By the time Chris reached eight and a half months, the palace had reorganized itself around him with the seamless ruthlessness of an institution that understood two facts very clearly.
First, the future second child of Saha would arrive when it pleased.
Second, if anyone made that more difficult for Chris than it already was, Dax would become a problem of national scale.
So Dax had taken leave. Actual leave.
Or something close enough to it that parliament had learned to survive limited exposure to his direct interference while he remained in the private wing, conducting only the meetings he absolutely refused to hand off and glaring at everyone else as though they had personally designed the concept of late pregnancy.
At that exact moment, one such meeting had just ended.
