Amrela is the counselor Queen Lamenrae trusts before any other, and the one the rest of the Istori court has learned to route through if they want a thing actually done. She is older than the queen by a wide margin and was already a fixture of the household when Lamenrae was a girl. When Istor XXVI died and the eastern claim had to be made into a working state in a matter of months, it was Amrela who made it work: the appointments, the grain accounts, the marriage of old families to a new and irregular throne. Lamenrae fights the war. Amrela runs the country the war is fought from.
It was also Amrela who built the case against Taoinor. In the chaos after the king's death she gathered the servants who had been near the chambers, found the cupbearer who would later swear the wine had not smelled right, set the accounts of that night against one another until they pointed west, and laid the whole of it before Lamenrae as a finished thing. Her court knows her as the queen's hard sense, the steady one who keeps a grieving sovereign governing when grief alone would let the realm rot. The Winterwood reforms move because Amrela schedules them around the campaigns. The human steel arrives because Amrela arranged the credit. She does not raise her voice and she is rarely wrong, and a great many Istori sleep easier believing she is at the queen's shoulder.
There is one thing about her that the perceptive find faintly strange, and they generally talk themselves out of it. Amrela has never, in all the long argument over Taoinor, treated his guilt as a question. Lamenrae arrived at her certainty through grief; her hawks arrived through hatred; her doves arrived nowhere and are uneasy about it. Amrela was simply certain from the first hour, before the witnesses she herself would gather had said a word, and she has held that certainty so evenly for so long that it reads as steadiness rather than as the odd thing it is. A counselor who knows a thing before the evidence for it exists is either the wisest person in the room or the one who already had the answer. Her court has decided she is the wisest. It is the more comfortable conclusion.