By the time the last months arrived, the palace had become a machine built around one simple, dangerous truth: Christopher was going to give birth, and nobody in Saha knew how to be normal about it.
It wasn't loud anxiety - not in the corridors where servants still moved with careful grace and guards still stood like statues - but it lived everywhere anyway. In how doors opened too quickly. In how meals were checked multiple times. In how the medical wing had been quietly reinforced with extra staff and extra supplies, as if the act of preparation could intimidate fate into behaving.
Dax didn't say he was anxious.
Dax didn't have to.
The staff read it in the way he checked the same hallway twice. In the way his temper shortened by half a breath when someone stumbled over a report. In the way he stood closer to Chris than before, as if distance was an insult he could no longer bear.
Three months ago, they had found out it was a boy.
