The Regent’s seal went onto the inventory before the lid came off. Tallow had insisted on it, and Idrin had agreed without argument, because a clerk who opened a crate without first sealing its contents to the Chamber’s own wax would have been making a story out of nothing, and a story was the one thing the Hold could not afford to be handed by the Chancery.
So the seal went on first. Idrin pressed his signet into the warm red wax on the inventory-sheet with his right hand, slowly, the ring of the Saelmar arms cutting a neat impression into the paper. He did not glance at the impression once it was done. He set the sheet down beside the crate and said, quietly, “There. Now it is ours, and so is whatever it says.”
“It was ours from the day it arrived,” said Tallow, who had the minute-book open and was writing the date. “The Chancery only forgot to tell us.”
Ysra stood at the crate’s corner with her hand on the lid and counted the nails. There were twelve, all square and new, each one set into the wood with a single blow. She had counted them every night for twenty-two days, and she had not once seen anyone touch them, and yet she had found on the third night that one of them had been loosened and then driven home again, very neatly, by someone who did not want the Hold to know. She had not…
