Lyra counted the coins in the wine merchant's till while she pretended to admire his rings. Six coppers and a clipped silver. Not enough to bribe a palace groom, let alone a guard. She had come down to the market to price her way closer to the king, and the market had answered plainly: she could not afford a single step. The merchant leaned in, breath sour, and asked what a girl like her wanted with a man like him. She read him in three seconds. Wife he feared. Son who shamed him. A soft place under the jaw where flattery would land. She smiled and told him his son would come home by winter. He went pale. He gave her the clipped silver to make her leave. She took it and walked out knowing silver would never be the thing that put her on the throne. She went back to the room she rented above a tanner and pulled the bundle from under the floorboard. The stone egg sat heavy in her lap, cracked along its length, the shell hard as riverbed rock. Her mother had sworn it was real, and dead, and worth a kingdom to the right buyer. Lyra had never tried to sell it. A dead dragon's egg bought coin once. A rumor of a living one, held by a girl no one could place, bought something else. She wrapped the egg in linen and walked to the scribe who wrote petitions for the palace gate. She paid him the clipped silver to write one line in her hand: I have something the king's mages have been looking for since his grandfather's reign. She folded the page around a chip of the shell she had broken off with a hammer that morning. She gave it to a page boy with the last copper and told him which steward to find. By dusk a rider in palace colors was at the tanner's door, asking for the woman with no name. She let him wait a full minute before she opened it. She had no title yet. She had a summons.