"Correct. He's been ejected from more courts than some lords can name. I doubt the man could afford or find a retainer, but he's the kind of person that needs one." By that point she was craning her neck to see above the crowd, although she was tall enough to stand even with most of the men there. It might have just been the boots, barely distinguishable from more casual footwear under the cuffs of her trousers. The other man hadn't turned up from within the castle yet, and immediately her mind went to the assumption that something had gone wrong. She sighed and lowered back to the ground from her tiptoed stance. "I'm compromising, but in the other sense of the word. Bard Urien's court has a target painted on it, there's a Lyoki royal in town, and every name in Estovetian politics has somebody worth killing under that roof. It's good to have people you can trust at a time like this." In truth, she was more concerned with what Lyok's interest in the country was because if there was one entity that could truly make her life miserable, it was any of the ones that happened to drag an entirely different continent's problems into hers. But, having friends never hurt.