I told Princess Twilight of my discovery the next day, and she all but barred me from her study as she pored over the book of northern legends that I had found it in.
I remember how I stayed, even though she had retreated. It was not our usual sort of interaction, and to be honest with you I have not ever been one for long company without specific purpose. But the light in her eyes… it had been so familiar. If only I had guessed why, I might not have experienced what I did. Would that have been for the best? Would it have been a better fate?
I sat in the living room of her suite, reading. Occasionally, I would bring her tea or kaf. When the daylight began to fade, I cobbled together a serviceable dinner and with great difficulty I coaxed her from her cloister to break bread with me on the balcony. Or, really, for her to break bread while I served her. I was her valet, technically, or so the game was. Some wine, but no meat. She refused meat—would not explain to me her reasons why, merely that she would prefer not to touch it and so she did not.
I asked her what she thought of my discovery, but she shook her head. Not yet. She wanted to be sure.
I wanted to protest, but the look… again, familiar. Again, I knew that she would reveal all with time. So I shrugged, and relented.
When I left her, I confess I had almost forgotten about the whole mystery. In my haste to prove to myself whether or not she was a charlatan, I had quite forgotten an upcoming evaluation and was woefully unprepared. I hurried home, and decided that for now, I would believe her.
My examination went poorly. For the first time, I found myself at a loss to perform magical tasks not from a lack of power or ability but from a simple lack of knowledge. I cannot explain to you the immense shame I felt. I had never been unprepared for a test. I had never, in my life, stepped into a classroom without full preparation. And yet…
I remember stalking towards the Princess’ apartments deep in a foul, fey mood. I was furious—not at her, but at myself. Always and ever, my own self has been the more perfect target. I had not prepared. I had chased a foolish phantom and this was the result.
So, when I threw open the door to her living room, I fully expected to not only beg the Princess for help with my studies but to stipulate that I could not longer serve her even for the exorbitant wage. But before I could open my mouth, she was already upon me, speaking so fast and so intensely that before I knew what had occurred, she had ushered me into her bedroom,put my arms in front of me, and begun to fling things from the drawers into my baffled grasp.
I tried to ask what on earth had gotten into her, but she only babbled at me in a tongue I did not understand. In moments we had uprooted much of her apartment and stuffed it into a few trunks. Books, flasks, clothing… all of the things I had helped her acquire in Venaria found themselves now messily readied for some imminent departure.
At last, I demanded she explain herself, and then and only then did Twilight stop. A slow look of comprehension spread across her features, and she pointed to her throat.
Before I could ask what she was doing, she had acted.
She performed magic. On herself. She did it as neatly, as how’d-you-do, as cavalierly as… as anything! Even now I do not have words to express it. Surely you can understand the mixture of horror and awe that welled up in me at the sight. Her hands glowed, her throat glowed, and both things were beyond me.
The ranks of mages who willingly use magic of significant magnitude on themselves without some medium are small and elite. Even they do so with care. Princess Twilight Sparkle did no magic with care, ever, or at least not in the way I understand the word. For most, magic was a thing of caution, precision, mystery, power. It was a dangerous force, like gunpowder that pre-dated gunpowder, like a lion kept on a thin lace leash. Even with skill, one still found it hard to control.
And yet for her, magic was simple. Or, if not simple, then natural in a way I could never and will never understand. It was as if the magic was a part of her.
No, not “as if”. It was a part of her. She drew it from within herself as raw, wild magic.
She spoke then in the common tongue, like any other midlander, and told me excitedly that she had found a way home. That she could finally, after so very long, see all of her friends and family again. She could see Equestria.
She just needed to go past the Empire’s borders and find the Well of Souls.
Ah, nothing huge. Just…
Just a myth. And she needed to be there in eighty days.
And that, snowlander, is why I’m here. In your country. Because when she said that, she seized me by the shoulders and told me that we could do it. She had charted our route out, calculated everything down to the hour. If we left in the next two hours for the aeroport we could catch a flight northwards.
I didn’t know what to say at first. I was a student. I couldn’t leave! Being a “valet” had been an amusing and lucrative distraction, but my life was there in the city. My studies were there.
My studies that I had just shamed by failing a test that I was sure Lady Villiers had already heard about. She would summon me to her office tomorrow, no doubt. The conversation would be polite, gentle, nervewracking. I would crack. Perhaps it would be all over and she would send me home to live with mother and father without any direction or vocation.
I didn’t want to be sent away. I would die if the Lady had to send me home.
So I left before she could.
It’s really as simple as that. You must understand that at the time I was beside myself. Emotionally compromised, as some might say. Foolish, as others would call it. They would be right. But I think, also, that it was more than that, more than a childish response to an imagined fate.
I wanted to help her. The way she talked about her homeland, her Equestria, tugged at my heart. When the Princess would speak of it, her eyes would drift out towards the window to the city, and by and by her voice would grow soft and somehow she would seem both immeasurably sad and immeasurably lovely.
That was the beginning of it. The rest? It goes on and on.
I could tell you of our delay crossing the border, or the wide open vistas. Or perhaps the bandits which attacked our craft in the dead of night?
I’ll remember that. I’ll remember it for as long as I live. How, only four days into our journey, I awoke to screams as they began to run wild among the passengers. The Princess was up, her hands brimming with eldritch might, and without incantation or even effort she simply blasted the blackguards into submission. From her hand flew terrible flames and intensely bright light that dazzled me into temporary blindness. My own magic defenses were, I confess, much more mundane—mage armor which threw back a curved blade and a blast of arcane lightning that took the wind quite out of my sails.
We saw the peaks of the Daggers, in the western province, and the Frozen Sea, surrounded on all sides by the tundra. In fact, I did more than see it. I walked upon the ice, so thick that nothing but magic could hope to thaw it. We travelled far beyond where the airships sailed, and then we travelled to the farthest point that the caravans rode, and then we walked with only a guide, and then we walked alone.
I asked her many questions. She taught me many things.
Who were you? A student, she told me, and then a friend, a librarian, and then a teacher. I asked when she had become a princess, and she told me that a good princess could and should be all of these things.
I asked her about the people of her world, and she told me about her friends who bore such outlandish names. How such a one, whose name was Rainbow, was fast and brave. How one grew apples and how the Princess had lounged in the shade of her trees. How another was graceful, and how another was kind, and how at last one she merely named Pink always smiled. I remember telling her, in disbelief, that perhaps the word “princess” meant something different than she thought, for the princesses of our own world would not have friends among farmers and bakers and commoners. Perhaps we were thinking of different things.
Delays cropped up at every step. The last leg of our journey by air, I procured a place for the two of us with a trade caravan moving along the Imperial Highway towards the Vilmus Pass, that gateway to the north. But, when I brought her to the caravan’s gathering camp, the local tribal ayvan hired as protection grew restless, demanding that something be done. They sensed something, or more accurately, the shaman who had been silent among them sensed something. At least, this is what I believe. He rose from their tents and pronounced that the Princess was beyond the world, and then proceeded to prostrate himself before her.
She was mortified, begging him in the midlander tongue to rise and be at peace, and she did so with such formality mixed with earnest familiarity that I could more than ever believe her claim to royalty, but he would not move.
She tried to use magic to give her a new language, and when she did the ayvan in the camp took to the sky in shock, scattering… all but the shaman, who shivered in the snow. The humans all around me, and myself among them, were at a loss. She spoke and he rose, and their conversation was brief but intense. When it was over, there would be no more problem, yet she would not relate to me the nature of the conversation.
Some things are meant to be experienced but once, she told me afterwards with a flat tone.
Eighty days to travel from Venaria to the Well was not impossible on a map, if one were simply thinking in miles. But thinking merely in miles is a mistake. Five miles on flat country, on good roads? Easy. Five miles in hills? Five miles in snow? Five miles along the edges of precipics and rocky crags?
As I said. Miles begin to lose meaning.
We were on the road from Amethyst City when the uprisings among the peasants there first exploded into true violence. The day they went from mere rumblings to actual revolt.
We were in a small village along the road. As was our custom by this point, I handled the Princess’ money and acquired food and refreshments. I was chatting with the publican who had rented us rooms when some ruffians entered and the chattering of the public room died in an instant. It was not unlike this very room, really.
They were peasants. They all were, but these great hulking shapes were peasants of a different sort.
You look at me with disbelief. How did we manage to leave the eastern province in the middle of a revolt? Did we bribe the legions? Did we the pickets or the revolutionaries?
No. We just kept riding along the road.
But that night when they entered, I knew that when I woke the next day that everything would change. Straight away I warned the Princess that some terrible trouble was brewing, and she told me not to worry. She was always telling me not to worry. We were more or less on time, after all! I insisted to her majesty that she was sorely underestimating the capacity of man for violence.
It was more than simply witnessing them. I had lingered. Intrepidly or foolishly, I know not which, I had endeavored to keep myself inconspicuous as I could whilst still listening on what they discussed in their corner table.
In this precarious situation, I listened to them espouse their rhetoric to one another in the manner of such hotblooded men—as if they were convincing some recalcitrant patriot. To my ears, they seemed more to be convincing themselves. Whatever the truth of their claims of misrule and liberty, their words were violent and they seemed concrete. This was not discontent but revolt. These were not instigators but outriders. They planned to raise a force that very night and ride hard for the next village, and to repeat the task until they had acquired a sufficiently numerous host to report back to their masters.
With some difficulty, I managed to convey at least some of my concerns in such a way that the Princess took me seriously. Seriously enough that when we left in the morning, we did so quietly and quickly. We followed the road as best we can, but stopped no longer than was needed. I feared leaving the path and meeting those brigands in the wild, and I feared meeting them upon the road. There was nothing for it. If this land was to erupt, we could only be preserved by haste.
I am glad to say that we avoided much of the worst of it. Three days later and ten miles farther along then the Princess’ calculations had placed us, we did see those brigands again. They were much changed. Where before they had been hotblooded, arrogant, uncaring that others saw them and their planning, when next and last we saw them they looked out at us with despair from the gallows. The local governor had caught them, so I was told after a moment of trying to use my still limited command of the local variation of the common tongue. The crowd around us, gathering still in the small town’s public square, grumbled. Resentment thicker and more sour than any I had ever felt, hung in the air. It was a resentment powerful enough to wash away the sins that weigh down such men and transmute them before the crowd into living saints waiting their injust martyrdom with stoic dignity. This was the kind of cloud that hung over the birth of revolutions back millenia. It started with grumbling and then jeers and then it escalated to rocks, and then finally, silence. The sort of silence that is preamble to the murder of the local magistrate and his family in their comfortable, feather-downed beds.
Before the hangman could mount the platform to do his grim duty, I had half-dragged, half-pushed the Princess out of the crowd’s orbit and away towards the local inn. But not before she could ask what was occurring. Dumbfounded, I told her. Of course I did.
She was… distraught. That is as close as I can come. Whatever forms of capital punishment this Equestria might have, hanging does not seem to be among them. She was horrified. She insisted that we rescue the ruffians before they could be so callously slain, but I held my ground. Was I not her valet, her gentleman’s gentleman, for lack of a better term? I was her guide, guardian, translator, and navigator. She had to trust me, I said. What heat was in my voice. She shrank back, stung, and I think wounded by how harshly I spoke.
Fear motivated me. No, it hounded me. As a young girl,I had read my great grandfather’s first hand account of the civil strife of his time. And, moreover, I had seen the work of the street toughs of Venaria first hand. I did not and do not need to wax poetic about the inhumanity of man to man. Some things speak for themselves.
I think it was my assertion that I was afraid for her safety that tipped the scale in my favor. Much of her frustration melted away. These were not good men, I continued, feverish. Why, then, she asked me—why then does the crowd seem to have sympathy for them? Because, said I, the crowd is bitter and bitter, frustrated people do horrible things.
She fixed me then with a look of such sadness that I found myself ashamed to be human, even as I was still half-convinced her tale was madness and that she too was human. It was not a good way to be, she told me quietly, and I had no response. If it was unlawful to help, and dangerous besides, she continued, then she would bear witness as a monarch should. This was a failure, however out of her hands it may appear. If these were assassins and criminals as I claimed, then she could not in right mind deprive the legitimate authority of its right to pursue justice in its bounds, but she would not cower.
I obeyed out of something akin to nausea, an anxiety so strong that I felt at any moment I might claw my skin away. She would do something reckless. Always, you must understand this, Princess Twilight stood apart from us and our world. She seemed to walk through us, and not among us. And she did this now, graceful, carrying herself as a queen—no! As an Empress might proceed, so she proceeded through the muddy streets of that dismal town. And, under the gray skies the resentful townspeople noticed her at last. They felt what I felt, I believe. It was like a mailed fist around one’s heart, not crushing or even hindering, simply there. Present. A reminder of immense power and authority of some kind which did not need to be exercised to exist and to terrify. Some yokel asked her who she was, sputtering perhaps in the presence of one of those highborn individuals he has so recently been decrying. Yet she answered him not, treading softly to a beat only she heard, until at last, with many eyes upon her, she stood before the gallows. I hurried behind her, not wishing to see. Not wishing her to see. Not wishing to be there at all.
Fifteen days into our adventure it had been, and already I had fought for my life, seen a shaman weep in awe at some unknown thing, braved the foreign steppe, and now here I was at the feet of men marked for execution. I had served her for three weeks before our departure and for two since, and already she was dear to me.
Did I wish for her not to see, or did I merely wish for myself that I might not see what came next? Yes, I had seen bloodied and bruised bodies in the alleyway. I had read of men wading in blood to their knees. But these were things external to me. Now, here in front of me, I was to witness death by staring it in the eye and I was unnerved to my core. But her? The Princess?
She stood there, back straight, eyes forward, all of her so… so imposing. Daunting. I don’t have the words. They escape me, just wander off somewhere else and taunt as they go. The atmosphere of it all changed. The hangman mounted the stair but he stopped before her and slouched, like a man caught cheating at cards by his aged mother, like a child who knows it has done wrong. She did not glare or scold or shame him. She did not say anything.
The local magistrate tried to ask what her business was, but she merely told him that she was royalty passing through, and that it was the duty of any ruler to never turn away from the necessary, the brutal, the unpleasant, but to always be forthright in their observation of nature.
He did not know what to say to that. I don’t think there was anything to say, at that moment, as her calm voice cut through all of the murmuring. For a moment, I thought to myself that surely this madness would cease. That in the presence of such commanding grace no man would dare to shame himself by violent excess.
And I was wrong.