The hellcat sat in her throne and looked around the tavern. Everyone was yapping. Did they ever shut up and just listen for a change? She thought not because if they did, they wouldn't feel the need to come to her with the questions they usually did.
Her arms crossed over her chest and she began to tap her fingers upon her forearms as she analyzed what had happened in the back alley the night prior.
An assassin had come to harm Kristia which would not have been a big deal had this particular assassin not spoke to her as if she knew her. She could not recall the woman's face but she knew, deep down, she had met her before. She just couldn't place it.
When she had taken out Soul's blade and attacked her, the assassin demanded she give it back to its owner. At first she chalked it up to grandstanding but as she sat in the throne and really thought long and hard about it, she wondered if the woman knew the circumstances regarding how she came to be in possession of the weapon.
Soul was dead. Long dead. But that didn't mean all his allies were.
She needed information, in the worst way. She needed to know who the woman that attacked Kristia was and why she had taken an interest in the enchanted dagger of her long dead husband.
There were two ways to get information quickly.
On your back, or out of pocket.
She wasn't about to even entertain the former as she was happily married now and even the latter was seeming unnecessary as she still held the title of the reigning queen of gossip. If there was something to know, Tara Rynieyn knew it save the assassin's name and purpose.
This disturbed her.
Not knowing what else to do and growing irate by the constant chatter of the mortals (some of whom she called friend) she got up and went to Hunter's Chalkboard.
There she took up the chalk and scrawled a note that to the ignorant reader might seem like a cipher though it really wasn't, it was just a note to an old friend who, incidentally, had the same remarkable ability to remember past events and personages like she did. Except with the old friend she possessed a clarity in her vision whereas the hellcat's memory was chaotic and frenzied.
There was much to remember in the space of six centuries, you know.
Mistress of Rhilshen-
I'll need whatever guild rosters you have from the Golden Age and a meeting with you and the White Queen. A.S.A.P.
Your fan,
Da Cockroach Killa
If the note went unnoticed by its intended recipient, which she sincerely doubted it would, she would have to make a trip to Loreil to go see Blue. Another, old friend.
Failing that, there were two other places she knew she could go to get the information she required.
One was the Rhy'Din Library, a hellish place filled with absolute silence that was so loud at times you could just put your head through a wall.
or...
Grimm himself.
The thought of returning to the FOES compound to see the man she still called father made her twitch. He'd ask her questions, want to know what she had been doing since they last spoke (four months ago now) and since Grimm never was a man that trusted his "daughter" as far as he could throw her, he would know, at once, something was up.
Especially when she asked to see the tomes relating to Rhy'Din's history.
She walked out of the tavern and got into the black carriage that was waiting for her outside, then instructed the driver to take her back to Longden Castle.
There she would break out her own recorded history of the lands, scour them until the early hours of the dawn and sooner or later she would turn something up.
And if she didn't, she'd just have to turn the whole town upside down until she got what she wanted.