Skandra wondered why no one looked at taverns as more important than they were. Taverns were places of commerce, places of bonding and emotion, where you could have a kiss and a tickle if you didn't mind buying the best of ale. He'd been making his living in taverns since he was a boy. If you threw the dice or played the cards with a shrewd eye you learned that you could live better than a man with an honest job. And after the first time the White Riders picked you up for a fight, or for stealing, or for suspicion of those things, you learned how to spot a thing that wasn't right. Skandra thought it was very much like a sense that elves developed in the forest, or soldiers on the battlefield, but he'd never been an elf and his success as a soldier was long behind him - and good riddance. Cities were their own sort of hostile environment. Ithacles didn't have the same sort of sense, being a pampered fool of a prince and a soldier to boot - but Skandra could see the glint of a knife from across the room.
Hear the cough of a just man.
Those eyes crawled the tavern even as Ithacles was speaking, and Skandra couldn't think of an answer to that question which wouldn't upset his friend. The other was the sort of question he wasn't used to being asked. Could he recognize the man. A nod of thanks to Captain Stunning and he sipped the vicious cold of the ale, thankful enough for it that his sip became a gulp. There were a lot of things shaking loose in Skandra's head at that moment. Not all of them were useful or even relevant to any situation. Would he recognize the man if he saw him again? There wasn't a question in his mind that he would try. But how? How was he going to recognize a fellow he'd seen up close for all of thirty seconds? There was enough trouble here if he could spot the man. If he couldn't he was letting down a friend. And possibly letting a monarch die; Ithunvel had returned Skandra's bow once upon a time, and thanked him for saving Ithacles' life.
You didn't want a king like that to leave this world.
"Yeah, I'd know him," Skandra agreed - he would simply have to hope for the best if it came to that. "How many of them can there be?"
Lethe was something of an odd girl. Skandra remembered thinking she was pretty but for the way she pursed her lips, and there was nothing about her that was not proper or refined. That was a fine way for a lady to act, but she never did get that from her mother, who had once drank two tots of whiskey for every one of Skandra's before having him carried out into the streets as a drunken vagrant - his punishment for losing, she said. No one believed the story, not even Ithacles - not that Skandra had been sober when he'd told the story - but it did bring into sharp relief the kind of person they were dealing with. Rebelling by conforming to codes your parents did not care especially much for. At least, that was how he would have pegged it.
"Ithacles," and he hesitated; took another long pull of his ale. "If nobody's told you, that means they don't want you to know. The only reason I can think of that they wouldn't tell you is that they think you're linked to it somehow. Not the plotting-"
And he was quick to raise his hands.
"-necessarily but something ties you to this, and if we don't know what it is, we're never gonna get close to the answer."