The boat trip up the lake was slow and introspective and Vingent spent the ride staring absently into the distance, reflecting on his time in Equestria. He never could have expected to find himself in such a wonderful place when he—
“Say, what is that, anyway?”
“Eh, what?”
“Your mark, buddy,” the lake pony who was ferrying him today clarified, adding unnecessarily, “mine’s a sculling paddle. Nothin’ I’d rather be doing.”
He patted the handle of the paddle as he slowly swept it back and forth, propelling the small craft from his seat in the stern.
“Mine’s called a t-chart. We use it in double-entry book keeping. Accounting.”
That was one thing that seemed to work the same on this world of talking ponies. Friendship and magic were everywhere, but at the end of a fiscal cycle the books still needed to balance.
“Not a clue what that is.”
The ferry pony belonged to the ‘chuck all your cash in a bowl on the kitchen table’ school of business finance.
“You’re probably happier that way, it’s not the most exciting profession.”
“How you get one like that?”
“I had a job digging ditches. Honestly, I was grateful for that much, and I was doing the numbers on the back of an envelope, trying to figure out if I could afford to buy food and pay rent. The next thing I know, my flank starts glowing. Everypony mistook the mark for layout lines for designing a formal garden and I got offered a job in landscaping. That was an improvement over ditch digging, but now I’m doing the books for a company that employs over a hundred ponies.”
They were drawing near the rocky island where the castle stood.
“Uh, huh.”
His attention was on navigation now, as they threaded the final approach. Around the big rock, through the tunnel, to the jetty beside the castle.
—
“Is it going to be the knife again?” Vingent asked Grimmle as they climbed up the stairs, instead of down. The alarming first attempt at undoing his displacement had taken place in a large cellar below ground.
“I think not, sir.”
“Thank goodness. I wonder where that thing came from.”
“I believe it came from a human world, brought by a visitor a century ago when the Princess was young.”
The butler turned away from the next flight of stairs and gave a single rap on a door before opening it.
“Your eleven o’clock is here, your Highness.”
—
“So tell me about the alpha centaurs of your world. Centaurs are almost as mythical as humans, but they’re typically too mindlessly aggressive to form a stable society with alphas and betas, et cetera.”
“Uh, no, centaurs aren’t real, as far as we know. Alpha Centauri is just the name of the star we orbit, it’s the first star in the constellation Centauri, as seen from a planet called Terra. Of course, I’ve never been to Terra.”
“I see.”
“And Chiron was a wise and peaceful centaur who taught some of our heroes, so we named the planet after him.
“Got it.”
The princess led the way to a huge metal disk hanging on the stone wall of the room – it was nearly a length across, with a slight lip.
“Let’s do this, we’ll have you home, safe and sound, in just a splash!”
From a tall, slender, ewer the princess poured a measure as if she would let it trickle down the shallow plate. Instead of falling to the stone floor, the liquid clung to the disc, dispersing across its surface. By the time it had spread to the raised edges, the water was little more than the thinnest film, barely wetting the pale metal.
She chanted a spell as she poured, and the skin of water agitated as though there were invisible turbulence writhing beneath it. As her words ceased, the churning fading into little waves. Each wave held more water than the Princess’s pitcher could hold, protruding impossibly from the vertical surface. Placidly, they concealed a hungry deepness.
“Can you see anything? Can you see your home?”
To his eyes, everything had grown dim as the tottering pier creaked under his weight, Twilight’s voice was a distant murmur from the far shore, indistinct. The only light, dancing glints of reflection from the rippled surface granting no indication of where they were reflected from.
Between the flashes of light, glimpses of a lake bed, black beneath the water. Vertigo struck – was he looking horizontally at a water-mirror posed on a wall he could no longer see, or down into the fatal depths?
“Vingent? What do you see?”
Ignoring the question he reached a hoof towards the familiar wavelets; the sensation of cold on his fingertips came as a shock. Perspective shifted and he was falling into the waves. Once again the water closed above his head, dark-bright in the moonlight.
Sinking, sinking, into the cold. Somewhere far above the Princess was watching helplessly as he drifted to the bottom, worlds out of reach.
Inevitability.
He deserved this, he let it all go, drowning, suffocating. Had Equestria been a dream, the delusional random misfiring of oxygen starved synapses? The need in his lungs became unbearable, as his hands touched the muddy bottom. There was a sensation of falling as awareness faded…
And then found himself gasping for breath as he sprawled, hooves scrabbling on sunlit stone. Light streamed in through the window and litres of water poured from his coat and mane. He was soaked, chilled to the bone, shivering and panting.
“A towel, Princess?”
There was something preternatural about Grimmle’s almost prescient readiness for every eventuality. Vingent watched silently from the floor as the butler first applied a towel to his mistress’s coat where she had been splashed when Vingent emerged from the drowning depths.
“Thank you,” he said, a moment later, staggering up to his hooves and accepting a towel.
“But of course, sir.”
The towel had been warmed, a great comfort after the chill submersion.
“Sir will find hot tea in the chamber adjacent, if sir steps right this way.”
He did, and he did.
Brewed strong, three sugars and a touch of brandy. Perfect.
The Princess had preceded him here and paused between bites of cake.
“Well, I guess that didn’t go so well, did it? Are you alright?”
“I think so.”
Between the towel and the tea, at least he was warming up.
“Do we have to keep trying this?”
“Nah, that was messy. I’ve got a surefire potion I’ll whip up for tomorrow. There’s an entirely different route we could maybe try if my partner were home—”
“I can wait.”
“—but he’s off sitting by an old enemy’s deathbed.”
“To make sure the enemy really dies?”
“No, nothing like that, they’ve made their peace.”
The stallion who could look forward to a lifetime of the princess’s laughter was a lucky fellow.
“Apparently,” she said as her merriment moderated, “they are now having a very small symposium on mental health pharmomancy.”
“Ugh, that really would kill me!”
“Oh, no, it’s totally fascinating, you see—”
Vingent was glad to accept the butler’s offer of escape. Back at the small jetty his ride waited and they were soon out on the freedom of the lake again.
—
“What if I went with you? To your world?”
“No, Carren, no, that would be the worst thing possible!”
“Oh? Are you married after all? You told me you were always single.”
“No… uh, yes, I mean. Yes, I am.”
“What’s your wife’s name?”
“Uh—”
“When was your first foal born?”
“Well—”
“Merde.”
He winced. Carren never swore.
“You’re not fooling me, Vin. Do you hate me now or something?”
“No! You know I don’t!”
It wasn’t his raised voice that made her look like she’d been hit.
“You know that I…”
He couldn't finish.
“You’re going to have to find a way to go on without me. And I don’t want to do anything to make it even harder for you to do that.”
“What if we ran away together? Equestria isn’t the whole world, we could find somewhere to hide.”
If he was honest with himself, the thought had a lot of appeal. But what kind of life could they have, on the run in a world where he was an utter stranger? He was a bookkeeper, not an adventurer. Carren had been his first good friend in this world –really, any world– and nearly more. He wanted only the best for her. Somehow, being a fugitive was not quite what he had hoped to offer her. Princess Twilight had been cordial, friendly even, in her efforts to rid the land of an intruder. But if he fled the shoe might be on another hoof and he really didn’t doubt the Princess’s ability to track them down. She was, after all, widely considered to be unstoppable.
“Stay with me tonight.”
Carren had found this final strength in her despair.
“But—” he tried to protest.
Her misery was irrefusable.
“Even if we don’t do anything that you think would be wrong, just stay.”