The Royal Palace was not so much a building as a city in its own right, walled away from the rest of Gaalen behind a high curtain of pale stone and patrolled at every gate by men of the Royal Guard in the sapphire blue and silver livery the house had worn for more than two hundred years.
Henri had grown up inside those walls and still sometimes forgot, when he was outside them, just how much of the kingdom's wealth had been pulled inward across the centuries to make the palace what it was.
The Grand Court dominated the southern side of the inner walls with not only a vast, echoing chamber that could hold hundreds of barons, more than a dozen counts and the dukes of the Ruling Council for the rare occasions when the king summoned every lord in the realm, but also the quiet halls of power where the Ruling Council met as well as their personally appointed ministers who oversaw the administration of the vast kingdom of Gaal.
