“Children, this is Pen Stroke,” Father announced, gesturing with one hoof to the unicorn standing in our entryway. She had a long, straight black mane that parted around her horn, and a dark gray coat. Her cutie mark was a sheet of parchment marked in red ink. “She will be here a few times a week for… well, for a few months, at least.” He glanced at his wife for support, and she gave him an encouraging smile. “I expect you both to treat her with respect.”
I shot my hoof into the air, and my father looked at me. “Why?” I asked.
“Why should you treat her with respect? Twilight, I thought we taught you better—”
“No, why is she going to be here a few times a week for the next few months?” I interrupted. I had been imprecise in my language, something I felt far more chagrin for than being assumed to be disrespectful.
“She’s Shining’s new governess,” Father said. “She’ll be helping him with his studies.”
“Why does Shining need—”
“Cut it out, Twily,” Shining hissed. He barely looked at me out of the corner of his eye, his tail tucked tight against his side. “It’s not your problem, so quit worrying about it, okay?”
My parents gave each other another glance, but no one said anything while I fumed. Shining had gotten the same lessons I had, hadn’t he? Questions lead to knowledge, so there are no bad questions, even if we won’t always find the answers, Father had told us.
“We should finalize the schedule,” Pen Stroke announced. “And I must see his most recent marks, so I know where to begin.” She looked Shining up and down, and then turned dismissively towards Father. “Let us speak in private.”
The adults left, and then Shining brushed past me. “Nice going,” he muttered, with more vitriol than I’d ever heard from him.
Vitriol was a word I’d learned just last week. It means bitter and caustic, which is like acid. I hadn’t expected to need it so soon.
I heard his bedroom door slam a moment later.
In the weeks since Pen Stroke had entered our lives, everything had changed for the worse. Shining Armor had stopped smiling, and we hadn’t played together once, as he was always too busy studying. At first, I had thought that was a good thing. I of all ponies knew the value of a good study. But Shining never wanted to discuss what he had learned, or really talk about anything regarding his new tutor.
I had approached her once and offered to help, but she had said I was ‘too young to possibly know anything of use’ and so I didn’t like her anymore. This had been a problem at first, because I had thought she was a teacher, and teachers were universally good. But actually, she’s a governess, which is more like a boss, and now she was bossing Shining into being unhappy.
So not liking her was okay. I had a whole diagram to prove it.
Now I just had to do something about it.
The solution was obvious, at least to me. I’d heard my classmates whispering (usually to each other while I was nearby) that there were lots of ways to cheat at learning things with magic, and obviously I knew them because I was so good at school. This was nonsense, of course; I would never cheat myself out of a chance to read a book. But if such spells existed, they’d be in the library, and then I could learn them and cast them on Shiny. Even though I had no use for them, Shiny surely wouldn’t mind not having to read all the books he didn’t like reading.
Even if he was wrong about not liking reading. I could forgive him for that, because he’s my brother.
The only problem was that I couldn’t find any of the spells my classmates talked about in the school library, even after a perfectly methodical search. So I begged my parents to take me to the city library, which fortunately did not strike them as unusual or odd in any way. But while that took much longer, I soon had to conclude that the spells I was looking for were not in that library either.
To my knowledge, that left only one option: the Canterlot Archives. If the spell existed at all, it would be there. Father was a Royal Astronomer, so he had access. Unfortunately, that was where my plans hit a wall.
“No, you can’t go to the Archives. It’s restricted for a reason. Besides, what would you even do there? Surely anything you would want is in the public library.”
“But—”
“No buts. I couldn’t get you in even if I wanted to. Sorry, pumpkin.”
“Shiny, I have a plan.” I announced. We were gathered at the kitchen table, early on a Saturday. Mother was out on an errand, and Father wouldn’t be awake until five minutes before noon when Pen Stroke would arrive for the day, so we had the house to ourselves.
He just gave me a flat look. “Twilight, I don’t have time for games.”
“It’s not a game!” I squeaked, indignantly. “It’s important.”
He looked me over, appraisingly. “Alright, fine. What’s your plan?”
“I need your help to sneak into the Archives.”
Shining rolled his eyes. “Oh, is that all? You can’t break into the Archives, and I’m not gonna risk my neck for your dumb books—”
“It’s not for me,” I said, suddenly meek. “I mean, I know there’s books there and I would love to read all of them forever and ever but that’s not the point. There’s a spell in there that can fix you so you won’t be unhappy anymore.”
“‘Fix’ me? I’m not broken, Twilight.”
“No, wait, that’s not what I meant,” I said, stepping forward because Shining was already turning to leave. “I know you’re not broken. But all this studying is making you sad, and I want you to smile again. So I found a spell that would make you better at studying! You could skip all the reading and just know things, all at once! But it’s not in the regular library so it must be in the Archives.”
Shining paused, and then looked back, one eyebrow raised. “Really?” he said. “There’s a spell like that?”
“Yeah! So are you going to help?”
“Twilight, even if that spell exists, that doesn’t mean we can just walk into the Archives. Or that I can weasel my way out of studying long enough to even try.”
I drew myself up indignantly. “I said I had a plan!” I lit my horn and concentrated, and a shimmering image of Shining Armor curled up with a book appeared between us. Occasionally, he would toss his head or turn a page. “I can leave this going for hours. And…” with a grin and a flourish, I pulled a card out of my bag. “I stole dad’s ID.”
Shining actually laughed out loud. “When did you become such a rule-breaker?”
I hmphed. “Sometimes, you have to bend the rules a little to do the right thing.” I held out the card to him. “So? Are you in, BBBFF?”
He frowned at me. “BBBFF?”
“Yeah! You’re my Big Brother Best Friend Forever, but that’s too long, so… BBBFF.”
He smiled, for the first time in weeks. “Yeah. I’m in.”
The Archives building was deserted on Saturday, and there was only one guard at the entrance. Since we didn’t think he’d let us in even with dad’s card, we just walked over the fence. Shining has the best shields in the business, and with a little outside-the-box thinking, a shield is basically a ramp. Take that, miss ‘too young to know anything’!
Our card got us into the building proper, and I resisted the urge to salivate at all the books. I could happily lose myself in here for weeks, but I had to focus. I didn’t have time for distractions.
Well. Maybe one distraction. Two, even. I read fast.
“I can’t believe that worked,” Shining said as we closed the door behind us. “You can be pretty clever when you want to be, huh?”
I tossed my mane. “I’m clever all the time,” I said, proudly.
For some reason, Shining sighed. “Yeah. Sometimes I wish I was born with your brain, little sis.”
“Really? But then you’d like reading, and you hate reading.”
“I don’t hate reading!” Shining protested, before lowering his voice. “I mean, I don’t hate the idea of reading. It’s just… when I read, the words don’t always fit together right. It’s like… I’ll read a word, but it’s not actually what’s written down, and then by the end of the line the whole sentence doesn’t make sense, so I’ll have to read it again.” He scuffed a hoof against the ground, looked away, and almost didn’t continue. “It makes it really hard to take tests, because if I rush I get the questions wrong, and if I don’t I run out of time. It’s why I’m failing.”
“But that’s not fair!” I protested. “If you know the answer, you should get the points! That’s what tests are for!”
“Try telling Pen Stroke that,” Shining grumbled. “It doesn’t matter. If we find this spell, then I won’t have to read things anymore, and it won’t be a problem. It’ll fix—” he paused. “It’ll make it so I can show everyone I know it.”
“We’d better start looking, then.”
We spent hours. I found spells to make you stronger, spells to make you faster, spells to make your breath smell nice or to make your horn grow (though I couldn’t imagine why you’d want such a thing). But no spells to make reading faster.
It was well past noon. Father would be awake, and Pen Stroke would have arrived. My illusion would fool mother casually checking in, but it wouldn’t fool the governess for long. They had to know we’d snuck out by now. We were certainly going to be in trouble, but Shining didn’t want to leave.
“Did you find any good spells?” I asked him, walking over to the section he was searching through with a book held in my magic, skimming with one eye.
“Not exactly,” he muttered. “Look what I did find, though.” He showed me the book. It was titled On Learning: A Study of Foalhood Development. “Listen: A small subset of the observed subjects showed difficulties with reading and writing, and expressed difficulties with parsing complex words and sentences. When given sufficient time, they did achieve similar results to other foals in their age bracket, however. I am tentatively categorizing this group of foals as having some form of reading disability, a lexicographical error in their minds. I think this might be talking about me. Surely they tried this spell of yours on them, too, right?”
I hesitated. “Well,” I hedged. “I’m beginning to worry it might not… exist.”
Shining stared at me, incredulous. “What do you mean, it might not exist?”
“Well… it was just something I heard my classmates talking about, and in retrospect if it was some spell that was kept in the Archives it maybe isn’t something they’d know about, but I was just so focused on helping you that I didn’t think—”
Shining interrupted me with a hug. “Twilight, you are the dumbest smart pony I know,” he said, but his voice was full of love. “It’s okay. I think I found what I needed.” He put the book in his bag. “Just knowing that I’m not… that I’m not stupid, or broken, that I’m not alone... and that my little sister always has my back.” He grinned at me. “Come on. Let’s go lie to our parents about where we’ve been, and you use that clever brain of yours to come up with how we found this book without breaking any laws.”
I laughed as he scooped me up onto his back, and made his way to the exit. “You got it, BBBFF.”
We were still both smiling when we ran into the guard right outside.
