Chapter 1
Applejack looked out the window to the speck coming down from the horizon, and let out a groan. “Look who’s back again,” she said. “Ah swear, customer or not, sometimes Ah want to take a shovel out to clobber that bird upside the head. Head that hard it can’t do any real damage anyhow…”
“I’ll take care of it,” Granny Smith said.
“Are ya sure you can handle it?” Applejack asked. “We got a lot of work to do, Ah can’t have him hovering around all day.”
“I said I’ll take care of it!” Granny Smith said as she closed the front door of Sweet Apple Acres behind her. She turned, and grimaced at the sight of Grandpa Gruff bent over awkwardly to preen his back.
He quickly spat out some feathers and stood up as she walked down the wooden steps from the deck. “Granny Smith,” he said with a murderous tone.
“Grandpa Gruff,” Granny Smith replied in kind. “Look what the cat dragged in! What do you want this time?”
The old griffon snorted. “You know just fine why I’m here. I’m here to talk about the next shipment to Griffonstone.”
“So ya want another one after all?” Granny Smith said dryly.
Gruff huffed. “Against my better judgment! But mark my words, I won’t get taken advantage of again. That last batch was terrible, it wasn’t worth half what you got for it.”
“That’s hogwash! Those were some of the finest Crimson Delights anypony’s ever grown! And if you’re lookin’ for a discount you can forget it. It’s fifty bits a barrel or nothing.”
“Bah!” The griffon sputtered and shook. “I’ll give you ten bits at most. Those wormy little things barely tasted of anything. You’re lucky that griffon pastry chefs are the best in the world, and we could save them with our magnificent baking abilities, or we wouldn’t come back at all.”
“But here you are,” Granny said snidely. She turned and ambled towards the barn, where two score barrels stood filled, lidded and labeled and ready to be shipped.
She wandered over to an open barrel and tossed an apple at the griffon, who caught it in his talons. “Well you must be hungry after all that flying. Here, have a taste and see that it’s up to your exacting standards, why don’t ya.”
Grandpa Gruff sniffed it suspiciously, and took a bite. “Awful.” He took another bite. “It’ll do, but I won’t come all this way for this again.”
“Why do you come all this way?” Granny Smith demanded. “Yanno you could just send the order in the mail like everypony else.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Grandpa Gruff jabbed an accusing talon vaguely in her direction. “You could send just anything! No, I want to see before I buy. Buying unseen – might as well throw your bits into Abysmal Abyss.”
“What do you take me for, some Granny Flim-Flam? An Apple’s word is as solid as it comes!” Granny Smith stomped the grass and sniffed. “Fifty bits. You can take it or leave it.”
Grandpa Gruff snorted, and adjusted his fez. “Why should I buy your apples anyway?” he demanded. “Apples are everywhere! Seems like half the towns in ponyland are apple farms. I can go someplace else and get apples that are just as good as these for half the price. Or even better!”
“Hah!” Granny Smith bent over in laughter. “Ya daft old coot, Ah’d like to see you try! You’d come crawling back here wit’ yer tail tucked between them cat legs o’yourn beggin’ for a deal this good! If’n you want good apples you go to the Apple family, and we sell our produce at a fair price. That’s how it’s been for generations, and no big-headed bit-higgling grimalkin is gonna change that.”
Grandpa Gruff raised his beak. “I could buy oranges from Manehattan instead.”
Granny Smith’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “You wouldn’t dare… Not even you would sink so low. You would be the sworn enemy of all my kin unto seven generations! Honest ponies would turn y’away at the door, and the very grass would shy away from your paws!”
“Sounds like you’re getting nervous. Fifteen bits a barrel and not a feather more!”
“Forty-eight!”
“That’s a joke!”
“I ain’t going any lower!”
They glared at each other, neither budging an inch. “You’d change your tone if you were clever,” Grandpa Gruff said. “Critters come to Griffonstone from all across the Eastern Lands for Griffon pastries, even dragons from the Dragonlands. Frankly your farm should be paying us for the advertising.”
“That ain’t how we do things here and that ain’t gonna change!” Granny Smith roared.
Grandpa Gruff snorted. “Well I don’t know why City Hall wants to order these apples anyway. Who needs em? When I was little we used the fruit of the gruppy tree for everything. It was the most delicious thing in the world and any griffon could pluck it right off the trees. If you could get past the mountain rams, that is. Only the fastest and the canniest griffons could get past—oh I see, you’re trying to distract me! Well it won’t work!”
“Wha—I didn’t do anything, you blown-up sack of feathers!”
Grandpa Gruff furiously raised his head high and puffed out his chest for about a second before he slumped back, coughing and wheezing.
Granny Smith rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Fer real though – Griffonstone is a long way. Gabby brings the mail on the reg’lar and there’s griffons living in that newfangled Friendship School in town. I don’t know why y’bother to come all this way just to be a bird’s patootie every moon.”
“Because no griffon else can do this properly! Soft little kittens, the lot of them.”
“Uh-huh. And because you ain’t got nothing better to do with your time.”
“Don’t you get smart with me, missy!” Grandpa Gruff waved a pointing claw. “The chicks at home laugh at me and think I’m useless but do I see them coming out here to haggle for apples? No I don’t, and they can’t, not like I can, they don’t have what it takes!”
“Gettin’ a mite full a’yerself there, ain’tcha?”
“Certainly not!” He crossed his forelegs, sitting on his rump. “I’ve been all over the world! I’ve seen all the tricks and heard all the excuses. No little pony song and dance routine is going to get one over on me. I did the Trek of Treachery across Mount Calumny five times. I know what a barrel of apples is worth.”
“You’ve been all over the world, huh?” Granny said in a low, dangerous voice. “My kin and I grow apples all over the world. Fer generations, we’ve mastered the ways o’ the land to grow the best fruit there can be. For a hundred years every band of explorers searching fer new horizons had an Apple colt or filly with them to find new seeds, to plant our trees, and to share with the whole clan. What ye’re looking at there ain’t just a tree, sonny. It’s the shoulders o’ giants.” She glared at him resolutely. “So when I tell you what a barrel is worth, you’d best believe it’s what a barrel is worth.”
Grandpa Gruff glared back. “We can get by without your apples,” Grandpa Gruff said, in a flat and heavy voice. “We got by before we all started making friends, and even if no griff else remembers it anymore, I still do. Maybe they all think it’s fine to get lazy and lean on ponies to solve all their problems until they can’t fend for themselves, and maybe you think you got us all hooked and we’ll pay anything, but I don’t fly that way. I learned to get by with anything. There’s always another valley over the next mountain with its own trees and their own weird fruits.”
“I learned at my pappy’s knee never to let anyone rattle me and never to let anyone undervalue a good apple.” She smirked defiantly at the griffon. “I like haggling face to face. Keeps those skills sharp, don’t it? So many ponies nowadays wanna look at some chart of exchange rates and kiwi futures in New Steedland. I’m longing for some good honest drag-down fetlock-dragging table-biting hard-nosed salesponyship, so you can go ahead give me your best shot! Ah. Ain’t. Budging.”
“That’s not what that twinge in your right hindleg says,” Grandpa Gruff said, and Granny Smith clenched her teeth tight. “Does that knee ache? You’re not getting tired on me, Granny Smith?”
“Don’t you start with that! Y’sound like mah granddaughter... ‘Granny don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t carry that chair down the stairs, think of your hip’. But make no mistake, I can do this all night long.” Granny Smith closed her eyes and drew a deep breath through her nose. “I can’t do a lot of things anymore but I can still do this.”
“So can I,” Grandpa Gruff said. “I used to be a merchant caravan guard. Many a gluttonbird’s last sight was the wood of my club pressed against their eyeballs when they tried to snatch a bite. They used to tell stories about me. Scavengers and thieves from Mount Aris to Yakyakistan knew to steer clear when Guard Gruff was on patrol!” He chuckled proudly at the memory “Then the trade routes changed and they started packing everything in them magic sealed crates that not even a gluttonbird could gnaw through. I hung my club over the fireplace and it stayed there until a dang hatchling chick, Gallus or Gilda or one of the others, swiped it when I slept and it wound up tossed in the Abysmal Abyss. At least it gave Arimaspi one last good whack.” He shook his head bitterly. “I miss that club. One of these days… I’m gonna jump down there and get it back.”
“Well, when I was a foal we lived on the road,” Granny Smith said. “We didn’t have a place to call a home until I was a young mare. I learned to wrangle watching my pappy when I was just a little filly.” She looked out across the vast orchards of Sweet Apple Acres. “We gathered and sold seeds for our feed, and those traders were a canny bunch. I watched him go at them with fire and gumption like nothing else. He was not gonna let anypony take him for the smallest bit, not when his family’s well-being was on the line. At nights in the cart, and when we settled down here, after the day’s work was done he played his banjo and we sang songs and we talked and he taught me to be a good honest pony, who works hard and drives a fair bargain, and I never forgot. And I kept his banjo hanging on the mantel over the fireplace, where he put it.” She glanced back at the farmhouse with a faraway look in her eyes. “Four generations, that banjo hung on the mantel. Then the foals were roughhousing one day, and the banjo… came apart. And there weren’t no repairin’ it. They don’t make em like that no more. Didn’t sound the same after.”
They were both silent for a moment.
“Gallus isn’t coming back to Griffonstone,” Grandpa Gruff said. He shook his wings, and struck a claw against the grass. “Good riddance! I taught that boy everything I could. He had nothing, a lost boy without a home, and I taught him the way I learned… He left and isn’t coming back. Other griffons are thinking about spreading out too. And other creatures have visited Griffonstone. There’s more bits there now than any time since King Guto’s day! I barely recognize it anymore, the way they’ve built it up… Barely recognize it.” He sighed bitterly. “Soft little kittens. No idea how hard and cruel the world can be. They’re gonna fall to bits once I’m gone.”
“They’ll take care of themselves,” Granny Smith said in a low voice. “They always do, somehow.”
Another moment passed without either of them speaking. “Sun’s getting along,” Granny Smith said after a while.
“So it is,” Grandpa Gruff conceded. “We used those apples up pretty fast this moon… Put another ten barrels on the order.”
“Will do.” Granny Smith looked back to the house. “I’ll put you down for 35 bits a barrel, same as reg’lar.”
“Good.” He looked up at the mountains on the horizon. “Well… I gotta catch the good winds back to Griffonstone. See you in a moon.”
“Yeh,” Granny Smith said. She stretched her legs, heard the creaking in her back as she shuffled around and climbed the step to the front door of the house. “See ya around, ya old bird.”