9. Dragon Delivered
Pinkie Pie had gone to sleep. Octavia remained wakeful, eyes hooded but focussed on everything around them. So it was that when a pair of new griffins arrived and spoke to the guards she was the first to sense something was amiss. Her heart skittered when several sets of baleful eyes turned in their direction, but the griffins didn’t pounce on her and her pink responsibility. Instead, one of the guards stalked forward with purpose into a crowd of dismayed ponies. Octavia was wondering whether it would look more or less suspicious to leap to her feet too and whether the risk of not following everypony else’s lead was worth exposing Pinkie Pie, when a familiar wail went up.
“What are you doooooing!? Where are you taking meeeeeee!?”
The guard reappeared, walking on his hind legs with a pale blue mare across his forelegs. Her elaborate yellow hairdo fell across her face as she struggled and wailed while trying to avoid his upturned claws.
“Take this one,” the guard said over her din. “Please take this one. It just keeps making that awful noise. It’s driving me insane!”
“Noooooo!” The mare kicked harder, but the guard passed her to one of the new griffins with a sigh of relief.
“We need two,” said the other newcomer, a female whose feathers were red as a robin’s chest. “Orders were for us to fetch two earth ponies.”
The guard grinned eagerly. “I know just the one.” He all but dived back into the crowd of ponies, scattering them like a fox among rabbits. He came back up with a bigger pony that struggled even harder than the mare.
“Release me, you ruffian!” the grey stallion yelled.
“Can it, pony,” the guard snapped. His grip was poorer, since the stallion was so much bigger than the mare. Eventually he gripped the scruff of the stallion’s neck in one claw and the base of his tail with the other, carting him across the concert hall like he was a bouncer and the stallion was about to be ejected from a club. “What do you want them for?”
The red griffin shrugged as if she couldn’t care less. “The orders came from Stargazer, so probably it’s something to do with His Majesty.”
The guard stiffened. “These two are for King Claw?”
“Or Stargazer.”
He shivered. Octavia wondered who this ‘Stargazer’ character was to elicit that kind of reaction from a swaggering bully like their guard. No-one she wanted to meet, that was for certain.
The red griffin accepted the stallion by clamping a heavy collar around his neck and dragging him off. When the stallion tried to fight her she cuffed his ears, though she kept her claws carefully averted. Evidently she was to deliver him and the mare undamaged. Something roiled in Octavia’s gut: a sensation like she had eaten fermented grass or cordial left out in the sun too long.
“Octavia?” She looked down to see Pinkie Pie also watching the mare and stallion being led away: him glowering, her sobbing. “Where are Ritzy and Vainglorious going?”
Octavia blinked. “You remember their names?” Panic washed over her: what else did she remember? Pinkie Pie in her natural state was a bundle of energy and joy, but that same energy was uncontrollable and apt to get her noticed and then killed in a situation like this.
“Uh-huh. I was listening to them talk before.” Only when the door shut did she meet Octavia’s gaze. Her blue eyes were full of worry and confusion. “Ritzy’s always crying and Vainglorious is always telling her to shut up. He’s really mean. I don’t like him, but I don’t like the idea that he’s in trouble because of it. Do you think they’re gonna get punished for being naughty?”
The simplicity of the question floored Octavia. “Um, I … I don’t know.”
“My teacher at school keeps giving me detentions when I talk in class, but I can’t help it. I like making my classmates laugh. She never sees it that way. I don’t like Miss Hackney. I wish I was still in Miss Cheerilee’s class. She was my teacher when I first joined the school, and she was really kind to me because I started after everypony else.” Pinkie Pie frowned, scrunching up her battered face in thought. “Do you … are we in the same class at school, Octavia?”
Octavia swallowed. The story she had fed to Pinkie Pie – or ‘Jubilation’ as she was now trying to pass her off – involved a fabricated friendship outside of school. She had drawn on her childhood in Trottingham for details, reasoning that a small town like hers couldn’t be that far removed from life in Ponyville. She hadn’t even thought about school, or the fact that minor details from Pinkie Pie’s past would filter into her mind at the worst possible moments.
“No, Jubilation, we’re not.” She thought up an excuse quickly. “I’m older than you, remember?”
“Oh.” Pinkie Pie’s frown cleared. Clearly this was enough to expunge the discrepancies her mind had thrown up so far. “Did you have Miss Hackney last year? She’s been at the school for, like, EVER!”
“O-Of course I did. But do you really want to talk about school right now?”
“I guess not.” The frown returned in full force. “Do you think Ritzy and Vainglorious will be okay?”
“I’m sure they’ll be fine. They’re probably just going to get a, ah, detention or something. They’ll be made to clean the chalkboards and weed the gardens for being so loud and rude to each other.”
“Miss Hackney makes me clap the chalkboard erasers together to get the dust off. I hate that job: it makes me sneeze and I crash into stuff when I sneeze.” She gingerly touched her swollen snout. “Did I … crash into something to make my face hurt this bad?”
“Something like that.”
Griffin fists, most likely. Really, it was a wonder Pinkie Pie was still alive. Octavia couldn’t ask her how she had accomplished it, since that would involve pointing out to her that she was older than she thought, had been in a bloody skirmish with their captors and likely lost all her friends as well as any chance of ever going home. She didn’t know what that kind of sudden mental trauma would do to anypony, and Pinkie Pie was far from any pony. Until she could figure what their next move should be, Octavia resolved to keep Pinkie Pie in her little fantasy so as to keep her safe. If she felt unpleasant about the untruths, well then, that was just something she would have to live with.
“Can I have a drink of water?” Pinkie Pie asked plaintively.
“Not at the moment, Jubilation.”
“Why not?”
“There isn’t any.”
“Still?” Pinkie Pie gave a stupendous pout. “Those griffins are meanie-poops.”
Octavia boggled for a moment. “Meanie-poops?”
“Uh-huh. They’re mean and they’re poopy-heads, so they’re meanie-poops.” She crossed her front hooves and laid her chin on them, still pouting. “Meanie-poops.”
Octavia watched her for a moment. Despite the gravity of their situation, she had a sudden urge to laugh that she only just managed to squash. Clearing her throat, she crossed her own front hooves and mimicked Pinkie Pie’s posture, trying to fade into the background while also keeping an eye on everypony and every griffin around them.
Gilda pulled up short at the doors to the throne room. Her way was barred by two griffins; a buck and a hen, both considerably larger than her. They refused to even glance at her as she approached. Their only acknowledgement was a downward flick of their eyes when she was right in front of them, before they went right back to ignoring her.
“I have something for King Claw,” she said, suddenly realising how stupid that sounded. Why hadn’t she found one of the other captains if she didn’t want to speak to Captain Ripper again? Why had she bypassed all sane ideas and gone straight for the big cheese? King Claw had better things to do than give her an audience. She had been mad after talking to the dragon and it had impaired her judgement. She couldn’t back down though; not now, with these two arrogant feather-bags dissing her like this.
To distract herself from her own idiocy she held out the covered bird cage. She had discovered it in a side room. Judging by the big honking portrait on the wall and the private letters scattered across the floor and table, she presumed the room was part of Celestia’s private chambers. It might even have been where the poisoners found their mark. The cage had been empty on a stand, its previous occupant, if there had been one, long since departed. Gilda wondered whether it had been taken off by somegriffin to be prepared into a meal for His Majesty: parrot l’orange, canary parfait or, knowing King Claw’s rustic tastes, simply roast parakeet. Tired of avoiding the little dragon’s gaze, she had pulled out the perch and fashioned it into a muzzle, then shoved the dragon inside, fastened the door and covered it with a sheet. It made carrying the thing much easier.
The two griffins didn’t even bother to look at the cage she held out. Stung, Gilda stepped forward to pass between their bodies and open the huge doors behind them. The female stuck out a wing to block her and finally deigned to glare at more than empty space. Her feathers were a beautiful mix of different shades of red that made her gold eyes stand out like the centre of a flame. By comparison the buck’s brown and white feathers looked dowdy.
“His Majesty is not to be disturbed,” said the hen.
Gilda stopped. “Says who?”
“Someone more important than you.”
She riled at this and automatically started puffing up her chest and back feathers like an angry cat.
“Don’t even try it,” the hen snapped, rolling her eyes in disgust. “I could squash you like a rotten egg, underling.”
The emblem of an underling displayed on her vest burned like a hot brand. Gilda resisted the urge to cover up the evidence of how much lower down the ladder she was than everyone else. When she had left Flight School she had been full of dreams and big ideas of how she was going to make her mark on the world. She, Dash and their egos were going to take Equestria by storm until their names were famous and everyone knew who they were. Well, Equestria had sure been taken by storm, but here she was, anonymous in the crush of overeager warmongers, while Dash was –
“Will you just push off?” The hen scooped one massive wing towards Gilda, literally pushing her away. “King Claw isn’t going to see you. Why did you ever think he’d speak to an underling?”
Gilda hop-skipped backwards to avoid the red wing. Much like swans, a griffin wing could break bones if it hit you without enough force. “I have this for–”
“He’s not going to see you,” the buck interrupted. “Get that through your thick skull. No wonder you’re just an underling. Complicated thoughts really are beyond you low-rankers, aren’t they?”
Was it a quirk of nature that griffins born in Gryphona were genetically predisposed to be assholes? Gilda had yet to meet one for whom ‘being civil’ wasn’t a foreign concept. The closest was Captain Ripper and something about the way he complimented her made her deeply aware of her secrets as well as her shortcomings and keen to avoid his company. It was too bad he was her commanding officer and she saw more of him than anygriffin else.
“You’re not getting in here,” the hen said irritably, shooting her companion a dirty look. She clearly thought she was the more important of the two of them and didn’t appreciate him interrupting her. “So get lost. I’m sure there’s some gutter with your name on it that needs scraping out.”
Gilda fought the desire to launch at her for a brawl. The hen was larger, brawnier and of a higher rank, but a more powerful opponent had never stopped Gilda before. One time in Flight School, when she was still in her first semester, she had taken on a senior and won. She remembered cannoning across the storm-ball field after he kicked a particularly nasty raincloud into her gym class and fried the tails of several meek classmates. They had scattered in fear, which he had found hilarious until Gilda punched him on the nose. She hadn’t been defending them, but the nerve of somepony thinking he could get away with something like that had made her blood boil until common sense took a vacation. Later, outside the principal’s office, she had been plonked next to a filly with a bleeding lip and realised it was the rainbow-haired freak she had fought on the first day. The filly had leaped into the fray to keep her from getting her tail kicked by the senior’s teammates even though she should have hated Gilda’s guts after their first encounter. She had thrust out her hoof for Gilda to shake and the way she introduced herself had remained with Gilda to this day.
“I’m Rainbow Dash. Don’t forget it. Someday I’m gonna be the most famous flier in Equestria and you can say ‘I knew her before she was famous but not before she was kick-ass’.”
Gilda’s throat constricted. The memory disappeared and her desire to kick tail died when the double doors opened and both the hen and buck guards arched to attention like they had been carved from stone.
“What’s going on out here?” asked a sibilant voice.
“Stargazer, sir!” the hen barked. “We were just sending this underling away, sir.”
An ancient griffin slipped through the narrow gap, closing the doors behind him. He slunk to stand between the guards, though his single eye was fixed on Gilda. “An underling?” His voice drew out the last syllable as if he was savouring it.
Her heart skipped a beat. She had never heard him talk or seen him this close before, but every griffin in the Claw Army knew who Stargazer was. Magic was so rare in griffins it was impossible not to know about him and the three others with powers who served under him. No-one had ever confirmed it to Gilda, but the rumour was that those three were responsible for the poisoning of Celestia and Luna, since they were the only ones able to slip into Canterlot when the princesses were at full power. Moreover, rumour said that on Stargazer’s orders they had also managed to steal the Elements of Harmony; ancient artefacts whose sole purpose was to protect Equestria from harm. Without Stargazer and his assassins, this entire invasion could not have happened. And now here he was, standing in front of her looking expectant. He kept his face turned sideways, so that his good eye could focus properly on her – and the cage in her claw.
“Why was this underling trying to see His Majesty?” Stargazer asked. His voice sounded like dead leaves blowing across concrete. “What would prompt such a large breach in protocol? Simple stupidity or some other reason?”
“Uh …” the buck fumbled.
“She said she had something for him, sir!” the hen replied.
“What might that be?”
“We … didn’t ask, sir!”
“Didn’t you think such a flagrant breaking of rank was odd for an underling to try?”
“Uh …” Now the hen fumbled as well.
Stargazer came forward, eyeballing the covered cage. “What do you have there, underling?”
Suddenly, despite her dislike of the little dragon and her eagerness to be rid of him, Gilda tightened her grip on the cage. It was irrational and ridiculous, but she didn’t want to hand it over. This grizzled old griffin was nowhere near a threat physically; it was something else about him that set warning bells ringing in her head. Something deep in her gut told her that giving him Twilight Sparkle’s dragon would be a very, very bad idea. She unconsciously pulled the cage back towards her own chest. “It’s … it’s nothing, sir. Totally not important. Um, I mean … I’m sorry I wasted your time.” She bowed and backed off, as was proper etiquette.
“Halt, underling,” Stargazer said quietly. She froze as he took hold of the sheet and pulled it aside. When he saw the little purple dragon his eye rounded in delight. “A dragon hatchling? Where did you find this?”
“It … it was hiding … I found it by, uh, accident …” Gilda glanced at the dragon, which was no longer looking at her, but at Stargazer. It was still furious, attested by its smoking nostrils, but it no longer looked quite as sure of itself as it had when yelling at her. It sensed Stargazer’s dangerousness too.
“Celestia certainly had some interesting pets,” Stargazer breathed. He held out a claw, clearly expecting her to fork over the cage.
Gilda hesitated a moment more before reluctantly acquiescing. Her stomach coiled like a basket of overturned snakes. She felt like she had just made a terrible mistake.
“I shall keep hold of this one until His Majesty is more of a mind to think about it.” He lifted his gaze to her thoughtfully. “What is your name, underling?”
“Uh, Gilda, sir.” At his frown she added, “Goldfeather.”
“Goldfeather.” Stargazer turned the name over like a cat inspecting something interesting. “Goldfeather. An old name, but a respectable one.”
Her parents had given her an Equestrian name, but every griffin she told it to focussed more on her surname, since it was more akin to their kind of naming system. If she had been more committed to their cause she would have given herself over totally to being ‘Goldfeather’, but instead she had stubbornly held on to ‘Gilda’. It meant ‘decorated with gold’ in Olde Equestrian and the sound of it had appealed to her dad alongside his great-great-great-however-many-times-great-grandfather’s name. ‘Goldfeather’ had been turned into a family surname by subsequent generations. Gryphons didn’t bother with first names and surnames, since the population of Gryphona was so small and every griffin mother tried to think up new and fearsome names for her offspring to make them stand out. Gilda was an oddity but couldn’t bring herself to discard this last part of her pre-Claw-Army identity. If she had been more of a mind, she might have examined this, but she wasn’t and didn’t.
Stargazer gave her a sudden, brilliant smile. You could see how he might have been a handsome buck in his youth, but now he was withered and twisted. His back was hunched and his stance terrible, but he moved with incongruent speed and grace. Something about him reminded Gilda of a still oil slick floating on water with a strong currant hidden beneath. The skin around the base of her feathers prickled uncomfortably even though Stargazer’s expression was ostensibly friendly.
“Thank you for the gift, Underling Goldfeather,” he purred. “I won’t forget this.” He turned and went back through the doors to the throne room without another word. As he was so much higher in rank than her he didn’t need to worry about showing her his tail, nor did he look back, but he did pause to flip the sheet back over the cage before entering the throne room.
Gilda felt sick to her stomach, so she didn’t move fast enough with the hen guard swept a wing at her again. Instead she staggered and nearly fell over.
“Beat it,” the hen snarled, clearly embarrassed that she had been made to look foolish in front of her superior. She had abandoned all pretence at aloofness and allowed her emotions to blaze through. “Go on, get lost or I’ll rip you a new colon.”
Gilda fluffed up again. Feathers on end, she came up to the hen’s shoulder. “Just try it, chuckles.”
The hen planted her claws and paws in a fighting stance. “Gladly.”
“Don’t,” said the buck. “She’s not worth it. We’re on duty. Don’t throw away your honour on some stupid little underling.” He spat the word the way others might say ‘dog dirt’. “Do what she said and get lost,” he added to Gilda.
Gilda eyed them both and then, to their increasing anger, turned her back and flew off, swishing her tail impudently as she went.
High in the rafters, a pair of pupil-less golden eyes watched the scene unfold. They took in the exchange, the posturing, the handover and finally the retreat of the presumptuous smaller griffin. The owner of the eyes had never met any of these creatures before, but they were all intruders and thus all enemies, big or small.
Despite being fliers, the griffins rarely looked up, so the owner of the gold eyes was able to open her wings and glide silently away without being noticed. She knew this castle better than any of them and knew how to get around undetected. She had often evaded the Royal Guards when she got bored and went exploring without permission.
Her ancient brain worked on the problem now laid before it, while her young eyes searched out more information on what these intruders were doing in her territory.