Hurricane rested the silver shilling in the cleft of her forehoof and looked up towards the sky. It was darkening to evening, thin clouds shrouding the dusk vastness and drifting on aimlessly in the high, cold winds, and her day’s recruiting hadn’t netted a single new pegasus for her warflock. “Light another candle, serjant,” she muttered.
Serjant Westerly rubbed at her rheumy eyes, coughed, and turned to Hurricane. “If I may, mhm, say so, Commander—”
“Another candle, serjant. That’s an order.”
The old serjant didn’t pass comment or pointedly sigh or any of the other number of things Hurricane half-anticipated. Instead, she said, “By your order, mhm, Commander,” and rooted around in some saddle-bags by her hooves under the table. Hurricane watched the existing stub of candle’s flame flicker in the wind, and felt a certain sympathy for the wax.
They’d come down from the high camp that morning and tethered a small cloud to Fledgling Hill. The hill was a crossroads, nestled amidst snarled, saw-toothed lines of mountains and river-valleys, arising where the borders of five different pegasi tribes met. There was no mistaking it; Hurricane had hung the warflock’s banners from it and had sent her other serjants and bannerets out to any nearby cloud settlements and mountainholds of note to spread the word. She’d seen the cloud done up properly, its top made level and a table and stools and a bag of silver shillings laid out in readiness. And when the first passing pegasi and flocks had been seen in the light of dawn, she’d settled down next to Serjant Westerly and hoped.
That had been that morning. And now it was evening, and the bag of shillings was still full.
Westerly plucked a fresh candle out of her saddlebags and planted it on the rough wooden table in a trembling jaw. She teased out its wick and touched it to the existing flame, and fresh light spilled across the cloud. Hurricane shifted in her stool, her fitted barding rustling faintly, and scanned the horizon.
Before long, the first of the wax began to dribble down the new candle’s sides.
“Mhm,” started Westerly, in that half-wheeze, half-cough which had been her signature for as long as Hurricane could remember—since she herself had joined the warflock as a mere private a decade ago. “If you’ll pardon candour, Commander, I would not be too discouraged. There’ll be, mhm, other tribes on our route. Other pegasi. Strength’ll come to us. A few reminders about the threats beyond and within our lands, and they’ll come.”
“Will they?” ground out Hurricane. “When?”
“Hard to, mhm, say. But it has been a hard recent while for this corner of the land, perhaps. The winters are getting colder. The mud-botherers are still recalcitrant. There was the incursion north by several corvid clans a few years back. Perhaps there are not, mhm, the numbers here that there once were.”
“Hardly reassuring for us, if so,” said Hurricane.
There was a long, wretched pause which the wind’s whistling merely accentuated, and then Westerly said, “If numbers aren’t forthcoming, Commander, there is always the option of, mhm, more forcible recruitment—”
“Only weak Commanders ever need to conscript. The weak or the desperate.” Hurricane furiously spun the shilling on the wooden table before her, making it a tightly-whirling sphere of metal in which the candleflame danced. “If you’re strong, pegasi’ll come to you. Why aren’t they coming?”
“With respect, Commander...” Westerly trailed off.
Hurricane eyed her. “No, no, out with it. With respect…?”
Westerly sighed. “With respect, you are still new, Commander. Perhaps, mhm, once you’ve proven your mettle as a successor to old Gale, sky carry his soul gently, they’ll—”
“Prove myself,” Hurricane muttered. She ground the coin’s edge into the table’s surface. “Prove myself with a warflock still half-empty from Gale’s battles and staffed by soldiers with too few teeth to be called long in the tooth. Safeguard the tribes, cow the chiefs, keep the peace, keep the corvids and Empire alike at bay, and keep the mud-botherers’ grain flowing skywards. With nopony else standing up to do their part. Skyfire, what a mess. Something’ll certainly be proved.” Silence descended for a moment before she spoke again. “Apologies, serjant. You shouldn’t have to see me in this mood.”
“No Commander’s lot was ever easy, Commander,” Westerly replied, apparently unruffled. “We recruit the best. And the best will come to you. Just, mhm, show them something they know they can rally behind. Then, maybe...”
She trailed off again. The candle flame flickered, and as it moved another increment down the candle’s height, the dark shapes of the clouds were steadily swallowed up by the blackness of the sky.
“Something to rally behind,” Hurricane repeated to herself. She sighed, let out a weary laugh, and made to rise from her stool. “Let’s call it a day, serjant. Snuff out the candle. I’ll move the flock on at dawn tomorrow. With any luck, maybe some idiot thing’ll offer itself up for proving purposes before the next stop on our circuit.”
“Wait, Commander.” Westerly’s voice tightened. “I see … or, well, with these eyes I think I see somepony coming.”
Hurricane looked up sharply and squinted, before surprise filled her head like a lightning bolt taken in through the ear. Sure enough, by some miracle, a shape came flapping towards their cloud from out of the dusk. They were roughly pegasus-sized, became roughly pegasus-shaped as they drew closer, and alighted on the edge of the cloud in the way any pegasus could. It wasn’t a smooth alighting, though, as if the flier had managed to stumble on thin air. They hung back, shrouded in shadow, and seemed to jitter with nerves.
“Ah! Come forward!” called Westerly while Hurricane frowned. “Here to enlist in the Commander’s warflock? Step forward! Let us get a proper look at y… oh. Oh dear.”
The new figure trepidly trotted into the circle of light cast by the candle, and Hurricane beheld a slight, dishevelled, and trembling pegasus mare. Her mane was dirty and tangled, her frame looked like a bundle of sticks held only loosely together with matted hide, and it took a long moment before she dared lift her head to make eye contact with Hurricane and Westerly. Undiluted nervousness shone out at Hurricane. “Er,” she said. “Er. I’m here to… to… to enlist.”
“Oh dear indeed,” said Westerly, shaking her head. Her rheumy eyes glittered under the brow of her helm. “And who might you, mhm, be, seeking enlistment into the Commander’s own warflock?”
“P—Pansy, ma’am. Serjant.” Pansy’s eyes flicked between Westerly and Hurricane, and she seemed undecided on whether to breathe or not.
“Pansy? Sounds like a mud-botherer’s name.” Westerly glanced at Pansy’s wings and the bedraggled feathers covering them, and Pansy cringed back as if trying to hide them. Every line of her expression spoke of deep regret. “Your age?”
“Sixteen summers, s—serjant.” Her trembling legs were long and coltish compared to her frame, and her soft voice’s pitch wobbled this way and that. Hurricane regarded her with some amazement.
“Sixteen summers,” Westerly repeated flatly. “Mhm. I have my doubts. Regardless. Your build doesn’t inspire confidence, whether for past experience or as raw material… but any skill at arms? Hoof-fighting? Storm-crafting? Archery?”
Pansy mumbled something inaudible.
“Speak up!”
“...foraging.”
“Foraging.” Westerly was clearly in a repetitious mood. “When the warflock needs to forage to excess on campaign, mhm, we call upon nearby tribal pegasi for that purpose. To my knowledge, we have not put out such a call.”
Pansy looked even more wretched, which took some doing. “...I could learn to fight.”
“Meaning your tribe hasn’t already taught you? Or you haven’t bothered to learn, mhm? The warflock’s not a cradle, it doesn’t coddle, and it only accepts the best a tribe puts forward. Call yourself the best of your tribe? What even is your tribe? Where are you from?”
Pansy didn’t answer, instead opting to shrink in on herself and stare at the ground directly between her forehooves, and Westerly shook her head. “Beg pardon, Commander, shouldn’t have delayed us and got our hopes up for this one. Shall we, mhm, go?”
“Serjant,” Hurricane hissed as the old mare began to rise. “A word.”
“Yes, Commander?” On the other side of the table, Pansy seemed to be paying them no heed, instead looking as if something had been broken inside her.
“Serjant, I trust your skill for recruitment and assessment. But we are low on numbers. If we can take her on and whip her into shape, that’d be best for us.”
Westerly’s practised expression of serjantly dispassion slipped into a frown. “The warflock takes on strength, Commander. We can take something unhoned and give it skill, certainly, or slap muscles onto somepony with the spirit to do ‘em justice. But if we tried to whip this one into shape, Commander, all we’d do, mhm, is run out of whips. We move fast and strike hard at whatever needs striking, we can’t carry useless weight. We can’t be seen to carry it either.” Dispassion re-asserted itself. “But it’s your decision, of course, Commander. Just, mhm, contributing my own best judgement on the matter.”
Hurricane was silent for a moment, and turned to where Pansy stood. Still stood.
Memories of her own first encounter with Westerly came back to her, where the mare, one of nature’s born serjants, had reduced her and the other would-be recruits to cringing wrecks before laying down her ultimatum. Joining Commander Gale’s warflock was an honour, she’d said, and if they were accepted, they’d be expected to sweat blood proving themselves worthy. It had left the decade-younger Hurricane torn between the blazing desire to undertake said proving and to flee in bowel-loosening terror.
They’d all got older since then. But here another pegasus was, still standing. “Serjant, head back to the main camp. I’ll be a while yet,” said Hurricane. “Make sure the word’s spread to the bannerets that we break camp at first light. It’ll be a long flight tomorrow.”
Westerly gave her an opaque look, and nodded. “By your, mhm, order, Commander,” she said, and flapped stiffly upwards, her barding clattering against her thin frame.
Hurricane watched her rise up and fly into the dusk, to where the great shape of the camp-cloud loomed, and where the rest of her warflock would be waiting. Eventually, the old serjant vanished from sight, and Hurricane turned to Pansy. The nervous pegasus looked up at her, her ears angled down and eyes wide and wary. “C—Commander?” she ventured.
Hurricane still wasn’t used to being on the receiving end of the title, and she toyed with the shilling. “It’s been a few years since I was a serjant myself, so make allowances if I cack any bit of this up,” she said dryly. “Let’s start again my way. Your name, pegasus?”
“I… um, Pansy, Commander.”
“And your age?”
“Oh. Um. Sixteen summers—”
“No,” Hurricane said sharply. “Your real age.”
A long and echoing pause there, in the light of the flame. Pansy’s gaze drooped again. “Fourteen, Commander,” she admitted. “I’m sorry.”
Hurricane sighed. “The warflock’s policy isn’t to take on a recruit younger than sixteen. Not till they’ve grown something of their full muscle and vigour. But you wouldn’t be the first pegasus to try and lie their way into the warflock. What I don’t understand is why you’re trying to lie your way in.”
“I—”
“The recruits that seek out the warflock don’t usually look like you,” Hurricane said. “What the warflock gets—and I speak from experience here—is every bold young meathead from a tribe. Every ambitious young pegasus with a knack for scrapping or archery who chafes up against what their tribe’ll let them do, who thinks they’ve got what it takes to be one of the best, and who needs glory like other ponies need water. As time goes by, what the warflock’s left with is those meatheads who either started off with a scrap of sense or who cultivated some very quickly. If I saw you out in the skies somewhere, I wouldn’t take you for the type who’d so much as look sideways at the warflock, let alone try to lie your way in. So enlighten me. Why?”
Pansy took a deep, steadying breath. “I… I want to help, Commander.”
“Help how? Were you hiding martial talents from my serjant as well?” Hurricane eyed Pansy. “She wasn’t lying about how we need fighters. Surely your tribe must’ve seen to it that you could at least throw a decent kick.”
Pansy didn’t speak then, and when her voice finally re-emerged, it was hoarse. “Never had the chance. Lost anypony who might have been willing to teach me. And… and when the winter hit a couple of years back...”
Hurricane let the ellipsis hang there for a moment, waiting for elaboration. “When the winter hit, then what?” she said, more gently than was her wont.
“Chief said—” Pansy swallowed. “Chief said the tribe couldn’t afford useless mouths. So he ordered me out. Said I could fend for myself or… or leech off some other daft tribe, if they had any reason to want a pegasus who was shy of the sight of blood.”
Chilliness had insinuated its way into Hurricane’s own blood. “What? That’s still a thing pegasi do? What tribe was this? What chieftain?”
“I...” Pansy hesitated, but Hurricane’s eyes bored into her. “Chief Vortice. Of the Pine March tribe. Some… some of the others sneaked me food until I learned to find it for myself out in the woods. But please, that’s not —”
“I am going to have words with good Chief Vortice,” growled Hurricane, the frost within her giving way to a blaze. “We guard our own!”
“Please! No!” Pansy gabbled suddenly. “I know you guard the tribes, Commander! And I know you might be angry, but… but it was after the corvid incursion! The lands were burned, most of our strong pegasi were dead, the earth ponies and unicorns had fallen back, and… I saw you. That’s why I want to join. I saw you. All of you.”
Hurricane paused. “Explain.”
“I saw the warflock come between the mountains, even from where I was hiding,” said Pansy. “Saw you fall on the corvid outfliers like a hammer-blow and save the old and foals of the tribe. Saw you cordon off the whole of the area, and the old Commander fly south to clash with the corvid chieftain in person. And when you were done and you’d buried your dead, you flew off. Flew off, without demanding tribute or payment. Only taking those pegasi from the tribe brave enough to follow you. And I wasn’t old enough—brave enough—to follow you then. And when the chief threw me out when there wasn’t enough food to go around… I thought I could learn to be.”
Hurricane was quiet then as she hunted about for something to see. She remembered that flight south, that battle. She’d have just made banneret then, and she’d done more than her fair share of the burying afterwards. “And do you think you’ve learned?” she said, damming the stream of memory.
“A peddler once told me some stories in exchange for some nuts I’d found,” Pansy said. “In one of the stories, he said that bravery’s what happens when a pony does something despite being scared out of their wits.”
“Oh?”
“So, um, by that measure, I think I could be the bravest pony there ever was.”
Despite herself, Hurricane let out a brief laugh. Pansy looked relieved, and the look of something akin to happiness on her face made Hurricane in turn feel as good as she’d felt all of this wretched day. “Useful talent, that,” she said. “But the martial skills are still something of a sticking point. We wouldn’t be a good warflock if our soldiers couldn’t pull their weight.”
“I’ll do anything,” Pansy said desperately. “I’ll learn to kick and loose shot and storm-craft from dawn till dusk, and I’ll spend dusk till dawn doing everything else that can help. I’ll … I’ll dig every latrine, and cook every meal, and fletch every arrow, and… and anything! So long as I can help other ponies. The way you helped me. The way you helped my tribe. And if I’m no help at all, just leave me behind. I know how to cope with that. So long as I know I’ve tried my best for others.”
And for the longest moment afterwards, there was nothing but the whisper of the wind, high above.
Look at you, thought Hurricane to herself as she regarded Pansy. Featherweight even in barding, if I’m any judge. Shy of the sight of blood, you said. Barely a pegasus at all, if you asked the traditionalists. But if I could take that impulse of yours and give it to a hundred more callous pegasi… if I could give it to me…
Look at you. Plenty of pegasi reckoning you won’t amount to much. Plenty of pegasi expecting nothing but a cack-up atop past cack-ups as the winters grow ever-crueller.
Lots of expectations going about these days. Let’s prove them all wrong.
“You said ‘ponies’ there,” Hurricane said, in tones she felt a second later had been a shade too affected. “Not ‘pegasi’.”
“There’s innocent earth ponies and unicorns out there,” muttered Pansy, in the same trepid tones one might use when voicing treason aloud for the first time. She looked up at Hurricane. “I don’t like the thought of them hurting either.”
Hurricane nodded thoughtfully. It was a dangerous sort of statement, especially when the mud-botherers were being as recalcitrant with their dwindling crops as they were. But a pony who could give voice to a dangerous statement, right to the face of the most theoretically-dangerous pony of them all, was a pony worth keeping an eye on.
“Lots of older ponies in the warflock,” Hurricane allowed. She rested her forehoof over the shilling. “I inherited my current aide from old Commander Gale, and she’s white-maned and growing whiter-maned by the day. I could use a new one once she retires.”
Hope flared up in Pansy’s eyes. “You mean…?”
“I mean that I could do with a pony who could do every tedious chore I can’t be bothered with or would be too busy to do myself. I’ll need a pony to help keep me fresh and to run my errands, and to be my voice as far as message-carrying is concerned. And I’ll especially need a pony who’ll work exactly as hard as, if not more than, what she’s promised. Who’ll carry her own weight, and carry the weight of others when they slip up.”
“You’ve got her!” Pansy jumped up, before she collected herself. “I mean, um, I’d do my very best to be that pony, Commander, if you’ll have me.”
“Now, if said pony happened to have seen fourteen summers, frontline peril would just sort of miraculously elude her for two years. That probably wouldn’t make her any friends when she’s away from her Commander, so she’d have to be prepared to fight like something spawned from the Abyss when the time finally came. She’d have to be everything hoped for. Exactly what every pegasus needs. Am I understood? And she’d probably get nothing but a short life of toil and hardship and petty humiliation, followed up by a painful death, followed in turn by nopony remembering her name. Only what she did. Only the knowledge that whoever she’d saved, in one way, would be saved thanks to her. Is that an enticing proposition?”
The candle flared. And Pansy gathered her breath. “Yes, Commander. Yes, absolutely, with all my heart, yes.”
“Then, Pansy, you’re exactly the sort of madpony the warflock needs.”
And with that, Hurricane slid over the shilling. Pansy picked it up in one trembling hoof and stared into her reflection, meeting her own shining eyes.
“Call it an apology in advance for all the indignity the next while’ll hold. If you’re good and we can find the silver, they might even come your way regularly,” said Hurricane. “Now come on, Private Pansy. There’s some one-size-fits-none barding with your name on it, and a lot of menial toil that isn’t going to do itself.”
