An Unexpected Winter Journey
Chapter 2
Admiral Biscuit
For Comma Typer, Jinglemas 2022
The two of them sat on the couch and sipped apple brandy for a time, and then by mutual agreement they went out the door, back into the storm.
“I can hitch up to my sleigh,” Hayseed offered.
Rain Shine could picture it in her mind, and shook her head. The indignity of being towed to Ponyville when all four of her legs worked perfectly well, thank you very much.
She shook her head. “I’ll walk. Snow never bothered me anyway.”
“Huh.” He shifted around on his hooves and then looked up at her again. “Beggin’ your pardon, but I never thought a fancy pony’d wanna walk if a ride was offered.”
“I’m not a fancy pony.”
“Well, you’re tall like one . . . are you Prench?”
Rain Shine giggled. “I’m a Kirin.”
“Can’t say I’ve ever met one afore.” Hayseed turned towards the path. “I was gonna say that I could go slow so’s you can keep up, but I don’t reckon that’s gonna be a problem.”
“I’ll carry you over drifts if we encounter any.”
“Oh, we will.” Hayseed had started walking, but he stopped to motion over the empty fields. “Terrain like this, get just a little wind an' something to stop it, you got a drift. Fence, embankment, even a tree . . . I know the road as well as I know my fields. We’ll get to Ponyville, maybe a little late and with sore hooves, but we’ll get there.”
He started walking again, and then stopped again. “Before we leave, are you gonna be able to carry that present on your back all the way? I could get my panniers; I think it’d fit in ‘em.”
Rain Shine would have said no, but just then a gust of wind whipped some snow across the path, and the package slid halfway off her back. She could keep it in place with magic if she had to, but a pannier might make it easier.
•••
Hayseed was more than willing to carry it, but she insisted. His girth strap barely fit her, but fit her it did. It was an unusual feeling—Kirin rarely wore saddlebags or panniers or anything else combustible.
She remembered that the train had had a mail car right in the front; she could have given them the present and it would have been delivered . . . but that wasn’t the same as being there, even if being there now meant following a new friend all the way to Ponyville.
“Are you sure that you want to lead me? I can just walk on the railroad tracks and they’ll get me there.”
“Oh, no, can’t do that.” Hayseed shook his head. “Train might come along . . . passenger trains run a regular enough schedule, but freights go when they can. Plus, ties ain’t spaced right for a pony to comfortably walk on’ em.” For the second time, he started along his walkway, this time without stopping to turn back. “And I do want to, seems like when a pony needs help anypony who can oughtta help her.”
“Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
•••
The two walked in silence to the end of town—or what passed for a town. A few scattered homes, a couple of stores. Most of them were closed. A restaurant or tavern—she wasn’t sure, since there wasn’t any sign on the ramshackle building—had ponies seated on the patio. One pony waved to Hayseed, and a few pairs of eyes studied her with curiosity.
Tempting though it was to cut their so-far brief journey short and introduce herself to them, she focused back on the road ahead.
Was that the right thing to do? Kirin weren’t well-known in Equestria proper, and even if it hadn’t been her intention, she was essentially an emissary. Summer Chills said that ponies were always curious about her and the other pony-adjacent species; she said that it fell off after a while, unless she visited somewhere new.
Which was more important? Getting her present to Ponyville or stopping to chat and disambiguate?
That thought led off in two directions; first that Hayseed might be upset if she delayed him—a silly thought; he seemed more interested in her journey than whatever he’d had planned for his evening.
Secondly, she wondered if some of the ponies who saw her in his company might think they were a couple. Gossip had started from less, and sometimes gossip led to anger and oftentimes anger had led to fire.
That was in the past, and that should stay in the past. The whole reason for her trip . . . Rain Shine growled and turned her attention back to Hayseed, who’d actually managed to outpace her while she was lost in thought.
•••
His village fell away and the duo journeyed into a more feral part of Equestria. Some of it would eventually be worked by ponies; a few fillies and colts got their cutie marks and then bought a farm. Not all the land was tillable: bottomland was good, flooding brought nutrients into the soil and a pony just had to be prudent about what crops she planted and when. Other land wasn’t so good, it stayed swampy most or all of the year, and there wasn’t anything a pony wanted to eat that would grow on it.
He’d done well with his plot of land; it had been just the right soil for turnips. They might not have been as fanciable as some crops, but he didn’t mind. They were good eating, they filled a pony’s belly, and they could be combined with almost anything. Kept nearly forever in a root cellar.
Hayseed glanced back to make sure that Rain Shine was still following.
She was.
He had a lot of questions about her. The horn made her a unicorn and her build should have meant she was Prench, Saddle Arabian, or a princess. She didn’t fit any of those categories.
Plus, her horn was wrong for a unicorn anyway. It looked more like a changeling horn . . .
Hayseed stumbled on his hooves as the realization hit him. What if she’s a changeling? She’d said she was a Kirin, but he wasn’t sure what that was.
There were lots of new species showing up in Ponyville lately, on account of the friendship school there. He snorted. Friendship school was a silly idea; ponies ought to know how to be neighborly without having to go to school for it. He knew how to be neighborly, and he hadn’t attended a friendship school. Heck, he’d barely attended regular school; there was always farm work that needed to be done and that took precedence to book-learning.
It was so much easier when they were just three tribes in Equestria, he thought. A pony knew where they stood. Now it seemed like some new kind of creature showed up just about every day.
He turned back, both to make sure that she was still following him and to get another look at her. Not that he really needed to; he’d gotten a good look on the station platform.
There were good changelings and bad changelings; the bad ones had black carapaces and holes all over them and crooked horns, while the good ones were pastel and had a curved horn. Both kinds could change to look like other ponies, and it didn’t take a school diploma to realize that a changeling who couldn’t change the shape of her horn as part of her disguise would get discovered very quickly.
And she knew Applejack, which he decided made her the real deal. He might not know what a Kirin was, but any friend of Applejack was a friend of his.
“Getting to the edge of Seven Top,” he told her. “Lands go beyond the town border, but it’s more feral—from here on out, road’s gonna be bad. If you’re thinking of turning back, now’s a good time to say so.”
“How far is Ponyville?”
“Well, I don’t rightly know, never paced it out. Normally takes me half a day to get there, if’n I go by hoof. Snow’ll delay us, I don’t think we’ll get there before nightfall.”
Rain Shine nodded. “You . . . I should have asked: do you have a place to stay in Ponyville? You aren’t planning on walking back, are you? Because I can follow the road on my own, I’m sure.”
“Don’t you worry about me. I got plenty of family in Ponyville, I can spend the night practically anywhere.”
“Because you don’t have to accompany me.”
“Yeah. I do. You don’t know the road; I’d hate for you to get lost and wind up in Forelle by mistake.”
•••
Kirin had never really gone for long journeys, not in her lifetime. The vastness of Equestria hadn’t really crossed Rain Shine’s mind, not in a meaningful way. She knew of some towns and cities that were ‘far away,’ and the train ride had started to give her a sense of what ‘far away’ meant. Being on her own legs on a snow-covered road let it really sink in. From anywhere in her village, she could see the whole of their land, and the range of mountains that surrounded it as well. It was easy to know how far her lands spread.
Here, she had no idea. Seven Top was a memory, replaced by trees and occasional clearings covered in snow, and somewhere up ahead was Ponyville. Far enough away that the sun—still faintly shining through the heavy snowclouds—would be gone before they arrived.
It was intimidating when she thought about it that way.
All the stations the train had gone between. She hadn’t considered how fast it was going, how long it would take to walk the same distance. What would she have done if the train didn’t come almost to her doorstep?
She’d be ruling over a silent village, as quiet as the woods that surrounded them.
Hayseed hadn’t been lying about the drifts; near clear areas they piled up on the road. Sometimes there was enough wind moving in the right direction to clear all the snow off; other times it looked like shifting clouds, hiding the road from her sight.
Every now and then, they’d pass a small home tucked into the woods. Hayseed knew most of the ponies who lived along the road and what they did. Some of them just preferred to be alone, while others gathered firewood or mushrooms or made wicker or syrup. Some of them would go to Seven Top on market days to buy food or other supplies; others relied on what the woods could provide.
His stamina was impressive; serving both as a tour guide and a trailblazer, his pace hadn’t slowed since they’d left his house. She’d wrongly assumed he was a lazy, slovenly pony, although kind-hearted. She’d wondered if he’d been trying to discourage her from walking to Ponyville since it was too far for him to walk, but she was starting to get the idea that he could keep up his pace for as long as he needed to.
•••
Hayseed didn’t expect that naming off the ponies who lived along the road would mean anything to Rain Shine—although if she knew Applejack, who knew who else she might know?
In truth, it had been a while since he’d walked the road. The train was fast and convenient, and lately he’d just been whisking by all those homes on his way to Ponyville.
Even if it was cold and snowy, even if so far he hadn’t seen any ponies he knew out by the road or working in their yards, it was good to take the slow way.
Seven Top had never been big enough to get a full market, and they’d always grown more turnips than they could sell in town, especially once he got big enough to help out in the fields. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d made this journey either riding in his mother’s market wagon, or walking alongside.
He rarely sold turnips in Ponyville anymore; it was just as easy to send a consignment by freight train. Just as easy to talk to a broker who looked over his crop and made an offer for a certain number of bushels. It gave him more time to make sure his turnips were the best he could grow, and he’d never considered what had been lost in the convenience.
How many ponies who lived on this road had watched the daily hoof traffic fall off as the train took precedence? Some of them still came to Seven Top to sell their wares, or at least to catch a train to Ponyville or wherever else they could get the most profit.
Sometimes he wondered how much progress was good, and how much of it wasn’t. Investing in new and improved farm equipment always paid off over time; a cultivator that could clear two rows simultaneously was better than the old one that did it one row at a time, and he spent hours in the winter perusing farm catalogs by lamplight, trying to decide if a new implement would give him good bang for the bit.
He focused his attention back on the present as he bashed through another drift. Rain Shine was still keeping up her pace, which impressed him. She didn’t look like a pony who’d spent a single day in harness.
Just the same, she had good endurance. Most ponies he knew that weren’t earth ponies didn’t have a lot of endurance, especially unicorns. They didn’t like discomfort; they’d constantly complain if they had to do any work, and here she was, trailing along through the drifting snow and blowing wind with no complaints.