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Red scarves.
Light, how she hated red scarves. How she despised the Defias and those who supported them.
It made the faint memories from her childhood come back.
Memories of hiding in the cellar, terrified her infant sister would start to cry.
Of staring through the narrow crack, covering her mouth to muffle her own breath.
Of staring at a man with a bloodied knife standing over the bodies of the man and woman on the ground.
Of the sound of his gloating from behind the anonymity of his red scarf. His proclamations of superiority over the Major.
She couldn't remember who the Major was. Was it the man or woman on the ground? Someone else? That was lost to her.
But not the red scarf and its significance.
She came back to awareness in the tavern, her hands around the woman's throat.
The woman's red scarf was skewed and her face blue, eyes bulging. She was no longer proclaiming how the Defias was right, instead choking and clawing at the mercenary's gloved hands around her throat.
It took a pair of Dwarven men to break her iron grip on the woman's throat. The others in the tavern didn't let the woman get far, despite her attempts to scurry away; the mercenary wasn't the only one who heard the words of support for the Defias and the recent vandalism of the Queen's grave.