find Changelings!” His voice was becoming shrill, and as he continued his excuse for what he had done he turned to address the ponies under his command, as though trying to convince them as much as me. “They resisted! It was self-defence! We had to do it!”
The Corporal spat on the ground and rubbed the wasted moisture away with his hoof. “They were unarmed,” he said.
“They resisted.”
“They were civilians. You made us kill them all.”
“They were collaborators, working with the enemy!”
“That colt - his blood is on your sword - was he a collaborator?”
“I-” The words choked and died in Second Fiddle’s throat. His face was pale, and wracked with the dawning, sickening terror of a pony slowly realising that they have just slipped past a point of no return. A pony has a choice upon reaching that point; the Corporal had chosen to accept it and whatever consequences would come, and it seemed that the rest of his section had likewise resigned themselves to whatever fate the inevitable court martial will bestow upon them.
Commissar-General Second Fiddle, however, chose not to, and with that decision he seemed to draw a degree of strength from it. He stood up straighter, swallowed hard, and strode on over to me with defiant strides. His blade was seized out of my aura, though I let him take the offending article, and he brandished the disgusting thing in my face as he attempted to explain himself:
“An informant tipped us off that a Changeling was hiding in that little shanty town over there -- some young colt by the name of Bright Spark who lives with his family. They said he’d been complaining about us, the Equestrians I mean, about how we should go back to where we came from.”
“That hardly seems like adequate grounds to do that,” I interjected, waving a hoof at the ruins behind me.
“I’m getting to it, damn you,” he spat, and I fought down the urge to admonish him for his rudeness. “We watched the clan. There’s only a few dozen of them that live there, and they keep to themselves far too much according to our informant. The other groups say they’re secretive and act strangely, like they’re hiding something. It turns out they were. We went in and found Bright Spark hiding in one of the tents, so we dragged him out kicking and screaming. I hit him with the reveal spell and there, he was a damned Changeling! The heathens kicked up a fuss, Faust knows what they were saying, but one of them hit me. We fought back. They were knowingly hiding an enemy of Equestria, so we had to set an example.”
“By murdering them all in cold blood?”
“It’s about sending a message.” Second Fiddle breathed a deep, frustrated sigh, as though I was a foal failing to understand the very basic concept he was trying to explain. “We’re at war, for pony’s sake. If you don’t have the stomach for this then you shouldn’t be here -- leave the fighting for the stallions with the strength of will to do what is necessary to achieve victory.”
I was at a loss for words, which is quite unusual for a skilled dissembler such as myself, yet this was unlike any situation that I had been in before. Odonata was right, damn her, and if anything her grim prophecy that we too shall descend into atavistic barbarism in the pursuit of victory was a little conservative in its estimate of how long it would take. And yet, though the soldiers there had followed Second Fiddle’s orders, the very obvious guilt and trauma of what they had done was, in its own twisted way, a faint light of hope that there remained some glimmers of civilisation even out here at its moral and physical edge.
“If this is what you think it takes to win,” I said at length, “then we have already lost.”
It sounded better in my head, as it only elicited a confused look from Second Fiddle, but I think I can be excused this muddling of words. Besides, if he either failed, whether earnestly or by choice, to understand the true implications of what he had done, then nothing I could say then and there would make him see otherwise. He had committed to this delusion that anything could justify the wilful and deliberate slaughter of the very ponies we had been fighting to protect and liberate, and there was no going back for him.
“I’m going to go over there and take a look for myself,” I said, hoping that they had been careless, or prescient from a certain point of view, enough to leave surviving witnesses behind. “Then I will write a report directly to the Ministry of War about this.”
“No,” he said, which was so strikingly plain and blunt that I could only dumbly echo it.
“No?”
“No.” He advanced until he was almost nose-to-nose with me. “I won’t let you tear down everything that I’ve so worked hard to build, out of… out of what? You couldn’t stand to see me, your high school bootlicker, succeed?”
Second Fiddle’s voice became shriller with the raw desperation of a pony trying to hold together the torn shreds that his career had become. I pitied him, which is certainly not to say that I felt any sympathy for what he had just done, but more of a sense of shame at just how far he had fallen, and indeed when ponies in Canterlot would read my report, preferably in a room without anything breakable in it, how far his career would continue to plummet into the depths of ignominy and disgrace. He would have only himself to blame for it, and even then he wouldn’t.
“You still haven’t moved past bloody high school,” I muttered aloud, partially to myself. And then, louder and addressing the wretch before me directly: “If you truly believe you are innocent then you’ll have nothing to fear from my report.”
I turned to leave once again, but this time made it no further than a single step in the direction of the smouldering tents and homes before Second Fiddle tried one last, futile ploy to worm his way out of the utter mess that his lust for glory had created for him. “Corporal!” he shouted, his voice cracking with the strain. “Arrest Blueblood! Take him into custody! If he files his report we’ll all be hanged.”
The Corporal didn’t move, though by the way he was looking at me with his face screwed up in mental anguish I could tell that he was sincerely contemplating following that order. Even if he did, the word must still get out, as it always does; arresting a prince of the realm, while not exactly uncommon as I had spent more than a few nights in my youth in a cell for being drunk and disorderly, would at least generate enough attention that other ponies would start asking the sorts of questions that unravel hastily slapped-together cover-ups.
Still, I wanted to put Second Fiddle in his place, so I looked the Corporal directly in his tear-rimmed eyes and said, “You were there at the breach, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said with a hushed voice. I had no way of knowing for certain, of course, but given he was of the Prism Guards regiment and clearly a veteran thereof it was all but inevitable that he had faced the storm of shot and shell that was the breach at Virion Hive’s castle. “You were there, too, sir. I saw you take the breach.”
“I had a little help with that.” More than a little help, really.
The Corporal chewed on his lower lip, and held his breath before releasing it in a slow, heavy sigh. “I’m sorry, sir.” Then, turning to Second Fiddle, who continued to stand there with his limbs shaking with rage: “I cannot comply with your order.”
“I will have you shot for this,” snarled Second Fiddle. “You too, Blueblood.”
I didn’t bother dignifying that useless comment with a response; clearly nopony thought that he could possibly follow through with that threat, though I would have liked to see him try, and we had wasted far too much time bickering out here. So I turned and trotted off towards the burning shanty town and left the guilty party to their own devices. Perhaps I ought to have dragged them all back to Virion Hive, but in truth I was at such a complete and total loss as to what I was supposed to do there. Though I had bumbled my way through being a regimental commissar and then a military governor with just enough success to hide the fact I had no idea what I was doing, this was so far beyond any frame of reference I had. Yet, given what happened later, I cannot see how anything else I could have done there would have changed things for the better. Hindsight, it seems, is not as perfect as ponies say it is, and if anything can be even murkier than the tunnel vision of the here and now.
The stench of blood and smoke was overwhelming even to my ruined sense of smell, such that I found myself lingering closer to Cannon Fodder’s more familiar, earthy aroma to alleviate it. The tents had ceased burning, leaving only smoking piles of blackened ash and the charred, broken remains of what little furnishings and personal possessions these ponies kept. There was one more permanent structure that was still smouldering -- a small, squat little building made of mud bricks, and through an empty window black smoke poured out heavenwards. I could see no bodies yet, so I approached the building, nudged open the door, and peered inside. Instantly I regretted it and slammed the door shut. The image I had seen of burning corpses, stacked like wood in a campfire and set alight, was fleeting, but it stuck in my mind and wouldn’t go away. The fire had died away to embers dancing across the blackened, bubbling flesh of the dead, each curled up and shrivelled in the heat. The image still hasn’t left me.
I leaned against the sun-baked wall, fighting the urge to vomit, swallowing down the foul-tasting bile until I could stand it no longer and my lunch splattered on the ground by my hooves. When I heard Cannon Fodder call my name he sounded very distant and remote, even though he was standing not more than half a dozen paces from me.
Lifting my head helped to clear it a little, but where I expected to see him as his usual pillar of stoic, unflappable strength, I was stunned by the expression of shock on his usually blank face. Eyes wide, mouth agape, ears pinned back, and even the skin under his grubby coat had become deathly pale.
“Sir, you should see this,” he said. “It’s… it’s awful, sir.”
The sound of the buzzing of flies gave me a clue as to what he had found, but nothing could have prepared me for it.
He led me behind the building to a sort of clearing in the middle of the shanty town, which I assumed had previously been used as some sort of communal square like a piazza. Bodies were piled up in the centre, and their blood had spread out in a rough circle as it soaked into the dry earth. In the pile I could make out faces, limbs, cutie marks, and so on, in dusty yellows and blues and pinks, all streaked with red. It was impossible to count them, as I could hardly tell where one blood-drenched corpse started and another ended, but I could assume that most of the population of the town, however tiny, was either lying before me, deathly still and eyes gazing out into nothing, with the remainder in that building.
The ground was covered with hoofprints and shallow furrows. Streaks of dark crimson-brown led from this pile to the burning building behind us. If one had to hazard a guess, the soldiers had attempted to dispose of the evidence of their crime by dragging the bodies into the building and burning it, but had given up on that venture for one reason or another, most likely to maintain the illusion that the Changelings had committed this atrocity.
The body of a dead Changeling drone was sprawled out and crudely staked to the ground with bayonets a little bit away from the main pile. It appeared to be on display, as it were, as though Second Fiddle had dragged it there to make sure that anypony who stumbled across this place would see it. So, there was some truth to what he had said about a Changeling hiding amongst them, but even then it was nowhere near enough to justify the pile of pony corpses before us.
I had seen death before, but the old cliche trotted out by tired old soldiers that it ‘gets easier’ was nothing more than a comforting lie. One merely finds a way to cope with it or simply go mad, and in the case of the former it merely feels like delaying the latter. This war had consistently found new ways to disgust and horrify me, and I dreaded to think just how much it could possibly escalate from here.
“There’s something moving in there!” exclaimed Cannon Fodder, pointing at the morbid heap before us.
There, at the base, I saw one of the bodies, this one of an older mare with a kindly face twisted in shock, shift and jerk spasmodically. The thin, slender body rolled away, her limbs flopping lifelessly like a ragdoll, and she tumbled onto the ground in a heap. Another pony, his face a mask of blood but very definitely alive, pushed his head through the resulting gap and gasped in great lungfuls of the foul, stinking air. He then strained against the bodies above him pinning him down, jaw clenched in a rictus of desperate exertion until he managed to pull one hoof free, which stretched out to the ground and dragged along it, forming increasingly deeper furrows, as he tried to pull himself free.
“Saguaro!” I shouted. The wave of relief I felt was palpable.
His head turned towards the sound of my voice, but the expression he pulled was one of utter fear. I broke into a gallop and Cannon Fodder followed. The blood-soaked sand squelched appallingly under my hooves like wet mud. My aide pushed the limp bodies up, groaning with the effort, with some assistance with my magic, while I grabbed Saguaro’s free hoof and dragged him out. He rolled into the muddy dirt and lay there in a curled-up foetal position, shivering like a leaf in a gale and whimpering quietly and pathetically with his face buried in his forehooves. His body was covered in blood and gore, and as I pulled him free my white fur became streaked with that warm dark slime.
Cannon Fodder stepped back, allowing the bodies to fall once again. The empty, soulless face of the old mare stared directly at me with her hollow eyes; I imagined her once being full of life, the sort of mother that common ponies usually have, doting over foals and all that. What was left now was a mockery. She had been stabbed in the neck with a bayonet, while others bore the cauterised craters in their flesh that were the hallmark of magic blasts. I swore that Second Fiddle was going to damn well pay for this, not just for this crime against all that was equine but for making common soldiers complicit in his sins, and unlike with Scarlet Letter I was not about to make that same mistake of trusting Equestrian military justice to damn well do what it’s supposed to.
I lifted Saguaro up, and he just sat on his haunches and stared out into the middle distance. His gangly frame shivered in spite of the heat. He didn’t seem to see or recognise either of us, as the poor thing must have been in a state of shock. A once-over revealed him to be unharmed, at least physically, and I did my best to clean away the filth that covered his coat with my hoofkerchief and water canteen.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
Saguaro was still unresponsive, so I picked him up and draped him over my back as we embarked upon the long walk back to Virion Hive. He neither resisted nor helped, but still being on the slender side and seemingly incapable of independent movement he was hardly much of a burden. There was nothing else to do there, so we left the pile of corpses where they lay amid the ashes of their meagre homes, with Cannon Fodder’s usual vacant silence replaced by one of grim despair and Yours Truly seething with thoughts of rage and revenge. It had been one thing to hear of it from Second Fiddle, or even to see the effects it had on those battle-hardened professional soldiers, but to see the grisly aftermath with my own eyes, to have their blood staining my coat, made me truly understand that this was not something that I could quietly foist on another pony to deal with.
I thought of the Corporal and his section who took part in that massacre, and pondered that eternal question: why in Faust's name did they not refuse to carry out those obviously illegal orders? The walk back was a long one and nopony was in the mood for conversation, so I had more time than I would have liked to consider the issue. I would wager that most ponies reading this might say that they would never have followed an order that contravened the most basic rules of war and even mere basic equine decency, and that they would sooner have run Second Fiddle through with his own damned sabre before committing such a grotesque act. Most ponies, however, would go their entire lives without having their sense of honour and duty put to the test like that, and it is impossible to say how one would really act. I am all but certain that each of the ten ponies in that section would have stated that they would never knowingly harm a civilian pony had I asked them long before that massacre, and I would have believed them.
A soldier, after all, is trained from the second they are measured for a suit of armour to sublimate their own will and even identity in favour of the rigid discipline and unthinking obedience necessary for them to execute their orders quickly and efficiently. While that has meant that the Equestrian soldier is the best fighter in the civilised world, it all hinges on the ponies issuing those orders to be of sound mind and calm disposition, both qualities that Second Fiddle lacked. The compulsion for mindless obedience even in the face of such irrational and immoral orders is so intrinsic to how these stallions and mares are trained, and that is why, even as I think about this decades later, I cannot blame them. They had done merely what was expected of them, and though this does not completely erase their own personal guilt, to live out the rest of their lives with what they had done might just be punishment enough. I know it is for me, for not having stopped Second Fiddle in the first place.
This was one of those dilemmas that simply did not have a neat and clear answer, and I, an indolent prince who once got lost in his own palace, was hardly the one to swan onto the academic scene and settle it for them. However, we trudged on slowly, the experience having seemingly drained us of energy. Second Fiddle and the soldiers had gone by the time we reached where they had stopped to argue, which meant that he had opened a lead on me in getting back and telling his side of this sordid story. It would do him no good, for once I was there to strip away the layers of lies he would spin to reveal the truth like wallpaper over a severe structural fault, then he was finally completely and utterly finished.
After an interminable amount of walking Saguaro started to come out of his daze. I felt him shift on my back, lifting his head to look around as though he had only just woken up from a deep sleep. We stopped and I let him down, and he sat there on the dusty ground. The shock still hadn’t worn off yet, but he seemed to indicate that he wanted to walk back instead of being carried.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” I asked.
Saguaro stared silently, then bowed his head and shook it no.
He was the only witness to the massacre, aside from the perpetrators themselves, and given Second Fiddle’s apparent desperation to avoid the legal and moral consequences for his orders I could not trust them to give an honest account of what exactly had happened. I feared that it would all hinge on coaxing the truth out of this young colt.
“Very well,” I said. “You can tell me about it when we get back.”
We carried on in silence. I don’t know how long the rest of the journey took, but the sun was noticeably lower in the sky when we slipped through one of the breaches into the city. The dull, tedious mundanity of native ponies going about their day, albeit under the ever-present supervision of our troops, was striking in its contrast to the horror we had just witnessed. I envied their ignorance as I passed them by to the castle.
I immediately led Saguaro and Cannon Fodder to my office, turning away the many officers, bureaucrats, factotums, and fans along the way with a few polite and curt words that I was very sorry but I had something of the utmost importance to deal with right now, and for the first time I was not lying. Upon arrival, and after dismissing the small queue of petitioners lingering outside my door in the hope that I might sign off on one of their proposals, I shut the door behind me and beckoned Saguaro to sit on one of the comfortable cushions I reserved for guests.
It was getting a little darker now, light enough to still see for the most part, but I lit a few candles with my horn anyway and brought them with me as I sat next to Saguaro. I bade Cannon Fodder to attend to the door and turn away anypony short of Princess Celestia herself while I dealt with the matter at hoof.
“I need you to tell me exactly what you saw,” I said, taking off and discarding that awful hat I had to wear.
The young cold stared at the ground in silence, shivering slightly. Damnation, I wasn’t very good at this sort of thing, but some instinct told me to place my hoof on his shoulder so I did, and that seemed to loosen him from his fugue state a little. I wished Auntie ‘Tia was here; she’d have had no trouble at all. He lifted his head and looked up at me, the breath caught in his throat, and then he shook his head as he had before.
“He’s here,” he said in a whimpering sort of voice. “The pony in black and red.”
“And I’m going to get that bastard for what he did, but I need your help. Please.”
Saguaro swallowed, and then, without raising his gaze from the patch of bare stone on the floor, began: “I try to hide but he goes from tent to tent, dragging ponies out. They try to fight back but it’s useless. I hear them screaming. I smear blood on myself and lie very still, then a pony drags me out and puts me with the others. He looks at me and I think he knows I am pretending to be dead but he says nothing and he goes. I wait until you come.”
“That was very brave and clever of you,” I said, rubbing his shoulder and pressing him against my chest in a sort of hug. “I need you to be brave again for me, please. Can you tell me about the Changeling?”
Saguaro didn’t answer, and just looked away and stared at the floor again. I considered trying to push him further, but it felt like the wrong thing to do there. Although I was certain that I had more than enough evidence to render Second Fiddle an eternal pariah from Equestrian society at best, it was all but certain that he would take immediate steps to salvage the tattered remnants of his career and try to stitch them together again. In this young colt I had a witness that he could not bully, threaten, dismiss, or otherwise do away with, unlike those soldiers he had dragged along for this, as long as I could keep him safe.
The door to my office opened and I saw Field Marshal Iron Hoof’s moustachioed face emerge through the gap. Cannon Fodder moved to intercept him like a griffon on a pigeon.
“Commissar Blueblood is very busy and-”
“This is more important,” the Field Marshal snapped, pushing the door open forcefully.
Cannon Fodder made a step to obstruct him. “The Commissar said he mustn’t be disturbed.”
Iron Hoof brandished his enormous moustache at Cannon Fodder and glowered. “I need to speak with him now.”
“It’s alright Cannon Fodder,” I said, getting the sense that neither of them were going to give up any time soon. “Let him in.”
My aide stepped out of the way and returned to his corner of the office, either ignorant of or expertly ignoring the death glare he was receiving from Iron Hoof.
“What’s the matter with him?” asked Iron Hoof, pointing at the sullen Saguaro.
“He still misses his mother,” I said, and was relieved that my knack for improvised lying remained undimmed through this ordeal. However, the look that I received was not an encouraging one. “What is it?”
“It’s very important.” Iron Hoof leered at Saguaro and Cannon Fodder. “And top secret, too. I must speak with you alone.”
There were no prizes for guessing what it was about; in the time it had taken for us to finish poking around in the smoking remains of the Medusita’s village and then trudge on back to Virion Hive, Second Fiddle must have gone straight to one of the very few ponies out here who might have been willing to protect him. It was just like him to do that, always hiding behind those superior to him in any social hierarchy, thinking that he could escape the consequences of his actions. He had done quite enough of that lately and it was about time that he stopped getting away with it. I was somewhat curious to learn if he told Field Marshal Iron Hoof the whole unvarnished truth or, as was more likely, some ridiculous lie; either way, it would avail him none once my regal aunts knew what was being done in their name.
I ordered Cannon Fodder to take Saguaro to the officer’s mess, cite my name should the staff there raise any objections to their presence, and use my tab to buy anything the young colt wanted (I had heard the staff had somehow procured ice cream). It did not feel right to leave him, but I felt he was in capable hooves with my aide and Iron Hoof seemed adamant that whatever it was he wanted to discuss could not be delayed. With the two of us alone, and I acutely aware and wishing I had a witness for what came next, I went to my drinks cabinet and poured two glasses of a twenty-five year old Glenmareangie for my guest and me. I had intended on saving that for when I had my provisional job confirmed, but after the day’s events that seemed rather less likely, so I might as well use it as a gentlecolt’s bracer for what would come next.
“I had a…” Iron Hoof began, but trailed off as he watched me place the two glasses on my desk, one for him and one for me. He took a seat on the cushion opposite without my invitation, which irritated me more than it should. “...an interesting conversation with Commissar-General Second Fiddle.”
“I see.” I sat down behind my desk and took a big gulp of my drink, and wondered if the earth pony peasants who tended to the grains that would make this whisky knew how much comfort their hard work would bring to a tired prince.
“Nasty business, that,” he said, bowing his head and shaking it. “Still, these things happen in war, don’t they? There’s really no need for you to go spreading it around.”
I took a second gulp, which left a third of the glass left. “What in blazes are you on about?” I snapped.
“I know you’re thinking of writing to the Ministry of War about this,” he said, nursing his drink. “I understand that you are upset by what you saw, but think about this logically for a moment, sir. The Equestrian Army has just won a great victory here, the first of many, I’m sure, so why ruin the first bit of good news for over a year for everypony at home?”
“You weren’t there, you didn’t see it,” I said. “Second Fiddle has tarnished the honour and traditions of the old Royal Guard and he must be brought to account.”
“Come now, Prince Blueblood, I’m trying to help you to see the bigger picture here; that’s what a commissar is supposed to do. How do you think all of the ponies in Equestria are going to feel if they find out about what happened? Civilians will never understand that it takes ponies like you and Second Fiddle to do the unpleasant things necessary to keep them all safe. It’s better that they don’t know, don’t you think? The last thing our next offensive needs is civilians sticking their noses in and getting in our way.”
I snorted contemptuously. “Are you afraid of what else they might find?”
The Field Marshal sighed and shook his head. “This is disappointing, sir. I might as well come out and say it bluntly -- I know you and Commissar-General Second Fiddle have clashed recently, and over what I don’t know and don’t care to, but it’s unbecoming of you to use this incident to ruin the career of a promising young officer for your own gain and hide it behind a show of sentimentality.”
“That ‘promising young officer’ is a coward,” I said, without the slightest hint of irony. “He ran and hid when we stormed Virion Hive, did you know that? Now he’s a coward and a murderer -- his career isn’t worth protecting.”
“You must know that this sort of thing will reflect poorly on all of us,” said Iron Hoof. “It’s not just his career that will be at risk.”
“Ponies died,” I hissed, planting my glass down on the wooden desk with a heavy thud. Its contents nearly sloshed over the side. “Murdered by Equestrian soldiers on Second Fiddle’s orders. And do you honestly think that this can be kept quiet? One of them will crack, and Faust knows how many ponies saw the fires there. Sooner or later, this will get out.”
“Heavens, you really do care about those heathens, don’t you?” Iron Hoof arched an eyebrow. “You truly aren’t trying to ruin Second Fiddle’s reputation so you can take his job?”
“The thought hadn’t even occurred to me.”
“Then I pity you even more for your romanticism,” said Iron Hoof. “We’re fighting a war, sir, and if that means telling a few white lies in the name of victory then so be it. The official story is that Changelings wiped out the town and RAID was just too late to stop them. That is what has already been reported in official dispatches, and tomorrow’s newspaper headlines will read ‘Cowardly Changelings Massacre Innocent Ponies’. If anything, that will help us more than the ‘truth’ ever could. We will have no shortage of new recruits now.”
“Based on a damned lie.” That might have seemed hypocritical, but my own self-serving lies were never employed to cover up something as monstrous as the murder of innocent ponies. I would never have to put myself in that situation in the first place, of course, but one had to consider the fact that it was me of all ponies taking a moral stand, which said more about Field Marshal Iron Hoof here.
He held my gaze for a moment, then placed his unappreciated glass of whisky on the desk between us without breaking his stare. “I hoped that it wouldn’t come to this, but you have forced my hoof,” he said. “I know about you and Princess Twilight Sparkle.”
I took the final gulp of my drink to still the worm of anxiety knotting in my guts. “How did you find out, and what in blazes does that have to do with anything?”
“You weren’t the only pony to read the file the Changelings kept on you. Your reputation as a cad and a bounder might provide some light entertainment for the sorts of ponies who read the society gossip columns in the papers, but when the filly you’ve been fooling around with is our Princess of Friendship, and in her own home too, then this will be a scandal you won’t just brush off like the rest. It’s not a good look for you, sir, especially after you might have fathered a Changeling foal with a high-ranking enemy officer. And poor Princess Twilight, just a year as a princess and she’ll be embroiled in her first royal scandal.”
“That’s blackmail, you beast,” I snapped.
“Yes, it is.” I could just about picture the smug grin hidden by his enormous moustache. “Besides,” he continued, “you are no doubt aware that all outgoing correspondence is reviewed by the censor to avoid leaking anything that might damage morale at home. The soldiers who took part in today’s action have already been re-assigned to the colonies. RAID is already on the scene too to make sure the evidence fits the official line, so don’t bother inviting anypony to take a look either.”
“Do you really think you know better than the Princesses?” I asked.
Iron Hoof was silent for a moment, apparently in contemplation that maybe, for once, I had a salient point. “That doesn’t matter,” he said, finally. “Victory is my sole concern, and I shan’t allow you, politicians, or even the Princesses themselves to stand in the way of that. When we have won, none of this will matter.”
He stood up from his seat, and all I could do was sit there and seeth silently at him, shocked and angered by his unbelievable arrogance. To think that he could dismiss the Royal Pony Sisters in the same breath as politicians and Yours Truly.
“One last thing,” he said. “You were in charge of Virion Hive when this unpleasantness happened, so I doubt that it would reflect well upon your leadership. Good night, sir.”
With that he left, shutting the door behind him and leaving me feeling more alone than ever before. He had left his glass of whisky, unsullied, on the table. I snatched it up, brought it to my lips, and then in a fit of anger and frustration I hurled it at the wall whereupon it shattered into glittering fragments of glass.
It wasn’t bloody fair. As always, just as I start to think that I have my life sorted out, where I have arranged to have myself taken out of the hell of frontline combat so I might stay somewhere relatively safe, this had to come along and ruin it for me. That I would have to do it to myself made it hurt even more.
I had thought I had done a rather good job of taking the credit for other ponies’ work in running Virion Hive, so I was a little too confident that my reputation and I would be able to weather whatever difficulties this damned war might throw at me. However, I hadn’t considered the possibility of something this appalling, this contrary to all that was Harmonious, would happen under my watch. I should have seen it coming, really, Odonata had warned me that it is the nature of wars to escalate in brutality, and I could only curse myself for not having done more to stop Second Fiddle before he could cross that line into barbarism.
“What am I going to do?” I said out loud.
I spotted Slab on my desk, leaning casually against a small pile of books. It felt absurd, but so was the situation I now found myself trapped in, and so I carried on talking to an inanimate sheet of slate.
“This can’t remain a secret forever,” I continued. “Sooner or later somepony will say something -- those soldiers, or one of the natives might have seen it, or even Saguaro. Or if I don’t say something now it might happen again and they won’t be able to cover it up. Either way, ponies will want to know why I did nothing.”
Slab maintained a stony but respectable silence as I carried on. The walls were thick here, so I could count on nopony overhearing me complain about life to a rock, but even though I felt a little silly, I found that it helped to put some order to the chaos of thoughts in my head.
“And then there’s Twilight Sparkle.” Somehow, the thought of putting her through a royal scandal, thoroughly unprepared as she was for the sort of intrusive evisceration from the national press that I had grown used to over the years, would hurt me more than whatever slings and arrows they would direct towards me. Yet it was the price one paid for the privileges of royalty. Scandals always passed, regardless of how ruinous they might appear at the time, and perhaps a hundred years from now when my bones are entombed within the family mausoleum she, the immortal alicorn princess, might think back on it fondly, one hoped.
“She would understand,” I said, and Slab silently agreed with me. “The common ponies too; what would they be more upset about, that Equestrian soldiers murdered civilians at the orders of a commissar or that I’ve rogered a princess?”
That was where Iron Hoof had made his blunder. I recalled the morning after that little affair, and how even Shining Armour of all ponies seemed to be perfectly content with the knowledge of what I had done with his sister. The old Equestria that the Field Marshal and I had grown up with would not have cared for the lives of foreign ponies over the perceived violation of the sanctity of a princess, but in an age where a common pony such as Twilight Sparkle could become an alicorn princess and be celebrated for it, our kind were fast becoming old relics. He had failed to understand that, and in trying to cling onto the last vestiges of the old ways of doing things, of running an army and waging war, had blinded himself to the reality that he simply couldn’t expect to sweep this under the rug and that the ponies back home would quietly ignore it.
Yet that old fool was right on one thing; I would not escape this affair entirely unscathed, as though I had made pains to spread out the responsibility of administering Virion Hive to as many ponies as possible to avoid taking it myself, this was simply too big a storm for me to hide from. The axe would still fall the hardest upon Second Fiddle and Iron Hoof, now that the latter had wedded himself to covering this up, but there was every chance that my neck would be on the metaphorical chopping block too. There would be an inquiry, and once the ponies from Canterlot would start poking their noses into this sordid little affair they would find it very difficult to stop until every sin was laid bare for judgement. Even then, though I was very confident that whatever impropriety they might find or conjure up on my part absolutely paled in comparison to the vast dragon taking up all the space in the room that was Second Fiddle’s appalling lack of judgement, there was no way that I was getting out of this affair without yet more scars, of the invisible and insidious kind. Not to mention that he would use every damned dirty trick he could think of to cast doubt upon my testimony.
Either way, it was unlikely that I would be able to cling onto this job at Virion Hive for much longer. I tried to avoid taking part in the grisly business of politics back in Canterlot as a matter of principle, but I had picked up enough from other ponies to learn that for senior ministers and high-ranking civil servants there existed some sort of code -- that to be sacked from the job was shameful, but to resign was honourable. Returning to the position of a regimental commissar would allow me to escape whatever reprisals Second Fiddle, Iron Hoof, and anypony else caught up in this conspiracy might decide to inflict upon me, by mere virtue of the fact that I would be out on the frontline where, according to some ponies, I belonged. I hated the very idea of giving up all that I had worked for to secure my own safety here, but as with a game of cards one must play with the hoof one is dealt, and when one has run out of aces up one’s Prench cuffs it is often better to cut one’s losses and leave the table than to suffer the indignity of losing it all.
“This is not what Red Coat died for,” I said, and my mind was finally made up.
Therefore, while I waited for Cannon Fodder and Saguaro to return from the mess, and by the dying light of the setting sun and warm glow of candles and my own horn, I set about writing two letters. The first was addressed to the Ministry of War, stating that due to irreconcilable professional differences with RAID that I would resign immediately as the provisional military governor of Virion Hive and retake my post as the regimental commissar for the Night Guards. The second was to be sent directly to Princess Luna herself, and was merely a frank description of the facts thus far, including my conversation with Iron Hoof. Before sealing it, I added a postscript asking her if she could check on Saguaro’s dreams, should he be capable of sleeping after his ordeal.
As to how I would circumvent the censor with the second letter I already had some inkling of a cunning plan, but once Auntie Luna broke the wax seal bearing my family’s crest and read my letter then all things were, quite literally, in the hooves of the gods.