The grass crunched under young hooves. Big Macintosh wiped his brow and gazed at the white haze that was the morning sky. There were no clouds in sight, nor were there any pegasus ponies about.
“Of all the days they pick to have a strike,” he muttered.
Granny Smith used to tell stories about days when the sun seemed to burst with far more energy, like a fire that had found a new pile of timber. It wasn’t clear what did it. Some said Celestia did not always have control over it, but then some folk would say things like that, wouldn’t they? They failed to see the bigger picture, and what would it be if every year was the same? Big Macintosh asked himself questions like this as he stepped across the Sweet Apple Acres threshold.
Even with the Stetson hat drooping over his short, boyish muzzle, his neck was already slick with sweat. His horse collar slid and slipped over his matted mane, catching his straw locks in its splinters and making him itch uncomfortably. Yet even as his twiggy legs mechanically swung over the curve of the hill, there were sinewy bulges that rippled along the limbs.
“Don’t forget Winona!” shouted Granny Smith.
Frantic barking met his ears. Big Macintosh whisked his head round, and had barely lifted the brim of his hat off his face when a black-and-white blur came bounding across the yard to meet him. Beyond them, Big Macintosh saw the reassuring mountain that was Sweet Apple Acres’ barn, and Granny Smith peering out of the kitchen window.
“An’ make sure y’all are back before noon, y’hear? Or you won’t hear the end of it from me! This ain’t the season to be testin’ your mettle, y’know.” Granny Smith grunted as she shifted the bundle in her hooves from one foreleg to the other.
“Got it, Granny!” Big Mac said, trying to fend off the licks and jumps of Winona. “But what’s Winona for?”
“Well, Ma and Pa ain’t aroun’ to keep an eye on you, an’ Ah got mah hooves full with little AJ here.”
The bundle began to bawl.
“Now, settle down,” Granny murmured to the crying bundle. “Your big brother’ll be back soon, AJ.” To Big Mac, she said, “Now, Ah’m puttin’ a lot of faith in you, Big Macintosh. Young’un, you gotta make me happy it’s earned, you hear?”
Big Mac, who had finally pushed Winona off his face, saluted. “Got it, Granny! An’ don’t worry. Ah’ll get every last bit done before the end of the day! It’ll be like Ma an’ Pa were already back from Manehattan!”
Even from a distance, he could make out the approval in her sagging smile, and she shut the window.
Winona stirred dry leaves under her paws as she ran between the rows of trees. Big Mac tried not to notice as he set out the buckets under the dangling red apples, but as she began nudging and knocking them with her passing, he gritted his teeth.
“Winona,” he said.
Winona kept on bounding around. The sheer pleasure of being outside was one thing, but the sheer pleasure of being yelled at made her jump higher and bark louder.
It would’ve worked if Ma had done it, Big Mac thought. He sighed at the canopy.
“Winona!”
The border collie acknowledged this by trying to leap at his face.
“Not the hat!” he shouted. The Stetson settled among the leaves.
As though fearful it would vanish within seconds, Big Mac seized it between his teeth, and braced every muscle in his face against the blasts of doggy breath as Winona tried to lick his face.
“Winona!” He yelled – dropping the hat again – and stamped his hoof. “WINONA!”
Winona stopped barking, and simply stared at him.
Big Mac pushed her front paws off his chest – leaving tiny cuts as he did so – and picked up and dusted the Stetson with his hooves.
“Now lookee here,” he said, “this is Pa’s hat. Pa’s hat, see? He gave it to me, an’ he ain’t never done that before. That means Ah’m in charge of the farm, cos Pa and Ma ain’t here, an’ Granny Smith’s gotta look after AJ.”
Winona simply stared at him in canine puzzlement.
“That means you do what Ah say, cos Ah gotta bring in the apples like Ma and Pa do.” Big Mac paused to ram the hat over his ears. “So do what Ah say! Understand?”
Winona blinked at him. Then she began panting, and yipped as though a telling off from a pony was the utmost peak of nirvana.
Big Mac groaned. He wished his boyish voice was already gone. Pa with his big, booming baritone would’ve commanded the utmost respect for those words, and Pa and Ma had accents that reached back to the beginning of farming.
“Now,” he continued, “buckin’ time.”
The first column of bark stretched from roots to sky. Big Mac tried to straighten up as he aimed his first kick. Jus’ practisin’, he thought. Ah’m jus’ gonna practise firs’.
He was scrunched up behind his hooves, with his legs folded as tightly as possible, and the skin on his bones pinched between every bendable part of his body. Big Mac tried to balance on his two front hooves, and stumbled once or twice when his rear legs nearly swung up and over his rump.
Winona scampered across the bushes to his right, presumably to seek unadulterated bliss from chasing a blue jay’s shadow. Big Mac blushed deep red, even under his thick, crimson fur.
He struck with as much of his body as he could, but the joints rebounded and he felt himself fall flat onto his face. The tree twanged like a towering ruler. A few branches rustled overhead.
Ah heard something! He quickly got to his hooves. Ah heard somethin’ hit the bucket!
Big Mac almost tripped over his own hooves as he hurried over to the bucket. Opposite him, Winona burst through the bushes and raced him to the wooden rim.
“Ah did it!” he shouted. “Ah bucked mah firs’ apple tree! D’you see it, Winona? D’you see it? D’you see… it…”
His smile boiled away into the heat haze around him. Five apples sat, slightly shrivelled, at the bottom of the bucket, looking lost.
He glanced back up at the tree. Dozens of self-contented red eyes seemed to peer back at him, wondering what all the ghastly noise was about. The heat of their eyes on him, more than the heat of the sun, made his ears wilt and reach down to cover his eyes.
Winona glanced over to him, and barked for more. Big Mac sighed, and turned his back to the tree for a second buck. Another shudder went through his body. Another smattering of apples dropped into the bucket.
“OK,” he said, looking across. “Maybe third time’s lucky, like Granny says? Winona, no, put that down!”
She lifted her head out of the bucket, and drool oozed around the apple impaled between her canine teeth. Even now, her tail writhed in ecstasy.
“That ain’t a chew toy! Give me that!” Big Mac’s hooves were a blur, but Winona had already turned tail and ploughed through the bushes.
Big Mac felt the headache moving in already. Overhead, the sun beat down on him and squeezed and stretched his dank skin until he simply couldn’t gallop anymore.
He tripped and fell into a pile of leaves. The gambolling figure of Winona ran around him like a demented moon around a boiling planet, and Big Mac pushed the hat off his eyes again.
“Fine,” he gasped between breaths. “Fine. You... You can… keep… that one.”
Big Mac ambled back to buck the tree again. He felt as though he was looking at a gigantic pillar of rock. The leaves turned to crisps, and slices of white sunlight peered through the mass of dead greenery. Big Mac scratched his legs feverishly.
“Well,” he managed to say, “Granny Smith always said, them as don’t buck the trees don’t get any apple pie.”
This ain’t how it’s supposed to go, he thought, and he turned redder at his own childishness. He didn’t dare think what Granny Smith would think if she could see him now. Her own son’s son, and he could barely make a kick better than a unicorn’s. Grandpa would turn in his grave.
Tired, sweating, and while shaking off what was rapidly becoming a migraine, Big Mac turned around and braced himself for the next kick.
Further along the rows of browning apple trees, and darting from bush to bush, what looked like a bright yellow insect paused and hovered beneath a low-hanging braeburn.
Honeysuckle’s antennae twitched and caressed the fruit. The taste of the skin was of crumpled papyrus, and when she prodded the fruit with all six of her ballerina legs, the flesh collapsed and died. A tiny gnat zipped out of a hole in its side and buzzed at her in protest. Large, dragonfly-like wings buzzed back, and the gnat retreated to its hidey-hole.
The flutter pony sighed and zipped smartly over open ground. With nothing but the scent of rotting apple flesh all around her, she had to rely on getting close to the fruits for tests, and every time she shot across a clearing, her body shivered with the touch of phantom jaws closing in.
Fewer and fewer flutter ponies were getting back home as it was. Even now, some part of her mind kept moaning and whimpering, and wishing that the rest of her had just stayed quiet.
Let someone else go out, it had said, and was still saying. You kept quiet when Rosedust offered, and she never returned.
Honeysuckle’s wings flushed red with fury, and she tried to drown out the voice with a louder buzz.
Rosedust’s disappearance was still the talk of the family. Back in the paper nest, they’d still be whispering and chatting about it. Nothing consequential; just endless wonderings over what she might have met, and why her years of dealing with the outside world would fail her. It was as if Rosedust had merely given a disappointing performance at a game.
She’d joined in more than once, but even then she could sense them trying to avoid something. It was like talking endlessly about Rosedust would convince them it hadn’t been such a shock.
Honeysuckle landed on a twig, and stared at a suspiciously green leaf hanging nearby. This wouldn’t be the first time she’d found greenery staring back at her.
While her eyes and antennae strained for the slightest off detail – and as her hairy feelers skimmed through the air for anything other than the dead fruit smell – Honeysuckle’s mind dwelled on her sisters’ faces.
They had gathered around in the dark recesses of the nest beneath the paper house, where the paper gave way to soil that oozed underfoot. It was utterly dark, but as the long threads protruding from above their wide eyes entwined, she could feel the twisting of her sisters’ discomfort.
Go to Sweet Apple Acres.
Gall Sting had been the one to give the commands. She sat there, a squat, bulbous acorn of a flutter pony, silently letting her antennae drift over the squabbling and the buzzing of their sisters. Honeysuckle had not spoken, nor had she taken her eyes off Gall Sting, the eldest sister. Finally, the chitin creaked, the sisters fell silent, and the eldest sister had cleared her throat.
Go to Sweet Apple Acres.
Honeysuckle was now the one to rise in protest. Sweet Apple Acres was too far away. It would mean hours of flying across open country, with every chance of being snagged in a spider’s web or seized by a passing sparrow. Even one apple was too heavy for one flutter pony to carry. She’d be dead before she could lug it back.
Gall Sting had plaited her own antennae around Honeysuckle’s. It didn’t squeeze, but any attempt to back out would be met with firm resistance.
The sun is too hot. There’s not enough food out in the open anymore. Too many of us are dying, and not enough are bringing back food. Go to Sweet Apple Acres.
And that was it. Gall Sting had told her what her future was.
Satisfied that the leaf wasn’t about to sprout pincers and attack her, Honeysuckle rose and gave it a kick as she passed. Save for the chance of being first-born, Gall Sting would never have been the best fed, the first to food, or the one to act as a matriarch in their mother’s absence.
Honeysuckle wished their birth orders had been switched. She’d missed out by mere seconds.
To her surprise, she was feeling her wings sag. Normally, a gentle breeze would be enough to give her a bit of a push, but the air was dead. She gulped a bit more – the better to inflate and stretch her shrivelling wings – and perched between the gnarls of a trunk.
The woods simply boiled in silence. Honeysuckle tried to focus on the distant birdsong, but every ounce of focus was like shifting a clutter of knives around her skull. Her wings were too numb to feel anything, having been baked senseless by the heat haze.
“This is your fault, Rosedust,” she muttered to the spongy bark. “You just had to be the best, didn’t you? And I just happened to be next.”
Despite the venom in her spitting voice, Honeysuckle gave herself a smack around the face.
“Don’t you ever say that again,” she said.
We’ll get out of this, she thought. Every hive has its difficult times. All-Mother herself had to travel across the sea to reach here and escape the First Famine.
Something clicked.
Honeysuckle bristled and began frantically glancing about her.
All-Mother, she thought – her own mother had told her to think the words rather than speak them, for obvious reasons – I beseech you, worthless insect as I am. Let me join the Hive Of The Sky. Let my spirit swarm with my sisters and brothers.
A second click made her stop. That was the nice thing about flutter pony prayers; they were short.
Let me not get horribly mangled and chewed to a pulp, she added. This part wasn’t in the official version.
Honeysuckle waited. She was never sure whether keeping still or darting away was worse. There never seemed to be just one way to deal with the Things of the Bush.
What would Rosedust do?
By the time she felt the thoughts rush to get to her legs, a third click came right by her antenna. She darted off the trunk and pumped her wings as frantically as she could.
If this is it, then at least make it quick.
Soon, she stopped and spun around to check. The tree across the clearing hadn’t moved. Not a leaf stirred.
Honeysuckle banked sharply, and the fourth click deafened her.
Right beside her was a bulging red apple. Honeysuckle hovered warily some distance from it, trying to pick out anything odd, and first noticed the two twiggy feelers protruding from the red mass. A pair of goggling orbs faded into view, and she saw red move across red, a faint shadow marking its passage. The antennae glowed and what had been a red bulge was washed clean of its disguise by a wave of magic.
Honeysuckle landed hurriedly on a nearby leaf and flared her wings out. What looked at first like an angry emerald with grasshopper legs leaped from the apple, and crashed onto a bigger leaf nearby.
An applehopper.
Towering above her, its plated bulk squashing any chance of a future, the applehopper bristled. Its mouthparts scraped and clicked against each other with all the subtlety of a cutlery set. Its legs threatened to snap.
Honeysuckle’s wings flared and closed. The applehopper’s own armoured wing-covers stretched out, and for a moment Honeysuckle almost imagined a great pair of jaws ready to snap around her thorax with a crunch.
She flared and closed again, trying to drain her wings of anything other than pure white as she did so. Her eyes never left the applehopper’s own bulging ones. She could almost imagine the ghost of Rosedust staring at the back of her head, silently pursing her lips.
Honeysuckle felt a bead of sweat tickle the side of her face. Not now. Don’t fumble this. Don’t try to break away. It’ll snatch you out the air before you’ve made so much as an inch.
It signalled back, but the wings were noticeably slower in spreading out, and did not return to rest. Honeysuckle flared, and had barely returned her wings back to rest when she flared again. Surely, in that monster’s vapid and goofy stare, it could see what she was doing?
“Don’t…” she whispered quietly to her legs, which began quivering in panic. “Don’t…”
She closed her eyes, and hoped to Hive Heaven Rosedust wouldn’t be too harsh on her in the afterlife.
The joints in its grotesque and backward-facing limbs relaxed. A couple of dismissive waves of its front legs were followed by a small click of its mouthparts. Honeysuckle opened her eyes and recognized her cue.
Even with the blood-rush beginning to ebb in her whirring wings, she took off too fast, and could almost hear Rosedust tutting after her.
The flash of green and the thump of a body hitting the leaf behind her were just for show. She was already a vanishing dot further down the aisle.
Honeysuckle glanced around, and was already trying to forget that she’d even made a prayer.
“Darn you, Rosedust,” she breathed to thin air. “Why didn’t you get back?”
There was a scent of fresh apple in the air, as though some kitchen windows were wide open and pulped pomace was wafting its perfume all over the place. Honeysuckle’s ballerina legs stretched to embrace the leaf, and her landing made it quiver up and down in irritation. She pressed her thorax and abdomen onto the veins and, with twitching antennae, peered over the green rim.
She could hear a voice booming through the trunks of the trees. Even though it still made her ears throb, she could tell it was too high pitched to belong to an adult. A couple of barks met it, and she ducked out of sight as something gigantic crashed through the vegetation below her. There was some shouting, and then the crashing and the barking vanished as quickly as they had come.
Honeysuckle tried to keep herself from vomiting. Mouldy dog breath and the stench of sweaty hair stung her antennae, making them coil up and wilt. Dogs were worse than dead apples.
Up ahead came the grunts of a small pony, and the sound of hooves smacking wood. A thunder of apples was all she needed to guess which way to fly. With a spurt of her quivering wings, she darted across the gap and took refuge behind another leaf. Another thud of hooves hitting bark made her glance over her green shield.
The red pony braced his front hooves and lashed out with his back ones. The resulting strike knocked several apples off their stalks, but with his front legs braced too far forwards, the youth’s stiff limbs had gotten him stuck between the baked earth and the tree. Gingerly, he tried to remove his hooves from the trunk without falling onto his stomach. He reeked of sweaty fur – lighter in its stings than the dog’s had been – and had a faint whiff of something smothered in fermented apple juice.
“Weren’t there supposed to be two of them?” Honeysuckle whispered to herself. She almost saw Rosedust hiding next to her, clearing her throat to answer. Rosedust had always been the one to keep an eye focused on the farm. She’d known better than anyone else what there was to see, and hadn’t been modest in sharing the stream of news.
As the pony settled onto all fours, his hat slipped over his eyes, and he hastily pushed them up like a pair of glasses.
Look at him, she thought, and then gave a slightly guilty laugh. Big, clumsy beast. When you’ve seen one, you’ve seen the whole species…
Beasts were all the same to her. Oh, they could come in all colours and all shapes and all heights and weights and lengths, but they were all, once you’d glimpsed them, big, four-legged bulldozers. It was a wonder they survived, especially when she’d seen – on one memorable occasion involving Rosedust, Waxwing, and a picnic – the amount they had to shovel in just to stay standing. Pony, donkey, cow, and sheep: they were just name after name for different kinds of beast.
Honeysuckle glanced along the aisle, her eyes zipping from branch to branch. The scent of fresher flesh cooed after her, and she could make out the sheen of the bulging red blobs all around her. Either side of her, the slopes of two hills rose up, exposing their fruit to fiercer sunlight. To her surprise, she shivered. A tiny breeze snaked between the criss-crossing thatching that was the canopy, and it tickled her leg joints.
The pony on the ground sat down and stared at the soil, panting softly. His barrel of a chest heaved and quaked. He had an utterly defeated look about him, and even his glance at the piles of fruits in the wooden buckets beside him did little to ease his mood.
Despite the queue of insults gathering in her mind to pep her up, Honeysuckle couldn’t bring herself to mutter one. The red pony’s skin was crying under the sun. Big, clumsy, and hideously short of appendages and wings though he was, his face sagged with weariness like timber slowly collapsing in a heap, occasionally flickering with frowns and glares as though defiant that the spark would not go out.
A bird’s screech broke the silence.
Honeysuckle gave a quick look over at the harvested stock, but gave an equally quick dismissal of it and turned her attention to the many hiding places overhead. There were better prospects to be had without exposing herself to danger. In any case, many of the harvested apples stank like a chemical factory. It amazed her how the beasts could bear the stench, or if they even noticed it.
Spoiled for choice here, she thought. Good. Spoiled for choice means pick whatever the heck you want and go.
There were plenty of fruits around her. Buzzing loudly was not high on her list of priorities, so she simply spread her wings and let herself fall into a swooping glide.
She knew gliding was risky for a creature lighter than cotton, but with barely a breeze to ensnare her, she needed no further excuse.
Barking met her ears, and a bird whooshed past overhead, squawking with alarm. Honeysuckle closed her eyes and gritted her teeth.
All six legs met the bark, and she quickly folded her wings and scampered up the trunk.
When she guessed she was near the crown of boughs, Honeysuckle froze and opened her eyes. Had they noticed?
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the black and white blur rushing across the rows of trees towards the pony. To her surprise, the dog slowed down just underneath her.
Her blood went cold. Ponies might have atrocious noses, but dogs were a different matter. Every flutter pony knew they could sniff out even the fabled scentless silkworm. A half-starved flutter pony would be easy pickings.
Honeysuckle’s legs broke into a frantic sprint. It was hard to get six legs to cooperate, and more than once she had to flail with her wings when one or two of her tiny claws lost their grip. Honeysuckle felt the blood rush through her chitin and wings, making them actually pulse. All of her joints creaked as she scuttled over the bark and out on an arching limb. Once, she paused and almost checked to see if the joints really were being stung by needles, such was the pain.
The dog whined. Before Honeysuckle could turn around and check, leaves rustled and she heard a slower, lighter patter of paws.
“So you thought you’d run off, did you?” said a deep, booming voice. Honeysuckle’s whole body vibrated with it. “Some help you are, Winona.”
Near the top of the limb’s arch, she flexed her wings and made a running leap for one of the dangling apples. It quivered, and she almost lost two claws off its skin before she regained her grip.
It was a good apple. Each bit of flesh was springy but firm under her probing legs. A fruit this size could feed a good third of the nest. She wondered if this would be worth pointing out at the next summit of the sisters, but decided not to.
Or would she? Without Rosedust around to restrain her, Gall Sting could start getting above herself, and that was a bad thing to see in an "acting" queen. It was hard enough assuring everyone at the hive that the true one would return one day. Everyone just kept asking when.
Honeysuckle peered down at the pair, the pony and the dog. He – the voice left little doubt as to what gender it belonged to – was watching in silence as the dog whined further. Then the dog – Winona, she guessed – nuzzled his chest and curled up next to him. He didn’t resist. Indeed, after a while he idly began stroking Winona along the scalp with a hoof.
“Bet you’re tired from all that running around, huh, Winona?” he said. Even with her body twanging at each syllable, Honeysuckle could tell he was trying to be gentle.
She clambered over the fruit towards the stalk, and braced her legs tightly against the bulging flesh. Her lips were pressing against the thin thread of woody fibre that kept several pounds of ripe and juicy banquet near the column of rock-like wood, and the tree stood like a sentinel. With one eye on the pair below, Honeysuckle bared her teeth.
Winona whined again.
“Ah know, girl. Ah miss Ma and Pa too.”
There was a long pause. Both blades in Honeysuckle’s mouth slid across the stem and she gnawed back and forth. Once or twice, she adjusted her mouth's grip.
“They’d know what to do on the farm, wouldn’t they, Winona?” The pony sighed and rubbed his forehead. “They’re wastin’ their time in Manehattan, don’t you think? Aunt Orange went to Manehattan, an’ Ah ain’t never seen her since. Folks say it’s nice and s’phisticated there.”
They talk so often about so much. What’s Manehattan even supposed to be? Some kind of hive, or a beast queen? Honeysuckle had nearly cut through the entire stem, and had stopped to examine the thread. A few more cuts should do it.
“Granny Smith says they’re comin’ back.” There was a slight choke in his voice when he said this. “D’you think they’re comin’ back, Winona?”
Honeysuckle paused in the act of biting the stem. Still, she thought, it paid sometimes to notice what the beasts garbled on about. Rosedust would have said as much, if she’d come back.
The pony below began idly rubbing Winona behind the ears. She stood up and licked him on the chin, and then barked happily at a thought that had struck her canine mind.
“Ah know what you mean,” the pony said, rising to his hooves. He pushed his hat back, and peered at a distant red mountain that was the Sweet Apple Acres house. “If AJ were jus’ a bit older, then maybe it’d be OK. Ma and Pa and Granny Smith wouldn’t have to worry then. Why, Ah bet we’d have every tree on the farm harvested before sundown if us two were together, an’ she were older, Ah mean.”
The last thread was almost out. Honeysuckle groaned. If only Rosedust had been around, then taking this thing would’ve been easy. One of us would cut the stalk, and the other would carry it.
She glanced up through the canopy of leaves, and tried to see shapes in the endless haze. If only Rosedust had been around, I’d have some kind of clue how this is done. Heck, Rosedust could’ve done both jobs all by herself.
The first breeze of the day washed through the orchard, making the trees whisper and shiver over the pony and the dog, and over the flutter pony as nostalgia came back in a rush. There was the faintest music as though a player, on some distant hilltop, was blowing through a row of reeds, whistling both for grief and for the comfort that grief gave to a heart that felt it, and knew what it meant.
“Sure hope you’re hating it up there,” Honeysuckle said, and smiled as though at a private joke.
The pony bucked the apple tree next to hers. Honeysuckle shook herself down and seemed to see the bare thread of woody fibre before her for the first time. Gall Sting’s disapproving look bore into the back of her head and almost through Honeysuckle’s own eyes at the pathetic strip of bark.
She stretched her wings, took a few deep breaths, and paused. So... did you do it like this?
“Well, Winona,” said the pony. “Till then, Ah’ve gotta keep the business goin’. Imagine Granny Smith’s watchin' me now. Ah reckon she'd say that Ah gotta try mah best, like at school. You know, Miss Stapler at the school said Ah was a natural at numbers...”
Only one way to find out. Ignoring her own frantic breathing, Honeysuckle tensed her jaw until she thought it would lock into place, and then snapped at the stalk.
The apple fell clean out of her grip.
Honeysuckle swore and buzzed straight down, and at that instant she heard Winona yelping and howling at the sound.
All six claws latched onto the fruit, but she still plummeted helplessly in its wake. Before she could even hear the crashing bushes, she was thrown off, and her face smacked into the soil.
There was barking nearby. Everything seemed to rush in at her.
“What is it, Winona?” cried a voice some distance away. The words pounded in Honeysuckle's head.
Then she got back to her senses. Good thing I'm so tiny and feather-light, she thought dazedly. A fall like that would have barely fazed Rosedust. Thank goodness I lost a bit of weight last season.
“Winona, where’re you goin’? Wait for – What the hay’s that?”
The apple was right next to her. She could already feel tremors through the ground. Quickly, she leaped up and seized the fruit in all six legs just as the lights went out and she hit a wall of felt.
Honeysuckle dropped the apple and buzzed frantically in all directions, but wherever she went, the wall of felt had her completely covered.
“Darn wasps – stand back, Winona! You ain’t getting’ a thing!”
WhattheheckdoIdoWhattheheckdoIdo? Wings, legs, teeth, even battering the wall with her entire frame did nothing to shift it.
Part of the hat collapsed. Honeysuckle screamed as several square inches of impenetrable fabric lunged down and smothered almost all the space. She shot to one side, thanking Hive Heaven that the beasts were so slow.
“Ah got it, Winona. Ah got it!”
The mass eased off, and the hat oozed back into shape. Bits of apple juice and golden flesh smothered the underside. Honeysuckle wished she hadn’t looked at it.
“All-Mother, I beseech you…” she breathed, and then caught herself in time. “Darn!”
The barking continued. She got up and tried ramming the side of the hat as hard as her wings could force her. She thought she heard a slight, shocked whisper above her: “It talks?”
Gall Sting, Honeysuckle thought, managing to suppress a snarl as she did so. If I get out of this, then I swear by the All-Mother I’m going to challenge you to a Queen’s Duel, and I’m not going to play by Queen Filly’s Rules. I’m going to make a maggot’s nightmare out of what I’ll do to you! You think you can get away with sending me –
The barks stopped suddenly, but were replaced by a prolonged growl. Even Honeysuckle’s thoughts shut up at the sound. Her thorax – her easily impaled thorax – tingled with the imagined bite. She hovered over shadowed grass under shadowed felt. The beasts were still.
“You can hear me in there?” said the booming voice of the pony. It was as if the entirety of the little world within the hat had spoken.
She swallowed. There was no rule against contact with large beasts, as such. Seeking out a large, blundering animal was deemed its own punishment.
“Hello?” said the voice. “Ah heard you say somethin’ earlier. Ah could swear it – Winona! Stay!”
The growling, which had arched it back to pounce, lowered itself again.
Honeysuckle tried to think, but everything was black. Another stamp of the pony’s hoof could crush this little world with ease. The little world itself just threw a blank look at her. She could almost feel her heart ramming itself against her back like a trapped animal in a panic.
“What were you doin’? Stealin’ some apples?”
Has he got his hoof poised over the hat? Honeysuckle nearly clawed her own eyes out while the seconds closed in. Her heart, giving up on the back, made a dash for her windpipe, and forced the cowering and surprised word out of her mouth.
“Yes,” she said.
Winona stopped growling. No sound met her ears, but she could feel the silent heat of his fuming stare through the Stetson.
“You got no right,” he said suddenly, and the ground trembled as he spoke. “That’s Apple family stock.”
Honeysuckle landed on the soil. There was no point wasting energy on the wing.
“Sir?” she said. If Gall Sting could be kept at bay by the right language, this oaf could. “Mister Pony?”
“You can talk!” To her surprise, the pony sounded delighted. “Ah heard you clear as a brook. Now look, Ah don’t wanna hurt you or nothin’ –”
“What are you going to do?”
There was a long silence. Honeysuckle didn’t trust long silences; Gall Sting had been far too fond of them.
“Please, sir?” she added.
“That’s Big Macintosh to you,” said the foal, but his voice wasn’t harsh now. It was more like the tight squeeze of her antennae by a larger flutter pony, and she could almost hear him puff out his chest as he spoke. “Folks sometimes call me Big Mac. Ah’m in charge of the farm now. It’s a big responsibility.”
“Yes,” she said, as though reminding him as often as possible that she could talk.
“Now why were you stealing our food?” Big Mac said. Winona began growling again.
Honeysuckle tried not to look at the hat around her. “You’ve got lots of apples.”
“But we can’t jus’ give 'em away! We gotta sell 'em!” Big Mac’s voice drowned out Winona’s growling, and made it stop altogether. “We barely got enough as it is. Granny Smith says the pegasus ponies were gettin’ fed up of somethin’ an’ went on a strike, an’ there’s no rain or clouds, an’ we got ourselves one of them hot seasons like the ones Granny had when she was a foal. We’ve lost the south field as it is, an’ what if we don’t have enough to live on when harvest's over? Granny Smith says Ah gotta look after the farm, an’ Pa gave me his hat, an’ Ah gotta look after the family most of all, an’ don’t you care about any of that?”
Honeysuckle wished her stomach would rumble, or that her hunger would just reach over to him and strangle his juvenile brain. Make him really feel it. How could she convey, to a complete stranger, what it was like to see dozens of emaciated faces every day, all over the shrivelling ball she called a paper nest, and knowing she was one of them? Was there anything that would make him understand?
“Well?” Big Mac asked loudly.
“What do you think I want?” she said just as loudly and even more fiercely. "I'm starving! You can’t be this slow, even for a beast."
She thought she heard the wipe of fur against fur, and the sound of someone breathing into their sleeve. Winona yipped, and there was a question mark at the end of it.
Oh All-Mother and All-Father to Hive Heaven! Did I just say… Oh Hive Heaven, tell me I did not just…
“Ah, uh, beg pardon, ma’am.”
It might have been a new pony speaking. Given how harried and tremulous the voice was, she almost fancied she’d spoken them herself.
Oh sweet summertime, I’m going up there now. Rosedust, you know I’d never be so stupid! You knew the beasts better than anyone else! You know I’d never be so stupid… so…
To her surprise, the hat rose and a blast of light hit her in the eyes.
When they cleared, she could see the pulsating and wet nose of the dog swelling to fill her eyes. Two angry beetles blinked and stared at her from a mass of dark fur beyond the nose, and its wilting breath washed over her like a heat haze. She turned and faced the pony instead.
Four columns of red fur loomed over her, one of the columns moving across to rest a hoof on the dog’s shoulder. His neck seemed to be decorated with a block of wood that he’d probably torn straight from a trunk and punched a hole through, and up from the centre towered a massive neck. What looked like straw hung low over his foalish face, and two brilliant eyes glared at her with all the intensity of two apples made of marble. Only the Stetson hat looked too childish to take seriously, hanging limply from an ear like a dead fish on a god’s statue.
Honeysuckle wanted to crawl into the dirt and die as she turned to face him. She opened her mouth to speak, and felt the words turn tail and flee down her throat.
“Now listen, Ah’ll let you go this one time,” he said brusquely, “but if Ah ever see you or anythin’ like you on this farm again, Ah ain’t gonna go so easy. Ah gotta look after mah family. You understand, right?”
She dared herself to look up.
“What about mine?” she whispered.
For a moment, Big Mac looked surprised. “Ah’m sorry, ma'am. What was that you said?”
“I gotta feed my kin, too,” she said.
The expression on his face was hard to describe, but it was the most penetrating and complicated look she'd ever seen on anything bigger than Gall Sting. It struck her that behind that oversized face was a gigantic brain, and that somewhere behind the sweaty fur and the red bluster, it was taking notes, mulling things over, and watching the world with intelligent eyes. Bizarrely, she could almost feel his big, booming heart beating at the air around her.
Honeysuckle felt the last of her spirit die away. She shook her head and spread her wings. Winona made a start as though to leap, but Big Mac pressed his hoof harder on her, and the flutter pony darted out of sight just as Winona managed to break free and scamper along the aisles in noisy and enthusiastic pursuit.
Big Mac waited for the barking to die away before he let out a sigh he’d been holding in for a while. He stared up at the sun overhead, and then flinched and shielded his eyes.