The royal palace was everything this court's architecture had been building toward and then made larger.
I had been in significant rooms before. The Dowager's council chamber, where the air was thick with the particular authority of people who believed they had already decided the outcome. The formal hearing room where Harren had sat across the table with his advocates and his carefully prepared defense. The east garden where Cassian had offered me a road I had not taken. But those rooms, for all their weight, had been rooms I had entered with a prepared position and time to establish it.
