Chapter 20: Palpatine Ascends — The Move Arthur Predicted

The messenger came at midmorning.

Arthur had been in the palace's east wing, in a small room the Naboo had cleared for him with the particular consideration of people who understood that grief required privacy, seated at a writing table that held nothing but his own folded hands. He had not slept. He was not trying to sleep. He was doing the thing he had learned in the years after too many campaigns — simply being still, letting the night's accumulated weight settle through him at its own rate, not accelerating or resisting the process. Grief processed quickly was grief processed badly. He had paid for that lesson enough times to have absorbed it entirely.

The knock was Captain Panaka's — three precise strikes, the cadence of a man who respected thresholds.