Chapter 332 --332
Maybe they had been. It was not lost on her — not *me*, she had to remind herself sometimes, this was bigger than me — that the palace itself seemed to exhale when she walked in. Like a building that had been holding its breath.
She walked the length of the hall alone.
That was the tradition — the future emperor walking the ceremonial path unattended, which was supposed to symbolize something about solitary authority and individual destiny and several other concepts that the court’s philosophers had written extensively about and that Elara found moderately interesting as ideas and not particularly relevant right now. She walked it because it was the correct thing to do, and because she walked it well, and because there was something she understood about the value of a room watching a person move through it with complete composure.
She reached the dais.
The High Priest was waiting.
He was an old man — old in the way that men become old when they have spent their entire lives inside institutions that protect them from consequence, smooth-faced and well-fed and carrying the particular confidence of someone who had performed this ceremony before and understood himself to be, in this specific moment, the most important person in the room.
He did not want to do this.
She could see it. Not loudly — he was too professional for loud — but it was there in the precise arrangement of his expression, the slight over-correctness of his posture, the way his hands moved around the crown with just a fraction more ceremony than the moment required. He was a man doing something he objected to while performing the appearance of a man who did not object to anything. He had objected to her, she knew, through three separate back-channel communications to three separate noble houses in the two days since the succession announcement. He had called her ascension irregular. He had used the word *unprecedented* in a tone that made it mean something closer to *unacceptable*.
And yet here he were. Here his legs were, bending into a bow. Here his hands were, lifting the crown.
Because the document was real — or real enough — and the witness had been convincing — or convincing enough — and she was standing on this dais in this hall with this much preparation behind her and this many people watching, and the accumulated weight of all of that left him with very few options that did not involve consequences he was not prepared to accept.