It is not down on any map; true places never are.
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The War on Hearth's Warming
It is not down on any map; true places never are.
“You really think the pirate wench got her nethers ‘round here, Captain?”
I broke away from the barren icescape dotting the Northern Sea and caught my second-in-command standing at attention, a hoof away from the galleon’s wheel. No matter how tense her body language, Brine couldn’t hide the shivers running down her legs.
“You’ve read Princess Twilight’s royal order,” I said, folding my spyglass into my rudded coat. I rubbed my muzzle through the scarf draped over it and cleared my throat. “Just like I did.”
Brine rolled her eyes, gave me a tired smile, and broke into a sigh. “Griffin whalers saw that dang ship sailing them forsaken shores,” she said with the monotony forged in so many similar and fruitless debates. “I’ve read that letter ya know, more than you did I’m sure.”
“I usually remember what I read on the second pass,” I replied with a cocky smirk.
“I get it.” She threw her hoof in the air and laughed lowly. Her acerbic chuckle hit my chest like a brick. “For Princess and Country, we gotta freeze to death up here, right?”
I glanced at my hooves, not looking for the last word anymore. I breathed slowly, shuffling my thoughts in order while I worked my jaw into a difficult smile. My lips opened, but no words escaped them. It was my turn to sigh and so, I just waved my hoof at her. She was still saluting.
“Come on,” I muttered. “We’re thousands of miles away from Equestria. Stop making a fool mare out of me with the overblown protocol.”
Was I lording over her, waving my captain privilege around to get my way? A bit. But I had to. For… Twilight. I closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. Princess Twilight counted on me. And after twenty years of long and loyal service, I couldn’t fail.
My teeth were grinding against each other again. I looked up and, with what I hoped were my pleading-est of eyes, I watched the tension in Brine’s shoulders recede. A smile lit her face.
In three long strides, she was by my side.
“I’m sorry for being, uhm, mean?” I said, rubbing my sore shoulder under the cape thrown over it.
Her pointed look worn high and proud, she set her hooves on the deck’s railing from where I’d been scouring the navy blue and white landscape stretching past the ship for eternity. Sea and ice, wherever eyes could see, wherever the fog wasn’t eating away at the world.
She drew closer. Her light tart fur, cold as ice, brushed against mine and my coat stood on end. A sly sea lion, she was.
“Ain’t not much of a shore in them terra incognita, I’m ‘fraid.” She sifted the biting chill through her pursed lips. “I can just guess what a pirate’d do round here. Surely, this ain’t no place for a hideout.” She gave me her best over-the-glasses look, not that her piercing orange eyes ever needed any. “And no place for us either.”
“Terrae Incognitae,” I noted, giving her my broadest yet still hesitant smirk.
“You hang out too much with the purple Princess,” she remarked, one eyebrow rising, lifting with itself a bit of the darkness still hanging over her face. “But I guess you got to lower yourself at doing grammar jabs ‘cause you know this is all but a lost cause.” She pushed her hoof against my chest. “I know when I’m right.”
I waved my hoof at her as if to swat her assertion like a fly.
“You have a theory?” I asked, diverting the topic as gracefully as I could. A short silence followed, spent listening to the wind’s moaning through the cracks in the boat’s wooden deck. “I mean, why would the pirate come here?”
“You got soft,” Brine said as she huddled further against me. Her elbows pressed against the rail, she drew circles with her hoof—dismissively, I had to note. After a moment, she gave me an askance look. “I’m but a humble seafarer. Requisitioned with her ship to go comb some buttcheek-chattering cold lands… I’m not even privy to them secrets involved in your mission. I’ve seen my royal letter, but yours…” She flicked her hoof, ”was longer than mine.”
We fixed each other's eyes; I was the first to break away. Getting mellower, wasn’t I?
“So, Captain Fizzlebop Perrytwist...” she continued and I bit my lips close. I barely gave her more than a squinted look, “I think I’ll leave the whole theorizing to you.” I rubbed my cheeks, the skin sagging with fatigue at the tip of my hoof. I didn't know what to say. “You know I can’t see your face behind that scarf of yours,” she taunted. “Are you smiling? I sure hope so.”
She was the death of me.
“I prefer Tempest,” I said, grinning, “Helmsmare.”
Her seamare’s accent fading, her voice took on the caricature of a Canterlot courtesans’ accent. That damn accent that I’d grown to hate, “I am quite sincerely sorry, Capitaine, but protocol insists that I call you by your proper title.”
“I should really stop telling you how much I hate castle life,” I said, shoulders drooping. I studied the state of the ship instead of her smug, young, pretty face. “I’m just giving you ammunition to annoy me.”
“Oh, come on, Fizzy. We need to shoot the breeze if we’re going to waste it this dang far north.”
I sighed and shook my head. That was the only thing left to me.
The wind picked up and slammed into the sails strung on the mizzenmast above our heads. The frost-layered fabric whipped and snapped, and sharp icy sheets rained down upon us.
Discomfort didn’t belong on Brine’s pretty face. I pressed myself against her and draped my cape over her frozen shoulders. As she lay against me, the wind swept across the galleon's weather deck and whistled against the two rows of blanched thirty-six pounder guns that equipped it.
Alone together. The crew had kept to the lower quarters, shut away next to fiery braseros to enjoy the filth and heat of our three-month long voyage.
“Shooting that cold breeze, right?” I repeated, shuffling my hoof under the cape to hug Brine’s cold shoulders. “You should go down and fetch a blanket.”
“Patronizing, much?”
I’d dodged sharper daggers than the ones her eyes glared.
“For an Apple to spend time so far off the charted maps,” I said, giving her my best uneasy smile, “away from home and family… It must be hard. Just don’t make it harder on yourself.”
She wrestled herself out from under my cape. I still towered her as she tried to bolster her proud stature on her four sturdy legs, our muzzles nearly touching.
“Don’t you dare take me for a damn sea apple, Tempest,” Apple Brine said, punching my chest lightly. Her breath flitted through her chattering teeth in a cloud of steam. “I may be related to cousin Applejack but I’m no barn-dweller. I’m a sailor. I got no need for your sympathy.”
“And you’re just as stubborn too,” I retorted.
She huffed back, looking away to spitefully rob me of her orange eyes and tears the wind had wrestled out of her. I put my hoof on her muzzle, cutting off one of her complaints.
“That’s an order,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong. I just… I just don’t want to bring a box back to Equestria.”
Brine held my hoof in hers and forced it down to the floorboard. Her chest swole with a single long-winded breath. "Yes, Cap,” she growled.
And so she left, walking down the nearby stairs to the gun deck. As she was about to reach the staircase to the lower parts, she stopped by the closest artillery piece and scratched the frosted-over metal. A few icicles under its body came tumbling and shattered at her hooves.
“Brine,” I called, pushing myself up with my two hooves on the railing. The mare turned and looked up at me with a difficult smile. “Don’t worry about it, just ask somepony to come up and scrape the cannons. Get some food too.”
“But–”
”You shouldn’t spend Hearth’s Warming Eve on an empty stomach. We may be rationing, but that doesn’t mean our navigator should starve.”
Brine mimed tipping an absent hat and disappeared into the ship’s bowels.
I rubbed my hoof against the railing and scraped off the frost like it was blistered, dead skin: the biting mark of the brutal southern sun. Up at this latitude, I yearned for its cruelty. But up in the sky, it seemed so small and distant, hidden in the evening’s white haze. The green meadows of Equestria were so far away, and I was alone.
As the bitter wind strengthened, I tightened my scarf and wrapped my cape around my hinds. I hated it, that wind the northern griffons called the “Windigo’s Kiss.” But without its embrace, the ship’d have ground to a halt. Between certain death locked in the creeping ice and the wind’s biting chill, the choice had been quick to make. With everypony huddled underdeck, unable or unwilling to man their positions, the ship was left to the wind’s mercy. Brine and I would only tip the galleon’s wheel whenever an iceberg stalked out of the fog.
Days had become harder to navigate, nights growing ever longer and more treacherous. The heavens allowed us barely two hours of sun this high in latitude, this late into the year.
“That pirate has to be nearby,” I muttered to myself.
I hadn’t dragged everypony to this place for nothing. I couldn’t bear returning to Canterlot empty-hoofed. Still, scurvy would soon settle in and mark the end of this treasure cruise. I couldn’t bear writing sorry letters to any filly or foal. I had to end this search soon.
We had a duty: to chase a stolen galleon and its captain and report our findings. We couldn’t leave such a troublemaker to accrue power and terrorize the Equestrian coasts. She’d already caused too many losses to the Crown.
I rubbed the ice off my mane, bringing to view my greying mane. The fuschia pink had faded with age and so I closed my eyes. Against my better judgment, I prodded the wrinkles marking their contours, and merely sighed.
“Still blaming yourself for not bringing enough mane dye?” Brine said, startling me. I hadn’t heard her walk back up the stairs.
Only her orange eyes glimmered in the slit between the many scarves wrapped around her head. She’d hidden herself behind one large coat.
“I… Yeah,” I stuttered.
I looked away at the many coils of ropes strewn across the deck and anchored to the boat at regular intervals. We were two hours deep into the day and we’d soon have to anchor ourselves to an iceberg. Their massive underwater bodies naturally repelled each other and offered us a modicum of security. But not always… Icebergs could tip and roll anytime. It was just another trade-off the north had thrown at us.
This was no place for a risk-averse mare.
“You still with me, Tagada Strawberry?” Brine called out.
I threw her a glare. “I don’t like being reminded that I’m old, okay,” I said without an ounce of bemusement. I shook my head, angry at my outburst, and went on to rub my mangled horn instead. “Broken and old.”
“A truly stale candy for sure,” she said, rolling her eyes. She set her hoof against my muzzle’s side and drove me to look at her. “Now, now, I ain’t the first one to tell you that, for sure, but you’re still taller than most earth ponies and you’re as strong as an ox. So stop whining, ‘cause you won some birth lottery and yet couldn’t be immortal like your pink princess.”
“Twilight’s purple.”
“How would I know?” She laughed. “The only damned things we see from her are letters, orders, and missives… and other whatnots when some young punk rolls into town and onto my boat for some adventures’ sake.”
“Like me?” I couldn’t muster to even raise an eyebrow.
“Well… young-ish punks, sometimes,” she said with a wave of her hoof and a smirk. As I didn’t answer, she scraped the ice that had set on her scarf where she’d been breathing through. “Still, you should be content with what you have. Some will live through their time without having done a smidge of what you achieved by working for the princess in her high castle.”
“I know. I know.” I growled. “I just like to commiserate.”
“Sure do. That’s what makes you old,” she said, and I glared at her again. She set her hoof defensively on her chest and I could picture the wide smirk crawling behind her scarf. “Only old ponies waste their time being guilty over lost time. Big emotional maelstrom shenanigans, you know.”
“You’re a sour apple,” I grumbled, lightly punching her in her now well-padded shoulder.
She cackled and circled around me, forcing me to pivotto keep up with her eyes.
“Sour is just another flavoring agent.” She rubbed her neck and stepped forward.
I took a step back but my rump hit the railing and I was trapped. I retreated upward, extending myself as far as my legs could. But to no avail. She joined my side in a close embrace.
“And it sounds like life’s gone pretty tasteless for you,” she said.
I laughed and, after a quick moment of hesitation, arched forward till my muzzle hovered an inch away from her ear. “You’re quite forward today.”
“Want me to go back to protocol?” Brine offered, pushing herself away not without a snicker, only to rub her foreleg against mine.
“Brazen mare,” I whispered, tightening my scarf around my hot cheeks. “What do you even want from an old rag like me?”
“We sailors make do with what we have on board,” she said.
I guffawed. “Is that a compliment?”
“Lieutenant. Captain?” a new voice interjected.
Brine and I looked down over the railing to catch a glimpse of the nasally interruption: a slender pony was sunk deep in an oversized coat, or two… make it three. Only a small dash of steam indicated where his muzzle was. He lifted a hoof to salute, and his layered sleeves flapped in the wind.
“Snails, am I right?” I asked.
“Sure am, Captain,” he said. “You wanted me to scrape the cannons?”
I nodded and waited. And waited. I sighed when Brine snickered at me. Buried under that many layers, I doubted that the young stallion could even navigate by touch. I repeated myself aloud this time.
Not long after, the sun was well set behind the obscured horizon. We had to anchor and the chosen iceberg had been chosen. Only a few minutes remained before the galleon’s crew popped back up the ship’s bowels.
“Tempest?” Brine asked, with a hesitation in her voice that I wasn’t accustomed to.
“Yes, what is it?” I said, turning away from the steering wheel. Brine was sitting by one of the two aft cannons, glancing down at the blackened sea and the iceberg we’d just passed. “Something’s troubling you?”
“You know… I ain’t so impatient to meet that, uhm, pirate,” she said, drawing inquick breath in. “A battle in these shores’ a guaranteed death.”
I hung my head low. I didn’t want to but… I nodded back. “I know, and still, we must look for her. It’s our duty to protect the Crown’s trade routes and its citizens.”
“More like the Princess needs to placate her trade partners.”
I pinched my lips. “That’s not wrong.”
“Don’t speak like a Prenchmare out to muddy the truth.”
I chuckled and shook my head. “I won’t.”
“So we’re privateers,” she said, giving me enough of a pause that I raised my eyebrow. “We sail to serve.”
“I guess. But we’re here to investigate, not start a battle.”
The boat had finally reached the edge of a large iceberg. With its flat top and the water around it a deep green hue in the light of the crews’ torches, the white blotch loomed before us like a mostly submerged promontory.
I took the wheel and steered the boat to snug loosely alongside the underwater behemoth. My heart wrenched every time I heard the echo of the hull brushing against the ice.
I didn’t have to say a word. I threw Brine a glance and she stormed off to order the crew. Her voice bellowed far and wide across the ship, unleashing the might of her voice and the inner fire of the Apple family. I could do nothing but chuckle.
Grappling hooks flew to the iceberg. Canoes were winched down to the sea and set away to secure our lifelines for the night.
The night was out in force when the last canoe came back. But we were secure, and so the crew skittered back to the quarters below. A few laughs and the rumbling of cutlery carried the sounds of ponies enjoying their only meal of the day. Meanwhile, outside in the cold, I was yet again alone with Brine.
“Don’t you wanna come down with the crew?” she asked. “It’s warmer down there.”
“I just want to get one last look from the crow’s nest.”
Brine sighed and shook her head. “Every night you do just that, and every night there ain’t a smidge of something to see,” she groused. “It’s not gonna change now.”
“It’s the best time to catch a ship on the horizon. There must be lights.”
She clambered behind me all the way up—not without grumbling and growling, I might say. Huddled together at the top of the mainmast, I scoured the water and icy desert for a sign of life in the darkness.
“I mean,” Brine started, tucked into a ball, her back against the walls of the barrel that served as a nest, “if that wench evaded every privateer so far, she ain’t stupid. I don’t think she’d slip up now.”
“You know the adage,” I said. “What could go wrong will go wrong. That’s why we’re just investigating.”
“Sure rolls of the tongue,” Brine replied then bit on her dry lips. “But that also applies to us. Don’t forget that.”
Shaking my head, I took up my spyglass and surveyed the darkness again, and saw something. Tiny, far in the distance, maybe eight or nine nautical miles away. But there it was: a single, flickering pinprick of light coming in and out of existence.
“Ah-ah!” I said, passing the spyglass to Brine.
She turned around with a grunt, her joints popping in the cold. She spent a few seconds looking as I held the tip of the instrument to guide her sight.
“Dang it,” she mumbled.
“Tonight is a good night,” I celebrated, rubbing my hooves together. “For tomorrow, we hunt.”
“Tonight’s a good night, Tempest. But tomorrow will not be.” She looked down at the gun deck. “These are pirates. And I’m scared.”
Under the now cleared and glistening night sky, I saw her eyes drift up to meet mine. I puckered my lips together and threw my legs around her in a tight hug.
“You’ll see land again,” I struggled to say. “I promise.”
“If only you hadn’t looked.”
As we hugged, I squinted my eyes at the evidence of life on the deadly sea. The light itself, a small yellow pinprick turned pink and shot off towards the sky. It erupted into a rain of glittering fire.
They were partying for a reason unknown to me. It didn’t matter. In the morning, we would catch them off-guard.
