The thing about sealing off a palace was that it didn't stop life from going on. It just made everyone inside progressively harder to tolerate.
With the gates sealed tight after Iryna's poisoning, the high nobles had spent the last several hours loitering around the palace grounds like beautifully dressed, deeply anxious ghosts. They couldn't leave, so they gossiped. They picked at pastries they didn't want, complained about the delay of the imperial banquet, and watched the guards with paranoid eyes.
Karson, however, didn't have the luxury of loitering. He had spent the entire morning coordinating barrier checks, verifying supplies, and ensuring that the defensive circles around the main palace walls hadn't been tampered with.
By mid-afternoon, he was running on pure adrenaline. He was crossing the lower stone terrace near the edge of the east gardens when a sharp flash of movement near the forbidden tree line caught his attention.
