Chapter 19: Elara Addresses the Small Council — Uninvited

The procedural mechanism was called Right of Witnessed Concern.

Elizabeth had found it on a Tuesday morning six weeks ago, in the third of the inheritance law volumes, buried in a footnote regarding the obligations of the Crown toward subjects of good standing who possessed direct knowledge of threats to the realm's security. The footnote referenced a statute from the reign of Aegon the Third, invoked twice in the subsequent century and a half and apparently forgotten thereafter. The language was precise, legalistic, and airtight in the particular way of old laws that no one has bothered to close because no one expects them to be used.

She had made a note of it then, in the margin of a different document entirely, in numbers that looked like page references and meant something else.