Gilda sat on another cart's buckboard, bundled up in a blanket against the cold, trying to read a book she'd found in Gleaming Shield's things. The unicorn officer had discovered another cache of books in the garrison which, if you squinted real hard and lowered your expectations, might conceivably be called, with a spirit of generosity, a 'library'. This book in particular was a heavily-worn volume purporting to be a history of the city and noble dynasty of Trottingham, written from a very biased pony perspective.

You'd think the first duchesses of Trottingham had been ponies, for all the writer ever mentioned the species of that clan of notables. Only the names gave any clue to the unwary reader. Gilda was not impressed, at all.

All around Gilda, anarchy was set loose within the bustling confines of Tinker's Alley. The cart she was sitting on rocked now and again as orderlies, nurses, and griffish troopers dumped this box or that bundle in the cart-bed. Gilda largely ignored the process, having decided that the organization of the materials and their arrangement was the business of the creatures of the 93/1st, and none of hers.

She was here to make sure that nogriff took a five-talon discount on… scalpels, or winding-bandages, or… bedpans?

Gilda wasn't sure why she was here, but Gleaming Shield was still busy with her stupid sexy foal-sitting princess, and Lady George had told Gilda she needed to be here for some reason that the enormous bird of prey hadn't bothered to detail. The turul had spent the previous chilly day flying about the city while Gilda had been busy shooting ponies in the back, orchestrating ambushes, delivering heavy haulage carts, and dropping off prisoners at Fort Gharne.

"We don't have room for that monstrosity, Captain Eye! It's against a dozen regulations, it's dangerous, and it stinks!"

"Shut up, Burns. My still is a necessary piece of squadron equipment. We're not leaving it behind so that you can fill up a cart with trashed surgical tools, used bandages, and old bed linens. They're not even clean bed linens! It's all garbage! And what are we going to use broken scalpels and bent clamps for?"

The hippogriff grabbed a sample out of the box sitting on the cart behind Gilda, and brandished the surgical tool in front of the unicorn's face. "I know we call it 'meatball surgery', but not even you would use half a scalpel to open up a patient!"

"They're still squadron equipment, and they've not been written off the inventory lists! That could be re-forged into a perfectly fine scalpel, good as new! And stop calling me 'Burns', my name is Burn Salve!"

"Your name should be 'walking malpractice lawsuit'! And it's garbage, you little weasel!" Hawk Eye threw the offending article over her own shoulder, where it landed between two cobblestones, broken blade down, quivering, right between the squadron commander's hooves.

"Lieutenant Colonel Pole! Tell her she can't take her illegal still with us!"

Fishing Pole looked up, blood in his eye.

Metaphorically.

"Salve, I don't want to hear about it! Hawk Eye, stop throwing sharp objects at ponies!"

The two doctors started talking over each other, yelling.

"I don't CARE! Work it out between the two of you, I don't have time for your damn squabbles. Smoking Tartarus, take it to the griffons, these are their carts. You! Corporal… Grizelda?"

Gilda looked up from her book and looked around, coming to the realization that she was the only Territorial corporal in sight. "Me, lieutenant colonel sir?"

"Yes, you. You griffons are in charge of these rolling disgraces, you referee these two foals'... whatever this is. I don't have time for it. Ping!" The pegasus jumped, realizing that the spooky little bat-pony was already behind him, with a clip-board already held out for Fishing Pole to look at. "Damn it, Ping, you're going to give me a heart attack. Can't you wear… I don't know, a bell?"

"Bells hurt my ears, sir. The next issue is over behind the main house in the alleyway, follow me…" The two administration ponies trotted off, leaving the fuming doctors staring at each other and Gilda with matching peevish expressions.

Well, as long as they were heated, they weren't freezing, Gilda thought, suppressing a shiver.

"Captain, ma'am. Major, sir. You see these stripes? Do you know what they mean?"

"Yes, of course. You're a corporal," said the major.

"What do they signify?"

"You are a very junior non-commissioned officer," Burn Salve said, as if to a mentally deficient child.

"Do they mean I outrank a major or a captain?"

"Stop wasting our time, corporal!" snapped the 'hippogriff' with her weird talons shoved in her armpits, trying to keep them from freezing. "I don't want to arrive in our new posting with first-degree frostbite."

"Why can't the damn pegasi bring in a warm front?" demanded the pony major, likewise standing on his rear hooves with his forehooves folded in front of him, protecting them from the cold cobblestones. "Back home in Hoofington, they'd always bring a break in the weather on the first of the month, so that anypony who was moving could do so without all of this… cold!"

"Trottingham doesn't have a weather team, major." He didn't rate a sir. "The pegasi who grace us with their presence generally have better things to do than mess around with the clouds." Especially when it was this cold. Gilda certainly wouldn't care to go flying on a day like today.

"It's not the way things are done! It's like the Isles aren't even in Equestria!" The Isles weren't in Equestria, Gilda thought, and did her best to not let those thoughts show themselves on her face. She'd gotten that much from the book, if nothing else. The sun alicorn might be Duchess of Trottingham, but that didn't make the Isles part of the realm. It made Celestia Duchess of Trottingham. Technically, the Equestrian EUP Guard was in the Isles at the express invitation of Celestia in her ducal person.

Gilda sometimes wondered what might have happened if the last griffish duchess had left the coronet to one of the elderly hen's many combative suitors. Even on her deathbed, they'd tried to make love to the old bird. Three centuries later, Gilda found herself sickened by the behavior of those repugnant, long-dead toms. Gharne had spited them all, left a will in the custody of her most loyal retainers, left the duchy to her immortal neighbor to the west.

Gilda didn't blame old Gharne for not leaving it to her overbearing neighbor to the east. King Guto of Griffonstone had been one of her most obnoxious suitors.

"Corporal! Corporal!" Captain Hawk Eye was snapping her talons in Gilda's face. What? Oh, right.

Gilda looked into the box of garbage that Burn Salve had dumped on her cart. Then she looked at the disassembled still sitting on the cobblestones next to the hippogriff.

"Why are you making my griffons pack rubbish, Major? This is barely worth hauling out to the nearest tip or landfill."

"If we leave our expended supplies here, they'll only be misappropriated by the local savages! We must keep our properly issued supplies in the possession of the squadron, pursuant to logistics manual CE 142:01, page eighty-eight, section three!"

Local savages. Right.

"OK, you don't want the tinkers pawing through your broken scrap and dirty linen. Objection noted. Captain ma'am, why is the still against regulations?" asked Gilda.

"Why are you asking me? He's the one who says so! I'm the one who wants my damn still brought with us. I need it!"

Gilda fumed, internally. They'd gotten Captain Falcon shipped back to the garrison, so his constant inebriation was no longer a concern for the Territorials left with the 93/1st, but it still stuck in her craw. "I asked you to express why it might be against regulations, in hopes of getting a definition in your own words. What does regulations actually say?"

"How the bottomless depths should I know? Do I look like a mare who reads regulations? I'm a doctor some imbecile waved a wand over and declared a captain, not a soldier who barely knows which end of a scalpel to cut with."

Gilda thought she looked like a half-pony, half-griffon abomination, but she wasn't going to tell an officer that, no matter how careless and unmilitary that officer was. No ma'am for her, either.

"Fine, Major Salve, can you express why you prioritize worthless garbage over this apparatus for the distillation of swill?" Gilda asked the huffy unicorn.

"Hey! I make perfectly potable gin with my still! It is a marvel of portable distillation technology!"

Gilda turned back to the hippogriff. "Which is not an argument in favor of it getting shipped all the way out to Bridlederry with the rest of the squadron. It's a detriment to unit discipline, at best."

"What she said!" sniffed Burn Salve, and Gilda felt dirty for being in agreement with the weasel. She suddenly wanted to find reasons to haul the heap of metal components with them.

"It's a valuable morale-building tool!"

Gilda rolled her eyes at the captain.

"Fine! We also use it to generate pure distilled alcohol for disinfectants, and the gin itself is useful for pain-killing in extreme situations. Which we've encountered in this dump, given how often the supplies have been disrupted. It's a backup for our actual painkiller supplies, and proper chemical disinfectants!"

"Alcohol is a metabolic poison, which makes it a rotten painkiller, and an inefficient disinfectant!" objected the major.

"Fine! Backup source of painkillers and disinfectants for when supplies are disrupted, that sounds like an argument to me," Gilda said, jumping at the opening. She kicked Burn Salve's box of rubbish off of the cart, and waved to the freed-up bit of cargo real estate. "Go wild, Captain Eye. One emergency disinfectant distillation rig, added to the inventory. Next time I see Ping, I'll have her add it to the lists."

"Ping's a stallion," Hawk Eye corrected Gilda.

"What, are you sure?"

They both nodded at her.

Gilda cringed. She thought she had been better than that at judging the genders of ponies.

Thankfully, it was about then that a shadow blocked out Celestia's feeble-rayed winter sun, and Lady George appeared overhead, with a couple griffons flying alongside her.

And Rarity the Unicorn riding side-saddle on the great turul's back like a fledgeling carried on her mother's back.

The diamond dog surgeon and his little harem of cooks and nurses scattered from the middle of the street, as Lady George landed with a mighty thump. The three griffons of great dignity and age settled around her in the street, looking around themselves at the chaos they had just brought to a halt with their arrival. They had landed in front of the guildmaster's mansion, and one of them was staring inside the mansion through the poorly patched hole in the parlor window that some careless charioteer had knocked out a few weeks back during one particularly wild emergency landing with a cart full of dying soldiers.

Gilda walked up to Lady George and the new griffons as Rarity daintily picked her way down the turul's extended wing and jumped to the cobbles below.

"Lady George, this is why I had to be here today?" Gilda asked.

"Ah, Corporal Gilda, so good to see you. Might I introduce to you some mutual friends of Rarity's and I? I hope they will become friends of yours as well. Guildmasters Gort, Gren, and Garrick."

Garrick was the name of the missing master of the tinsmiths and tinkers guild, that ancient worthy whose sacked-out home they were standing outside of, right now. Gilda looked at the long-faced, grizzled old griffon peering inside of his home, and felt a sudden wash of intense shame.

"Lord Garrick," Gilda bowed, deeply. "I would like to extend the Fifth Griffish Territorial Battalion's collective thanks for your generous and patriotic contribution of your premises for the uses they have been put in this time of privation and necessity. The surgical squadron put them to hard but necessary use these last several weeks, and there are many a griffon and a pony who now cling fiercely to life, because they were given a talon up here in your home, and those of your guild-griffons. I wish the saving of them had been less costly to you and yours, in this, the hardest of seasons."

The old tom turned to look at Gilda, his gaze steady and without waver.

"I offered them as was my duty, and as was my griffons' duty. I see nothing burnt to the ground, nor irretrievably defiled, but then, we are simply standing in the street, no? A reckoning must be made. The ponies who requisitioned Tinker's Alley promised compensation for property used and expended. I do not see those ponies here."

Gilda paused, realizing just how out of her depth she was. "My apologies, Guildmaster. My involvement in the stewardship of Tinker's Alley came some days after your apparently hurried evacuation, and I have no idea who it was who made promises, and what was the substance of those promises. We'll get to the bottom of this, I promise so far as my promises mean anything."

"Hrm. Yes. I am not well versed in military matters, but I think you're rather young to be making any sort of promises. Although you're remarkably tall for your age. And… interesting colors. And accent. Griffonstonian?"

"Yes, guildmaster, sir. Recently emigrated."

"Sad state of affairs, Griffonstone. Not even now, in the winter of our discontent, can I envy your homeland's state of affairs. We must do better. I will take your proffer, young Gilda. Follow me, I want to see what has become of my home."

They toured the half-evacuated mansion, whose halls still bustled with orderlies and troopers packing up belongings, supplies, and random kibble. The kitchens were still in use, as the creatures of the 93/1st and the griffons of the Fifth still needed to eat, even as they tore down the rest of the hospital around the ears of the cook staff.

"Better than I'd thought," sighed the guildmaster as Rarity and the two other griffons followed them across the street into the now mostly emptied out journeygriff's hall. "Lady Rarity, your promises to oversee the situation here were not in vain, thank you. And Corporal Gilda, I trust the rest of the homes and shops are likewise… relatively kept up?"

"To the best of our abilities. There were some early incidents with the septic tanks that I had to get troopers to clean up. I don't think any permanent damage was done."

"Ha! Yes, these tanks were dug by a particularly greedy set of brothers in my father's time. I've never been able to replace them with something less temperamental. Ah, well."

"Guildmaster Garrick, may I ask, where have your griffons been? Working here in the Alley has been like walking among ghosts. We had no idea where you all had disappeared to, where you'd gone."

"Factory work, Corporal, factory work! Terrible crowding over on Foundry Hill, but we were kept busy. Most of them are working on that project of Rarity's and Cid Sawhorse's."

"Ah, I'm aware of it. I wish I had the bits to invest in it like Lady George did, I can smell the opportunities."

"Indeed. We once were more active in aeronautics, before the ponies forced us into these guild shackles. My grandfather wasn't nearly so stuffy as I have to be, if I want to maintain my griffons in their homes."

Gilda looked around at said twice-abandoned homes, and thought about the costs of that maintenance.

The old tom looked at her silent assessment, and chortled. "Indeed, indeed. Which is why I'm considering Lieutenant Colonel Pie's project, this new blue-zone city council. I find it difficult to understand how we can have two city councils without, in effect, having two cities. It sets in stone the disparate status of griffons and ponies. Bad enough that we have a pony duchess. But if we have a separate legislative body for griffons, does that mean that we're lesser subjects of that duchess? I've met Duchess Celestia. She's a noble pony, indeed. I don't think she intends to treat her griffish subjects differently than her pony ones."

"But if they're in separate buckets, it's impossible not to?" asked Gilda, trying to follow his logic.

"Exactly. Which is why I hesitate to take up the alder's robes once again. It was very painful, when they docked us from the body politic. One snip! And gone. The Docked Council, they call the pony's legislature. Which would make Lieutenant Colonel Pie's new griffish council what, the Tail's End?"

"Many of your fellow aldergriffs are not likely to be of good moral character," Gilda warned. "Among other reasons which makes me think the council may be a very bad idea."

"Whatever do you mean?" asked Garrick, smiling wryly.

"I don't trust the lieutenant colonel ma'am. She's got bats in her belfry."

"Hey!" yelped Ping as he flittered through their group, a long scrap of paper trailing from his clipboard, looking irate.

"No offense intended - oh, he's gone. Huh. Sorry - what were we talking about?" asked a disconcerted Gilda.

"The contents of the pink colonel's upper stories, I think?" said the guildmaster, smiling.

"She's crazy, the dangerous kind of crazy. And has a history of using flashy public displays to mousetrap the enemy, at the cost of the general public."

"One incident does not make a trend, young Gilda."

"The Crab Bucket was one hades of an incident. And I don't like the composition of the aldertoms and alderhens invited to join the council."

"You disapprove of my potential appointment?" Garrick asked, smiling dangerously.

"You're a unionist," Gilda said, in the least accusative manner she could summon.

"If you aren't planning to have me arrested for it, I will not quarrel with that assessment."

"So are all the other guildmasters invited. The non-guild griffons are, as far as we've been able to determine, the more problematic flavor of street boss and criminal mastermind," Gilda elaborated.

"And I will not quarrel with that assessment, either."

"Lieutenant Colonel Pie is plotting a massacre," Gilda said, flatly.

The old tom sat on his haunches, and looked pensive, staring at the stained washbasin they'd paused in front of, in one of the tinsmithies. Gilda thought it was the same one she'd seen a pony sergeant cleaning contaminated bedpans in, those many weeks ago, but wasn't about to bring it up in the current circumstances.

The guildmaster looked up from his reverie. "There are many things we cannot do without a legitimate council. Appoint new constables, regularize the guild militias, petition the duchess. All these are things that we might accomplish, in council. Not the great things we might do, with the Duchess In Council, but still, good things.

Garrick sighed. "Corporal Gilda, I was willing to sacrifice the homes of my griffons, and the property of my fore-fathers, to the long-term interests of the city of Trottingham, and the future prosperity of the workers of this city. If my presence in this mousetrap of a council can do a fragment of the good that this sacrifice, redeemed, has done, then how can I do ought but offer up my old beak and bones upon the altar? The workers and the duchess, they are worth the price.

The old guildmaster looked around the disheveled mess the ponies had left in his workers' homes. "And if not me, then who?"

Author's Notes:

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