As the Stravos carriage arrived outside of the Nikolaos manor, Danae knew though that this visit orchestrated by her mother didn’t have anything to do with wishing to catch up with Lady Ianthe or laying the groundwork for the men to strike some sort of trade deal. No, the girl knew her mother much better than that. Circenia might take a marginal interest in such things and had these been normal times, she might have stopped by the Nikolaos home. Given that these were not only not normal times and the sheer fact that her mother had insisted that she and Danae visit the Nikolaos on their way back from Lyncestia made it more than clear to the girl that there was something bigger going on here. Her mother might be the queen of the gossip circuit, but not even she would go this far out of the way for what would ultimately amount to no proper reason, especially if she had her notoriously difficult daughter Danae in tow.

The mere fact that the trip was occurring at all would be more than enough to raise a few eyebrows if the other courtiers caught wind of such a visit. Danae should know, she had asked a pointed question or two once she realized that the two of them were not taking the usual route home once arriving back in the capital from their trip to their ancestral lands. However, once it was revealed that the two Stravos women were going to visit the Nikolaos, the younger girl understood what the bigger picture was unfolding before her very eyes. After all, her mother would never go to visit the Nikolaos just for the hell of it… but she would if she suspected that they might know what happened to the Head of their patron house.

Magnestis was a Xanthos barony. One of only two in fact, if you didn’t count Persephone’s own holdings in Arcana. That meant that not only were the Nikolaos honor-bound to serve the swans like the rest of them because they held the throne, but there was an extra element of loyalty attached to this family as they owed their nobility to them. If it hadn’t been for Danae’s grandfather finding favor with the founders of this house, they would all still be peasants in the shipping yard -- certainly well off, but they would have no noble title to boot. Now Danae might be a bit naive to what entailed the political scene within her country, but having lost her own nobility for a brief period of time, she knew full well what a family might do to hold onto the privileges noble blood had to offer. Danae didn’t need to directly ask her mother to figure out that Circenia wanted to check in with the swan’s most loyal birds in case they might have known what had happened to Persephone since she fled the night that the castle was attacked. After all, if the intelligence that the Stravos were able to get their hands on that spoke of her being in Taengea was true, they would have had to get there somehow and the Nikolaos certainly had plenty of ships that they could offer in exchange for the promise of better titles once the dust of political strife settled.

Now, neither Stravos woman knew for certain that the Nikolaos had helped Persephone when their carriage came to a stop outside of the grand Nikolaos manor. If they had known that this family had no direct influence in what had occurred that fateful night after the funeral of Danae’s uncle, King Minas, there would have been no visit in the first place. There just would have been no point in stopping by to visit this artsy family as Circenia certainly had other pressing matters that she would much rather attend to. However, such things could not always be gleaned through putting enough gold into the hands of the right servant. Sometimes, you just had to go to the source for such information. That was something that Circenia had ensured Danae had learned long ago which was a big factor in why the girl wasn’t questioning it all.

Danae just wished that her mother had dragged Chara along instead of her.

Stepping out of the carriage, Danae was forced to contend with the fact that her presence here was not really needed and the poor girl was going to have to suffer through these stiff interactions when she’d much rather be at home, hiding away in her room doing god knows what. At least she’d be free from this annoying pastel green peplos that was far too flowy for her tastes. It was clearly designed for the sort of girl who did not have to do much and was expected to sit still with their back straight for hours. Danae didn’t like this sort of dress. She was the sort who preferred plainer clothes that were far more comfortable and more suited to letting Danae do her own thing without needing to worry about looking pretty while she arranged her next bets for the seedier gambling rings of Athenia -- the ones that wouldn’t question some kid working on her behalf as Danae could never be seen herself in these situations.

The nearly seventeen-year-old girl internally groaned when the two women greeted Ianthe and the elder Nikolaos woman made a subtle comment to the younger guest that her own daughter was somewhere in the gardens. Not needing to be told twice that whatever pointed conversation was going to occur here in the manor, it was for the two matriarchs only. Danae was going to have to go play nice with one of the other Nikolaos girls until her mother decided that she had what she had come here for. Had the younger girl been her older sister, this wouldn’t have been much of an issue. Chara was a social butterfly, in fact, Danae was fairly certain that she was close friends with one of the other girls. Dianthe? Desma? This Stravos girl certainly didn’t know and cared even less. Small talk and making friends wasn’t her forte. It had never had been and that was unlikely to change if the girl’s own social anxiety had anything to say about the matter. Danae just felt more comfortable curling up with some interesting book and pretending that the rest of the world did not exist. That was certainly easier than pretending to be a socialite when she clearly was just because the stupid rules of her social standing demanded such a thing.

Even though Danae was clearly not happy about the game she had been unwillingly roped into by her own mother, she didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. Especially as the servant who had been summoned to bring Danae to Rene in the gardens wasted almost no time in completing this task, giving the poor girl only a small chance to steel her nerves as she was introduced to the other girl who had likely been startled out of her own thoughts. Danae tried to push away the horrible thoughts about how Rene already hated her and how Danae was going to mess everything up as her eyes drifted between the horse in the distance and the parchment beside the girl who Ianthe had pawned Danae off upon. The youngest Stravos, being the astute girl she was, refrained from commenting on it at first as she completed the introduction that the servant had started before she scurried away to complete her own tasks elsewhere in the Nikolaos home. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Rene. I don’t believe we met before?”

It was clear in her voice that Danae was trying her best to emulate the sheer grace and poise that her mother possessed, at least in the hopes that this might stave off the anxieties that were going to undoubtedly crawl up the young girl’s throat. It was working for the moment, but Danae knew that it would fail soon enough. It didn’t matter what she did, her own social anxieties would always get the better of her. It was only a matter of time. She tried to stave it off with the brief introduction, hoping that Rene might offer some sort of explanation why these two girls who were close in age might not know each other all that well even though Danae was pretty confident that she already knew the reasoning. After all, her mother might be a Xanthos, but Danae was not. She had no personal stake in being buddy-buddy with the Nikolaos and thus had never properly sought any of them out at the few court events she had attended in the past two years she had been eligible for them. Rene would likely say something similar along these lines -- both girls would know of each other but never had much of a reason until now to actually speak -- which was something that Danae figured she would need to explain as it wasn’t often that a member of another high-ranking family shows up without warning in another’s gardens. “Your mother told me that we would find you here, she and my own mother are chatting inside.”

Even though the air might have been somewhat frigid due to the autumn temperature, Danae was not keen to stand in the sunlight for any longer than she had to. That was why the girl decided at that moment to take a seat on the bench next to Rene, her hands instinctively moving to swallow down her nervous energy by smoothing out her dress as her gaze shifted back to the parchment as she asked Rene about it, hoping to strike up a conversation about it -- or anything really, just as long as Danae herself didn’t need to talk. “I didn’t know the Nikolaos had an artist among them… What are you sketching?” It might not have been the most thrilling conversation in the world, but for these two girls who had nothing in common being forced to talk while their mothers engaged in a battle of political wills inside… well, at least it was something, right?