Chris had expected parliament to be worse.
Not blood-on-marble worse, Saha saved that kind of drama for funerals and coups, but the familiar kind: nobles circling the throne like they owned it, smelling Dax's absence and deciding it was their civic duty to test how much of the crown Chris could hold alone.
They tried.
Of course they tried.
They praised the king's response in Alamina with suspicious enthusiasm before pivoting exactly where Sahir had warned them to - resource allocation, domestic strain, and 'accountability,' all disguised as concern. They tried to make it sound as if helping Alamina meant abandoning Saha. They tried to make it sound as if 'stability' was something the crown owed them personally.
Chris let them talk.
He let them get comfortable inside their own speeches.
And then he gutted the argument with math.
