She snickers quietly and continues to eat with poise and grace.

Conversation from the neighboring tables is a bit muted, but the bits that drift over show a people concerned with the impact of the ongoing Civil War on trade. People here, of course, dislike Ulfric and his cause, seeing them as upstarts causing problems for decent folk.

She's a perceptive type, and logs all of this information solidly in her memory. She doesn't each much of what is on her plate, and waits for Noel to finish his meal.

He doesn't take his time, not because he notices she's done, but because he's an animal scarfing his food down at a terrifyingly unhealthy pace. With his final large mouthful still masticating within his mouth, he grins as boyishly as he can manage with bulging cheeks. "So, horses?"

"Yes, please. I'll be waiting up in my room," she hands him some money and takes her leave.

He takes the money and leaves, a skip in his step as he makes his way to the stables.

Horses for sale are mostly very well bred, hardy to Skyrim's harsh climate, pretty, spirited, and expensive.

He is picky and, thanks to his mistress, in control of a large sum of money. He thinks he might be thankful for how stupidly rich her parents are, but then remembers he hates them. Instead, he pays who is there to be paid, then looks around for an appropriate place to leave them while he goes to get his mistress.

The stable can hold his horses for him, no problem, and that's probably his safest bet.

Good, he does that and begins making the trek back to his mistress.

Nothing interrupts him on his way.

He enters her room without knocking. "E, got the horses, they're waiting for us at the stable. Now let's go, let's get, be free my beautiful butterfly."

She chuckles at her fool of a friend. "Sometimes, I wonder if you were dropped on your head as a child."

"Bold of you to assume I was held."

Neither say anything more, instead walking in silence back to the stables to get their horses.

The horses are available. The stable hand tries to make idle conversation about where they're intending to go.

She explains she's going on a several month long tour of the country, visiting for the first time from her homeland and intrigued by seeing more of a place elsewhere to where she has always been.

Well, he's not too sure about areas much past Dragonbridge, though the long stretch between there and Whiterun sometimes has bandit problems. There's been rumors of necromancers between Solitude and Dragonbridge, but so far no one's been harassed traveling during the day.

She thanks him for the information, gives him a little coin in thanks, and mounts her horse to begin their leisurely pace in the direction of Whiterun.

They're set to arrive in Dragonbridge near the end of the day. The wind over the peaks to their north howls, carrying flecks of snow blown down from the mountain. Sometimes, you could almost swear something else was howling with it.

The path winds along a cliff, and the view over Skyrim is astounding, the air crisp and clear.

Of note is a massive statue of a woman in robes, her raised hands empty, off the road to the north at the rough halfway point. A trail cuts up the mountain, and there's an odd symbol on the rock where the road forks. Still, their main road is pretty clear.

She's interested in odd things of note on her journey, to her, it is about what they did along the way more than their destination, so she directs her horse towards the odd symbol on the rock to look closer, much to her guards chagrin.

The symbol is a rather simple twenty pointed star, just lines gouged deeply and then rubbed with some kind of reddish orange pigment.

She reaches out to trace it with her hand, almost reverent in the way she caresses it. 

It's a bit warm. Incongruous, next to the cold stones around it.

Her prodding starts getting a bit firmer, so much so that if there were, say, a button, it would depress under her touch.