The Queen's Second Seal
When the clasp tore from the queen's riding cloak, Lysa expected to find loose thread. A silver seal fell into her hand. Across the chamber, an order bearing the same crest instructed the northern guard to abandon the gate before dawn. The queen's own seal lay beside her untouched wine.
Lysa had sworn to protect her sovereign. The oath offered no instructions for discovering that the sovereign might be lying. She placed the second seal between them. Queen Irena looked at it without surprise. Her father had commissioned two, she said: one for the crown, one for the person trusted to act when the crown could not. The second had vanished the night he died.
Outside, the trumpets called the first watch. Irena could denounce the order, but the commander carrying it controlled the gate. Lysa proposed a smaller deception. They pressed both seals into warm wax. One crest showed a tiny break in the lion's tail. She had seen that flaw on the queen's childhood letters, long before anyone had noticed it on military orders.
At the gate, Irena asked the commander to authenticate the order with the seal he claimed never to have touched. He reached instinctively for his inner pocket. His guards saw the movement. Lysa opened the cloak and showed them the genuine second seal, recovered from the lining where the dying king had hidden it. The gate remained closed. Later, Irena offered her a place on the council. Lysa accepted on one condition: the next oath would permit questions.