There was frost on the ground on Monday morning, crunching under my hooves whenever I happened to walk across a patch of grass. Plum was walking next to me, though without the usual bounce in her step. She had been surprised to find me waiting in the street outside of her house in order to walk her to school.
“I don’t want you walking around by yourself,” I had told her when she asked about it. “You’re too easy of a target all alone.”
“So, what, you’re going to walk me to school every day for the rest of my life?” she asked, arching an eyebrow at me.
“If I have to.” I shot a smirk her way. “Though we’ll both be better off once I figure out a plan to keep them away from you and your family.”
She smiled over at me, though I could see the worry in her eyes. “No plan, yet?”
“Not yet.” I heaved a sigh. “I’ve got lots of partial ideas, but nothing is coming together. I’ll keep on it. But until then, I’ve got some rules I want you to follow.”
“What rules?”
“First, no talking to strangers.”
“Well, duh,” she said with a snort. “That’s a given.”
“Especially keep away from anypony who’s hanging around your house, or who acts strangely.” I showed her my serious face. “They may be out looking for you. Try to avoid letting them see you.”
She gulped and nodded.
“Next, it’s probably a good idea to avoid the police, at least until we find out how far this goes. But if you get into real trouble, find a cop and ask for help. They can’t all be on the bad guys’ payroll.”
“Right,” she said nervously. I hated that she was scared, but she had to understand how serious this could be. I couldn’t protect her from everything. She needed to know enough to watch out for herself. “But what if it’s a cop that’s acting weird?”
“Find a different one. Or run to the nearest crowd and start shouting your head off,” I continued. “Get as much attention on yourself as you can. If there’s no crowd, run into a store. Ask an adult for help. Knock on the front door to somepony’s house and ask for help. If none of that is possible, run until you can find somewhere to hide.”
“Okay,” she said in a weak voice.
“If that crooked cop unicorn comes over to your house again, you stay out of sight. If it sounds like he’s looking for you, or if he asks your mom about you, you get out of your house however you can and you come find me.”
“Okay,” she said quietly. “What about my mom?”
“She’ll be okay,” I said with a confidence that I wasn’t really sure I felt. “She’s a grownup. She can take care of herself.”
She nodded, though she was scowling at the ground as she walked, her face screwed up in a look of concentration.
I nudged her softly with my shoulder. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I brought this on you.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I hadn’t gone to the warehouse that night, none of this would be happening. It’s my fault.”
“It’s my fault too,” she said. “I decided to go with you. Besides,” she said with a hint of her usual cheerful smile, “We’re Plum and Cinnamon, filly adventurers extraordinaire. We can handle anything!”
I offered her a smile of my own. “You got that right.”
She stopped walking so suddenly that I took a few steps before I realized she wasn’t next to me anymore. I stopped and looked back at her.
“It’s going to be okay, isn’t it?” she asked me. Her voice was pleading with me to make it all better.
“If we stay smart, if we keep our eyes open, if we’re careful…” I put on my best reassuring smile. “Yeah, I think it will be.”
Plum sighed, sounding as if the weight of the world were coming off of her shoulders. And, heck, maybe I’d even told her the truth. We started walking again, and I cast around trying to think of anything I could to get her mind off of things for a little while.
“So, Plum,” I said. “You were saying something earlier about different types of migratory birds?”
She turned to look at me as we walked. “Oh, was I?”
Ordinarily I’d do my best to tune out Plum’s bird talk. Today, though, was a different story. “Something about how some swallows will migrate and some won’t, I think.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, it’s really cool! The Equestrian swallows will migrate south for the winter, but only if led by pegasi. The Zebrican ones will just stay in one place, though. Some of the books I've read say that they were originally one species, but they separated because some flocks would get left behind when the weather pegasi went to find them. Over the years, they adapted to the warmer climate and just stayed like that. According to the book The Common Birds of Equestria, it turns out that they…”
I smiled as Plum rattled on about obscure bird facts. She was still a blank flank, but I’d be willing to bet that cutie mark ended up with feathers on it. She turned into a little professor whenever she was talking about birds.
Plum seemed to be in a better mood after that as we walked together through the crisp morning air. She rambled on about birds for a while longer and I went back to tuning her out like usual. What she was saying wasn’t as important as the carefree way she was saying it.
Eventually, her bird talk wound down. A spring returned to her step as she trotted out ahead of me. When she got a pony length ahead of me, she glanced back over her shoulder with a mischievous grin.
“Race ya!” she said moments before she ran off, giggling like a loon. I felt a smile, a more genuine one this time, pull itself across my muzzle.
“It’s on!” I shouted after her. A half-second later and I was hot on her heels, the dust from the road forming a cloud behind us. We laughed all the way to school and she ended up beating me by a nose.
“I win!” She was gloating, stepping high as she walked into the classroom ahead of me.
“Only because you cheated,” I pointed out.
“It’s a fair tactic,” she said with a gleam in her eye. I shook my head with a dry laugh. What passed for logic in Plum’s head never failed to surprise me.
Our run had put us ahead of schedule. Students were still arriving as I hung my saddlebags on the hook with my name on it. I made my way through the typical early morning shenanigans of our hyperactive classmates, sliding my lunchbox into my desk compartment before sitting myself down.
Reality set back in once I was back in my hated school seat. My good mood started fading as the gabbling of the colts and fillies in the classroom started grating on my nerves. Talk about weekends and incompleted homework, interrupted playtime and boring chores all bubbled in the air around me. The things that little colts and fillies had to worry about. I could only wish my own problems were so insignificant.
Plum’s own spirits seemed to be taking a dive, too. Either she was picking up on my developing bad mood or she was growing one of her own. I should have kept her talking. Poor kid could have used the distraction. Instead, she was frowning down at her desk and keeping to herself. I found myself missing her chatter.
The bell rang and cut the classroom chatter short, much to my relief. Miss Persimmon was already there behind her desk, looking at us all with a well-practiced smile that didn’t touch her eyes. A pity, because she was wearing a fetching green dress that complemented her coloration nicely. Maybe the librarian look was growing on me.
“Good morning, class,” she said.
“Good morning, Miss Persimmon,” the class echoed back. The mare flashed that rehearsed smile at us once again and came around to the front of her desk.
“Just a reminder, everypony,” she said in the sugary singsong she used when she was faking how excited she was about something, “The school play is coming up next week. If you haven’t returned your permission slip yet, make sure you do so by the end of tomorrow, okay?”
Excited murmurs filled the classroom. I snorted and rolled my eyes. The teacher must have noticed that, because she stopped in front of my desk with her mouth turning down into a hint of a frown.
“If your parents don’t sign off on the slip, or if you turn in a slip that says they don’t want you in the play, I may stop by your house to talk to your mommies or daddies,” she said. She was staring right at me while she said it. Then her mouth quirked up into a smile again. “You know, just to see if I can convince them to let you be in the play.”
“Ah, shit.”
I didn’t realize that I’d said that out loud until Miss Persimmon flinched back a little while staring at me in shock.
“What was that?” she said, too stunned to be angry.
“I said, ‘You got it’.”
She scowled as I composed my face into a look of utter innocence. After a few seconds, I began to doubt my acting abilities. She must have decided to let it drop, though, because eventually she shook her head and moved on.
“We’ll be doing casting starting on Wednesday. I’m sure you will all do a great job!” Only the eye twitch gave away the massive lie she’d just told.
“Dibs on Princess Celestia!” piped up a filly in the background.
“I wanna be the Princess!” another filly objected.
“Can I just be a tree or a rock or something?” a unicorn colt the next desk over from me muttered while several fillies began arguing over who would be impersonating our solar monarch.
“Class!” The teacher stomped her hoof, which silenced the kids. “I will make the decisions the same way I always do! By pulling the names out of a hat!”
Groans of disappointment filled the air. Miss Persimmon took a deep breath and let it out.
“Alright, then,” she said as she readopted her chipper persona. “Let’s get started on math, shall we?”
“Aaawww!” the class groaned in unison. Most of the class. I hate to admit it, but I really liked showing off in elementary mathematics.
As much as I enjoyed feeling like a math whiz, it didn’t last long. Math class was over soon enough, and then we entered the nightmare landscape of Arts and Crafts. Construction paper and glitter, macaroni and glue. And dozens upon dozens of crayons and markers everywhere the eye could see.
I don’t think Miss Persimmon much appreciated my own artistic submission: three black dots on a white piece of paper.
“Cinnamon,” she said with a long-suffering sigh as her magic lifted my masterpiece off of my desk. “What is this supposed to be?”
“A polar bear in the snow,” I told her evenly.
She passed it back to me, shaking her head. “I really think you could do better if you would just apply yourself.”
“Give me an ‘F’, then,” I said with a shrug.
Her eyes narrowed and she gave me the disapproving scowl I was so used to. As her lungs inflated for a reply, I decided to push some buttons.
“It has to be you,” I said, “because I honestly can’t give an ‘F’ for this on my own.”
I spent the rest of Arts and Crafts in the time-out corner.
Lunchtime saved my sanity. I retrieved my battered lunchbox from my desk and followed Plum outside. Vanilla Sweet must have been off being a nuisance to somepony else, because our favorite spot under the tree was open. Plum’s mood was better, at least. As we made our way there, the little purple filly was once again chattering away.
We were just sitting down when I realized that she’d asked me something about my lunchbox.
“Oh, yeah. I pounded it out yesterday with one of my dad’s old hammers,” I said. The box was lumpy and misshapen, but it closed and managed to stay latched, which was all that mattered. It was still an improvement over the pretty pink princess lunchbox I’d traded it for.
“Hmm,” Plum said as she chewed on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “So, any ideas yet about what we’re going to do?”
“Follow the rules. Never go out alone. Watch out for that unicorn. If he comes over, hide,” I said. I knew I was reiterating the basics, but it was important that she remembered.
“Anything new, I meant.” She sounded sulky when she said it. I shook my head and she pouted.
“I would have told you if I did,” I said. As if spending twenty minutes in the relative peace and quiet of the time-out corner would have been enough for me to come up with anything solid. The only thing I kept coming back to was the sacrifice play, putting myself in the line of fire to take the heat off of them. But even that wouldn’t necessarily protect them all.
I sighed, poking at my celery sticks with a hoof. “We just stay safe, Plum. Time is our friend. The more of it that goes by, the safer we all are.”
She obviously wasn’t satisfied with that answer, because the next thing she said was, “Well, I still say we should go to the police. They can’t all be crooked!”
“You’re right,” I said. “They probably aren’t. But if we pick the wrong one, then we’re in worse trouble than ever. And even if we pick the right one, they may not take us seriously.”
We ate in silence for a while. I could practically hear the gears clicking in Plum’s head as she tried to figure out an angle. I finished off my lunch while she was still eating her carrot chips. When Plum noticed that I was done eating already, she passed me her apple.
“So, any idea what you’d want to be for the play?” she asked when I had chewed the apple down to the core. I shrugged, glad for the change of topic.
“Don’t really care. Make me a rock or something. The less I have to do, the better.”
“Aww. I think you’d make a great Celestia! Though, she’s not pink.”
I glared into her grinning face.
“I don’t think so. A rock. Or maybe a tree. That’s more my speed.” I grinned back at her. “And you’ve got peanut butter in your teeth.”
Plum flushed red as her mouth snapped shut. She covered her muzzle with a hoof and glared at me when I gave a snort of laughter.
“Besides, the play is next Friday. With any luck, I’ll be back to normal by then.”
I tried giving her a smile, but it didn’t do much good. She stopped looking angry only to look sad instead.
“I was… I was kind of hoping you’d stay like this,” she told me.
The words came out before I had a chance to censor them. “Are you crazy?”
“No!” She huffed angrily, then deflated as she admitted, “But I don’t want to lose you as a friend.”
It took a couple of seconds before I could find my voice again.
“You’ll always be my friend, Plum,” I finally told her. “I would have gone nuts weeks ago if you hadn’t been around.”
“Aww…” She smiled at me. “It turns out even the super-tough Cinnamon Swirl has a heart!”
“Sure, but its all dried up, tough and wrinkled.” I regarded at her for a few seconds, considering my words carefully. I owed her the truth. “We’ll still be friends, Plum. But we won’t be able to hang out much anymore.”
She rocked back a little when I said that. “Why not?”
“It would be hard to explain why the full grown stallion was hanging around with a little filly,” I said. “Society wouldn’t like it. Your mom and dad definitely wouldn’t like it, trust me. Our ages are too different. It would be inappropriate.”
She stared at the grass between us for a while. I looked away, in case she started to cry. Instead, I took out my thermos and poured myself some milk to drink.
“Well, then,” Plum eventually said in a matter-of-fact voice as I started drinking. “I guess I’ll just have to marry you.”
Before that moment, I’d never realized that spit-takes could happen in real life. But they can and I did, spitting my milk all over the grass. Plum fell over sideways as she burst out in shrill giggles. I tried to suck in a lungful of air in order to demand to know just what the hell she meant, only to breathe in some of the milk along with it. I spent the next couple of minutes alternating hacking my lungs out and gasping for breath, all to the accompaniment of Plum’s laughter. As soon as I could, I managed to gasp out one word.
“What?!”
Her laughter died away and she sat back up with a grin.
“It’s the perfect solution,” she said, nodding as if she weren’t spouting nonsense. “I don’t want to lose you as a friend, and you said you were too ugly as a stallion to get any mares interested in you, remember?”
My further hacking and gasping were the only answer she got.
“Anyway, I don’t care much about stallions being handsome,” she said, and even while I was in the middle of asphyxiating I was able to roll my eyes. She’d feel differently in a couple of years. “I know that you’re a brave and loyal pony, Cinnamon. What more does a mare need?”
“That… That’s not enough, trust me,” I managed to wheeze. A few more coughs and I managed to add, “Besides, the age difference…”
“Pfft!” Between the raspberry she blew and the dismissive wave of her hoof, I had a pretty good idea of how she felt about that. “My dad is older than my mom by almost eight years. It’s no big deal.”
“Our age difference is going on twenty years,” I pointed out with a raspy chuckle. “Besides, I’d be a grown-up, and you’d still be a filly.”
I was trying to keep my tone casual. In reality, my head was still reeling from the unexpected direction this conversation had taken. I’d have traded everything I owned for this conversation to be over right then.
“I’d wait,” she said, as if that settled the matter.
“Yeah, but you’ll notice colts your own age in a couple of years, anyway.” I said.
“Ugh, I don’t think so.” Her muzzle scrunched up and she added, “They’re all gross.”
“I think you’ll find ‘em to be less gross in a few years,” I said with a grin. “Besides, I wasn’t kidding about being ugly. I’ll show you a picture, sometime. I guarantee you’ll run away in horror.”
I laughed, trying to make light of the situation. It didn’t work out like I’d planned.
“You don’t have to laugh,” Plum said, sounding a little hurt.
“I didn’t mean… Look, I’m really not trying to make fun of you. There’s just no way it would work.”
“But it could!” she said with heat in her voice as she got to her hooves.
“No, Plum.” I shook my head. “I’m really flattered that you’d think that way about me, but no. Even when I change back, you’d still be too young for me to marry.”
She stomped a hoof. I looked up and was surprised to see angry tears in her eyes.
“You could at least pretend, you big jerk!” she snapped.
She spun around on a back hoof and charged off, leaving me sitting there with my thermos of milk in my hooves. I was torn between going after her and staying put. I opted to let her settle down before talking to her again. I was probably the last pony she wanted to see right then.
I started packing up. Plum had left her lunchbox behind, along with the small brownie that was supposed to be her dessert. I put it all back in her box and latched it shut before doing the same to mine. Since I could only pick up one lunchbox handle with my teeth, that means that Plum’s had to be carried on my back. Only for Plum would I end up carrying that damned pink lunchbox again.
I was halfway back to the classroom when I heard the noise of a large and rowdy crowd. Yelling and so on isn’t uncommon on the playground. Anypony under the age of twelve seems to spend way too much time shrieking and hollering at the top of their lungs, usually for no good reason. But this was different. This sound had an edge to it. I dropped both lunchboxes on the path and bolted towards the heart of the shouting.
There was a crowd of colts and fillies in a circle, most of them looking on with mild curiosity. The shouting was coming from the inner edge of the circle, or at least most of it was. As I pushed my way through the crowd, I heard two voices I recognized. One was Plum Pudding’s. The other, Vanilla Sweet’s.
I barreled my way past the useless damned bystanders, cursing up a storm and bruising more than one fetlock in the process. On the way, I recognized one of the fillies I pushed aside as a classmate.
“Get a teacher!” I barked at her. The filly blinked at me in surprise before nodding and running off. Good. At least one pony was doing something useful, unlike these other damned herd animals that were just watching or, even worse, shouting encouragement from the sidelines.
Plum was standing defiant against Vanilla Sweet, with Ivy standing uselessly in the background and looking like she wished she were anywhere else. The look on Vanilla’s face cranked my adrenaline up a few more notches. She had a grin on her muzzle like ice, and a mean glint in her eyes. She started moving towards Plum, who already had a darkening bruise on the side of her muzzle.
Ivy called out a warning just a moment too late. I broke into a run and rammed my shoulder into Vanilla’s barrel, sending her sprawling.
“You can't even face her without your buddy being here for backup,” I said to the bully, not bothering to hide my contempt. That bruise on Plum’s face had my heart pounding. I felt a fire building in my brain and I grit my teeth, trying to keep my anger under control. “You really must be afraid of her, Vanilla.”
The bully was pulling herself back to her hooves, fury boiling in her eyes. Ivy, still in the background, shot a worried look back and forth between us.
“I’m going to rip that ribbon out of your mane and make you eat it,” Vanilla Sweet told me, almost conversationally.
Plum responded to that with a loud, “I’ll make you eat it, you creep!”
I held out a foreleg between her and the bully, barring her way. “I got this, Plum,” I said. She batted my leg out of my way and turned her anger on me.
“This is my fight, Cinnamon!” Plum was shouting at me. I jerked back in surprise. “I can take care of myself, you know! You big dummy!”
“One of you or both of you, I don’t care!” Vanilla’s face had turned even uglier than normal, splotches of red showing up under her coat. “I’ll pound you both!”
Meanwhile, there was a mantra running through my head. Don’t hurt her, she’s just a filly. Don’t hurt her, she’s just a filly… Then I caught sight of the darkening bruise on Plum’s muzzle once again, and the mantra changed. Maybe just a little bit...
I shook my head and folded my ears back against my head.
“I don’t think so.” That was directed to all three of us, though I was looking at Vanilla when I said it. “Nopony is getting pounded today. Because any second now, a teacher is going to break this up. If you don’t want another detention, we should just go our separate ways.”
Vanilla screamed in rage and charged us. Plum stiffened next to me, getting ready to meet the charge head on. That would be a terrible idea. I shoved Plum aside, sending her staggering away. Then I neatly sidestepped Vanilla’s charge and clipped her hooves out from under her with a foreleg.
For the second time that day, Vanilla Sweet went flying. Not bad for an earth pony.
She didn’t take this fall as well as the first one, landing hard on her chin on the hard-packed dirt of the playground. Plum gave a victorious whoop and jumped in the air, punching a forehoof at the sky.
“Take that!” she crowed. “And stay down!”
Yeah, like that was going to happen. Vanilla got back to her hooves with blood on her muzzle and murder in her eyes.
I winced at the sight of the blood. I hadn’t meant for her to get hurt, but she hadn’t given me time for a softer option. All I could do was try to control the fight from then on and hope things didn’t get any worse.
Vanilla rushed again, this time trying a diving tackle that was comically easy to dodge. She landed in a grassy area this time, the air rushing out of her lungs with a whoosh when she landed. This time, her glare wasn’t towards me.
“Help me, you idiot!” Vanilla Sweet screamed at somepony behind me.
A rock clipped me behind the ear, briefly stunning me. Crap, I’d forgotten about her little sidekick. I looked back to see Ivy with a panicked look on her face as she hefted several more small rocks in her telekinetic field. She launched another one at me, this time hitting me in the shoulder.
Ivy soon found herself in too much trouble to try launching any more rocks at me. With a scream of pure rage, Plum tackled her. The remaining rocks fell back to the ground as the two of them tumbled and rolled, struggling with each other. The cheering from the audience around us ratcheted up in volume.
“Plum, no!” I shouted, far too late to do any good. And then I was hit in the side with a wrecking ball.
My breath exploded out of my lungs. I ended up falling on my back with a triumphant Vanilla Sweet on top of me, a cruel sneer on her face and both forehooves raised. But she failed to realize two very important things. The first was that one of the first things I’d learned in self-defense class was how to control a fall.
The second was that my back legs were between us, coiled like a spring.
As Vanilla Sweet reared up and prepared to pound my head into jelly, pure reflex took over. I kicked out, hard, taking her in the stomach and knocking her clean off of me. I heard her hit the ground and I rolled over, getting back to my hooves.
I spared the bully a glance as I got up. She was retching, puking her lunch up on the playground to the collective “eeew!” of the gathered students. She would keep for now.
I found Plum and Ivy struggling against each other a small distance away, on the other side of a tree. I ran over, shouting my lungs out. The unicorn’s head snapped up, eyes wide. With a shriek, she jumped away from Plum and took off, running away as fast as her hooves would carry her. I stopped by a panting and gasping Plum.
“You alright?” I grated at her. I was having a hard time breathing, myself.
“I’m fine,” Plum snapped, still keyed up. “You let her get away!”
“I’m fine, too,” I said in my driest voice. “You know, in case you were worried.”
She blinked at me, eyes wide with surprise. Then she grunted and looked away, apparently not ready to stop being mad at me yet. “Where’s Vanilla Sweet?”
I pointed a hoof. Vanilla was glowering at us as she leaned against a tree. She wasn’t making any moves toward us, and it was clear that I’d knocked the fight out of her along with her lunch.
“We won?” Plum’s voice was loaded with utter disbelief, which quickly turned to joy. “We won!”
“Nopony won,” I said, my voice stiff with self-loathing. “Trust me on this one, Plum. We all lost this one.”
“That’s stupid,” Plum said with a snort and an eye-roll. “You know what I think? I think you just can’t—”
“Just what the hay is going on here?!” a voice shouted.
Our audience scattered like roaches when the light is turned on, leaving just the three of us standing alone and facing the wrath of our teacher, who was descending upon us like a thunderstorm.
Miss Persimmon turned her disapproving eye on all three of us in turn, taking in the dirt, the scuffs, the messy manes, and the bruises. Her mouth opened, no doubt ready to let us know how very disappointed she was. I beat her to it.
“Just where the hell were you?” I shouted at her. The mare took a step back, eyes wide. So did Plum, for that matter.
“I beg your pardon?” the teacher asked, more shocked than angry.
“My pardon? You don’t have it,” I snarled. My legs were stiff and shaking as I stomped towards her. “You knew that Vanilla Sweet was going to be coming after me or Plum. Just like she has every other day for over a week. Where. Were. You?”
“I… You don’t talk to me like that! You’re the ones who were fighting!”
“Yes! And it’s your job to stop us! Where were you?”
The shock was fading from her eyes and anger was replacing it. I cut her off again before she had the chance to work up a decent head of steam.
“By the way,” I said in a tone closer to normal, though still vibrating with anger, “I had to kick Vanilla really hard in the gut to stop her from pounding my face into the dirt. She needs to see a doctor.”
“No I don’t!” Vanilla Sweet protested weakly.
“You could be hemorrhaging internally and wind up dead,” I told her bluntly. Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped open. “Just because I don’t like you doesn’t mean I want you to die. Go to a damned doctor and stop being a baby.”
Vanilla looked beyond panicked, now. “I could die? Miss Persimmon, I don’t want to die!” She was prancing frantically in place as she said it.
The teacher glared at me. “Stay right there,” she said, then went over to check on Vanilla Sweet. I used that time to check on my friend, sitting down next to her and giving her a once-over.
“Could she really die?” Plum whispered to me as I looked at the bruise alongside her jaw.
“A remote chance, maybe. Probably not. It doesn’t pay to take chances, though.” I turned her head with my hoof, looking for more damage. “Anything else hurt besides your jaw?”
“What? My jaw doesn’t hur…” she ran a hoof over her bruise and whimpered. “Owieeee!”
I sighed. “That’s adrenaline for ya. Distracts you from the pain.”
“This really hurts!” she whined.
“That’s one reason I don’t like fighting,” I said.
Miss Persimmon came back our way, leaving a teary-eyed Vanilla Sweet behind. She was radiating anger and disapproval as she said, “I’m taking Miss Sweet to the nurse’s office for now. As for you two, I expect you to go straight to the principal’s office and wait there for me. Understood?” Her tone was measured and controlled, a thin veneer of calm over a boiling sea of rage. I could tell, since it was a tone I used often enough.
Plum and I both acknowledged our understanding, Plum with a squeak and frantic nod and me with an irritated grunt and shrug. The teacher gave us a measuring look before taking off with a visibly shaken Vanilla Sweet in tow.
“I think we’re in trouble,” Plum said softly.
“Yeah,” I said. “And that’s another reason I don’t like fighting.” With a grunt, I got back up on my hooves. “Come on, Plum. Let’s go and face the music.”