Letters to the Princess

“I just…I don’t understand it. I don’t understand her.”

Flurry Heart did her best to ignore the anguished whispers from the far end of the table, and kept her gaze fixed firmly on her book. It didn’t matter that she had read the same paragraph on the Neighmann Hypothesis three times over without really taking any of it in. Anything was better than looking up right now.

“Come on, Cadie,” Shining Armour murmured. “She just needs her space, that’s all.” It was the sixth or seventh time he’d said it, but to his credit, there was still as much love in his tone as before.

Flurry Heart grimaced involuntarily, and then hastily schooled her face into a more neutral expression of concentration. If her parents figured out she was listening there would be hell to pay — hell in this case being another endless conversation about her emotions. Hopefully she was just distant enough that they wouldn’t be able to make out her features clearly. The formal dining hall was vast, and the crystal table stretched seemingly endlessly down the cavernous room. On a feast day, it could hold nearly two hundred ponies. Today it held only three, and Flurry Heart, pleading a period of intense study, had placed herself carefully at the farthest end. Cadence and Shining Armour were mere pinpricks of colour at the opposite end of the room. A normal pony wouldn’t have been able to hear their whispered conversation.

Unfortunately for Flurry Heart, alicorn hearing was exceptionally good.

“But it isn’t right,” Cadence insisted. “I’m her mother! She should share these things with me. On top of that, I’m the alicorn of love! I am quite literally the embodiment of romance. Why wouldn’t she ask my advice?”

“Cadie, be reasonable—” began Shining, but he was cut short.

“—Shining, what if she doesn’t trust me? What if she doesn’t trust either of us?” There was a tone of dawning horror in Cadence’s voice. “What if that’s the reason she won’t tell us? Oh, Celestia, have we failed as parents?”

“Of course we haven’t!” Shining’s rebuttal was just a little too loud, and Cadence hastily shushed him.

“Shhhh, she’ll hear us!”

“Sorry,” he whispered, suitably abashed.

Cadence fidgeted, the fabric of her dress rustling audibly. Flurry didn’t look up, but she knew that her mother would be twisting her hooves over one another in that classic I have a difficult daughter ritual that had become so common in recent years. “Though maybe that would be best. If she heard us, we could just have it out. Get it all out in the open. D’you think that would be emotionally healthier?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart.” For the first time, a touch of weariness tinged Shining’s voice. “Are you sure about all this?”

Cadence’s tone became aggrieved. “I know what I feel, Shining. I know what everypony feels. And Flurry — our sweet, lonely little Flurry, who has never shown any interest in anypony, mare or stallion or anycreature in between — who I thought must be aromantic or just…addicted to being alone — she’s in love. And you expect me to just…back off? Not ask her about it? You must be out of your mind!” The dress rustled again as she leaned forward to tap a hoof on the table. “No, Shining, trust me. Flurry needs my help. She needs us to be there for her.”

Flurry felt her cheeks flaming, and clenched her eyes shut for a second before glaring furiously at her book again.

The use of aromatic plants for ectoparasite treatment is a field of growing interest. Several species of birds regularly introduce aromatic herbs into their nests putatively to —

“I really think we should just let her work things out by herself,” Shining insisted. “If she needed us, she’d ask. She knows we love her and we’re always here.”

— reduce parasites. The behaviour is most often seen in cavity nesting birds and after nest building has finished. The Greater Crystal Grebe is often observed to—

“But does she know?” said Cadence plaintively, and Flurry Heart’s right eyelid began to twitch.

— observed to decorate its nest with snow-sage. For decades this was thought by Equestrian orthinologists to be for aesthetic purposes, a part of the Greater Crystal Grebe’s elaborate mating rituals, but more recent Crystal Empire studies have suggested that the practice actually serves a medicinal purpose. The implications of this, of course, are manifold —

“She used to tell me everything,” Cadence lamented. “She used to toddle up to me whenever she saw me, and tell me that the yellow block was her favourite, or that she liked the swings best out of everything in the playground. And she even told me difficult things — remember when she ate ten of Pinkie’s greenglo cookies and was so sick that the guards thought they’d found evidence of another changeling invasion?”

Flurry Heart’s eyes skimmed unseeingly over the text while her right eyelid twitched to a rhythm so fast she could have danced the salsa to it.

The memory earned her mother a chuckle from Shining Armour. “Yeah, I remember. And what about the time she had to go potty and couldn’t find the bathroom, so she used a potted plant—”

“—And told Nanny it was a cat!” Cadence laughed. “You see what I mean? She shared everything with us. Even the difficult parts. But now, when she’s feeling so…so strongly for someone, and I don’t even know the species of the creature that will be our child-in-law…”

Oh, for Celestia’s sake. Flurry Heart’s hoof came down on her page a little harder than she meant it to, and she shut her head and shook her eyes. It was time to get out of here. Even Neighmann couldn’t distract her from this; and besides, bird courtship rituals didn’t feel like a great topic right now either.

She didn’t want to think about it. Any of it. It was all so…so new, so weird. And if she thought of all that, Celestia only knew what kind of spike in her emotional state it would cause. Cadence would be all over it like a…a fly on a dungheap.

The analogy felt ungenerous, and while Flurry didn’t want to be…churlish, there didn’t exactly seem to be much alternative at times like these. Cadence had jumped down her throat about relationships and love every time their paths had crossed for the past week, and Flurry had been forced to conclude that the only option was to ensure that their paths crossed as little as possible.

At the far end of the room, Cadence was still lamenting the loss of her daughter’s foalhood. “What went wrong, Shining? What did we do wrong?”

Air puffed out from Flurry’s nostrils, just a little too hard, and she carefully shut her book. No sudden movements. It was time to make a move. Her plate was still full, but hopefully her parents were too far away to make it out. Who knew, they might even be wrapped up enough in their conversation and their parental desperation to not notice her sneaking out.

Silently, Flurry slipped down from her chair and turned towards the double doors behind her. She rotated her ears backward, listening for any change, and then froze.

The hall was suddenly completely silent.

“Flurry, are you going already?” Shining’s voice was suddenly shockingly loud in the gigantic hall, and there was a note of forced joviality there that only added to the hollow, echoing feel of it all.

She had been caught.

There was a pause, and Flurry slowly, reluctantly turned back.

“Don’t you want pudding?” Cadence’s tone was as brittle as her husband’s, and Flurry felt an abrupt pang of guilt. They…they were overbearing, but they only wanted the best for her, after all. They evidently didn’t care who it was, or even what it was — clearly they were more desperate on her behalf than she had felt even at her lowest — they just wanted to know.

But then Flurry looked at her mother’s eager, hungry smile, visible even from the far end of the hall, and steeled herself. No. Cadence didn’t need to know who exactly was on that train from Canterlot. That was Flurry’s business. Just because her mother could spy on all of her emotions didn’t mean that she was entitled to be told all of her thoughts.

“No,” she said aloud, fully aware that she was turning down far more than dessert. “I’m not really hungry today, Mom.”

“Chef will be disappointed,” Cadence answered, weakly. She knew when she was beaten. “Gorpone Ramsay sent the nougat recipe over to him specially.”

“Maybe you could save it for this evening?” Flurry was already backing away, forming the beginnings of a spell in her mind’s eye. She wouldn’t be back in time for dinner — possibly not even for breakfast tomorrow — but they didn’t need to know that, either.

“I will.” Half-rising from her chair, Cadence reached a hoof after her errant daughter. “Sweetie, are you sure that I can’t—?”

Sensing that a helping hoof was about to be offered and the forbidden topic openly broached, Flurry swung into action. “—No, that’s okay, Mom! Sorry, I gotta go—!” Before the sentence was even finished she released the teleportation spell and the familiar crack of displaced air punctuated her exit for her.

Her favourite guards flanking her — the ones that she siphoned off some of her allowance to in return for a solemn oath not to answer any of her parents’ subtle probing — Flurry waited on the platform, running an anxious hoof over her mane one last time.

Would she be here? Had she come? Or would all of this; the hope and the waiting and the avoidance — would it all have been for nothing?

No. She had to trust in her. The pony on the train. Flurry had to believe in her -- believe in something, or what was the point of any of this?

She would be here. She had to be.

A familiar toot sounded, rousing Flurry from her thoughts, and she looked up just in time to see the train pulling into the station. Her heart seemed to thump at a million miles a minute as she strained forward to see, her eyes flickering over each train window in turn as she searched for that one particular face —

— And then, suddenly, she found what she was looking for, and Flurry’s face split into an involuntary, infectious smile.

The carriage doors opened, and one by one, the passengers disembarked. And Flurry Heart, Princess of the Crystal Empire, daughter of the Empress and the High Prince, the champion of champions and the vanquisher of evil, the fifth-most powerful being in existence, waited, her heart beating quicker than a schoolfilly’s and the silliest of grins spreading over her regal countenance. Ready to speak the most inconsequential and the most important words she would ever utter.

“Hey! I wasn’t sure you were going to make it.”