Gleaming Shield was a different person in Gilda's eyes after that. Somehow it made her more… selfish, more predatory - more griffish. The angry little martinet wasn't mad at Gilda for defacing the morning reports with a light sprinkling of Corporal Guillaume's mis-delivered coffee, or any other such petty slight, she just wanted Gilda dead because she was a griffon.

Gilda could respect that.

There wasn't much to do on Seafoam. The battalion outnumbered the inhabitants of the port, if not the swarming crews of the fishing fleets which used the harbor as a foul-weather haven when the bad storms came. When those unguided black clouds swept down out of the glacier-tormented Bugbear Passage, nogriff could stop them, and all anyone could do, griffon or pony, was beat for harbor, and take shelter. Seafoam was well-placed for said shelter, lying downwind from the richest and best fishing banks.

The fishing fleets definitely outnumbered the thin scattering of ranching families whose scrawny herds picked over the few scraggly fields that grew among the rocky outcrops that was Seafoam's main land-form, main landscape. The ranchers were only there to maintain the hamlet, and to feed the fishergriffs something other than fish. Well, the fishergriffs and fisherponies.

The absent fleet was as much a part of Seafoam as any griffon you could actually lay eyes or talons upon. They were a constant presence in their absence, and their existence - somewhere out there, riding the currents, sweeping the schools of haddock, flounder and herring for the hungry towngriffs of Trottingham and her sisters - formed the reality of the little seaport more than anygriff who actually lived there.

For good and for worse. The fishing fleets were nogriff's idea of stable or sweet-tempered. The seasons were hard on the fishers, and the fish could be elusive. Sea-fights between rival pony and griffish flotillas broke out constantly, tribal animosities and desperation for catches causing skiffs full of ponies and skiffs full of griffons to fight over their trawling-rigs whenever they got too close to each other. Although the quarrels rarely rose to full-fledged ship to ship battles, they weren't completely unknown, and the resulting sharp-clawed clashes didn't always subside after the schools reappeared.

Or always stay on the waves where they belonged. Sometimes, the fishing fleets took their squabbles ashore, even onto to Seafoam, which should have been a safe harbor.

It had been more than a problem in the past. The entire town had been burned to the water-line in the course of fleet-wide shore-leave riots at least once in the recent past, a decade or two before the closing of the Griffonian ports. They'd come close on a number of other occasions, their homes and shops only saved by fire-brigades formed from the garrison and the townsfolk and whatever nominally-sober sailors they were able to dragoon into putting out the fires their fellows had started.

Shore leave on Seafoam was more often than not a rolling riot of debauchery and barely-restrained bloodshed. Every structure on the island were converted to pubs or bawdy-houses while the fleet was in port, and the sleepy little town became Satyricon on the seashore for those wild, mad days until the winds turned sweet and the captains could tow their hades-bound crews back out to sea.

Gilda saw two shore weeks in her time on Seafoam. The first had been merely debauched and rum-soaked. That was the first time she’d actually met any mud-ponies and featherheads, as the officers with the Fifth Territorial were exclusively unicorns. It was rather peculiar, seeing wings on a pony body, but the mud-ponies were even stranger to Gilda’s uneducated eyes. As far as Gilda was concerned, a pony’s head didn’t look right without a horn growing out of it.

"Recruit! Put down that tankard!"

"But corporal, she offered me a drink!" Gilda eyed the leering pegasus’s smug expression. It had been freely offered. How often did someone just give a griffon something like that?

"Of course she did, you numpty chick! You’re on duty, you are, you pillock! No drinkin’ on duty, ever!"

The corporals had a settled policy of refusing Gilda her grog ration, something about her being too young for it. She had no idea how they knew how old she was, she’d been careful before leaving her mother’s hovel to dye her feathers so nobody knew she was technically too young to be out on her own. But somehow the corporals had figured it out.

"She just wants to get a Territorial in trouble, that’s trouble right there, mark you, you foolish recruit! Stay away from cutie marks like hers!"

"What, the butt tattoo?"

"Those aren’t tattoos, they’re magical expressions of their innermost selves. And that mare’s got a troublemaker’s cutie mark if I ever saw one. Now that I think about it, come with us, Miss - what is your name?"

"Sheet Slicer, your worship. And I wasn’t gonna do anything to th’ fledgeling. Just a bit of grog."

The corporal tested the tankard, and reeled back, alarmed.

"This is half a bottle of rum! You were trying to kill my recruit!"

"Aw, you griffons can hold your booze, she’d have lived."

"Bollocks! I’m putting you in stockade on general principles!"

That shore week had been otherwise uneventful, but the second one - that had started with a running fight between two smacks as they raced into port, fish-heads and belaying pins flying in filthy arcs from ship to ship as they vied to get to the docks ahead of each other. The squabbling just spread from there. That had been a long week, with the dark and brooding storm overhead keeping griffons and pegasi alike from flying off their frustrations, and the storm in-doors keeping the Territorials' truncheons warm and their tails clamped down tight. By Gilda's half-educated estimate, a full half the sailors of the fleets had to be marched straight out of the stockade down to the docks when the time came for them all to ship out, when the skies cleared and it was time for the Fifth Territorial to shepard their unwanted guests back seaward. The captive sailors passed from the shore patrol's custody straight into the hooves and talons of their smug, villianous ship-captains, who were not much of an improvement on their lawless crews, if by and large better at keeping out of the Territorials' stockade.

Even the chaos of shore leave in the port wouldn't have been justification for the posting of an entire territorial battalion someplace like Seafoam, if it weren't for its proximity to the Griffonstone shore. Seafoam was closer to the Grand Tree than it was to Trottingham, and their snug little harbor and accompanying swarm of blind coves and hidden caves were an open invitation to smugglers and griffish traffickers.

Or, rather, it would be if Griffonstone had anything worth smuggling out other than griffons. As it was, Gilda quickly came to the realization she had been a fool. She could have simply sold herself into pony servitude the easy way, without opening herself up to the possibility of being chopped in half by an enraged Territorial griff in full battle-rage. Even with a battalion ensconced in the Seafoam harbor-fort, the locals and some of the sketchier fishing-boat skippers kept a trickle of skiffs flitting in and out of the even dozen coves you couldn't see from the high look-out towers atop the fort.

Everygriff knew it was going on, but even daily patrols barely sufficed to capture one shipment in twenty.

One in twenty was enough to keep the stockade at the fort full of scrawny Griffonstone emigres, and one or two well-beaten griffish sailors. Most of the time, the owners of the skiffs escaped free and clear, leaving the semi-worthless boats and their griffish cargos to the mercy of the Territorials.

They were damn lucky the Territorials had little reason to be vengeful. They were even more lucky that Gleaming Shield had no wings, and couldn't join the aerial patrols. Gilda was pretty sure her ensign would have 'killed while resisting arrest' every single boat's-master she came across actually smuggling griffons. One of the things that Gilda had teased out of her fellows was exactly how the terrorists had slipped into Equestria, the ones who had blown up Gleaming Shield's beloved brother.

Smuggled across a route like here at Seafoam, that's how. Being posted in Seafoam left the unicorn a fuming, ill-tempered brute, and even the corporals avoided her when the patrols came in out of the coves towing a skiff full of captives.

Gilda looked into her ensign's eyes whenever the new captives were processed into the stockades, and wondered if Gleaming Shield dreamed of executing all of the captives, right then and there in front of the stockade gates. Luckily for everyone involved, the ensign was simply the most junior officer in the battalion, and didn't have the authority to commit or order hypothetical atrocities.

Honestly, Gilda wouldn't blame the ensign if she offed the smugglers, they were incredibly smarmy. And weren't above trying to get under the tail of every hen they came across. They had to keep the one or two they might have on talon at any given time in solitary confinement, because if they left the smugglers with their cargo, the cargo would stomp them to death.

The griffish traffic trade wasn't a happy way of life for those who were trafficked, it would appear. And they seemed inclined to hold a grudge.

But aside from the patrols, and guarding the stockade, there wasn't much else for the rest of the battalion to do on Seafoam.

So they trained.

They let Gilda have a stick, so she wasn't sticking out in the endless marching drills, empty-taloned with a dumb expression on her beak. One day about halfway through the Seafoam deployment, she managed to convince a couple of the veterans to give her some training in spear-work.

Or rather, talked her way into a series of brutal beatings under the color of 'spear-training'.

"What did you think you were doing, Gilda?" The unicorn's horn-magic had a firm grasp of Gilda's head, and turned it gingerly one way and the other, as Gleaming Shield examined the damage.

"T-trainin’!"

"It looks like you went three rounds with a water grist-mill. How did you manage to get bruising on both sides of your beak? I didn’t think that beaks bruised, they just break."

"I’m toughar than I loook, enthen mam. An’ youn enouf they sa’ m’ beak ithin’t so’s muth ‘ard ‘as ith is spongy."

"Well, you’re swelling up, and I can’t hardly understand a word you’re saying. Go see the surgeon, and stay in the stockade infirmary until you’re functional again. You owe us a week for permitting damage to battalion equipment."

"E’quipmnt, mam?"

"Yourself, Gilda. You are valuable battalion equipment, and it is expected that you will take proper care of the equipment issued to you in the course of your service. Even something as filthy and second-hoof as, well, you."

Gilda had plenty of time to listen to the other prisoners who were waiting on the next prison transport, since she couldn’t talk with her beak bound with poultices.

She didn't know any of the captured contraband personally - Griffonstone wasn't that small of a place - but she found one who was a cousin of a cousin of someone her mother had known. Gunter seemed happy enough to be in chains. Claimed that being captured was fine, so long as it was on pony soil. The Equestrians rarely repatriated their captives to Griffonstone - there wasn't anygriff to turn them over to, after all. He expected to be settled in indentured servitude to some earth-pony in one of the southern colonies, work his pinions off, and maybe find work as a hunter or something like that in the deep south.

Gilda didn't waste much time on might-have-beens. She hadn't been that hurt, after all.

And Gleaming Shield showed up soon enough to reclaim her pet fledgeling, telling her that her five days were up, and to stop goldbricking. There was work to do, after all.

The next day, the unicorn gave Gilda back her stick, and started teaching her how to push a spear pony-style. Gilda would have thought that the unicorn style of spear-fighting would have been full of magical flourishes, but Gleaming Shield’s style was down to earth, all legs and hooves, and never let the shaft escape her grasp. It was a style suited to any suitably blood-thirsty quadruped.

Gilda took to it like a - well, like a griffon to stick-fighting. She liked to think she was good at it, but the ensign was a damn sight better. Gilda counted her blessings that Gleaming Shield pulled her strikes early on, or else she’d have spent another week or two in the infirmary, for sure.

And life went on, as they marked time on Seafoam, waiting for the fishing fleets to blow in on the next storm-wracked wave.

Author's Notes:

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