We would need to be a wrecking ball to that pleasant fiction.
“And you got this from the fevered mutterings of the badly wounded mage?” Kingsley asked, his skepticism thinly veiled.
“Yes,” Austin growled, his gaze not dropping into the submission zone this time. “Under the guise of an invisibility potion, working solo or in pairs, these mages, called runners, have been slinking around this territory for months. They’ve hidden devices to enhance their magic throughout the territory, along with hookups for military-grade steel that’ll lie over the river in its narrowest places to act as bridges. That’ll give them a lot more access to your town. I’m sure you identified those setups this morning, though I’m not sure why you hadn’t found them before now. They’ve also laid track for some sort of magical framework that’ll help them orchestrate a large…shield or something. I haven’t had a chance to talk to our mages about that yet. Tristan wrote that down, in two instances, and neither description was clear to me.”
“Twice, huh?” Nessa said to Tristan quietly, standing near him, her eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“The mage must’ve thought you needed to hear it twice to get those notes perfect, maybe.”
“Pardon me,” Austin said, the rest of the room not paying Nessa’s comment any attention, “but they’ve been lulling you to sleep, alpha, while they set up their weapons in your backyard.”
The heaviness in the air intensified with Austin’s words, but I didn’t dare look Kingsley’s way lest I randomly get worked up again and make a show of myself. All the power being thrown around made me feel…aggressive.
Instead I watched Tristan slowly look Nessa’s way, his bearing loose and easy and his eyes clear and open, glowing brightly.
“Obviously so,” Tristan murmured. “Or why would he have repeated himself, much more slowly the second time, as though he wanted me to get every detail?”
Nessa’s eyebrows drew together and her face flushed just a little, three parts anger, one part…
something else.
Sebastian had been intensely frustrated that he’d slept through the mage’s mutterings, thinking （probably correctly） that what the mage was saying would make more sense to him and Nessa than to Tristan. He’d calmed down after seeing Tristan’s notes. They really were very thorough.
Nessa hadn’t said a peep about the situation. She’d listened silently to Austin’s account of the night, looked at the notes Tristan had handed over, and then spent the rest of the morning seemingly lost in thought. When asked what she was thinking about, she’d shaken her head and bounced back to life.
“I don’t like your tone, Austin,” Kingsley replied, his gush of magic pulling my focus back to him.
“Nor your implication that we’ve been asleep out here, twiddling our thumbs.” He pointed at the projector. “We’ve cataloged every instance since the patterns began to emerge. We’ve doubled our defenses and worked day and night to protect our families and our homes. Some of us have been wounded, and we lost a good man, all while battling a force the likes of which we’ve never faced before. In case you’ve forgotten, we don’t have the ability to see through magical potions. Nor have we found a mage who somehow has secret information. But we’ve been doing this for months. So before you come in here with your swagger, thinking you know all, why don’t you get on a team for once and work with us, not against us?”
Austin’s power surged and his gaze heated.
This was less about two leaders trying to compromise and more about two brothers struggling to work out their issues on a public stage. That was all well and good, but it was not the time for this confrontation.
“If you think—”
“We haven’t forgotten,” I said loudly, moving away from Austin a little and putting out my hands, not wanting to seem like I was solely on his side. “We definitely have not forgotten, alpha. Austin is expressing his frustration badly, not at you or your people, but at the situation. At our— all of our—
helplessness against this magical tyrant. But we’re here to fill in some gaps. Before we captured that mage last night, we didn’t know any more than you guys. We’ve been flying blind—that’s the problem.
So let’s talk about what we know and come up with a plan to find out what we don’t. The blame game is a waste of time.”
I didn’t break my gaze from Kingsley’s, but softened it so that it wouldn’t seem dominating.