The three days passed quietly.
Too quietly. The palace had a specific quality in those three days — fewer people in the corridors than usual, shorter morning briefings, conversations that started and stopped faster than normal. Collective instinct. Everyone knew something important was happening in the upper rooms and had decided without being told that the appropriate response was less noise.
'Or,' Lysander thought, on the second morning, 'the harbor is exactly as loud as it always is and I am the one who is quieter and blaming it on everyone else.'
He ran the drill.
Six repetitions. The weight-shift sequence, the morning cold, the sword that had started to feel less like an instrument he was operating and more like an extension of a decision he had already made. On the seventh repetition Hector appeared at the gate without announcement — he sometimes did this, stood and watched without explaining why.
Two repetitions. Silence.
