The sun was almost directly overhead but the day had grown cooler. A strong wind blew down from the north and with it came dull grey clouds. From the west came a cool breeze and Dim knew the weather would soon change with the wind coming from two directions at two different altitudes. This was, however, a passing thought, because he was more concerned about Blackbird. She was, at the moment, eating an apple, and her lips were still greasy from the tin of sardines she had devoured. This was after she had said that she wasn’t hungry and had no appetite.

An airship chugged by overhead, a houseboat by the looks of it, and it left a trail of sooty black flakes falling behind it. A ship meant freedom; the ability to go anywhere, live anywhere, and to move to where opportunity presented itself. As with everything else around him, Dim hardly noticed, so focused was he on Blackbird.

It didn’t feel right to talk about it, or to ask questions. Dim had no real understanding of why she was upset and he felt as though he was cluelessly missing out on something that might be obvious to everypony else. Rather than embarrass himself, or make a fool of himself, he remained silent but supportive. At least, he hoped that he was supportive.

“Want some wine?” he asked while offering his half-empty bottle to Blackbird.

Much to his disgust, she took it; when her greasy, sardine-soaked lips wrapped around the top, he shivered and wished that he had thought this through. After a swig, he heard her say, “Oh, it’s half-full. Thanks, Dim, this is actually really nice of you.” Then, raising it to her lips once more, she leaned back and chugged down the rest of the bottle in such a way that Dim was left dumbfounded.

“Bombay, you look jittery,” Blackbird said to her friend and companion. “Do you need some wine too?”

“Maybe.” Bombay shrugged and continued to work on her claws with a file. “Fighting messes with my head.”

“Yeah, the conditioning,” Blackbird said while she seemed to perk up. She nodded, but then she began shaking her head from side to side. “I don’t understand. How can an assassin have an aversion to violence? I don’t mean to cause you pain, Bombay, but I don’t quite understand everything.”

“It’s complicated.” Bombay’s response was terse and sullen.

“Blackbird…” The Bard lifted a bottle of wine out of a wooden crate and his eyes darted downwards to look at the label. “When Bombay acted as an assassin, she was mindwiped. Basically, her will was overridden and her body was used like a marionette puppet. You can’t have someone as dangerous as her suddenly turning against you.” Rolling his eyes, the Bard slipped the bottle of wine back into the straw-filled wooden crate and let out a snort. “Ghastly.”

“Oh.” Blackbird’s long, triangular, tufted ears fell and her whole body shuddered.

Tapping the side of her head with her claw file, Bombay said, “All the training is still up here. Everything I learned. Everything that was forced into my head. Accessing it is the hard part. It’s easier when my friends or those I love are in danger. I can just push through. Eerie says I am healing. Getting better. She says that I can use this for a better purpose and that gives me the strength to go on.”

“Uh, we have guests,” Munro announced while he pointed skyward with his finger. “They have friends.”

“Oh, damnit, I knew that they just wouldn’t let Blackbird walk away from this.” The Bard spat out the words as if they had a bad taste and then he launched into a stream of Fancy vulgarity that made the air around him shimmer like summer heat rising from the road.

Garrulous and Giselle returned, along with two friends, both male hippogriffs. All of them stood in the grass a short distance away and Dim’s first instinct was to fireball them where they stood. The largest of them all, Garrulous, stepped away from his companions and approached with what could only be described as an aggressive posture.

“You should know,” he began in a calm, confident voice, “that there are five of us. The fifth has a bead on one of you right now, I know not whom and I really don’t care. We’ve found too nice a prize and being a female of breedable age, we just couldn’t let her go. Sorry, this isn’t personal, it is just a matter of our survival. History will judge our actions as being just, once we’ve established ourselves.”

“There is about to be five less of you in the world,” Dim replied in a way that only he could. “The history books won’t even remember you when I’m done. Nopony remembers ashes.”

“Hand over the girl.” Garrulous remained calm, commanding and as verbose as ever. “If this turns to conflict, one of you will be instantly killed. With us being hippogriffs, statistically, we’ll survive this. We’re faster, bigger, stronger, smarter, we are perfection… and you are not. So spare yourself some trouble and cooperate. This can only end badly for you.”

“Oh Garrulous…” Dim breathed out the words while summoning as much compulsion magic as possible. “Garrulous… Garrulous… kill your companions!”

At that moment, Dim winked, vanishing from where he stood, and his companions all scrambled. Just as Dim retreated into the aether, he felt something passing through his insubstantial form, the place where he had just been standing a fraction of a second ago. The thunderclap of gunfire had come from his left, so he focused on that and went off to deal with the lurking sharpshooter.

Garrulous meanwhile had taken to the air, drawn a pistol, and was now shooting at his companions, who had scattered in different directions. Two had taken to the air and the other two had taken cover behind trees. Shots rang out through the confusion and Garrulous was caught in a deadly crossfire. The Bard went scrambling when the crate of wine had a hole blown through it, and wine spilled out like blood onto the floor of the wagon.

Motte and Bailey had created forward cover for themselves, a mound of earth that they hid behind. Bombay, pistol in one paw and sword in the other, made a mad lateral dash for the trees while bullets kicked up dirt around her hindpaws. Blackbird, pistols akimbo, took to the air, zigging and zagging.

Munro grabbed the Bard, hoisted him into the air, and then ducked down behind the wagon in a protective crouch. Bailey had her carbine out and was trying to draw a bead on one of the airborne hippogriffs. A bullet hit the top of the dirt mound that Bailey had taken cover behind and the grimacing unicorn mare was forced to drop down lower or possibly catch lead with her face.

Garrulous shot Giselle, grazing her wing, and she now made a mad effort to escape. A shot rang out from behind the trees and Garrulous’ neck opened up in a blossom of scarlet. He tumbled through the air, blood spurting from the two holes in his neck with rhythmic pulses, and then a second bullet tore a gaping hole in his thigh.

“You motherfuckers shot the wine!” The Bard’s feeble scream was drowned out by the stuttering chatter of the gunfire exchange. “I hope Dim sets you on fire!”

Dim found the hidden sharpshooter perched in the crotch of an old walnut tree. He popped in and out of existence with great rapidity, and was shocked at how quick she was. Somehow, she was putting bullets in the exact spots where he had appeared moments before and he marvelled at her downright supernatural speed. She was almost like Blackbird in this regard, and Dim found that he actually felt a twinge of remorse for what he was about to do, because destroying something so perfect just felt wrong.

But Dim lived to destroy beautiful things…

With a flicker of magic, Dim set the walnut tree ablaze. All of it. The panicked hippogriff was flushed from cover and she flew away, smouldering while clutching her rifle. Flames crackled along her wings and the stench of burning feathers filled the air. It was a good looking rifle, though Dim knew very little about these sorts of things, and there was no point letting it go to waste. Reaching out with his mind, he tore it from her talons and then stoked the flames that consumed her wings.

Screeching, she fell from the sky, trailing black smoke. Dim heard explosions, loud pops, and it took him a few panicked seconds to realise that the sharpshooter’s ammunition was igniting as the hungry flames consumed her body. Frustrated, he cursed under his breath that the valuable bullets were being consumed, but at least he had saved the scoped rifle.

With the sharpshooter disposed of, Dim winked away to return to his friends…

And found them gathered around Giselle. She was the last one alive and she lay on the ground, gutshot and stabbed, by the looks of it. Beak open, she panted, clutching at her stomach with her talons while writhing in pain. An ever widening pool of blood spread through the grass and dirt around her, making a slow creeping advance upon those who surrounded her.

“Garrulous allait être un père,” she said while her talons clutched at her ruined stomach where her innards could be seen glistening. “Ayez pitié, s'il vous plaît.”

“Non, pas de pitié. Nous sommes des bâtards,” the Bard replied.

“Je vous maudis tous…”

“Foolish girl.” Motte shook his head in disgust. “Probably got plucked off of some farm someplace around here and then you had your head filled with delusions of grandeur. If you’d just stayed at home, if you’d just stuck with your culture and your traditions, you might not be dying in the dirt right now.”

“Somepony do something,” Blackbird said to her companions and Dim noticed for the first time that Blackbird had been grazed. “It’s wrong to let her suffer like this. Please!”

No one did anything and Giselle let out a bubbly shriek, which left her gagging. Her twitching talons snagged on a loop of intestines and whole ribbons of her insides came spilling out onto the grass like slithering, slick serpents. Blackbird turned away, unable to watch the unbearable sight any longer, and the whole of her body trembled as she began to sob.

“I did that to her,” she murmured.

With a gurgling shudder, Giselle surrendered her spirit and then went mostly still.

The walnut tree in the distance still smouldered, though Dim had put the fire out. Once mighty, the tree was now charred black, as was the land around it. Pegasus ponies and griffons had flown over, and a few passing travellers had stopped. All of them kept a fearful, worried distance from the companions and talked to one another in hushed tones. Motte and Bailey had stacked the bodies of their fallen foes into a pile and Dim had set them ablaze. Bombay was cleaning up spilled wine from the floor of the wagon and the Bard sat in the grass looking quite unhappy.

The wine had been shot after all, and a whole row of bottles had suffered an ignoble end.

Munro had collected the guns of the hippogriffs and was now sorting through their supplies, looking for anything useful. He found a map—which he kept—some ammunition, some food, and a collection of papers in a wooden scroll tube. The fastidious, meticulous minotaur was unscathed, unbloodied, and seemed undisturbed by everything that had just happened.

“Blackbird”—Dim tried his best to be comforting—“you shouldn’t feel bad about this. She met you halfway. That is how these things are. By choosing the life she did, she put herself in a position to be killed. It was bound to happen sooner or later. It is only happenstance that you and she crossed paths. You did no wrong.”

Blinking, Blackbird wiped her eyes with the edge of her wing and then stared at Dim for a time. Dim wondered what she was thinking and if what he had said had somehow made her feel better. If, for whatever reason, he had made her feel worse, he hoped that he could fix it somehow, because an unhappy Blackbird left him feeling miserable and out of sorts.

“Yeah.” Bailey sounded remarkably chipper for a pony that had just been shot at in battle just a little while ago. “Dim’s not wrong with what he said. I know it might not feel good right now, but once you think about the alternative… once you think about going with them and what would have happened, you’ll feel better.”

“I wonder if she got the same pitch,” Blackbird said, thinking her morose thoughts aloud. “Did she even have a choice? What if she left home to keep others safe? I’ll confess… I thought about going with them to keep all of you safe, and then maybe escaping later. Or something. I don’t know. We don’t know her reasons and it feels wrong to just make assumptions. Maybe she felt that she just had no other choices. Maybe she thought that she was doing the right thing. It’s easy to think that sometimes. It can be easy to justify stuff… like now.”

“She pointed a gun at us,” Bailey said in return and she shook her head to and fro while she grimaced. “It doesn’t matter what her reasons might have been. No justification can be made for her choice to shoot at others and take part in abductions. She and her stupid friends crossed the wrong group and paid for it with their lives. You can’t waste pity on stupid.”

“I guess you’re right.” Blackbird seemed to shrink and her whole face sagged. “When you say it like that everything feels so cut and dry… even though I don’t want it to be.”

“Looks like rain.” Motte craned his head skyward, studied the sky for a short time, and then returned his attention to Blackbird. Moving closer, he examined her wound, the bloody red line that went from ribs to hips and let out a powerful snort of disapproval. “Let me see what I can do about patching that up, Miss.”

“Yeah, it stings a little.”

“It’s a flesh wound.” Motte leaned in a little more, squinted, and then pulled his head away. “One little spot looks like it might need stitching. It’s not gushing, but it is deep enough that it’ll stay a slow, steady trickle that might not stop. Right about there, where your hips widen.”

“Yeah… my big, wide, foal-bearing hips.” Twisting her head around, Blackbird looked back at her wound, winced, and then jerked her head back around. “Eew. That’s worse than I thought. I bet when the adrenaline wears off, that’s gonna hurt. Do whatever. I don’t wanna look.”

“Hang on, let me go and get my medical supply bag…”

A steady rain fell upon the oilskin cover over the wagon and the battle was now behind them. Dim, cosy and dry, looked at the Bard and felt an odd sense of pity. The earth pony was passed out, exhaustion had claimed him and now he was lost in a deep slumber. With the rain came an unpleasant cold and Dim had thrown a heavy woollen blanket over Pâté au Poulet’s body, knowing just how frail his companion was.

Just behind the wagon, Blackbird could be seen walking in the mud. There was something almost juvenile about her right now, because she stomped in the puddles, squished the mud between her talons, and had a sort of glum, or perhaps dejected playfulness about her. Somehow, after a brutal firefight, the best part of her—though perhaps a little subdued and shaken—still shone through. The sort of irrepressible goodness she radiated gave him hope. Blackbird had found the wine bottle half-full… which was somehow endearing, though he could not say why.

Watching Blackbird frolick, Dim allowed his thoughts to drift.

Author's Notes:

The wine got shot...