• Published 8th Oct 2018
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Good Trooper Gilda - Mitch H



Gilda just wanted to find herself. Instead, she found herself a soldier's life.

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A Nest Of Royals

Gilda felt her eyes burning and watering.

"No, no," Gilda found herself saying. "I didn't mean - I didn't intend - please stop?"

The bat-hen started hiccupping.

The princess wouldn't stop crying, and Gilda couldn't stop herself babbling, and hiccupping, and heaving. The white-coated hoofmaiden was back, and she'd brought two of her. Their hooves dragged the frantic griffon out of that disaster-zone of a sitting room, and Gilda found herself, found herself -

Why was she crying? She never cried! She was a free bird of Griffonstone! She ate lead slugs and spat dragonfire!

Why couldn't she stop?

The twin blonde mares pushed her into an even whiter space, and between the wavering liquid wobble which were thick greasy griffon-tears, Gilda blinked and blinked until she saw that she was sitting in a chair in the kitchen. The sobs were fading, but she felt sick, and the hiccups weren't going away.

Gilda looked around, wildly, trying to stop the unfamiliar feelings. It was a very well-stocked kitchen. The General Staff's Intelligence Section apparently ate well.

She heaved and gasped, confused by these new, unpleasant sensations. The tendency to tear up had been beaten out of her at a young age, as they were from all griffons of a certain social standing. It felt like she was about to be gutted, or drowned, or beaten by her thunderously frowning old mother, and the sickness was joined by a sudden jolting fear. Her mother! Her mother, who, in her memories, was suddenly, astonishingly, caught like a flash of light in the darkness, tear-streaked and confused. The day…

The day Grampa Gruff finally died. How had Gilda forgotten that? She remembered now, viscerally, painfully, how she and her mother had wept for the old bird's last rattles. How her mother had plotted through her angry tears their escape from the hovel they'd been hiding in, the second such hovel they'd hidden in since they'd been driven from the mansion. The first, after the great wave of fighting had left the mansions painted in her cousins' blood. The second, after the assassins had found Gruff in that back alley, and one of them had followed him back to that first hiding place. And then, after they'd hidden his broken body in that second squalid sanctuary, far from the first… he'd been so long dying.

Gilda remembered as if she was hearing it for the first time, her mother whispering father's forbidden name, the prematurely aged hen dashing away her tears and pulling out the valises for their latest bolt into the night.

They'd left Grampa Gruff's corpse cooling for the land-hen to find.

"There, there, dearie. Are you back to us yet?" asked one of the two - no, three white mares. She smiled at Gilda as if nothing at all was wrong in her world. "Close proximity to dear Cadenza sometimes takes a pony like that. You hit her hard, too. I'm guessing denial, what do you think, Livery?"

"I think Hotspur will know best, Mirror. But yes, it's usually denial that hurts the worst. Ever since that assassin that Uncle Bullion sent in her first year with us."

"Oh, Hidden Blade?" said the third pony, as blissfully even as the others, all of them wearing the same unsettling smile. "Personally, I think Cadance trapped that silly fool in depression. Catatonia, don't you know. But who could imagine it, an assassin named something so on the nose. How he lasted long enough to try for a princess of all things, I never will know. And such a fool! Did he think the wings and horn were for show?"

"Well, whatever might be the case, it couldn't have been that bad, our patient is still conscious. You are with us, dearie?"

"Yes, I hear you," replied Gilda, clawing for self-mastery. "Wait, what are you talking about? What effect?"

"Oh, lovely. You'll be fine. Sometimes, dear Cadenza turns her regard on a pony, and it can be… a powerful effect. She's an alicorn, after all, is our Cadenza."

"Aunt Celestia moves all the heavens, the sun and the moon," said one of the others. "Did you think that our darling little sister couldn't move ponies?"

"Well, Cadance isn't exactly Sol Invictus, is she?" asked a fourth as she came bustling into the kitchen. "Serene, she needs you, why don't you go and help little Twilight with the princess?"

One of the three grouped around Gilda got up and walked out without a word, smiling beatifically.

"Hotspur, one of the reasons I encouraged this trip was to get Cadance away from that assassin's bed. Visiting the pony that tried to kill you, every week. It's morbid, isn't it?" What Gilda found morbid was the way this pony said these things, without a single change in her calm, smiling face. None of them were - it was like they were reading from scripts.

"But that is our Cadenza, isn't it?" said the one holding Gilda's talon in an iron grip, calmly stroking her back with her other fore-hoof. "She may lock you into an eternal reverie, but she'll still feel for your fate. Poor dear, she simply will not ever let go."

"That's our job, isn't it, Mirror? Letting go. Shouldn't you?"

"Oh, dear me, my apologies, dearie. Didn't mean to colonize your personal space like that."

"Mirror," said the first pony, still holding her tone and expression as if the - sister? - had simply made a mild joke.

"What, are we not allowed to joke about our brutal occupation of her homeland?"

"Th-the Isles aren't my homeland, Lady - you are a lady?" Gilda would not be treated by these - nobleponies? - treated like a wounded or pampered cat.

"Ah. Did nopony introduce ourselves to the little kitty-bird?" The speaker was half a head shorter than Gilda, who was no giant among her kind. "Little one, I am Lady Livery, oldest foal of the late Princess Electrum, scion of the House of Platinum. I would have, in my time, been princess in my turn, if it weren't, well, for the lack of a horn. You see before you my darling little sisters Hotspur and Mirror, likewise disappointments to our ancient and royal blood. Sister Serene is attending to our dearest of littlest sisters, our beloved Cadance."

Royals! Gilda was surrounded by royals! They'd eat her alive!

Wait, they were all grazers, and earth pony grazers at that. Gilda looked around herself, alarmed but confused.

"Personally," one of them was saying, "it was that madpony Minister Pants I wanted to get Cadenza away from, Livery. They were never good for each other."

"Fancy Pants. Tooling around in that gold-chased wheelchair of his, refusing all medical magic to fix his hurts. As if he was the only pony to ever suffer."

"And mourning, mourning his dead whore."

"Hotspur."

"Well, she was. None of them were even betrothed, were they?"

"We say so after the fact, regardless of the facts. You're not supposed to talk ill of the dead, Hotspur."

"I don't see how the dead could possibly care."

"Well, Cadance's love for poor Shining Armor was real, that much is true."

"I wasn't calling Lieutenant Armor a whore, Livery."

"She wasn't suggesting that you were, Hotspur."

The three mares sighed, looking placidly but steady-eyed at each other, each looking each other in the face. Then one turned to meet Gilda's eyes.

"Oh, dearie," said… Gilda thought it was Hotspur, but wasn't sure. They kept shifting about in the kitchen. "The look on your face. Have we scandalized you? Oh, yes, we've heard about you. There's been talk of you in our little household. The griffon whom the little vengeful Twilight Sparkle is willing to employ, let alone tolerate. We've seen the reports, the same as our darling little sister. Not that she pays much attention. That's what she has us for, isn't that so, sisters?"

The other two nodded, calmly. The subject matter had turned suddenly, from quarrelsome to alarmingly personal, but the amiable cheer never left any of their smiling faces.

"Gilda de Griffonstone, captured last year as part of an infiltration attempt by yet another little band of Griffonstonian illegals. Forcibly recruited into dear little Twilight Sparkle's little social project, one of the Griffish Territorial Battalions. Nominally the battalion of one Dinky Doo, beloved by-blow of… well, let's not gossip about others. Especially not when they're so heroically dead. The dear child looked so charming in her regimentals at her grandmares, didn't she? Old Golden Dawn is so proud of her grandfilly, and she should be. Such a darling."

"Not charming enough for the House of Greenspire to acknowledge properly."

"Oh, hush, Hotspur, not every noble house is matrilineal." So, not Hotspur. Livery? "You've been a strikingly loyal trooper, Gilda de Griffonstone. Surprisingly so, given your apparent antecedents. And reports that I've seen just this afternoon suggest that you've been truly loyal, or else I would have never allowed you access to our darling little sister.

"You see, the House of Platinum has a great deal of experience with alicorns, born into the family, and adopted into it. We have had our successes, and our failures, but never have we been as weak as we are today. Our parents had such high hopes for all of us, and we each of us failed them, one after the other. For the longest time, we thought that little Bluey would be the solution to all of our problems, the one success that redeemed all of our shortcomings, but he failed in his turn. Such a disappointment.

"But Platinum adopts as well as gives birth, and Celestia brought us a princess, to redeem all of our despairing failures. A beautiful, wonderful little filly, good-hearted and true, sad, it is true, mournful, it was as expected, a pony who had ascended in such tragic circumstances. Of course we clasped her to our bosoms, and held her in our hearts.

"And we thought we were doing well, for all of her crotchets. She found a young colt, and he seemed like he'd bring her out of her gloom. So lovely together. Even Aunt Celly approved of the match, for Aunt Celly reasons, no doubt, but beggars can't be choosers.

"And then the bombings happened, and all of our good work, ruined. If we had any rage left to us in those moments, you can be sure, we would have been first among the crowd crying for griffon blood.

"Lucky for you. We had been drained of all grief before that moment, and we four were able to offer dear Cadance a sort of… ballast, to keep her from tipping over in those troubled seas. And though she raged against your race, and poisoned hundreds, perhaps thousands with anger in the weeks after the bombings, it could have been worse. And now, today, she feels so much guilt over her part in the beat of war, the cries for vengeance and bloody-hooved retribution."

"Well, when Fancy Pants isn't breathing fire, death and damnation in her ears," said Hotspur, cheerfully.

"Well, all that is over and done with," continued one of them. "We are here because Cadance is here, whatever our other purposes that Cadance doesn't share in. And Cadance wants the dying to end."

"She feels it, even in Canterlot she feels it," said the third.

"She feels it even as she mirrors anger and denial and grief," said Hotspur, so gripped by the thought that there was almost a wrinkle upon that unnaturally smooth brow. Although Gilda might have been imagining that wrinkled brow, it went away so quickly.

"You see," said one of the others, looking kindly at Gilda. "She doesn't really control her effect upon others. She tries, oh bless her she tries. But she's a pony like any other. And her beau, that lovely colt, if he hadn't died, oh I can't imagine where we might be today. But he died, and here we are, and here you are. And we didn't start this, we didn't."

"Those madgriffons, those were the ones at fault," continued Hotspur. "We didn't start the fire, but poor Cadenza, she blames herself for everypony burnt in the blaze."

Gilda was just starting to feel up to the task of extracting herself from this nest of madponies when she heard the sound of raised voices in the hall, muffled by the closed kitchen door. They didn't really have any time to react before a tall white horned stallion burst through said door, fuming.

"-nopony says a word, nopony sends a letter, nopony even bothers to notify me that my entire family is about to descend upon my city!"

"Bluey," said the fourth white mare, following at the stallion's heels, "Dearie, calm down. We would have sent a letter, or a pony, or-"

"It's bad enough they won't give me my necessary ponies in this harmony-forsaken stinking mouth of Hades, and that they wouldn't give me the keys to this suite as was my due. Look at how shabby everything is! This degenerate generation refuses to give the royal house our proper support and maintenance, it's because Aunt Celly refuses to treat them all like the peasants and serfs they truly are!"

"Bluey, really," murmured one of the hoofmaidens already in the kitchen. "Serfdom has been abnegated since the days of Platinum. There are certain grudges the keeping of which only makes us ridiculous. Let it go. And how have you been, my dear little north star?"

"Hotspur! So you all are here! I heard the report, but didn't credit it. Still following in the Pink Watering-Can's train? All four of you, look at that. I get deployed to the savage end of creation, and none of you could be bothered to come visit, or send one of our retainers, or even the occasional care package. But the Widow of Mysteries gets it into her weepy pink head to come visit the front lines, and it's the whole bloody house here in bloody-hoofed Trottingham!"

"My dear," one of the white mares turned to say to Gilda, she thought maybe it was Livery, "may we introduce to you our dear little brother, the hope of our house, our pole star, Prince Major Blueblood, sixth of his name?"

"Livery!" barked the tall blonde unicorn, looking incensed, "what are you thinking in that head of yours to introduce a prince to this griffish peasant? A ranker, from her looks, indeed! You, you ragamuffin, get out of my house's kitchen and our rooms entirely, unless you're here to cook for my adopted headache of a little sister, in which case, get out anyways, we don't need her getting used to the filth they call cuisine here in the barbarous hinterlands!"

"Bluey. You can't speak to the Princess's guests this way, any more than you can to Aunt Celly's guests and generals. This is why you're still a major, and exiled out here in the war-torn provinces."

"Be silent, Hotspur! Mares! I swear, mares always make a mess of things. Well, I'm here now, and I'll put this mess to rights. "

"No. No you will not," said an iron-willed voice from behind them all.

Gilda turned to look, and there was the princess, back in the pink, and her mane rippling with fury. Gleaming Shield was looking over the princess's shoulder with a strange mix of disgust, concern, and fury. Gilda couldn't tell how much of that was aimed her way, and how much towards the clearly insufferable prince major.

"Corporal Gilda, your Captain requires your services. And I have my… brother to discuss matters with. My apologies for the earlier misunderstanding, we will have to talk later, when tempers are cooled. For now, I clearly need my Anger, for there are matters I must, as Bluey says, take in hoof. Good evening, Corporal, Twilight."

Gilda bowed in a loose approximation of a courtesy she half-remembered from a half-forgotten book, and scrambled around the incensed princess, who was advancing with fire in her eyes at her apparent adopted brother.

"Captain ma'am! Time to regroup, I'll secure our lines of communication!"

"Gilda, for once in your life, shut your bloody beak and follow me," seethed Gleaming Shield, clearly smarting at the use of her forbidden name. "I think everypony has more than enough to think about. Sufficient unto the evening is the evil thereof. Go on, go!"

One of the blonde sisters followed Gilda and her officer as they fell back to the hallway.

"Gilda de Griffonstone. We all have put great hopes in you. We trust those hopes will not betrayed.

"Do not betray them. Have a nice day." The steady-eyed royal bowed, never breaking eye-contact with Gilda.

The bat-hen escaped the royal vipers' nest, her captain covering her retreat.

Author's Note:

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.