That was when Aimilia turned and saw both Konstantin and Hypatia were in the room already seated, Hypatia watching the two of them with eagle-eyed sharpness, her hands curled on the arms of her chair. A dangerous gleam was in her eyes and her lips twitched into a smirk, as if she was watching a particularly entertaining game.
She certainly didn’t look like she’d spent part of the night before being reprimanded by the only man whose power could come close to checking her own.
Nikias moved toward the table, but unlike last night, then, where his encounter had left him visibly agitated, today he was in full control. At least, the marble façade he liked to wear was back in place. Although not completely impassive. As Nikias moved towards the chairs, he shot Hypatia a dangerous look. A smirk was playing on his lips, and he raised an eyebrow at her, almost like a challenge.
Whatever game the two of them were playing, Aimilia wanted no part in it. She moved to stand at attention.
Konstantin took one look at Nikias and Hypatia and he quickly shuffled his papers and cleared his throat, disrupting whatever unspoken challenge hovered in the air between the two.
“Alright, now that you’re here, we can get started. We made excellent progress yesterday. I believe we have a thorough picture of the events on your side. Now today, we will at least begin to give you a thorough picture of the events on our side.”
Nikias gave the man a nod. “Let’s begin.”
Hypatia didn’t say a word, just sat back in her seat and crossed her legs, resting her chin on her hand that leaned on the arm of her chair.
Aimilia didn’t dare open her mouth and draw any more attention to herself, especially from Hypatia.
But she couldn’t help but wonder as Konstantin’s voice filled the air that morning where Marcella and Gavril were. Well, she supposed they didn’t really have anything to contribute to the conversation. Neither did she. Why was she the only one there as support for Nikias when face to face with Hypatia?
What could be more important than this?
Still, Aimilia learned quite a bit as Konstantin spoke.
She did pay attention to the actions of the stone mages. Apparently they had started shortly after the treaty had been signed. It had been small at first. Little one-off occurrences. A couple Stonai sneaking into a Solitus village of one of the clans and stealing.
Then it became creeks drying up, causing issues for the Solitus farmers.
When the Solitus investigated, they came across a landslide blocking the creek. The first three times it had happened, they were in such differing locations that no one heard about the others. It hadn’t been until later that Konstantin had able to track down those occurrences and place them as early in thetimeline as he had currently. The Solitus had assumed they had been naturally occurring landslides.
Unfortunately, by the time Konstantin had heard of the occurrences they had been cleared by the mages and the Solitus, so he could not inspect them to be sure. But he strongly suspected they’d all been unnatural and caused deliberately by the stone mages.
Aimilia didn’t move a muscle. She just looked straight ahead, but she was able to see out of the corner of her eye when Konstantin pointed out these locations in the northmost part of the varying clans’ territories. When he put the fifth landslide down and the tenth occurrence of Stonai activity overall down, it was in his people’s lands, Clan Montis.
That was when he’d gotten involved.
Although Aimilia didn’t quite follow how one landslide blocking a road in his territory had made him immediately connect it to the stone mages when he didn’t know of any of the other instances yet. Especially given how he had mentioned the stone mages had chosen a road that had had a natural landslide in the past.
It made sense why they were the biggest suspect when she looked at the map overall, but Konstantin didn’t clarify what it was that had secured his accusation in the first place, enough to reach out and discover all the other instances. However, Nikias did not ask, and Aimilia was just there as the attending commander and had no interest in inserting herself unless required to.
It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Konstantin—Aimilia trusted him more than she trusted almost any clan mage—but Aimilia was a commander. She’d been trained to think of things from every angle.
The detail in just those initial incidents took the majority of the day, and once more, Konstantin cut them short only anhour or two after noon in order to go deal with a few other ‘engagements,’ as he put it.
Hypatia hadn’t said a word the entire time.
What had she been there for? Did she simply want to see Nikias squirm? Had she just wanted to put him on edge?
Although the most surprising thing was, it hadn’t seemed to work. Nikias hadn’t been rattled the whole day.
Aimilia had never been more desperate to find out exactly what Hypatia had said to him the night before that had shaken him so, but now did not seem to bother him one bit.
Aimilia briefly saw Marcella that afternoon as she wandered around the grounds again.
Marcella was in one of the courtyards surrounded by children much younger than the ones she normally was surrounded by at the Academy. All of these children had to be under ten and many of them had black curls like she did.
They were all chattering in their own tongue and pulling Marcella into some kind of game, based off Marcella’s laugh and the way the children were forming a circle and joining hands.
Aimilia didn’t interrupt. She only watched from the shadows.
