FFMS024

The forward units of the Army of the North were heavily engaged with a peculiar rear-guard action against the remnants of the White Rose's Housa expedition, which was dying by inches in the shattered wasteland they'd made of the lands between Dover and the river. The rest of the Army? We were twiddling our hooves, bored out of our skulls.

Although I admit that the rest of the Army wasn't offered the chance to observe the spectacle of hundreds, if not thousands, of former-White-Rose captives treat a barely-grown bat-pony as if she were some peculiar combination of the Peacock Angel and a daemon from the depths of Tartarus. Er, so, pretty much the Peacock Angel, now that I think about my metaphor? Oh, tartarus, Sawbones is totally going to rip this entry to shreds. No, I think leaving it in will be a good reminder to your future, arrogant self that you, too were once young and foolish. - .S

Anyways, Cherie flitted about from camp to camp, cage to cage, and badgered her new charges to make something livable of their imprisonment. They hadn't exactly been resisting the demands of Rye Daughter and the guards as regards to hygiene and shelter but there hadn't been offering enthusiastic obedience up to this point, either. In the believing cages, hygiene and hard work suddenly gained the virtue of semi-divine command.

In the doubters' cages? Cherie, on our recommendation, behaved obnoxiously, was openly contemptuous and mocked the prisoners in their squalor and indolence. The doubting-mayors knew that they were being operated via reverse psychology, but the wonderful thing about this technique? It still works even when the victims are aware that they are being manipulated. A few smart remarks about how the believing mayors' cages were so much cleaner and respectable did a world's worth of work upon the doubters, who would have spit in our faces rather than obey a direct order.

Down in the wastelands, the easternmost companies of our army met up with the regiments pushing over the Hayfriend from Coriolanus. That was about as far as the units of the reduced Army of the Housa was willing to extend itself away from its depots in Coriolanus. Their battering in the spring had left their remaining officers cautious, even timid. They loathed the idea of operating away from a direct line of communications, and thus weren't inclined to move more than a third of a day's march away from their pontoon bridges over the Hayfriend. Engineers were repairing the bridge at Beech Grove – quietly, I had been told that it was more in the way of a replacement, but officially? 'Repair'.

(The rest of the engineers and pioneers had been working on bringing the main road through the Wirts into operation as a logistical line of communication for our own forward regiments. That route would reduce heavily the massive number of wagons and carters dedicated to moving food, supplies and support over the battle-fields via the long way and the devastated Clearances. So long as the White Rose's fleets didn't return to close off one end or the other of that dangerously exposed road. It was also about this time that three full regiments of our Army returned south-west to the vicinity of Leveetown to reinforce the regiment which had been holding that port lightly against the possible return of said White Rose flotillas. They had been oddly absent, leaving us to destroy their charges without any sort of interference.)

Plans were for the bulk of the Army of the Housa to bypass the chaos in the wastelands via the Bride's Road and join up with the intact Army of the North. Because the fact was, the Army of the Housa was more notional than real. d'Harcourt had disappeared in the chaos after the first, disastrous battle of the Clearances, and most of his staff had died or likewise disappeared into the aether.

The 'Army' had operated via a committee of emergency, mostly militia colonels and majors, and using as a focus an incredibly decrepit and half-senile retired brigadier-general from the great manufacturing-port. This Brigadier Barrière d'Or may or may not have been a relative of Dior Enfant, but the accounts I've heard and seen suggests that she was mostly hauled about in a cart to convey dignity to the decisions of the three regimental colonels who actually ran the 'Army' after they tumbled back across the Hayfriend.

If they had been out in the open, the White Rose would have eaten them for breakfast. As it was, the Hayfriend did more to protect Coriolanus than anything or anypony outside of the walls of the Braystown Shambles. And nopony was more aware of this incapacity than the colonels' committee, who apparently were galloping full-speed towards the official embrace of General Knochehart. Never has an army more enthusiastically disbanded than that of the 'Army of the Housa'. They knew they were snake-bit, and were pathetically eager to append themselves to a winning organization.

***

And so it was that I found myself flying up to High Earth behind Whirlwind to greet the first regiment to pass over the 'repaired' bridge at Beech Grove. I don't know if it was accident, or the eagerness of the troops, but this first regiment was one of the units raised from the provincial militia of New Equestria. They had not marched very far from their own front doors, and yet, they had walked through a lifetime of fear, defeat, and recovery.

The battalions of the III New Equestria were far smaller than a well-established militia ought to have been. They, like most of the units mis-led by the hapless d'Harcourt, had lost heavily at the Wirts, and lost even more in the rout and retreat afterwards. After I and a lieutenant from Knochehart's staff officially welcomed the III New Equestria into the Army of the North, I toddled away from the officialdom, and sought out stories as Sawbones had taught me. I gathered much of the above from the ponies I interviewed, and a great deal else.

It was here that I heard the stories of the ponies who had retreated with d'Harcourt into Braystown, because the III New Equestria had not been among the fortunates that had fell back directly over the Hayfriend. They, like a number of other battered regiments and 'rear support battalions', had fled to the massive, low-walled fortress outside of Braystown, and the town which the Shambles protected.

The III New Equestria and a number of other units eventually were evacuated via ferry into the lines in front of the suburbs of Coriolanus, and had been glad to get away from d'Harcourt and his pet legate. They had sounded like a strange pair to begin with. The Beau was unusual for liches, in that he was apparently well-aware of his own lack of talent for leadership, command, and war-fighting. From all accounts, he had a reputation for latching on to mortal commanders of note, and following their lead slavishly. The Beau was a sort of daemonic familiar for successful generals, a powerful but capricious aide to those who knew what they were doing. Before the campaign began, the Beau and everypony else had assumed that d'Harcourt was another in this line of capable commanders.

It was apparent from the accounts I heard, that by Braystown, the Beau's faith in d'Harcourt's competence had been shattered, primarily by the battle of the Clearances, but perhaps more firmly by the poor choices that general had made leading up to the battle north of the Wirts. The New Equestrians reported that d'Harcourt disappeared a day and a half after the defenses of the Shambles had been revived and properly ponied, and he never reappeared. All commands were either issued by, or passed along as from, the Beau. For the first time in this long war, the legate had been leading his own command.

Nopony dared to ask what had happened to d'Harcourt. Even fewer actually cared, after his catastrophic failure of leadership. At least some of the New Equestrians I talked to assumed that the legate had eaten d'Harcourt, and more than a few thought better of the legate for this assumption.

While I was taking my accounts, I looked up at some hub-bub to note a civilian moving among the regimentals settling into the castra outside of New Earth. It was the Castellan, Long Scroll, accompanied by two ponies who I presumed were aides, and Cup Cake, whom I had not seen in a long while. I thanked my interviewee, and trotted off to find out what was going on.

What I discovered, was that the III New Equestria was Long Scroll's sister's regiment, as well as his nephew and his daughter's. The sister had been a battalion major, I learned quickly from the nearest non-com I could corral. The feckless Long Scroll had no idea of how to operate the militia-bureaucracy, and I knew before he did what he was searching for.

The nephew had died in the Clearances during the fighting. The sister had been badly wounded during the retreat to Braystown, and she died in the Shambles, as did most ponies so wounded in the rout. But the daughter…

Long Scroll was still scrambling about like a fool when Shared Feast came galloping through her fellow militia-mares, and tackled her father.

And not every story's end is an evil one. And what is lost may still be found.

I walked up to Cup Cake, and patted her on the withers, and asked her if she had eaten yet today. I was feeling like some pastries if she had any with her. Whirlwind was using a courier's chariot while my gig was in the repair-shop, so I offered Cup Cake a ride if she wanted one. I thought offering the baker a way to go meet her own beau, off somewhere along the fighting front, might be an easy way to sneak into the action myself.

***

The Princess was ahead of my game, though, and had Cup Cake berate my slyness. Back to the rear again for us, the rear and boring nonsense like inventory.

Inventory of the contents of the Annals-chest, for instance, left in the custody of Throat-Kicker, delegated mystically by Sawbones to carry his precious from place to place somewhere safe and in the rear. Both Sawbones and I were writing to journals during this period, and I took the opportunity to transfer my entries to the Annals-storage sections while I was inventorying.

The timber-weasels were all over the warlocks' encampment, digging into everything, getting underhoof, rubbing up against anything that would stand still. I tried to bar them from the tent that we had the Annals-chest in storage, but it's fairly difficult to keep animals (or animal-shaped ambulatory shrubs like the timber-weasels) from getting into hopelessly insecure places like field-tents.

It was while I was trying to shoo a couple of Gibblets' pestiferous plants out of the storage-tent that I looked down into the opened Annals-chest and noticed some grey hairs in the central compartment. They looked like nothing that would have come out of either Sawbones or my hides, and I looked further. It was at this point that I spotted some anomalies in the security-matrixes. Alarmed, I drew a sealing-circle ward around myself and the chest, and then I opened up the special compartment which held our most sensitive materials. I wish I hadn't discovered anything, but I somehow knew something was wrong, even before I opened that damned magic casket.

Somepony had opened up the supposedly-impenetrable chest, and removed the liches' phalacteries, and replaced them with crude fakes. And I had no idea who or why, or even when.

I looked up, and three timber-weasels were sitting on their haunches, staring at me and my warding-circle. We exchanged angry glares with each other, until one barked, and all three got up and ran out of the tent.

What in tartarus was going on?