The first 'roc' parade was… not the most graceful performance Gilda had ever been a part of, but on the other talon, by no means the worst, either. The great turul sort of… crab-walked behind the battalion with their bobbing feathered cockades, and occasionally waved a wing in lame imitation of the gyrations of the griffish soldiers as they rose and fell on graceful wing-beats, transitioning from all fours to aerial display, and then settling once more to the cobblestones below, to take back up the slow-step march.

As this rippling carpet of armed and armored griffons was the standard for demonstrative marches as they had evolved over the years, the Fifth's performance was objectively speaking rather lame. But that was strictly Gilda's opinion, and if she was not particularly proud to have been a part of such a shambles, the novelty of an enormous beast participating in the march was sufficient to wring enthusiastic cheering from the onlooking masses, who clearly weren't as exacting as an opinionated tyro like the exiled Griffonstonian.

Novelty beat excellence, it would appear. Gilda would have to remember that.

But nevertheless, the march was a success, and proof that the lieutenant's cockamamie plan, concocted on the fly in the middle of a poorly lit warehouse in the griffish quarter, had been exactly the right decision, the right choice. The unicorns had come to a rapid agreement with 'Lady George', right then and there in that poorly lit warehouse. They'd left with 'Bob', his great tamed roc, a lockbox full of coin and drafts of dubious authenticity, and enough bales full of 'roc' feathers to supply fascinators for the fancy new cockades Rarity's mystery seamstresses managed to turn out overnight. Gilda had looked up at the great turul, wondering how long the bird had been collecting her own molt, had been carrying these bales with her like - what? Mementos?

As that shambles of a march came to a conclusion, the crowds came to an end, too, clustered in a plaza just outside the working port, a bit of open ground where battalions could maneuver in support of and behind the fortifications that held the outer walls along the exterior of the harbor. The Eleventh peeled off to relieve a battalion holding the great masonry fortress right there between the outer wards of the city and the open sea. The Twenty-First and the Fifth took to the air, two entire battalions flapping their wings in something approaching unison, as they took flight for their own postings around the mouth of the harbor.

Gleaming Shield bumped along in a supply carriage, drawn by Grant and Corporal Gustav. The rest of the pony officers were likewise carried aloft by their own matched teams of griffon troopers, as they would if the battalion ever actually moved into the field or to battle. The Fifth's flight was short, barely a hop, and they curved in a somewhat graceful arc into the marshalling-yard of the great stone and brick mass known as Battery Garner.

The battalion major - who was the only commander the Fifth had at the moment, their titular colonel being a five-year-old filly, and the lieutenant colonel being on sick leave - greeted the colonel of the battalion they were relieving, whose troopers were themselves drawn up in formation. They took off over the heads of the Fifth, looking far more fine than Gilda's fellows had in the air, and flew off for their part in the daily 'crab-back march'. The Fifth broke ranks, to take charge of their 'post'.

At loose ends, Gilda stood awkwardly in her finery beside the great turul, looking through the great sally-port over a heavy-walled bastion. It held the mechanism and the storage-bay of the great chain that closed this particular harbor outlet when the city was under attack. This chain and the battey which protected it was part of the network of fortifications which made Trottingham one of the best-defended cities in the world. Gilda had heard that Trottingham was a tougher nut than any of the richer, wealthy pony ports of the Equestrian coast.

Rarity the Unicorn emerged from her hiding-place in the back of Gleaming Shield's supply carriage, and proceeded to fuss over Gilda and the remnants of the 'prototype' Gilda was wearing. This had been the only complete outfit that the unicorn had gotten anything near to completed in time for that first crab-back march. Gilda had felt rather foolish and overdressed, flailing about her wings and kicking her booted paws and talons at the back of the formation, while just overhead bobbed the chin of a spastic turul likewise making a fool of herself. Not all of the fabric had survived the athletic spasms which were the current march-step in vogue among the battalions.

"How could you have torn out this seam in a single day? It was double-stitched, with heavy, coarse nylon thread!"

"I do not know, Miss Rarity. We don't generally do this in clothing, let alone this sort of fabric. Perhaps something a bit sturdier? More… I don't know. Architectural?"

"Are you a griffon, or a basilica? No, no, I should have known. You aren't troopers at all, you're troupers. That was more like a ballet performance than a military movement. I clearly will need to redesign entirely, this will have to be like a ballerina's costume. With armor! Ha! I think have some measurements of the stress tolerances, and I think, ideas. Maybe something more extensively ensorceled?"

"The enchantments seem to have worked," said Gleaming Shield, who was looking on, wearing a neutral, inscrutable expression. "We need more gemstones, though." The lieutenant was still neatly turned-out in her Territorials semi-formals. Gilda didn't know how the purple unicorn managed a march through the whole of the city without getting a pinch of dust on her gambeson, not even a smudge on her gorget or pauldrons. The whole ensemble was far too shiny and elaborate for combat purposes, of course. But that wasn't their purpose, their purpose was display.

But Gilda couldn't get over how clean Gleaming Shield still was. She might have credited the lieutenant having ridden during the march, but for the fact that the officers had only mounted their carriages in the last evolution before the leap over the harbor waters. The lieutenant had stolidly trod along behind her dancing troopers like an implacable paragon of virtue, matching the slow beat of the drums, ignoring the wild skirling cry of the pipes that directed the wilder gyrations of the troopers in their procession.

The Fifth's lackluster and incredibly amateur fife and drum corps was perhaps part of their failure to shine. Pipers were expensive, rare, and, Gilda had been told, massive prima donnas. And a craze for griffish pipers was in the course of raging among the pony regiments, who were hiring away every experienced piper they could get their hooves on, leaving only the punters and the squeakers for the lowly Territorial battalions.

Gilda eyed her mistress. She still wasn't sure if the lieutenant was mad at her or not. Things had simply moved too fast, and Gleaming Shield had, perhaps, been too busy with urgent matters to bother with disciplining an overly rambunctious bat-hen.

Rarity pulled and prodded at the ruins of Gilda's uniform. Gilda's outfit was a echo, an allusion to the idea of the lieutenant's drill armor, rendered in brocade, satin, and twill. Gold embroidery - or something that sought to replicate the effect of gold embroidery without the expense - reflected light in a dazzling array across the fabric.

Or rather, it would have, if half the stitches hadn't come out, and the satin hadn't snagged on her spearhead during one flourish.

"Oi don't see how any o' this did my purpose any good, Lieutenant Shield," said the turul from overhead, clearly bored by Rarity's wittering over the wreck a single march had made of Gilda's prototype. "Oi didn't see a solitary unicorn in that entire crowd, aside from you-all in the officer corps."

The lieutenant resolutely refused to look upwards at the turul. "The purpose today wasn't to attract the attention of random Trottish civilians, 'Bob'. We'll have that soon enough, and from the ponies who actually matter when it comes to attracting the attention of Canterlot."

"Weren't ye supposed to be writin' letters?" The turul's Trottish accent was horrendous, and Gilda wished she'd just drop it, and stop trying to play-act 'Bob'. As far as Gilda could tell, so long as the turul didn't talk about royalty and crowns and coronets, the magic elided their interactions into the appropriate and expected approximations for onlookers and eavesdroppers.

Gilda was still trying to come to terms with just how malleable other griffons' perceptions of reality actually were, and how far they could be led from the plain facts before their beaks by the witchy falsehoods of a bit of gemstone and glass and gold filigree and ancient pony-magic. The turul had been vague about the origins, but had been clear on this, that the coronet was the fault of some monster of a pony wizard, once upon a time, lost itself in the sands of time.

Finally, the white unicorn left off on her poking and prodding and tugging, and Rarity let Gilda go, to flee into a changing-room to shuck herself out of the tattered 'uniform'. Gilda returned the bundled, dirty cloth to the unicorn, and the two unicorns wandered off, arguing over the viability of ensorceled uniform-gems versus putting all that work and effort into something that would come apart in use so quickly.

That left Gilda staring up at the other royal, who was trying her best to look like a tamed beast, squatting there in the marshalling-yard as griffons bustled here and there, putting the battalion away into their temporary quarters.

"So they see what, another griffon sitting beside me, keeping an eye on his 'roc'?" asked Gilda.

"Oi can never be rightly sure, little lady," said 'Bob' in a gruff sing-song cadence. "I can only guess what they see, by what they react to, right?"

"If they are going to hallucinate a Trottish cock sitting beside me, I think the magic will obscure your accent, your highness. Please drop the Trottish, you're very bad at it."

"Well, you know. You never have to get good, if the damn magic is always smoothing out the rough edges for you."

"Effortless success, such a burden. Perhaps we should go inside, lest we turn any eavesdroppers into drooling imbeciles by accident." Gilda frowned to herself. Her accent was slipping. She’d worked hard to drop those educated tones, these last few years. Her protective coloration was fading.

"Would be their own fault if they did, but I see your point."

The fortress had a series of supply rooms and carriage stables across the back of the compound, and Corporal Gustav had arranged for the 'roc' to be stored in Stable No. 29. Gilda wasn't sure why it was numbered that, there were only three stables in Battery Garner. The other two stables were teeming with troopers putting away the carriages, the supplies, and the colonel's gig. Gilda holed up in Stable No. 29 with her new charge and hid from the prospect of honest work. 'Gertie', or 'Bob', or 'Lady George' - whoever she was, she barely fit inside the mostly-empty stable. It was designed to hold six assault chariots, or two heavy lift carriages, but wasn't nearly tall enough to hold the great turul comfortably.

"You clearly don't want to talk about it," said the turul, miserably squatting like a chicken in a henhouse nesting box, her head hanging low, almost beak to beak with the much smaller griffon standing by her side. "But there's only one way you're not affected by this blasted coronet. What is it, are you some runaway hidalgo?"

"Do I sound like an Altiplano griffon? I don't want to talk about it, talking gets hens shivved in dark alleyways." There, that sounded a bit more like it.

"That's what I thought. I thought there weren't any more legitimate Groverlings left in the world."

"There aren't, and I'm not, and I'll knife anygriff who says otherwise, you savvy? Even you. I'll figure out which feather I can put the blade through, and down you'll go, like any Griffonstone guttertrash."

"Easy, there, my little griffon. I have no interest in whatever political fray you're fleeing."

"I'm not fleeing anything! I don't do politics! We don't have politics, anyways. We just have griffons killing each other over stupid crap I can't even understand."

"Don't you feel any remorse for the chaos you're leaving behind in - it is Griffonstone, isn't it?"

"No! Not in the lea- not at all! My family - none of our griffs have sat in that filthy stone seat in five generations! We're not descended from the last king - or even the third! The quarrelling killed both my father and my grandfather, and we're not sure about great-grandmother Gertrude, but it looked an awful lot like poisoning from what the grannies used to say. Those horrible griffons back home can all die of poverty, sepsis, and their own evil burro-shit. We've been tearing our own gizzards out since that first eagle eviscerated that rapist-lion who tore out her throat as he impregnated her twitching corpse. The ponies are right about us.

"The faster we go extinct, the better."

"You can't possibly mean that," Lady George said, recoiling.

"What do you know? What do you care! You're the literal mother of your race, aren't you? You matter! We don't. I don't.” Gilda’s chest heaved. She’d not intended to go that far.

“Can we talk about something else?"

"Like what, Lady Gilda?" The turul knew Gilda's name. That - was that a bad thing? Any other subject, any other subject -

"How about all that gold bullion we pulled out of that warehouse along with your rugs and - I didn't even recognize some of the stuff in those bales."

"It's nice to have employees I can rely on for a change."

"We're not your employees, 'Bob'! It's a business arrangement, whatever the lieutenant says it is."

"How is it that a lowly lieutenant has such sway that she can make this all happen?"

"Hello, that's Gleaming Shield. All the officers know they'll be answering to her in a generation. She was born to be a general. Not to mention she brought you in to impress the hades out of everygriff. A tamed roc turns a lot of heads. The question is, what are we going to do with all of these trade goods?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean we're a territorial battalion, not a trading company. The lieutenant claims she has contacts, but I have no idea what that means."

"Well, I do have contacts. They expect to hear from Lady George, though. And half the time the messages never get through, no matter how I try."

"The one thing the military is good at, is communication. Especially within the city proper, or so I've been told. You need to make your connections within the battalion signals platoon. I'll bring some griffs around later. In fact, I'm pretty sure they're just cooling their wings over in the ready room."

"Your battalion has an entire platoon of, uh, 'signals-griffons'?"

"I guess? I don't know, I'm new to this military business myself. There's about a dozen of them, quick fliers who carry messages and work with the telegraph relays." They were, alas, also the fife and drum corps. But she didn't want to dwell on that with the turul. "But they know everygriff. Well, the corporals say so, and the signals griffs claim it, so I haven't heard otherwise. We'll see, we've only been in garrison a couple weeks."

"Isn't that a diversion of public resources to private aims? A form of peculation?"

Gilda looked out the open stable door, thinking. Would Gilda the Griffonstonian gutter-trash know what ‘peculation’ was, or could she safely pretend ignorance? The view offered a prospect to the west, where a pair of black pillars of smoke rose into the brilliant blue sky. There were ponies and griffons fighting and dying in the city while they sat here in the safest, most heavily fortified two acres in all the Griffish Isles. Who really cared about any of it?

"Would you rather,” asked Gilda, “We spent our time murdering rebels and helping burn the city down around the civilians’ ears, or put our efforts into moving your trade goods around that city while it’s still standing, delivering them to those who would do something with them? Grover’s honest truth, it's the Territorials' communication resources. We’re not doing much else with it. We don't hunt rebels, we just prepare for our next march, we staff this big stone heap, and we arrange for supplies and other irrelevant nonsense. You could say that your little off the books messages are the most Equestrian, pony-like material to cross our bored signals-griffs desk in all the time I've been a member of this battalion."

Gilda didn't mention her interest in facilitating the unwinding of the turul's business dealings. What the big bird didn't know about what Gilda was skimming off the top, wouldn't hurt it. And it turned out that dealing with Griffonstone guttertrash was remarkable good practice for negotiating with respectable business-ponies and banking griffs.

Someday, Gilda might even be able to put down a payment or two towards her debt to her mother.

Author's Notes:

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