The court knew before breakfast.
That was the thing about palaces — they were essentially very large, very expensive organisms with their own nervous system, and the nervous system processed information faster than any individual part of it could account for. Nobody had made an announcement. Nobody had posted anything or called anyone together or said a single official word about what had happened the previous evening.
And yet.
The kitchen knew because Madame Tilda had come down at an unusual hour requesting specific things — the things Elara preferred, prepared the way Elara preferred them — with the expression of a woman who had information she was not going to share and did not need to share because the request itself was the information.
