Thoughts about Hearth’s Warming and the break coming up in a few days swirled around Twilight’s thoughts like fluttering butterflies. She had to solve the mystery before the break, or she might not get to for another year. If at all. Her snooping around might alert the thief to change tactics for the next time.
If there was a next time. Her snooping might scare the thief off entirely.
She sighed, glancing up at the sky as she started out across the courtyard. Looming clouds and streamers spun from tree to tree, strung with lights for the coming Hearth’s Warming Eve celebration—with its attendant cake-cutting and cake thievery—greeted Twilight as she huffed like a dragon’s foul temper across the courtyard, leaving a trail of slowly rising fog in her wake.
It was yet another ‘shortcut’, but one that had no unused cellars or disused pantries. All it had was the outside. During winter, that was quite enough to dissuade most ponies from venturing out into the high mountain air.
Spike, being a slugabed—or hibernating—would still be curled up in his basket, covers draped over him. There, he was immune from the cold that seeped up through her shoes with each sharp tap against the hefty paving stones in the courtyard.
The dormitories did have a direct access to the western wing of the Castle, where the classrooms were, but that morning she needed the brisk air and sharp breeze rising up from the plains to remind her that she was, in fact, awake. The single muffin for breakfast—she had been late for general breakfast after taking the long way around from Celestia’s chambers, and all of the food had been cold—hadn’t been enough to wake her up.
Sleep had been a fitful thing, flickering away from her as the moon sank lower and lower, scattering bands of light across her bed from the shuttered windows. It was almost as if the moon had sought to waken her to the task of finding out why. But that was just her tired mind putting reason to circumstance. Being perturbed by the question was reason enough to have a fitful sleep. She didn’t need to dream up reasons for her tiredness.
Of course, Spike’s snoring hadn’t helped, either.
She snorted. Everything had a perfectly rational, completely valid scientific explanation.
A skirling wind, carrying just a touch of the scent of snow, hurried her on towards the warmth of the castle. How the guards stood at attention day in and day out, no matter the weather—excepting blizzards—was one of those other mysteries. One she could leave to her brother to discover.
Or maybe he already had. She would have to quiz him when she got home. There had to be something about the barding they wore that was more than met the eye. Magical warmth enchantment, possibly. Such a thing would need constant renewal during the winter.
“Good morning, Twilight,” the guard said. “Awfully cold to be walking around.” He held open the gate for her with one hoof.
“I could say the same.” She started past him, stopped, and faced him. “How do you stay warm?”
He seemed surprised, and blinked at her. “I’m a pegasus.”
She stared back at him, the train of logic tick-ticking along. Pegasus. Flight in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Rarefied air, average temperatures below surface norms, even below norms at the height of Canterlot Castle. And they lived at those heights. In order to do so… Natural insulation. “Oh! Oh, yes.”
He laughed, lifting a wing. “You won’t see the earth corps or the unicorns on duty much during the winter, except inside.”
Natural immunity to the cold. It made sense. Cloudsdale was even higher than Canterlot, and the city was never abandoned, then. Maybe they wore warmer clothes, too.
“And we have shorter watch-shifts,” he added as he ushered her in. “No pegasus is totally immune to the cold, as much as some of our young bravos would like to have you believe it.” He snorted, flaring his wings. A touch of a warm breeze licked against her nose. “And we can trap thermal currents against our flanks.”
“Thank you,” she said, stopping to look up at him, more than the cold flushing her cheeks. “For answering my question. I should have put more thought into it.”
“Hey, nopony knows everything.” He smiled, chuckling. “But you’re very welcome, Twilight. Now let me close the door so you can stay warm.”
She hurried past as the guard closed the door behind her.
Today’s bonus lesson on the History of Hearth’s Warming Eve has been rescheduled. Please read pages 410 - 450 over the break. Happy Hearth’s Warming!
—Professor Tome
Twilight stared at the message pinned to the door. She’d already read that chapter. And gone over the questions, worked out the essays—twice—and had all of them tucked away in her saddlebags.
“Why?” She stared at the note as if it could provide the answers. It was, of course, silent.
Other ponies wandered by, took one look at the note, and wandered away, wishing her a happy Hearth’s Warming as they went. She returned each absently, puzzling at why Professor Tome would cancel class.
Put a little more thought into it.
Professor Tome, her Ancient Equestria history teacher, must have had something unexpected happen. He was always punctual, to the point that he put even Twilight Sparkle to shame. But… something niggled at her memory. Last year, he’d put off the second bonus lecture. While it was unusual for a teacher to cancel a class over anything other than illness, it wasn’t unheard of. But to do so two years in a row?
She stared at the note, recognizing his hoof from the little flourish he put, using the tail of the ‘e’ to underscore his name. So, he had written it himself, and it wasn’t the sickly scrawl of a pony barely in control of their magic from some illness.
Maybe visiting relatives showing up without warning. That made sense. She nodded at the door, sighed, and wondered what she was going to do with the rest of her morning. This close to the holidays, few teachers had the inclination to give optional classes, tending to spend that time getting ready for the holiday or spending it with family.
Maybe it was a sign. Hearth’s Warming Eve was still a little more than a week off. Maybe she should go home early. It wasn’t like it was far away. An hour would have her away from the castle and at her parent’s doorstep. But… it was comfortable in the castle, and she’d gotten used to living in the dormitory. It was certainly easier to get to the castle’s library from there, in the middle of the night. She didn’t want to think about wandering the city in the dark just to slake her mind’s thirst.
But then… she couldn’t ask why.
Why steal cake? It wasn’t something she could just look up in the library, as if a thief would keep meticulous records of every item they took. It was the question that had kept her up. It was the question that Sable Sleuth kept asking, and it was at the heart of everything a pony did.
“Why?”
Honey Cake had said that the ponies in the kitchens told stories all day long, or sang songs. Maybe she could learn something if she listened. At the very least, it was a cozy, warm place, and Honey Cake was always kind.
Giving the note one more glance, she wished Professor Tome a happy Hearth’s Warming and made her way down to the main kitchens. Maybe she could get a snack along with a story. Maybe she could even get more information.
The kitchens smelled even better in the early morning than they had last night. The foundation of the cake was taking shape in four massive sections, each one with its own team of cooks working under the dawning light through the frosted skylight. When it was finished, Twilight estimated it would be larger than the biggest oven in the kitchen, seven layers stacked together, each one a pie slice as thick as her hoof.
Seven cake layers, seven layers of icing and filling… fourteen flavors of berry and citrus and crumble and chocolate and vanilla. All of it was heavenly to smell and, as her mouth and stomach reminded her, heavenly to taste. The cake was meant to be eaten vertically, savoring each pairing of flavors as a pony made their way up from the bottom or down from the top.
And they had two more tiers to go. Twilight was almost happy for them that the other two would be smaller.
In addition to the confectionery preparations continuing in one corner of the kitchen, pastry chefs were sliding out racks of croissants, coffee cakes, and tarts from the ovens.
She lost herself in cataloging the smells. Cranberry, strawberry, cherry, cream cheese, lemon, orange… more. Sugar and brown sugar, vanilla mixed with the clean, sweet smell of clover honey.
“Excuse me.”
Twilight shook herself and stepped out of the doorway as Muffins padded up to her. The mare smiled sweetly and dipped her ears.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s easy to lose yourself in the scent.” The mare smiled at her and slipped past into the hallway, trailing that heavenly honey and crusted brown sugar steam. “Gotta deliver these to the throne room!” She balanced a tray of muffins on her back, braced between her wings, all of them leaving a trail of heavenly steam.
If she’d had wings, Twilight was sure she’d be floating along after them.
The bustle of the kitchen, in between breakfast and lunch, seemed less than it had the night before, even though there were more ponies tending to cook pots, ovens, and mixing bowls than there had been. An almost festive air permeated the air. Three ponies hummed the opening bars to a Hearth’s Warming jingle, and three more standing across from them at a long table of pastries, hummed the counterpoint.
“Good morning, Twilight Sparkle!” Honey Cake’s voice twittered from the far corner, where she was guiding Crunchy in the making of a tiny confection. Globules of icing danced around a dark blue circle, and the younger stallion had his tongue between his teeth as he separated tiny beads from a plain white mass and held them in place, adding color with another spell at the same time.
The weave of his spell was remarkably fine. She almost couldn’t make out the individual threads of telekinetic spells holding not only the medallion, but the droplet and three different food dye squeeze bottles in blue, silver, and dark gray. A separate heat spell froze the droplets in place as they landed without burning the rest of the piece. That heat spell must have been his special talent. She hadn’t seen anything like it with such fine control before.
Twilight walked as quietly as she could up to the table.
After a moment, Crunchy noticed her and twisted the medallion around to show her, beaming. “This is what I’m contributing this year. ”
Twilight stared at the mark. It looked familiar, but she couldn’t remember where she’d seen it before. It was the moon, a white crescent, on a dark blue emblem. There wasn’t any of the color-bleeding she was used to seeing in such treats. Every line was crisply defined, and the colors stayed exactly within them. Up close, what she had thought were blemishes were actually single grains of dark sugar. Through her study of the moon, she knew they weren’t there accidentally.
“Neat, huh?” He jiggled the medallion in midair, his golden aura brightening briefly.
“Very. What is it? What’s it for?”
“I’m… well, I’m not really sure. It’s my decoration for the cake, but I think it’s for…” Crunchy’s face fell for a moment as he shrugged. He smiled, hefting the floating ball of icing. “Would you like me to teach you how to make them?”
“I, um.” Twilight shuffled a hoof against the floor, forcing her ears to stay erect. Why do colts keep acting like that? If she wanted to learn how to do something, she would ask. “Maybe. I’m not a baker though.”
“Oh, it’s pretty easy, once you get the hang of it.”
“Maybe.” One ear folded back against her will, and she frowned until it popped erect again. She didn’t want to tell him no outright.
Honey Cake came back, brushing a hoof on her apron. “Focus on your work, Crunchy. It’s not break time yet.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He didn’t quite sulk, but he did return to his work with a bevy of sighs and glances in her direction.
“What is he working on?” Twilight asked Honey when they were back closer to her study table.
“It’s one of a dozen such devices Princess Celestia has requested for this year’s decorations,” Honey Cake said. She held up a template with twelve cutie marks, two of which she recognized; they were the cutie marks of two new students in the school. She hadn’t had much to do with them. She was three forms ahead of them. The other nine, she wasn’t certain of. At least one, she might have seen once, elsewhere.
As she studied the sheet, she noticed one that was missing. “Where is Princess Celestia’s mark?”
“She never has her mark on the cake.” Honey paused to study the disk Crunchy was working on, nodded, and turned her attention back to Twilight. “She picks two students from each year, four castle staff, and six ponies, one from each of the provinces, to honor. Your piece had your cutie mark on it, if you recall. That was… five? No, six years ago, this Hearth’s Warming. Do you remember?”
“No… I don’t remember. My piece was plain. Delicious, but plain.”
Honey Cake was quiet for a moment, lips pursed. “I see. Interesting.” Her eyes focused elsewhere. “I didn’t realize.”
“Didn’t realize what?” Twilight sidled up closer, pulling a notepad and pen from her saddlebags. She made a few short notes, summarizing what she knew already in a few quick lines. “What are the emblems for? I thought they were just decorative.”
“They’re the markers for special pieces. Twelve each year, one for each month.” Honey frowned at the sheet. “Yours was supposed to be for December. The moon Crunchy is working on is for December this year.”
Twilight cocked her head, studying the piece’s back, then flicked a glance at the template sheet. Every line and curve of the moon was perfectly recreated on the surface of the decoration. Even the shading was right. Slight imperfections that one less familiar with the moon’s surface might have mistaken for errors, but which she knew to be minor craters.
“And who is the moon for?”
“Oh, I never know that until she cuts the pieces and calls out the names. Of course, sometimes she has to have the cake preserved and flown out to the pony. Not everypony can drop everything for a slice of cake.” Honey chuckled and drew Twilight away from the table, template sheet still in tow. “Princess Celestia herself chooses the cutie marks, and she doesn’t ever attach names to them. That’s part of the surprise for me, when she gives this or that piece and I get to match mark to pony. It’s fun, too, to try and guess whose mark is whose, or what kind of pony is on the other side of that cutie mark.” She smiled warmly. “That’s about as much mystery as I like in my life.”
If that wasn’t an invitation, Twilight didn’t know what was. “I’ve been thinking about that story. And what you asked me.” She decided not to mention that she’d barely slept because of the questions the story raised. “I think… I think I should find out more.”
“No guesses? Conjectures?”
Sable Sleuth would have made a dozen theories by then. Sized up potential suspects, and would probably be keeping a close eye on Honey Cake as a suspect. But, as she had when she’d woken in fitful moments from slivers of dreams about chasing down the thief, she couldn’t bring herself to suspect Honey. The matronly baker made the castle feel more like home while she was living there. She couldn’t repay that hospitality with suspicion.
“No. I don’t have any leads yet,” she said finally. It wouldn’t have been right. She knew that. “I want to find out why. Why always leads to who,” she added, quoting a line from the novel. “But I need to know more. I can’t just guess at why.”
“Hmm. I do recall…” Honey Cake made a small sound, pursing her lips. “We do keep a record of past years if you’d like to look them over. Can’t remember why we keep em, but Matron Cherry Tart started the tradition over a thousand years ago, and we’ve been keeping it since. There’s at least a few hundred pages in there. It’s fun, sometimes, to go through and wonder who all these ponies were. What their cutie marks meant to them.”
Records. Secret papers. Obscure historical facts and figures. That was something any good detective would be looking for when trying to unravel a mystery like this. Slowly, Twilight nodded, peering at her notepad. Amid the scattered notes, diagrams and charts detailing what she knew so far, she had started a summary of what she knew… and what she didn’t. The second list was far larger than the first.
— Cake pieces go missing. Yearly occurrence.
— Who steals it?
— Why cake? When, exactly, do they go missing?
— Why?
— Myth links to Nightmare Moon and the Mare in the Moon.
— Same myth? Some link to thief? Calling card?
— Using myth to mask activities? Cult of ponies dedicated to Nightmare Moon?
— How long has it been going on?
— Cutie Marks on cake
— My cutie mark wasn’t on my slice? Was it taken?
— Do only slices with cutie marks on them get taken?
She frowned at the last. If her slice had been taken, what did that mean? She jotted that question down, too, sighed, and looked at the other column, labeled ‘Answers’. Empty, of course. Even knowing whose cutie marks had been on the cake might have been able to answer why those pieces were among the ones stolen.
“It’s a place to start. Do you know which pieces were taken?”
“Oh, I think it’s easy enough to figure out.” Honey’s eyes twinkled as she smiled.
Twilight chewed her lip, working back through the logic. “Mine was taken, you said?”
“I suppose it must have been, if your mark wasn’t set into the icing on the top.”
“But I still got a piece…” Twilight twiddled her pen against her notepad. “And I was the December choice?” That was something Sable Sleuth did. Ask the same question, just to make sure the story held up.
“Maybe not. Hum.” She lifted her chin and glanced at a cabinet. “My memory isn’t what it used to be, you know.” Out of the cabinet drifted a hefty book so stuffed with additional pages that the covers no longer sat parallel to one another when closed.
Twilight winced as the book thumped down on an empty table. That much paper would tear apart the bindings before too long if a pony wasn’t careful.
“Do you think you can manage by yourself, Crunchy?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He didn’t look up from his work as a thin flow of silvery speckled sugar water flowed up from the cup.
“He can be very focused,” Honey whispered as she drew Twilight aside. “When he’s not flirting.”
Twilight blinked, glancing at Crunchy Crust. “Is that what that was?” She made a small note to the side. Sable Sleuth was often the target of flirtation… but, in the books it was very different. More visceral, obvious, and even a little risque. Sometimes. She looked over at at Crunchy again, catching him looking at her.
He flushed, his eyes locking again on the sugary confection in front of him.
“Maybe. It’s not too important right now.” Honey paused, plucking at her apron. “Unless you want it to be. Sometimes… you get lucky and meet that right stallion—” She chuckled then, flicking her eyes at the door. “Or mare, when you least expect it.”
“Oh. Um…”
A dozen other instances of the same type of interest in her flooded through Twilight’s memory. She remembered other times colts, and even some fillies, had given her looks just like that. But they couldn’t all be flirting with her. She dismissed it. Maybe it was just when they tried to show off.
“I don’t think so. Not right now. This is more immediate.”
“Of course.” Honey tapped the cover of the book. “Just don’t get so lost in there you can’t come back out.”
“I won’t.” Twilight opened the book, each page loosely bound to the inside of the book with a simple glue spell. Pages towards the back felt like their spells were fading. She could still feel the lingering traceries of magic like a faint hum as she flipped through the first several pages, making notes of which cutie marks had been taken as Honey Cake filled her in.
After that, she sped up, her eyes flickered over pages and pages of cutie marks, adding a mental tally as she went.
If each page represented a year, then there were close to a thousand years of collected cutie marks there. A second flip, and a second, more precise count, and she came up with a different number. The reason why was apparent on a third, slower flip. Some of the pages were sticking together because of little globs of ancient icing. On that third time through, she realized something else.
The kitchen had kept better records than some of the bureaucratic offices specifically charged with keeping historic records. Certainly, it was less detailed than what the historians dealt with, and only gave cutie marks. There wasn’t even any guarantee that the pages were all in chronological order. They were held in place by a simple glue spell that would have been easy for even the most junior of unicorns to renew, but it also meant the pages could be removed by nullifying the spell, and rearranging them would be as simple as nullification and recasting.
Even so, the book would have been a valuable research tool for anypony researching repeat incidences of cutie marks through the ages. Well, discounting the necessarily shallow sample size. And the informal, non-rigorous selection parameters. And the undocumented source. Other than that, it was perfectly legitimate source of information.
By the time she had accounted for all of the sticky pages, some of which had actually been victims of the glue spell, she had counted nine hundred and ninety-five pages—give or take a few. Some of the pages had been thicker, and she hadn’t been able to tell if that was because of the change in paper quality or pages fused together by age and abuse.
This year’s sheet made nine hundred and ninety-six. The last was a sheet of vellum, old and marked with the fiber of the bark of the tree they had used in those days, and yellowed almost to the color of an orange peel. That, despite the powerful preservation spell she could feel impregnating its every fiber.
It must have been reinforced over and over again in order to last so long and still be that strong. The magic, too, vibrated against her own in an oh-so-familiar way.
“This is the first?” Twilight studied the sheet of cutie marks, puzzling out the symbols through the age-patina and cruft of being in a non-sterile environment for close to a thousand years. The preservation spells sunk deeply into the paper had done their job well.
There was Princess Celestia’s sunburst on the sixth month, and there was the moon symbol again on the twelfth. Only… it didn’t look like the one that Crunchy was working on. Maybe it was that the grays had faded, but it looked like the moon was fresh and clean white, with no shadowed craters marking out the Mare in the Moon’s profile.
The moon was on the twelfth month. Next page.
Neither sun nor moon. “Hmm.” Ten more pages, she flipped through, stopping at the twelfth page. The moon, again, on the twelfth month—the Winter Solstice. The style had hardly changed. Back to the front.
The page of cutie marks Crunchy Crust was working off of had the moon on the twelfth month, and the sixth month… wasn’t a cutie mark she recognized: a hammer and chisel over a pink heart. But five pages back… there was hers. On the sixth month. The month, she realized, of the Summer Solstice. A warm tingle ran through her as she remembered again watching Princess Celestia rising with the sun, her grace and beauty making the sun pale in comparison even as the halo of gold swallowed her in a brilliant blaze. She shivered from head to toe as the memory faded, no less potent ten years later than it had been that first moment.
Celestia must have known, even though she had shared her experience that day, so long ago, with nopony except her journal. Out of curiosity, she flipped back to the page for that year. Ten years ago. She didn’t recognize any of the cutie marks.
“Mrs. Cake?”
“Honey, dear.” The older mare cupped her ears forward, smiling. “Figure it out?”
“No… Maybe. Is it always the six and twelve?” She flipped to her page, touching a hoof to the twelfth cutie mark, an hourglass filled with water instead of sand. That would be Water Clock, a stallion who specialized in water-powered clockworks. She’d seen him around the grounds now and again, and had spent time with him learning about the intricacies of fluid dynamics and flow control.
Maybe she could add that as one of her areas of— Focus! She shook her head sharply. “Was his stolen?”
“Yes,” Honey said with a bright smile. “He was being honored for improving the efficiency of the Central Equestria dam’s turbines by nearly forty percent. He also, apparently, postulated some silly notion about the air being a liquid. He wasn’t at the cake giving, but out at his pet project.”
“Liquid air? But that…” Twilight groaned, shaking her head. She needed to focus. “But that’s not what’s important. Why was he the twelfth? And why was I the sixth?”
“Oh. Hmm. You’d need to ask Princess Celestia that. She makes the list. If she has a system about it, I’ve never been able to determine it.” Honey’s horn glowed briefly, and Twilight felt the detachment of the filaments making up the glue spell, and the paper with her cutie mark came free. “You can have this page, if you promise to bring it back. Maybe it will help you find some clue? A few of the ponies whose cutie marks are there still live close by, if memory serves.”
“O-of course!” The cutie marks on the page looked so real, freed of the faint haze of the glue spell. Her own sparkled and almost seemed to shine brighter than the light streaming in through the frosted skylight. Taking every care to not crease it, she slipped the page in between the pages of her notebook, careful to align it so no edge stuck out.
She made another note to track down the ponies on the sheet, especially Water Clock.
That still left the question of the numbers. She tapped the tip of the pen against her nose, staring between the numbers she’d written in her journal, and her cutie mark emblazoned on the page.
But why, then, would her piece have been stolen?
And this was the month of the winter solstice. Did the numbers mean anything? Looking at them on the paper, she could derive several solutions, and quickly sketched them out. Perhaps it was an indication of a type of numerocracy. Or numeromancy.
Twilight scratched out the last line. Numerocracy wasn’t even a word, let alone a form of government. But it was odd. Or, rather, even. The field of numeromancy was a well understood, hard science magical study, but she couldn’t think of any link from it to cake.
Hypothesis:
The years the moon showed up were even reciprocals of twelve. Falling on Years of the Moon, in the old calendar.
Only one way to find out.
Twilight held her breath as she went back twelve pages… and found herself staring at the moon in the twelfth slot.
Another twelve. Same result. She checked a random smattering of pages in between the first two sets of twelve, and found all manner of cutie marks from stars and hearts to xylophones and ant farms. But no moons.
A twelve year cycle, with this year being the crest of that cycle. It was the year of the Moon, as the old Equestrian calendar dated it, but that calendar had fallen out of popular use in the past centuries. Professor Tome lamented its passing, and had had them all calculate the current name of the year in that calendar, and provide a list of important historical events that had happened in others of the same year.
But, on the Solstice, it would become a new year, and the year of the Moon would pass into the Year of the Sun.
More and more, Equestrian calendars treated each year as a distinctly unique year. Some were given names, even; but that was up to the Equestrian Chronological Council to decide upon. But in the past, twelve year cycles had been the norm, starting with the Sun and ending with the Moon, and cycling through a list of other years in between.
She stared at the numbers, turning them this way and that, running them through multiple calculations, divisions, and derivations in her head. None of it came close to matching up. Maybe it was just coincidental. Twelve was as close to a perfect number as she had ever found. Twelve months in a year. Five sets of twelve seconds in a minute. Two sets of twelve hours in a day.
All related to time. But no matter which way she turned the times she derived from any of the derivatives of nine hundred and ninety-six, she couldn’t work it back into the stolen cutie mark medallions. Which were sugar anyway, and would melt, eventually, even in the mild humidity at the top of the mountain.
There would be nothing left of them, even if she hadn’t been almost certain everypony had eaten theirs. Or saved them and taken them elsewhere. Maybe a few were scattered here and there about the country. Maybe a few from ancient times still had preservation spells cast on them.
But they wouldn’t tell her anything about why. They would tell her what was stolen. Maybe. They wouldn’t even tell her who had stolen the pieces.
“Mrs—Honey, how are the sugar medallions arranged?”
“Two on the top tier.” Honey Cake gestured at a diagram of the finished cake, languishing under the field lines of a preservation spell shaped into a dome. “They’re always students here, and they’re the easiest to figure out, usually. Silver Bowl and I had you pegged as soon as you arrived here.
“Let’s see… the four on the second are for Equestrian bureaucratic staff who step above and beyond their duties—and they can be from anywhere. The six on the third tier are for any citizen of Equestria who does something spectacular.” No icing had been applied yet, but the bare cake layers still drew Twilight’s eye and set her mouth to watering. “The two on the bottom are selected by Celestia herself, and the rest, as I understand, are nominated by some sort of special council.”
“And they all mark a slice of cake?” Twilight asked. It would make sense. Twelve slices set apart from the rest, two of those twelve stolen each year, and one always found again. Is there a pattern? “Which piece was found preserved when I got a slice? I mean… which medallion had been on that piece? Or… I suppose you can’t tell that, I guess.”
“No, we could. We use a buttercream frosting that leaches a little of the color from the sugar because it’s so wet. If I recall correctly… and I’m not sayin’ I do, but if I do, I think it was the piece with your sugar medallion on it.”
“Mine.” A tingle ran up Twilight’s spine. Except her piece had been unadorned. She could remember that clearly. The frosting… Was it marred? Discolored? No... It was white. And lemon-flavored. She rubbed at her forehead with a hoof, as if she could work free the exact image in her mind.
Why mine? Another thought occurred to her, almost equally baffling. And who would take it?
Later that morning, back in her room and waiting for Spike to finish his hibernation, Twilight looked up from studying her notes. All she had to go on so far was conjecture and supposition. Nothing at all solid that she could form any kind of reasonable theory out of.
At least, not one that wouldn’t immediately fall prey to more whys, hows, and whos.
She rubbed a hoof at her eyes, sighing, and pulled out her Sable Sleuth book again.
“I don’t know why I dragged you along,” Sable whispered.
“I don’t know, either. Your apartment was safe enough,” Silver Hearts hissed back, flipping her tail into Sable’s face. “You could have left me there!”
“Oh, that’s right. I didn’t want you destroying the carefully crafted order—”
“I get that you're still upset, but it's been three years. I’ve apologized a hundred times! I didn’t know he had been your fiance!”
“Yeah… well, you dating him cinched that.” Sable snapped Silver’s tail out of her face and brought the binoculars back up to her eyes. The building was quiet. The grounds dark, save for the occasional security pony wandering around inside and looking out. “Why did you keep dating him anyway? You knew it would make me upset.”
“Yes, I did. And I’m sorry about that. But what else was I supposed to do? You’d broken it off. You have no idea how much he missed you. You didn’t tell him anything, Sable. What was he supposed to think? He’s gentle and very, very kind. It’s not in him to be angry… but you did it. You managed to hurt him so bad he didn’t want to look back. How could you do that to him? Do you know how much he was hurting? You breaking off the engagement nearly destroyed him.”
Silence settled between them. Sable couldn’t deny anything her sister had said.
“It wasn’t my choice.”
“You broke it off.”
“To protect him! The life I live isn’t exactly friendly to those close to me.” She flicked a meaningful glance at Silver. “As you’re finding out. He’d… seen something he wasn’t supposed to, and some ponies he wasn’t ever supposed to run into ran into him.”
“Who was it?”
“I… I can’t tell you. They’re not exactly… contained.”
“That doesn’t explain why you got so upset when I started dating him.”
“Because it was supposed to be—” Her heart was racing, blood boiling, head pounding. Get your head back in the game, filly. “It was supposed to be temporary. As soon as the bad guys were locked up, I was going to explain it to him. I was… I still love him, Silver.”
“And since the bad guys aren’t locked up…” Silver Heart shook her head. “But maybe it’s for the best, you know. Even if you got them locked up and put away forever, what about the next time he stumbles across something? Would you divorce him?”
“No! Of course not! I’d keep him safe!”
“Like you’re keeping me safe now? Huddled under a bush, staking out a museum with Celestia only knows what crawling around in the grass.” Silver turned around, facing away from the street she was supposed to be watching. “He’s not like you, Sable. He's like me. He and I can’t handle this kind of life all the time. I don’t even understand how you do it.”
“Someone—”
“Has to. I get that. But how can you live like…” Silver made a gesture, taking in the museum, the bush, and somehow Sable’s entire life. “This? Not knowing if your next case will be some eldritch demon from the past?”
“That’s Daring Do’s territory. I’m a detective. I solve mysteries, not fight ancient evils.”
“But you solve ancient mysteries that might someday uncover something you can’t handle. What will he know? You went off to… what? Wash carriages, and never came back? Or went off to work in the bakery, or as a scrivener, and your body washes up somewhere. What’s he going to think? How is that going to tear him apart?”
“Face the road,” Sable snarled. “And keep quiet. Somepony might hear us.”
Silver Heart turned around, and did as she was told.
Leaving Sable to try and rationalize away the questions her sister had brought up.
Twilight held a hoof to her mouth, holding back tears. The end of that chapter always hit her just in the right place. Just the wrong place, more like. She knew it would be alright. But… what must Sable have been feeling right then? She didn’t know everything would be okay.
A chill ran up her spine. The thief had meddled with her six years ago. What if they remembered her after all this time? Her case had become more personal than she could have expected. She didn’t know everything would be okay. Cake… is cake. But what if it’s more than that?
She closed the book, holding it to her chest, and prodded Spike with her other hoof. Spike would be able to calm her down. He always seemed to be able to.
When he was awake.