Chapter 1
“Oh, hello,” said the unfamiliar stallion standing in the middle of her library. He was very pastel, even for a pony, with a pale pink coat and a mane that mixed pale purples and blues. His tail swished back and forth nonchalantly. “Don’t mind me, I’m just here for the books.”
Princess Celestia stared.
“You do realize you are on private property?” she said finally, lowering her still-glowing horn. By instinct, she had prepared a defensive spell, but it did not seem to be needed.
“Oh yes, don’t worry, I’ve done this before,” the stallion assured her. “That’s how I met my husband.”
Princess Celestia stared harder.
“It’s a nice story. Our daughter likes it a lot,” the stallion said, with a fond smile on his face. “There was this rare book I wanted to read, and he had the only copy in Canterlot that wasn’t in a museum. I thought it’d be easier to break into a private collection.”
“And . . . you thought that would be a good idea to repeat here?” Celestia asked, rather nonplussed. With all the security measures and the diligence of the royal guards, she didn’t think anypony had ever considered breaking in just for a few books. Surely there were copies of whatever books he wanted in less heavily guarded places.
“Well, I have the All Access Pass,” explained the stallion, who shifted a little, revealing one of the Castle Visitor name tags. His identified him as Rhythm Emotion. “I figured that meant I could go in.”
So this wasn’t some hypercompetent book thief who’d managed to get past all the palace security. Some of the tension eased out of her body. This was simply a tourist who’d wandered away from his group. He’d already gone through screening.
That still left one pressing issue. That tour.
“I did warn them it would be a bad idea to name it that when it wasn’t really all-access,” Celestia said wearily.
“Oh, it’s not?”
“No. Not to the living quarters.”
Rhythm looked around, frowning. “This doesn’t look like living quarters.”
“We entertain dignitaries here and in the connected parlour.” At least, that was the excuse Celestia had given when asking it be declared private. In truth, she had wanted a place where she could relax without the risk of running into one of her subjects, starstruck or—even worse—wanting her help. She’d wanted a place where she could be Celestia, not “Princess Celestia, Ruler of Equestria.” It wasn’t a part of the living quarters in the strictest sense, but it was a place where she could actually live.
“Your husband must be a very forgiving person to have married you after you tried to steal his books,” she remarked. That, at least, was probably a safe topic.
“I wasn’t planning on actually taking anything. I was just going to read for a few hours. He wouldn’t have even noticed if he hadn’t been there when I broke in,” Rhythm said, a little defensively. “And I’m reformed. I just wanted to see if you had a copy of Star Swirl the Bearded’s Methods of Amniomorphics that I could read while my family finished the tour.”
“I don’t have the slightest clue,” Celestia admitted. It sounded like the type of book that Twilight might’ve brought up to gush about, but Celestia had never quite been able to follow her student’s ramblings. Was amniomorphics some kind of pottery? Egg hatching? “Is there any reason why you thought we’d have a copy?”
“I thought I saw it in the portrait of Princess Twilight we passed on the way in.”
“Ah. If it’s in one of Twilight’s official portraits, I’m afraid it’s probably in the Ponyville library or Twilight’s personal collection.”
His shoulders slumped. “Damn. I’ve been looking for that book for years.” He sighed. “I don’t suppose Princess Twilight might be willing to lend it to me?”
“If you show a proper appreciation for the book, I’m sure she’d be willing.” She couldn’t resist adding, “Well, as long as you don’t try to steal it,” eyes twinkling.
“It was only breaking and entering,” Rhythm grumbled.
“And why did you give up thievery, by the way? Or ‘breaking and entering,’ if you insist.” The corner of her mouth curved into a smile, a little wry. “Did you perhaps see the righteousness of the law?”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s mostly because my daughter would be sad if I went to jail.” He tilted his head. “I don’t think prison libraries are any good either.”
“You have a daughter?”
“Ruby. She’s eleven.” The look on his face was fond, a little faraway, a kind of look that Celestia hadn’t seen in a long time. “She’s pretty innocent, even for a kid. Happy all the time. Still a handful, though. Always vanishing and turning up when you least expect her.”
It took her a moment to remember that that expression was contentment. It had been a rare sight for her, even before the war. Her little ponies always seemed to want more out of life than what they had, and while she respected and admired their ambition, sometimes it was nice to see someone who was already happy. Someone who had been content to stop.
Acting half on impulse, she said, “Why don’t you tell me more about her over tea?”
The contentment hadn’t faded from Rhythm’s face as he finished telling Celestia the story of an ornament named Star Swirl the Beaded and had begun on a tale of Ruby wandering into a bar called the Mare Contraire.
“Your daughter sounds like a very interesting soul.”
“She is, but mostly by accident. She doesn’t understand half the stuff she gets up to.” Rhythm paused. “Actually, that reminds me. Princess Celestia, if you wouldn’t mind, I have a favour to ask. Ruby wrote this book . . .”
Celestia’s good mood vanished abruptly. She had heard this story many times before, and the very idea of listening to it, much less actually doing it, made her exhausted. “And you would like me to see if I could help get it published,” she recited.
Rhythm surprised her by shaking his head. “No, it’s already been published. Last month, by Pure Leaf Press. I was hoping you would keep a copy in your library.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Pure Leaf Press? Crystal Wishes’ press?”
“Yes, do you know her?”
“She’s married to the captain of the Canterlot Guard, and she runs a charity I’m familiar with,” Celestia answered, a little absently, because she was trying to remember anything Luna had told her about Pure Leaf Press’s most recent publication.
But if this had been written by a child of ten or eleven, how bad could it be? Rhythm had asked her for a normal kind of favour. The kind you could ask a friend as well as a ruler. Those requests were getting increasingly hard to remember as she grew older, so Celestia smiled and said, “Let me see this book. What’s it called?”
“Cathouse.”
A pause.
“Cathouse?”
“Cathouse.”
“Cathouse?”
He nodded. “Cathouse.”
“Does your daughter know . . .”
“No. No, she does not.”
Celestia was vaguely starting to recall Luna muttering something about “age-inappropriate.” “Then . . . it’s about . . . ?”
“It’s about cats. And one dog, but he doesn’t matter that much. Or so my daughter claims.”
If Rhythm had thought that description would help, it didn’t. Now images of feline prostitutes rose unbidden instead. She could hear Sunny talking about pussy with a smirk on her face.
“We weren’t actually expecting for it to take off,” Rhythm confessed. “We let her take it to a C.W. Step signing as a joke. But Crystal thought it was funny and said to send them a copy, and the next thing we knew, it’d actually been published.” He shrugged. “And I support my daughter in all her endeavours, so here we are.”
Celestia forced a smile onto her face. “Well, I don’t see why not.” No one would ever have to see it. She could hide it deep in the stacks and only take it out for foreign dignitaries with poor English and a love of cats. “Do you have a copy with you?”
Rhythm took a picture book out of his saddlebag. It was, true to his word, covered in drawings of actual cats. Ruby Rebel was emblazoned at the bottom of the cover.
Celestia took the book in her magical field and quickly flipped through it before laying it carefully on a table. “I’ll take good care of it,” she promised, and then desperately searched for another topic. Anything that wasn’t related to brothels. “Now, you’ve told me a great deal about your daughter, but not so much about your husband. Aside from how you met.”
“Reign?” Rhythm made a little humming noise. “He goes by R.B. Dash, so he gets mistaken for Rainbow Dash a lot. It’s pretty funny. He says he’s a rare book dealer and restorer, but he’s really more of a collector.”
“Ah. Another book aficionado, is he?”
“Of course he is. I only married him for his books,” he said matter-of-factly, but the edges of his mouth curled with humor, some kind of inside joke. It wasn’t the blushing giddiness of the newlywed or the lovestruck daze of romance. It was the warmth of the familiar, an easy, open affection.
Family.
Celestia had to swallow the sudden ache in her chest, the longing. Luna has returned, she reminded herself. You are not alone anymore.
But she would not see her sister until sunset, for perhaps an hour at most, and then not again until dawn. Two hours a day. That made it hard to remember sometimes.
“You and your family sound very close,” she said.
“Yeah. It’s nice.” Rhythm was smiling, distant once again. “I was alone before them, you know?”
Celestia was careful to keep her tone neutral but encouraging. “You were?”
“Yeah. I was an amniomorphics PhD candidate who was too busy researching to have a social life. I was burning out hard by the time I met Reign.” He tilted his head. “Now that I think about it, I probably broke into his library for stress relief.”
“Did it work?”
“Not really. Dating someone was even more stressful. But dropping out of my program did.” He shrugged. “Now I waste my Master’s by babysitting my daughter and trying to write novels in my spare time. It’s easier than I thought it’d be.”
“Oh?”
“Not novel writing. Or the babysitting. But giving up on my old dream—it’s not as bad as I thought it would be.” His smile was extraordinarily peaceful. “I’m happy.”
Celestia closed her eyes for a long moment. She thought of Luna, then of Sunny. Azurite. Her mother.
When she opened them back up again, she was smiling as well, and she had successfully kept the sadness from touching it. “I’m glad.”
It had been a lovely afternoon, but Rhythm knew that it was over the instant he heard the faint cries of someone shouting, “Other Dad! Other Dad!” He adored his daughter to bits, but sometimes he really wanted to strangle her.
He stood up with a regretful sigh. “That must be Ruby. I’d better see what she got up to,” he said mournfully, casting one last glance at the books.
Then he poked his head into the hallway outside the library and froze.
Ruby was marching down the hallway, banging together a pan and a ladle with cheerful aplomb as she shouted, “Other Dad! Other Dad, where are you?” The looks from other ponies ranged from nervous to disturbed, and they all gave her a wide berth.
She was not, however, unsupervised. R.B. trailed behind her from a safe distance, his face half-hidden from being buried in his hoof.
Then Ruby caught sight of Rhythm and beamed, completely oblivious to the scene she was making. “Oh, there you are. Hi, Other Dad!”
R.B. finally removed his head from his hoof. “I’m so sorry,” he said wearily.
Princess Celestia, who had come to stand somewhere to Rhythm’s right, surveyed the tableau with a curious expression on her face. Then she broke the silence with her laughter.
It wasn’t a chuckle or a dainty giggle. It was belly laughter, the kind that lifted your soul. It wasn’t full-on, rolling-on-the-ground laughter, but Rhythm got the impression that if she hadn’t been Princess, it might’ve been.
“Did you have fun while you were away, Other Dad?” Ruby asked. It was almost charming how utterly unobservant she was. “I noticed during the tour, but Dad said you could take care of yourself and you were trying to set an example of what not to do. But the tour is over and Dad says we have to go home now.”
Rhythm sighed before stepping forward to greet his daughter. “Yeah, I did,” he said, nuzzling the cat hat perched upon her head. “But your dad is right. It’s time to go home.”
He turned around to say goodbye to the princess, only to find that she was approaching them with a regal, gentle smile, now every inch the ruler. “Hello, my little pony,” she said, and there was a faint kind of serenity in her voice that Rhythm hadn’t noticed before, like she had found her peace. “Were you the one making the ruckus my guards were complaining about?”
“Well, yeah, I needed a way to get Other Dad’s attention.” Ruby looked at them as if to say, “Duh.”
Rhythm had a question of his own. “Where did the pot and ladle come from?” She certainly hadn’t hid those in the cat ears.
“She got them from the kitchen when I wasn’t paying attention,” explained R.B. “My apologies, Princess. I’ll make her return them later.”
“It’s no problem. They seem no worse for the wear.”
Some of the tension went out of R.B.’s shoulders, who then closed the gap between him and Rhythm until they were nearly brushing flanks. “Hey,” he said, voice dropping, “what have you been up to while we were gone?”
Rhythm smiled back. “Nothing much,” he said. “Just having tea with one of the rulers of Equestria.”
“How did that even happen, anyways?”
“Oh, you know me. Wandered off during the tour and accidentally broke into her library.”
“I can’t believe you left me for the first pony with a bigger library.” R.B. bumped his flank lightly. “You’re such a slut for books,” he said, soft with affection.
“What’s a slut?” Ruby asked.
The two of them froze and slowly turned to look at her. She looked back at them with bright, curious eyes.
“It’s, um, someone who loves something very, very much,” R.B. said. “Like your other dad with books.”
“Oh, okay.” They could see her thinking it over. “I guess that means I’m a slut for cats!”
Behind them, Rhythm could hear Celestia make an odd noise. It almost sounded like choking.
“No. No, Ruby, don’t say that to anyone,” R.B. said desperately.
“Why not?”
“Because —” R.B. broke off and nudged Rhythm. “Rhy, a little help here?” he hissed.
“You know what? Never mind,” Rhythm decided. “Ruby, don’t think about it too much.”
“Okay!”
Thank Celestia Ruby was a good child.
R.B., on the other hand, did not seem so happy with that answer, based on his glare. “What?” Rhythm said innocently. “I helped.”
R.B. glared harder.
“Oh, and speaking of helping, Ruby”—Rhythm nudged his daughter in the flank—“I gave the princess a copy of Cathouse.”
Celestia’s face froze and rearranged itself very carefully as Ruby beamed at her. “Did you like it?”
“It was a very . . . interesting read. I liked all the cats,” Celestia said, sounding like she was desperately trying to say something truthful.
R.B. and Rhythm looked at each other and at the expression on the face of their sun-raising, all-powerful sovereign monarch, and they manfully fought back laughter.
“I’m very pleased to give it a place in my library,” Princess Celestia concluded. Then she bent down to their daughter’s height and said, “Now, enough about my opinions. How did you like the castle, Ruby?”
Ruby regarded her seriously. “It was okay. Not enough cats,” she pronounced.
“Ah. Of course.” Celestia leaned closer to Rhythm and whispered, “Does she judge everything on a cat-based metric?”
“Pretty much.”
“Why does your daughter love cats so much?”
Rhythm’s shoulders lifted in a shrug. “Nopony knows. We like to say that we told her to be gay like us and love the pussy”—he winced as R.B. kicked him in the fetlock—“and she took it the wrong way.”
R.B. craned his head in. “Moved on to sharing our inside jokes? Are we airing out all the family’s dirty laundry to Princess Celestia now?”
Ruby frowned. “There isn’t any dirty laundry. We just did the laundry yesterday.”
“Wrong kind of laundry, dear. You’ll understand when you get older.”
“Oh.” She paused. “Does it mean Princess Celestia will get a cat?”
Celestia chuckled. “I’m afraid I already have a pet phoenix. But we’ll see.”
“Maybe we’ll come back another time, and then you can see,” R.B suggested, in the kind of polite tone that meant he was ending the conversation and resistance would not be accepted. “Ruby, come on. Let’s stop bugging the princess. It’s almost dinner time.”
After bidding them farewell, Celestia headed back towards the library at last. Luna was already yawning her way inside as the clock chimed, and a fond smile bloomed on Celestia’s face while her little sister sleepwalked through, bumping into one of the reading tables.
Today had been a good reminder of what was important. Here was her family. Maybe they were not as ridiculous or cheerful as Rhythm’s, but they had their own kind of contentment.
The smile vanished when she realized exactly what was on that table.
“Sister, really? Cathouse?” Luna’s scandalized voice took on a thoughtful note, with just a dash of smug superiority, as she asked, “Do you even know what that means?”