#look out...

Dawn began to rise over the foggy horizon and it found the Highborne standing there amongst the rocks that peppered the craggy beach.  She stood there silently, studying the coarse grains of sand with narrowed blue eyes and her hands curled into loose fists at each hip.  Within the grasp of her left hand lay a rumpled piece of embroidered fabric, recovered after a casual conversation led to its belated recovery.  The larger truth behind such a simple gesture of mischief vexed her, pulled at the corners of her mind with a nagging comment.  Her house was in disarray and she’d been the one to let it stray.

Crossing her arms and raising her eyes to the gray-blue sea, the creases in her brow began to deepen.  As a number of the Inn’s occupants had filed out in turn for an evening of frivolity and mirth two nights previous, she had stayed behind to manage both her business and her small family.  Nothing out of place there...or so it had seemed at the time.

The following morning, she’d managed to catch the resident physician during his usual morning ritual of a cup of tea and breakfast pastry in the dining room following his sunrise jog on the beach.  Sitting down across from him in hopes of a friendly chat, she was instead inundated with a lengthy account of the previous night’s egregious insults in the direction of a number of parties, himself included of course.  An earful indeed...tolerated only with the assistance of a well loaded cup of coffee.  It would seem that a small circle of the tavern’s residents were currently at odds with one another.  Oh, and by the way, I happened to recover this from my roommate’s belongings...I believe it belongs to Melisande.  Add that to the list as well, along with her own admitted delay in recovering the requested needlework. 

The complaints were trivial in her mind, but such was the content of her daily concerns as of late...the pitfalls of managing the more mundane aspects of life, she had come to assume.  Mercenaries tended to keep more distance from one another, and resolve their differences in more resolute manners...and thus the pettiness of domestic quarrels was something the former sergeant was disused to managing.  A fault she would have to soon remedy in her approach if the business was to continue flourishing.  The truth was she valued these people every bit as much as she had valued the sellswords in her previous line of work, and it would be a cold day before she let them simply self destruct in her presence.  

Looking back down to the intricate piece of embroidery she held in her hand, a simple plan began to hatch.  If these difficulties weren’t going to resolve themselves, she would have to intervene.  It seemed a series of conversations were in order.