Overwhelmed by the newly appointed servants rushing through her sector of the castle, Hestia charged for the queen's room to hopefully get some answers. She'd never allowed for a single soul not vetted by her to work in her stations, and yet the queen had somehow hired a fleet of women and children to run rampant through the kitchens? She couldn't believe it, not so much so that the queen couldn't do it, but because it made little sense for her not to be informed first.
"Your Highness, I need some answers!" She proclaimed, her hands banging on the queen's door.
An abrupt cacophony of sounds erupted inside the room. The sudden banging had scared the queen, but it didn't take her long to recover and charge for the door to confront Hestia. Opening the door, she stood in front of the head maid in her revealing prayer gown, and while glaring up at the giant that the head maid was, her breasts were nearly hanging out of her dress.
"Why are you banging like it's armageddon?!" The queen shrieked in her face, however, holding just as firm of an expression, Hestia slipped inside the room from right beside her. Following her with her gaze, Astoria slammed the door shut behind them in anger. "What is the meaning of this Hestia?! Have you sworn an oath to disrupt my prayers every day now?!"
Shaking her head, feeling frustrated herself, the head maid turned to face the queen with a slight contortion on her lips. Stretching a hand commandingly forward, she pointed firmly at Astoria.
"I've served your husband for the entirety of his life, I've served his father for the entirety of his and never have they reached into the kitchen to assert their authority! By Madia, what am I supposed to take from what you've done? Strange women and children running through my stations, the only place I have any command over–of course, I'm upset!"
"What?" Hearing the head maid talk, Astoria's anger was replaced with confusion. "What women and children and how does this even have anything to do with me?"
"Did you not hire thirty maybe even fifty or so villagers to help with the competition's preparations? I've been dealing with their incompetence all morning, especially the children, they're little devils against manners or etiquette!" Reaching into a hidden pocket on the side of her upturned teacup skirt, Hestia took out a broken Phial. "And this, the poison vial–one of them somehow took one out from the locked cabinet and broke it. I had to spend hours healing each and every one of them even if they hadn't touched anything, just in case any symptoms emerged later!"
Growing more and more confused the longer the conversation went on, Astoria stared blankly at Hestia while trying to piece everything together. In silence she managed to figure it all out, and then shooting Hestia an upward glance she revealed the truth about the situation.
"I didn't hire anyone, on whose orders were these people brought in? Because I assure you they weren't mine," hearing the truth, it was now Hestia who was left baffled by the revelation.
"What? But…every single one of them, even the guards I asked who told them to bring them here said that they did so on your orders," Hestia's confusion continued to grow until both the women realized that someone along the higher ranks must've lied to everyone else.
It had to be someone they could trust otherwise the ruse would've fallen and the news would've made it to the queen already.
"Someone's lying, but why?" The queen pondered, having no knowledge that Wolf was given a cup of her poison, she had no way of knowing that it was Robert and her son.
Musing over the thought, the two women stood in silence for a while, wondering what kind of gain someone could draw from creating such a chaotic situation. An attempt at the queen's life by sneaking an assassin in with the villagers? Or was their target someone else, that is if they were there to kill someone and not burglarize the castle instead.
"If you didn't order them to be hired, then whoever this mastermind is wanted this to happen for a reason," lifting her head slightly off the ground and matching the queen's gaze, Hestia offered what little sense she could make of the situation. "Either way we should get these villagers out of the castle. Past that, we can start questioning the soldiers on whose initial orders they brought them here."
Heaving a disgruntled sigh, Astoria fanned a hand in front of her face. Shaking her head, the queen brushed the maid's idea right off.
"These people were brought here under false promises, if we get rid of them now, who knows how many hearts and dreams we'd be shattering?" Turning her attention to the door, Astoria stared at it blankly as if she were expecting a knock. "Isolate the soldiers who headed out on these orders, I'll have the Whisperers bleed the answers out of them if necessary."
"The Whisperers?" Humming with a hint of surprise to her tone of voice, Hestia slowly turned her head to the side while her eyes remained on the queen. Drawing her arms back under her chest, she folded them neatly in preparation for her departure. "Isn't that a bit extreme, Your Highness?"
The queen's eyes lingered at the door.
"A vial of our greatest poison was found cracked in the kitchen, if anyone had so much as touched it they would've died already," taking a deep breath, Astoria looked back up into Hestia's masked eyes. "The phial wasn't randomly dropped to the floor, Hestia. Someone intentionally tried to poison someone, otherwise those villagers–all of them would've been dead before you found the shattered glass."
Willing to sacrifice women and children for the sake of killing one person, and then using the same crowd to hide? Nothing so despicable had ever occurred inside the castle walls, and Astoria wanted to ensure that this was the first and the last time anything like this occurred.
Recognizing that Hestia understood why the queen would want to mobilize the Whisperers. To the surprise of them both, however, a sudden knock on the door would cull the need to do any of that. For standing on the other end was the only person who knew what had happened…