And so the siege was laid; the day after the heights were taken the division’s artillery had been dragged up the slope to the summit, whereupon the two batteries of cannons began hammering away at the walls. I’m no expert on such things, but when I went up to take a look for myself, the twelve guns firing one after the other seemed to have very little effect on the stout, reinforced fortifications around the city. I would watch as a cannon fired, belching flame and smoke like a certain baby dragon with indigestion, only for the cannonball to smack into the thick stone wall and bounce off, leaving what looked like a tiny paint chip in the wall.

“Our guns might as well be loaded with apple sauce,” said the recently-commissioned and newly-breveted Captain Bramley Apple. He kept glancing down at the rank pips on his epaulettes, which were so new that they had yet to be tarnished by the burnt gunpowder residue that stained the rest of his uniform and coat.

Despite his very sensible insistence that the military life was not for him and that he’d like nothing more than to return to his family’s unhealthy apple fixation, he had finally relented and accepted the battlefield commission and brevet rank that the Ministry of War had been dangling in front of him ever since all of the officers of his artillery battery had been killed or captured. I had considered offering to mentor the aspiring new officer, after all, there was more to leadership than merely the capacity and will to rally ponies to a common purpose; it required a certain level of elegance, gentlecoltly behaviour, and manners that his crude, country upbringing had sorely lacked. While working with an artillery battery would allow me to sit back and sip martinis as cannons hurled lead shot at the enemy a mile away, that incident where the Changelings had infiltrated the battery had rather put me off that notion.

A cannon roared, spitting its lead shot in a streak of fire and smoke through the air, over the heads of the picquet lines a little further down the slope, where it struck the sturdy wall and bounced off harmlessly. The gun crew, stripped of their armour and their coats foaming with sweat, pushed the gun back into position and set about the arduous process of reloading. I waited until the thunderous bark faded before speaking.

“I heard Market Garden will bring in an expert to help,” I said.

“Well, bless her heart,” he said, and I wondered what that phrase really meant as I’d heard that quite a lot lately. “But I don’t need no ‘expert’ to bring down that wall. What I need is bigger cannons, and more of them, too.”

I couldn’t argue with that logic, and speaking of Market Garden, my presence was required at another one of her strategy conferences. Quite why I needed to be there, my input being considered neither useful nor desired, still remained something of a mystery, but I strongly suspected that I was merely there for window-dressing. Lord-Commissar Prince Blueblood, the Hero of Black Venom Pass who had saved Princess Luna from capture and recovered the Royal Standard, certainly lent a touch of class to any dull meeting of military minds. I was an attractive piece of furniture that happened to recite mindless sentences dreamt up by a team in the Commissariat who thought they would be inspiring, and really, that actually suited me just fine as long as I could grab some free sandwiches when it was over.

The bodies had been cleared earlier, making my journey back down the slope a little more tolerable at least, though the landscape still bore the scars of the battle; if one was not careful, one could easily place one’s hoof into a small divot carved out of the earth by an errant cannonball and end up with one’s snout buried in the dust where a Changeling might have bled out. I tried not to think about it too much, lest the vivid memories of that battle that I had been trying, unsuccessfully, to drown out with drink every night rise up like bubbles in champagne. It was a relief, therefore, to be back at the camp at the base of the hill. I was still rather early, so I took a quick detour back to my tent on the off-chance something there required my immediate attention and got me out of this meeting.

Selecting an appropriate spot to place my tent proved to be a rather more difficult task for me than most other officers, who were more concerned about its proximity to the mess tent. Erecting it too close to the edges of the camp would leave it vulnerable to any plucky infiltrators who slip through the picquets, but too close to the centre would make it harder to escape should we come under attack. Eventually, after much thought, I had selected a spot that seemed to offer the best compromise between the two, and the mess happened to be well within my usual ‘stumbling-home-whilst-very-drunk’ distance as well. That it was rather close to Market Garden’s command marquee was something of a drawback, however, but I had hoped that if the camp were to come under attack by assassins in the night that they would go there first before coming to get me.

By the time I had reached my tent Corporal Hooves had already completed the mail deliveries, and Cannon Fodder was busy sorting through letters and documents sent to me from the Royal Commissariat and the various bits and pieces that Drape Cut had dutifully forwarded from my various homes. The latter consisted of the small amount of mail I receive that my valet had decided required my personal attention, which tended to be vitriolic hate mail, fawning fan mail, and personal letters from various members of my extended family asking if I still really needed particular bits of land under my demesne and if I could possibly spare one or two fiefdoms. The former, which I had been receiving rather less of as of late, usually provided a few moments of amusement to read before being tossed into the closest fire. This was more than what I could say for the latter which was more often than not destroyed the moment I had deduced my distant relatives' self-serving schemes to ‘heal the schisms in the House of Blood’, whatever that was supposed to mean.

Fan mail was something I was quite uncomfortable with, as I could never be assured of the sincerity of the praise and desire to have my foals expressed in these letters, so I left Cannon Fodder to deal with them by providing a standard response along the lines of ‘His Royal Highness is too busy martyring himself for Equestria to respond personally to your rather creepy missive, but he appreciates its sentiments regardless’. Of course, he worded it rather differently, but, as each reply carried some measure of my aide’s powerful body odour, repeat letters were quite a rare occurrence. If, dear reader, you have received one of these in response to a letter you have sent me, then I can only apologise and point out that there are other ponies far more deserving of your praise and offers of marriage than I.

There was nothing from Twilight yet, despite her promise that she would write to me. Perhaps I should have taken the initiative, but I was rather at a loss as to what to write about; the Battle of the Heights was hardly the most appropriate subject for a pleasant and potentially amorous correspondence between two members of royalty, but everything else that I had experienced around that was either terribly boring or would have been subjected to the censor’s black marker.

[Censorship of soldiers’ letters home was allowed for under the DOE Act and was up to their commanding officers to blot out any information that might be useful to the enemy or lower morale. Correspondence between Blueblood and Twilight Sparkle, however, would have been protected under the Defence of Equestria, Royal Prerogative provision (the DERP provision) and therefore not subjected to censorship.]

One letter, however, caught my eye, and for once I read it personally. A lengthy missive was scribbled in three different styles of hoof-writing that were unmistakably those of foals, which was incongruous with the rather fancy parchment used. A closer inspection revealed a faint watermark on the upper right corner of the sheet, showing a mare in profile with a remarkably familiar manestyle and the words ‘Carousel Boutique’ beneath it. The letter was from the three fillies I had met on the station platform in Ponyville, the ‘Cutie Mark Crusaders’ they had called themselves, and rambled on at length, in the usual meandering way that foals tell stories, what had happened in the intervening period between that party and now.

The three of them had finally received their cutie marks, and had apparently decided that I had to know about it. There were a few other things mentioned, too; Auntie Luna had helped them overcome a few nightmares, Apple Bloom’s brother developed a taste for cross-dressing, and something about Twilight Sparkle and her friends at an obscure little commune run by some tyrannical unicorn with a cutie mark fixation, among others. Now that they had acquired theirs, it meant that they could put a stop to their absurd little paramilitary cadet force and cease harassing ponies as they disembarked from trains.

Rather than leave this for Cannon Fodder to deal with, I had a few minutes before the conference started to write out a reply myself. I am not sure why I felt motivated to personally respond to a letter sent by three fillies I had met precisely once in rather awkward circumstances, but nevertheless I felt compelled to out of more than mere polite obligation. Indeed, I felt rather embarrassed; in the previous week I had plunged eighteen inches of Manehattan steel into the body of a living, breathing Changeling, and now I was writing a congratulatory letter to foals on reaching the most important milestone of a pony’s life.

Perhaps it was precisely because of that odd disconnect between the horror of what I had just been through and the rather pleasant, quaint, and even, dare I say it, ‘cute’ diversion this letter had granted me that I bothered with it in the first place. Distractions from the war were difficult to come by out here on the very edge of the land liberated by our glorious Equestrian Army, and those vices familiar to any soldier on campaign, namely drinking, gambling, whoring, and fornicating, were of a self-destructive nature that, as I suffered through another hangover and the disconcerting gaps in my memory of the events of the previous night, started to feel like they were doing me more harm than good. So to indulge in an activity that was altogether much more edifying and beneficial simply felt good in a way that defied easy explanation.

[Prince Blueblood and the Cutie Mark Crusaders would exchange letters for much of the remainder of his life. After his passing, these letters were found in a safe and a selection are available for viewing in the Royal Archives.]

***

I was about ten minutes late for the meeting, but nopony seemed to care. In fact, they had started without me, and when I wandered into Market Garden’s marquee she and Major-General Garnet were already having a bit of an argument.

“I seem to recall forbidding further offensive action on behalf of your division,” she said as I entered. I made a bee-line for the refreshments table and picked up a cucumber sandwich first.

I received no acknowledgement from the other officers, aside from a polite nod from Second Fiddle as I took a reluctant position next to him; it was the polite thing to do, I thought, and if on the rare occasion that any questions were hurled in my direction I could simply deflect them onto my supposed superior officer. Perhaps the novel experience of being below another in the grand pecking order had its advantages.

“You only forbade me from encircling them,” said Garnet, shrugging all too casually. “I merely used my initiative and allowed the Griffons to do what they do best.”

Market Garden glowered at Garnet, her beady little eyes squinting up at him beneath a heavily furrowed brow. “I don’t approve,” she said, her tinny voice frightfully formal in that odd, cultivated accent she uses to tell off ponies. “I don’t approve of officers using their initiative. All I require of them is to follow my plans.”

“Your plan was followed. My division took and held the heights as you ordered. My orders to the PGL did not violate your battle plan. I merely allowed them to fight as their ancestors had done, during the Nightmare Heresy when two flocks harassed-”

“That’s enough, Garnet.”

Things looked rather tense, and I wanted this meeting over and done with as quickly as possible so I could go and do something more useful with my time, like taking a nap or reading a racy novel or considering how attached I was to my left forehoof and if I could spare shooting it off to be sent home. So I did something that I rarely ever did, or wanted to do, in these meetings and said something that sounded vaguely worthwhile.

“I’m sure Major-General Garnet didn’t intend on undermining your authority,” I said. The two generals stared at me from across the table. “But I was there, and the Griffons were straining at the leash to get stuck into the Changelings again. Letting them pick off the stragglers let them work off their natural, predatory aggression in a constructive manner, instead of picking fights with our ponies. I expect we’ll see less of those incidents from now on.”

It was utter nonsense and I knew it, and they probably did too, but I imagine that the drivel that gushed out of my mouth like jam from a doughnut that had been struck with a mallet distracted them enough from their petty little squabble long enough for them to realise it was all pointless anyway. From there, the meeting proceeded, and, as per usual for me, one should not expect an exact, word-by-word facsimile of exactly what was said; the majority of which was dry, tedious, and utterly boring, and therefore of no interest to anypony except those peculiar sorts who can explain in great and frightening detail the precise workings of a six-pounder cannon but are clueless on how one would go about pleasuring a mare. Twilight’s books on the war are good for that, but not for one’s psyche, and so for the sake of expediency in portraying this horrid battle the way I experienced it, I shall be forced to summarise and condense.

“Lieutenant-General Glitter Star’s VIII Corps attempted to cross the River Vir on I Corps’ right flank.” Market Garden picked up her swagger stick with her mouth, tapped one end on said location on the large map that dominated the table’s surface, and then put it down again to continue speaking. “They established a hoof-hold on the opposite bank, but counter-attacks threatened to destroy the pontoon bridges erected across the river. The situation on the southern bank was therefore untenable and had to be abandoned. The retreat was conducted in good order, as I instructed, with minimal losses.”

“It turns out Changelings are very good swimmers,” said Second Fiddle, grinning at his own joke. Nopony reacted.

Market Garden carried on. “The River Vir forms the largest natural obstacle for 1st Army’s advance deeper into Changeling territory. It must be crossed. I had hoped to cross along the flanks of the city, but this ‘General’ Odonata is smarter than she looks. It’s a bit of a setback, I must admit; I’d wanted to surround the city and push on ahead, and tackle the inevitable relief column before assaulting the city. Defeat in detail, and all that. We’ll have to take the city directly, then.”

It was grim news indeed. I had internalised enough of military theory, mainly through osmosis rather than paying attention, to know that taking a city ‘directly’, as Market Garden had put it, would be a slaughter on both accounts. The Siege of Fort Nowhere was horrific enough as it was, but now, with an entire city full of Changelings, fortified to the greatest extent of their science, and with Faust-knows how many terrified civilians to get in the way, I could only foresee a long and protracted bloodbath in my near future.

“We could just starve them out,” said one of the staff officers whose names I had never bothered to remember. I stared at him, waiting until he thought through the proper ramifications of what he was proposing.

“That would conserve our resources for the fight ahead,” said Second Fiddle. “Position our artillery to fire on Changelings trying to bring food into the city, and get the PGL to raid them too, then all we need to do is sit tight and wait for Charlie to surrender or starve to death.”

[‘Changeling Charlie’ was a character from a series of informational pamphlets and posters produced by the Ministry of Information. This was part of a media campaign aimed to teach Equestrian subjects how to spot potential Changeling infiltrators in daily life and encourage them to report suspected infiltrators to the local authorities. This was neither popular nor successful. The Ministry also used such pamphlets to encourage soldiers to use this term to refer to the enemy over the more commonly used nickname of ‘bugs’; it was deemed bad for morale that the Equestrian Army had thus far failed to comprehensively defeat mere ‘insects’. ‘Charlie’, however, never really caught on, but the grotesque caricature of a Changeling remains a potent and controversial symbol of the homefront.]

“Right, but aren’t we forgetting something?” I said; reluctant as I was to interject, I couldn’t claim to be a prince of the realm and stand by and watch this insanity unfold. Second Fiddle sneered at me, the nameless staff officer merely looked confused, but Market Garden smiled knowingly and nodded. “What do Changelings eat?”

Second Fiddle rolled his eyes and sighed. “Love, Blueblood. They eat love. Where are you going with this?”

“Bear with me, there is a point to all of this,” I snapped back at him. “Changelings ‘eat’ love extracted from living creatures. So, in order for us to starve out the garrison, all of the ponies in that city, who have suffered under Changeling oppression for so long, would have to be starved first.”

An uncomfortable silence fell, as I waited for Second Fiddle to acknowledge his rather callous oversight. Instead, he stood there, glaring at me as if I had just told him that I had slept with his mother and spoilt the ending of a mystery novel he was halfway through reading. At the very least, the other staff officer had the good sense to flush crimson with embarrassment and admit that he had forgotten all about that.

“It’ll take far too long anyway,” said Market Garden, tapping her hoof noisily on the table. “We have to maintain the initiative, which will mean a direct assault on the city itself. I won’t sugarcoat it; the cost for us will be high, and perhaps too high for most ponies to bear. I don’t like it either, but it’s the only choice we have right now, which is why I have brought in an expert to assist us. Send her in.”

Another staff officer led a young earth pony mare into the marquee from outside, and pointed her to Market Garden’s side. Her appearance was bland to the point of obscenity; it was as though one of the statues in the gardens of Canterlot Castle had come to life. Her coat was grey, her mane was a sort of faded grey-ish purple, and her expression was so very neutral to the point that I feared she might have suffered some form of facial paralysis. The one thing, however, that at least hinted that this creature possessed a soul and wit and all else that life entails was a pair of piercing blue eyes that seemed oddly familiar.

“This is Maud Pie, a rock farmer,” said Market Garden. “She will assist our artillery crews in breaching the walls of the city, as part of her studying for her rocktorate in rock science.”

That was the second most stupid thing I had heard all morning, but I suppose that’s earth pony ‘magic’ for you. Still, if it made them happy, then it was no harm done.

“Hi,” said Maud Pie. “I look forward to working with you.”

It was remarkable, truly; I have heard some monotone voices over the years, as, indeed, military staff work appeals to some desperately dull individuals, but not even Field Marshal Iron Hoof’s infamous deadpan delivery could compare to the total flatness of the voice that came out of this mare. Devoid of the merest hint of emotion, I have heard metronomes with more expression and variation in pitch, tone, and volume than her.

At the very least, however, with such dullness came brevity, and after this rather terse introduction she was sent back outside for the rest of the meeting. I shan’t bore you with the details of this, because I have largely forgotten what was discussed, but as the old saying goes, if one can’t remember it then it probably wasn’t worth remembering in the first place. For a general idea, it was merely dry and tedious reports on morale, supply, reinforcements, officer-of-the-day rotas, picquet duties, and so forth, and made all the longer by Garnet’s frequent interjections about whatever subject was even slightly related to the topic discussed. I might have dozed off, if Second Fiddle didn’t keep jabbing me in the ribs with a quill each time I closed my eyes for more than five seconds.

Market Garden wrapped up the meeting, and just in time for afternoon tea, too; one could always trust the Trottingham officers, of whom I have seen a surprising number in the course of this career, to make sure enough free time was allocated for that most sacred of rituals. I, however, did not partake, as consuming heavy, butter-laden scones and imbibing steaming hot fluids in the blistering heat and humidity of the Badlands seemed somewhat counter-productive to me, so I used this as a cover to sneak out, citing the ever-convenient excuse of ‘paperwork’ to deal with.

Maud Pie loitered around the edge of the tent, apparently engrossed in examining a small collection of pebbles in the dust. A few of the soldiers, apparently starved of at least vaguely pretty mares to gawk at who weren’t printed in certain gentlecolts’ special interest magazines, had gathered around to leer at her, but she paid them absolutely no heed. When I stepped outside, blinking in the harsh sunlight, she looked up and trotted on over to me. As she approached, I gave those stallions a withering stare, or it was intended as such at least, and they quickly remembered they had other duties to be getting on with and swiftly dispersed.

“Hello,” she said. “You must be Prince Blueblood.”

“Yes,” I said, wondering if she had really been waiting for me for however long I was in that meeting. “I am Prince Blueblood. How do you do?”

Maud Pie tilted her head a fraction of an inch to the left, and then looked me up and down. “Pinkie Pie is my sister,” she said.

I didn’t see much of a family resemblance, but perhaps there was something in that rock farm of theirs that had caused a few issues with the pregnancies and drained all of the personality from one and into the other. Who knew what these isolated little earth pony communities got up to out of sight of civilised ponies? One shudders to think.

“Yes, I’ve met her,” I said, choosing to go along with it for now. “How is she?”

“Pinkie’s well,” said Maud Pie, and her tone of voice remained as flat as Market Garden’s flanks. “She asked me to give you a present.”

With Pinkie Pie it could have been anything at all; a hug, a kazoo, or the secretary of state for agriculture. So, imagine my surprise, if you will, when Maud Pie reached into the pocket of her frock and produced a small sheet of slate, about the size of a small paperback novel but at a fraction of the thickness. She held it up for me to see, and though, for all intents and purposes, it looked like a flat, rectangular chunk of rough grey stone, I admit to flinching slightly from it, as though it might explode suddenly in a shower of confetti and glitter. Having met her more exuberant sister before, that was a very distinct possibility.

“Pinkie Pie said you looked like you could use a friend,” she said. “Prince Blueblood, may I introduce Slab? Slab, this is Prince Blueblood. You take good care of him.”

She held out ‘Slab’ with her hoof. I waited for the inevitable laughter to accompany this bizarre little joke, but her face remained as stony as before. Either she was completely serious in her assertion that rocks are friends or she was very committed to this practical joke; both interpretations felt just as plausible. However, when I took this sheet of slate and peered at it, though I was thoroughly inexperienced in such mundane matters, it appeared to be nothing more than a smaller version of roof tile as seen on primitive earth pony houses.

Out of a lack of any other idea of what to do, I tucked Slab into my jacket’s inner breast pocket, where the weight of this thin sheet of stone felt oddly reassuring against my chest. “Thank you,” I said. “I will.”

“I was talking to Slab.”

***

Even out here, in this barren, desolate wasteland, the officers’ mess still provided the trappings of civilisation and culture that made existence on this miserable little world bearable for ponies such as I, who have been born into positions of privilege and wealth but have very little of practical worth to offer society. Sunshine Smiles still disapproved, of course, preferring to take meals and socialise with the common soldiery, where I made merely a token effort to participate with that sort of thing. An officer, and a prince no less, eating from the same trough as the enlisted was a wonderfully egalitarian gesture, symbolising the brotherhood that binds together the gallant defenders of Equestria across class lines, and yet it was just that - a gesture and a symbol. The gulf between our two stations, nobility and peasantry and all that lay in between, remained insurmountable. My unique position within Equestria’s new model army had forced me to share in the same dangers as the common soldiery, and as I have already described here I have shed blood with them. Therefore, I ask, with even an iota of luxury dangling before me, offering a temporary but unequal respite from this horror, can one truly blame me for desiring to take advantage of it?

The mess was quiet, but I preferred it that way. While the soldiers out there gathered around troughs and mopped up their tasteless brown stew with chunks of hard, crusty bread, I had dined alone on a wonderful wild mushroom and camembert puff pastry parcel and washed it down with an agreeable bottle or two of Chenin Blanc. On an ordinary night I would have been holding court with the usual coterie of officers eager to hear bon mots and anecdotes from Yours Truly, but Garnet had been pushing them pretty damned fiercely over the past few days preparing for the inevitable slaughter to come. So I dined and drank alone in the corner of the mostly-empty marquee, where I tried and failed miserably to do the crossword puzzle in The Daily Ponygraph, on the off-chance that Twilight Sparkle might remember a certain little lie I had told her in what felt like an eternity ago.

Besides, I still had Slab resting in my jacket pocket, so I was not entirely alone. Unlike certain officers I’ve had to deal with over the years here, he did not offer self-serving sycophancy masquerading as friendship, nor did he drone on relentlessly about boring military matters. He did not dominate the conversation with the tedious drivel of his personal life, nor his boorish and vulgar views on the important political matters of the day. I had to admire his stoic silence; Drape Cut had once told me that the true definition of a gentlecolt was simply a stallion who could listen to the problems of another without dispensing judgement or steering the conversation to his own matters, which made Mr Slab, Esq. the perfect model of a gentlecolt.

As far as evenings go out here, this one was at least approaching what one might consider to be ‘nice’; if I was careful about where I looked and kept my eyes away from the military camp outside then it was almost like being back at Canterlot, if the shining city upon the hill had become unseasonably hot and humid due to a weather pony strike and the Imperial Club had to temporarily move venues to a tent. To be somewhere where I did not have to even think of the conflict, even though it was mere dozen yards away through the open tent flap and if only for a few minutes at a time, was precisely what I needed to keep myself from plunging into the depths of despair.

This rather pleasant respite was cut short, however, as it must always be, when a pony-shaped shadow fell over the newspaper. It couldn’t have been a waiter, as the soldier-servants, whose greatest contribution to the war effort and eventual victory was keeping Yours Truly well-fed and well-lubricated, were far too polite and well-trained to block the dim candlelight that just barely allowed enough light for reading.

“Bastard,” I said, before looking up to see Second Fiddle glaring down at me.

“What?!” he blurted out.

“Thirteen down.” I tapped the half-completed crossword puzzle with the eraser end of my pencil. “Illegitimate son. The answer is ‘bastard’.”

In truth, I had given up on trying to do the puzzle properly, and had instead spent the last ten minutes or so filling in the blank squares with as many vulgar words as I could think of. This way was much more fun, but I don’t think Twilight or the eggheads who wrote it would have approved of my creative approach.

Second Fiddle squinted at me for a moment, then shook his head. “Whatever,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you, you weren’t in your tent.”

“I’m off the clock,” I said, using a phrase I had heard parroted around the hunched-back office drones I used to work with in the Ministry of Supply.

“A commissar is never ‘off the clock’. I thought I told you to look over those reports and-” Second Fiddle stopped and looked me up and down, frowning. His lips quivered, then pursed, and then he leaned in and whispered: “Are you wearing a tux?”

“Oh, this?” I looked down at the offending article, being a cream-coloured dinner jacket very similar to the one that had been ruined by so much icing and jam in a Grand Galloping Gala those long years ago. “Just because we’re at war doesn’t mean I should give up on the tradition of dressing for dinner.”

He screwed his face up in disgust, and sniffed as he eyed the empty bottle of wine on the table and the half-empty one next to it. “You are drunk.”

“Yes.”

“Blueblood,” he hissed, sounding almost… disappointed? I think that’s what it was.

I sighed, folded up the newspaper with its crossword puzzle now rendered unfit for publication, and pulled back the spare chair at the table with my magic. “Sit down,” I said, pouring a glass of wine and sliding it in his direction, which he glowered at as though the bottle had been labelled ‘arsenic’. “And for Faust’s sake, loosen up, damn you.”

‘Loosening up’ was not a phrase that appeared in Second Fiddle’s rather limited vocabulary, or whatever training he had gone through as a commissar, which I had not, had expunged it. Even though he finally relented after losing a staring contest with the wine glass and sat down with me, his posture still looked as though he had sat on a strategically-placed ramrod.

“I haven’t touched alcohol since that night,” he said, sliding the glass back to me. The rather pricey vintage inside swished and swirled precariously in the bowl in a manner that would have made Fine Vintage, were he here to see it and not out on the picquet line, faint with shock. [The remnants of the former 3rd Solar Guard had been used to bolster the new, reformed Solar Guard Regiment.]

Shrugging, I took a sip of the wine and found that the bottle, having previously been chilled to perfection, had become unpleasantly warm in this heat; the delicate notes of quince and apples had become sharp and tangy. Disappointed, I pushed it to the side and looked to my friend, if I could call him that.

“It’s a matter of knowing one’s limits,” I said. “Mine are considerable.”

Second Fiddle snorted, shaking his head, and then drew himself up even taller and straighter somehow, as though trying to invoke a sense of formality and authority over me. There was, however, something about his manner that simply did not lend well to those things, being concepts that, paradoxically, diminish the more conscious effort one puts into them. Contrast, if you will, to Yours Truly, slouching drunkenly and yet comfortably in the rattan chair; it irritated him to no end and I would be lying if I did not feel at least a small amount of glee at that.

“Why in Equestria did Princess Luna appoint you?” he sighed. “You haven’t changed since Celestia’s school.”

“I don’t know,” I said, exhibiting a rare amount of honesty. “I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I read about what happened with Princess Cadance,” he carried on, “and everything else since; you’re quite the role model back at the Commissariat. Now I see this. Do you want to know why Princess Luna appointed me?”

I had some curiosity on the matter; Luna was very much the sort of pony who had little time for fools, and made even less of an effort to hide it, so how Second Fiddle of all ponies made it to the rank of commissar-general was frankly a mystery, although I had an inkling based on what I knew of the lad. Then again, she also appointed me too, so perhaps she was just an astonishingly bad judge of character after a thousand years on the moon.

It was very clear to me, however, even though I was moderately tipsy, that he had been stewing upon these thoughts for quite some time, and only now, as he found me most pointedly not working as he expected me to, had he been finally pushed into shoving his metaphorical bowl over and spilling out his half-cooked thoughts all over my lap.

“It’s because I worked hard,” he said, emphasising his point by tapping his hoof noisily on the table. A few of the other patrons glanced over, but quickly looked away; few officers wanted to get involved in whatever it was that commissars were discussing. “Getting expelled from Celestia’s School with you ruined my chances of a career in magical research. You went and bought a commission in the Royal Guard with Daddy’s money, and I had to enlist and start from the bottom. That was the last time I ever saw you until that night in the Tartarus Club.”

“I’m sorry about that,” I said. It was a lie, of course, I might have been a bloody hellion as a teenager (and frankly, who wasn’t?) but it was his own damn fault for sticking too close to me and getting some of the blame splashed onto his coat when I was showered with it. “Things weren’t exactly rosy for me either.”

“Like Tartarus they weren’t,” he snapped.

I boggled at him, stunned by that outburst. “You can’t talk to me like that,” I stammered out.

“You might be a prince back in Equestria, but out here I am your superior officer,” he said with no small hint of smugness; he must have been positively itching to say that for months. “I’ll speak to you however I please.”

“Fine.” It wasn’t worth pressing, so I merely glared sullenly at him and drank my slowly-warming white wine. Wherever he was going with this, I didn’t fancy taking it without most of my higher functions drowned in alcohol.

He continued: “Whenever you hit a problem, you had your wealth and your titles to lift you up again. What did I have? Nothing, Blueblood. No money, no titles, and no golden alicorn auntie to put me back on my hooves. I spent three years on the Foalklands with those princess-damned penguins, but I kept at it while you dropped out of the Royal Guard and carried on as you always did.”

“Right.”

“And now you come here, undermining me at every turn; the sanitation issue, that stunt with the Griffon, and now correcting me in front of Market Garden. I did not work my hooves to the bone just for you to come here and take down everything I’ve worked for, and out of what? Jealousy? Because I’m your superior and you can’t take it?”

My glass was already empty by the time he finished that tirade, so I poured myself another. In truth, I didn’t care the slightest jot for what he was saying, for as far as I was concerned my title as a prince of the realm overruled any mere temporary military titles, and despite what he thought, I was, and have been, perfectly happy to work in a role subordinate to others, provided that their orders made sense. Indeed, the abrogation of responsibility when things inevitably all went to Tartarus in a hoof basket more than made up for any slight to my regal pride.

“But you still didn’t tell me why Princess Luna appointed you,” I said, acting on a hunch. I sipped at the wine, finding that as I drank more of it I didn’t mind it being a little too warm.

“Princess Luna recognised my potential,” said Second Fiddle, wrinkling his nose at my continued indulgence of one of my lesser vices. “She needed more commissars, so I arranged a personal meeting with her. I explained how, like her, I too had been held back by the nepotism and incompetence rife in the Royal Guard. I told her my ideas on how to stamp those out, and how to inculcate aggression, initiative, ruthlessness, and the drive for victory we need to win this war. I’d even brought examples from when she was Warmistress of Equestria. She hired me on the spot and mentored me through my training.”

“So you toadied.” The glare my words invoked from him would have turned the sweetest apples of Sweet Apple Acres as sour as lime. “You told her what she wanted to hear. It’s the same as when we were in school together. You weren’t my friend because you liked me; I know I was an utter horror back then and you thought a connection with a prince would give you an edge. But that didn’t turn out so well, did it? Auntie Luna still isn’t settling in well to the modern world, and so she responds all too agreeably to ponies who tell her she’s already right and doesn’t need to change.”

“Now see here, you can’t talk about the Princess like that.”

“She’s my aunt.”

“Fine, but while you were malingering in Canterlot, I was busy-”

“I was flogged.”

Second Fiddle blinked. “Pardon?”

“I was flogged,” I repeated, “while retrieving the Royal Standard. It almost killed me, Second Fiddle, and perhaps you might like to see the scars? I might not have had to work to get where I am today, but I have had to fight and bleed for Equestria. Only one of us sitting here has experience in the field with the common soldiery, and it’s a shame you think my sharing that experience is undermining you. It’s not about you or your ego, it’s about winning this bloody war, and it’s high time you put your feelings of inadequacy aside and actually listen to the things I say.”

And there it was, that chink in his armour, needled expertly with the thin rapier blade of reason. He slumped, as though the aforementioned stick that had been rammed up hard had been extracted, and his body was finally allowed to collapse in a small heap on the chair. The glare, however, remained, as I could tell Second Fiddle was trying to come up with an adequate riposte. While he racked what little remained of his brain besides an absurd victim complex and poor fashion sense, I poured out a second glass of wine for him, the last in the bottle, and slid it on over.

“Look,” I said, returning his stare with what I hoped was a friendly, if drunken, smile, “you’re right, I don’t know what it’s like to work, that day I spent doing slave labour excepted, but why don’t you tell me? We have so much to catch up on.”

Second Fiddle looked at the glass, and I could tell that he was tempted, but damn him, he just wouldn’t. Instead, he thanked me for my time, and then got up and walked right out, leaving me sitting there alone, bewildered and rather embarrassed. So much for the Magic of Friendship then, thought I as I watched him slip through the tent flap.

History is replete with moments where the fate of our nation might have been forever altered had one pony who made a decision went one way instead of the other: if Princess Celestia had been just a little bit more attentive to Princess Luna’s whining; if the Crystal ponies had been a little bit more suspicious of a certain power-hungry stallion named Sombra; if the Duke of Baltimare said ‘why not build a model of the solar system?’ instead of approving his daughter’s parasprite breeding programme for the school science fair. Though not as dramatic as the previous examples, if Second Fiddle had stayed a little longer that night then perhaps we could have rekindled some small flame of genuine friendship, or at least I might have convinced him that this sort of foalish politicking was beneath the both of us.

Alone again, except for Slab, of course, I opened up the newspaper to the crossword, and there, in seventeen across, I wrote a four-letter word beginning with ‘F’ that accurately and concisely summed up my thoughts on the matter.