Mary: “You say, ‘James, go and find me a seat in the council.’ And off he goes like a girl that’s been asked to fetch the laundry.”
“It wasn’t as easy as that,” says James.
Mary says, “How would you know?”
Seats on the council are, for the large part, in the gift of knights, of high priests and of the Man in White himself. A deficient handful of electors, if pressured from above, can be relied upon to do as they’re told.
James had got him a lower ring seat. The Purple Knight’s domain, they would not have let him have it had high priest Wyatt not said yes, if the Man in White had not said yes.

He had sent James to the city to explore the unknown territories that were the knight’s intentions. To decipher what lied beneath his weaselly smirk, “Am but a servant, dear Master.”
Now he knows. “The Crimson Knight,” James says, “is certain that the Purple Knight found and hid the Great Spear, and he believes that you know how to find it”.