Every Inch a King

VIII

Along with a suitable escort, I rode out of Fushe-Kuqe with Max and Essad Pasha the next morning. The Shqipetari in the port seemed remarkably indifferent to their new sovereign’s departure. Well, one sweeper did wave as I rode by. I think he waved. He might just have had something in his eye.

The Land of the Eagle has some stunningly majestic scenery. Shqiperi is not a very large kingdom. The landscape is large, though, large enough to dwarf mere mortals and their works. Roads seem nothing more than thin lines drawn across that immensity. Well, the fanciest roads in Shqiperi are narrow, rutted dirt tracks, which has something to do with it. But the fanciest modern Schlepsigian carriageway would seem lost and tiny amongst those mountains.

They rise row on row, tier on tier, climbing halfway up the sky and more. Till their midsections, they are the pale green of meadows and grainfields. Then the dark green of pines and firs takes over, then the gray of bare rock, and then dazzling white snow. That that snow on those jagged peaks reminds one-this one, at least-of a shark’s teeth is perhaps better not dwelt upon. I certainly tried not to dwell on it, but I didn’t have much luck.

No wonder dragons live in those mountains. The country is made for them. The wonder is that people live there. North and south, east and west, men with crossbows were watching us. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel their eyes on the back of my neck.

“You must not be sorry to walk away from rule over a land like this,” I remarked to Essad Pasha.

He gave me an odd look. Of course he was sorry to walk away from rule. To his way of thinking, only an idiot wouldn’t be. He would cheerfully have thrown me in that group if I hadn’t cowed him. After a couple of heartbeats, he took the meaning I’d intended. “Yes, the Shqipetari can be difficult,” he said. “They would have stuck more knives in our backs if they weren’t so busy stabbing one another.”

His wave encompassed that awe-inspiring landscape. Despite the sunfire flash off the jewels in his rings, he made me see the mountains and, here and there in the distance, the villages that perched on them like scabs on a mangy hound. Every house was a fortress, not to ward the men and women from the ravages of the Hassockian Empire-of which there were plenty-but to protect them from their own kind.

Shqiperi is the land of the blood feud. Lokrians have things they call blood feuds. So do Torinans. The Hassocki claim them, too. But they’re all amateurs. The Shqipetari, now…The Shqipetari mean it.

If someone from your clan has killed someone from my clan, my whole clan has an obligation to kill someone from your clan for the sake of vengeance. It can be-it often is-someone who hasn’t the least idea some hotheaded distant cousin of his has landed him in a small-scale war. That doesn’t make him any less dead when my clansmate happens to come upon him on a road or lies in wait for him behind a rock. And then, of course, his clan being the most recently injured party, my kinsmen go in fear by day or night till one of them lies bleeding-or sometimes two or three.

These feuds go on for years, for generations, for centuries. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them go back to the days before the ancient Aeneans brought the Dalmatians to heel. Conquerors come and conquerors go, but feuds drag on forever.

“I should do something about that,” I said.

Essad Pasha laughed out loud. I glowered at him. Max coughed and touched the hilt of his sword. Essad Pasha stopped laughing more abruptly than he’d started. “I crave your pardon, your Highness,” he said. “And I wish you good luck.”

The blood feud flourishes in Shqiperi to this day. But then, I-alas!-am king there no more. Who knows what a golden age the Land of the Eagle lost in me!

After a couple of hours in the saddle-long enough for me to begin to feel how little riding I’d done lately-Essad Pasha waved again. Blinking against the refulgent glitter of those gemstones, I needed a moment to realize the castle toward which he pointed wasn’t one of the many the Shqipetari had built to protect themselves from themselves. This one was of rather better design, and had evidently gone up to protect foreigners from them.

“My shooting box,” Essad Pasha said with becoming immodesty. I raised an eyebrow. I waited. Max didn’t even have to cough. Essad Pasha made haste to correct himself: “Your shooting box, your Highness.”

“Thank you,” I replied, as if I’d expected nothing less. “I look forward to shooting dragons.” Max coughed then. Looking back on it, I suppose he had just a bit of reason for coughing, too. Yes, just a bit.

As those things go, the shooting box was comfortable enough. Despite the Albionese name, it did not have an Albionese cook, for which I thanked the Two Prophets and the Quadrate God impartially. Any kingdom that will boil bacon doesn’t deserve to be allowed anywhere near a fire.

Instead of an Albionese, the cook was an elderly Shqipetari woman with, I regret to report, a mustache not much smaller than mine. Her methods had peculiarities of their own. The salad she gave us, with olives and crumbled white cheese, was not much different from what we might have got in Lokris, though the dressing, with pungent wine vinegar and a strong infusion of mint, had a tang I’d never met anywhere else.

After that…Well, how do I explain it? Where an Albionese will throw anything this side of his mother into boiling water, a Shqipetar will fling it into bubbling oil. Maybe this has to do with how the two folk fought off besiegers in years gone by. Or maybe the Shqipetari try to imitate the wild dragons of their mountains. I don’t know why they do it. No one can doubt that they do it.

It’s not all bad. Fried capon, such as we had that night, can be quite tasty. (It can also come dripping enough grease to keep a carriage from squeaking for a year.) Fried beefsteak, on the other hand, is the first step toward making leather, and the less said of fried mutton, the better.

No one will complain of fried potatoes with plenty of salt. The Shqipetari prefer bread made from coarsely ground maize flour to the usual sort made of wheat. They fry that, too, after baking it. The result would ballast a three-masted ship of the line. It stays with a mere mortal for days, if not for weeks.

They fry okra. Having said that, I draw a merciful veil of silence.

Our supper came with a bottle of brandy made from mountain plums and, by the potency, a good helping of mountain lightning, too. Essad Pasha ceremoniously poured glasses of the stuff for himself, Max, and me. I waited to see if he would take care of that the usual way. Followers of the Quadrate God may have as many women as they please, but they aren’t supposed to drink. To my mind, this demonstrates the fundamental falsity of their faith. Name me a man with as many women as he thinks he wants who doesn’t need to drink now and again.

Of course, some who reverence the Quadrate God are no better than they have to be. (I might say the same of some who reverence the Two Prophets. I might, but I won’t.) Essad Pasha handled things with catlike aplomb. He crooked the little finger of his right hand like an Albionese taking hold of a teacup. Then he dipped the crooked finger into his glass. He brought up one sparkling drop of brandy on the end of his finger and ceremoniously flicked it away: no, he wouldn’t drink that drop. The rest? Well, the rest was between him and the Quadrate God.

You don’t always see that ritual. In the lower ranks of the Hassocki army, as in the lower ranks of any army, soldiers drink first and worry-or, more likely, don’t worry-about it later. My own pinkie, and Max’s, also bent, also dipped. We flicked. We drank.

After the first sip, my eyes crossed. Lightning in a bottle indeed. I eyed the glass respectfully, wondering why the brandy hadn’t charred through it.

Max, however, sent Essad Pasha a reproachful stare. “You ought to fire your cellarer,” he remarked in his usual sepulchral tones.

“Oh? For what reason, Captain?” Essad Pasha sounded wary.

“Why, for watering the spirits, of course.” Max drained his glass without so much as a blink. It was not a small glass. No, not at all. He wasn’t pretending here, the way he had with Tasos.

Essad Pasha goggled. Then he tried to do the same thing. He choked. He spluttered. He sprayed brandy down the front of his uniform tunic. Max took it all in stride. Why not? He pours swords down his throat, by the Prophets’ curly whiskers. Pretending not to notice Essad Pasha’s problem, he poured himself another glass and drank that down, too.

I love Max. Whenever I can stand him, I love him.

I also know better than to get into a one-downsmanship contest with him. Aside from his scarred gullet, there’s more of him to soak up the spirits than there is of me. There’s more of Max than there is of almost anyone. A glance will tell you this. A glance should have told Essad Pasha. But no. Something-perverse pride, I suppose-made him try to drink along.

He did stop spraying spirits down his front. In short order, though, he started spilling them down his front instead. I hoped he would change his tunic before we went hunting the next morning. Any dragonfire within miles would send him up like a torch if he didn’t. For that matter, I was glad he didn’t choose to smoke.

He tried to tell me something. He raised his right hand, index finger extended as if to make a point. But his eyes glazed over and he started to snore. I wondered what to do with him. He wouldn’t be happy if he woke up in the dining room. Then again, after what he’d poured down, he wouldn’t be happy no matter where he woke up.

While I was still wondering, three stalwart Shqipetari silently slipped into the room. One took each booted foot; the third dealt with Essad Pasha’s forward end. They lugged him away with an ease that bespoke considerable practice. Maybe he didn’t need Max for an excuse to drink himself into a stupor.

One of the Shqipetari returned. “If the noble lords will please come with me…?” he said in oddly accented Hassocki.

I had no trouble getting up and walking: I’d been at least moderately moderate. Max ambled down the corridor without eight or twelve Shqipetari hauling him along, too. We shared a bedchamber. As he was my aide-de-camp and, presumably, bodyguard, I wasn’t surprised that the servants at the hunting box had arranged things so. I was surprised they’d found him a bed without a footboard. That saved him the trouble of sleeping curled up or diagonally, which he usually has to do.

“Well, between us, we’ve put Essad Pasha in his place,” I remarked as we undressed for the night.

“Ah, but will he remember in the morning?” Max replied.

“He won’t remember anything in the morning,” I said. “And what he does remember, he’ll want to forget.” Max scratched his head at that. After a moment, I scratched my head, too. Not even the (still uncrowned) King of Shqiperi could make meaning appear out of nothingness. I could make sleep appear, though. I lay down-and there it was.

Essad Pasha poured down cup after cup of thick, sweet, strong, muddy Hassocki-style coffee. It did wake him up, which only made him more poignantly aware of his state of crapulent decrepitude. His hand shook. He didn’t spill coffee on his tunic, though-he had a napkin draped over it this morning.

Max also seemed somewhat the worse for wear, but did manage to eat his-inevitably-fried eggs. I enjoyed mine. Essad Pasha’s sat on his plate, staring up at him. The whites of his eyes were almost as yellow as their yokes. He belched softly. Sometimes, among the Hassocki, a belch shows you’ve enjoyed a meal. Essad Pasha’s showed that his insides were as rebellious as the kingdoms of the Nekemte Peninsula.

“North and south, east and west…” he began, and belched again. He shuddered. “In any direction, in every direction, I am unwell.”

“Perhaps the hair of the dog that bit you,” Max said. After a moment, he added, “Perhaps the hair of the dog that bit me, too.”

“’Twas no dog bit me-’twas a viper,” Essad Pasha said. But then he brightened all the way up to suicidal. “Perhaps the scale of the snake would serve.”

He shouted to the servant who’d brought in breakfast, but flinched from the sound of his own voice. More quietly, he put his request to the man. In due course, a bottle and three glasses appeared. After flicking away the ritual drop, Essad Pasha and Max proceeded to have several scales apiece. I drank a bit, too-just to be sociable, you understand, and as a digestive aid.

Essad Pasha’s cheeks regained some color. Up till then, he’d looked as if he’d been staked out for vampires. He even toyed with his eggs, though he didn’t actually eat much. He said, “Now when we hunt the dragons, I may hope we catch them, and not the other way round.” Maybe he really had been suicidal, then. If a dragon caught him, he might not go out in a blaze of glory, but he would certainly make an ash of himself.

After breakfast, he showed us our weapons. No clockwork mechanism on these crossbows-they were hand-cranked, the way they all were till fifty years ago. With these, if we all shot our bolts and missed, it would be the dragon’s turn for quite a while after that.

On the other hand, the quarrels we shot would take the quarrel out of a dragon or anything else if they struck home. They were large and stout and heavy: rather like shooting Essad Pasha out of a crossbow, as a matter of fact, though they weren’t so blunt.

He sent me a sidelong glance as I picked up my crossbow and rather dubiously stared along it. “Your Highness’ marksmanship is renowned all through the Empire,” he remarked. “We shall rely on you today.”

“Of course we will,” Max said. What he didn’t say was, Now look at the mess you’ve got me into-and yourself, by the way. His eyebrows and the corners of his mouth were uncommonly eloquent, however.

If you can keep your head while all around you are losing theirs, you probably don’t understand the situation. Here I at least thought I did. I’d never shot this particular heavyweight monstrosity, but I did know what to do with a standard military crossbow…and the Hassocki Army had taught me. My marksmanship might not have been renowned all through the Empire, but I generally managed to frighten what I aimed at.

Then again, aiming at a dragon frightened me.

Essad Pasha pointed northward. “Do you see, your Highness? Dragons in their courting flight.”

By the way they spun and skipped and tumbled through the air, I had taken them for ravens. If they were that much bigger, then they were that much farther away-where that much meant a demon of a lot. And they were, for I saw one of them swoop behind a mountain peak. I could make a pretty fair guess about how far away that peak was. That made the dragons even bigger than I’d thought. Oh, joy, as Max would say.

Out tottered a white-mustached Shqipetari shepherd, a man who’d seen a better decade or six, leading a sheep with very little to look forward to. He tied it to an iron stake set securely in the ground, gave it a couple of tender pats on the head, and then cut its throat. Somehow, that spoke volumes to me about the way Shqiperi works.

The shepherd stumped away. The sheep lay there, twitching and bleeding. I suppose things could have been worse. If they hadn’t left it out for dragon bait, they probably would have fried its wool and served it up to Max and me as a delicacy of the countryside.

Another Shqipetar came out, this one a good deal younger and sprier. He bowed to me, then to Essad Pasha, and then to Max. That done, he began a chant of a sort I’d run into before. The language was different, but the rhythms were the same as the ones I heard whenever I put to sea. Eliphalet fry me for sheep’s wool if he wasn’t a weatherworker.

He knew his trade, too. He wasn’t as good as Stagiros, but who is? He was plenty good enough to send a strong breeze wafting northward.

Why he was wafting a strong breeze northward, I couldn’t have said. Essad Pasha could, and did: “We’d better take cover, your Highness. The dragons will scent blood soon.”

“Oh,” I said after a pause that, if not pregnant, was certainly out long past its bedtime. Everyone hears stories about how keen dragons’ noses are. In the days when knighthood was in flower, knights would have smelled even more like fertilizer than they did anyway if they hadn’t bathed before they hunted dragons. Their ladies, no doubt, would have appreciated that more if they’d bathed very often themselves. But foul hide seldom won fierce dragon, as someone probably didn’t say.

Still…Those dragons fluttering around that peak had to be miles away. Could a weatherworker send the scent of one sheep’s blood that far? Now that you mention it, yes. Watching, I could tell exactly when thoughts of courtship ended and thoughts of breakfast began. It was when the dragons started flying straight toward me.

“I really think we ought to take cover, your Highness,” Max said, in lieu of screaming, If we run for our lives now, maybe the dragon will eat the sheep instead of us.

A lot of what gets called courage is fear of looking like a coward in front of other people. Soldiers mostly don’t go forward because they’re wild to slaughter the bastards on the other side. They know the bastards on the other side are getting it in the neck from their generals, the same as they are themselves. But they don’t want to let their pals down, and they don’t want to be seen letting their pals down. Death before embarrassment! may not sound like an earth-shaking motto, but it’s won more battles than Eliphalet and no quarter! I ought to know. I’m no braver than I have to be; the proof is, I never had the nerve to run away.

And so, instead of doing what any sensible human being would do with several dragons bearing down on him-which is to say, vacating the premises as fast as ever I could-I hunkered down behind some boulders that would have done fine as cover against crossbowmen but were essentially useless against anything that could flame from above. They call this sport. I have another name for it-several other names, in fact. The mild ones are hotter than dragonfire. They go up from there.

“You have the privilege of the first shot, your Highness,” Essad Pasha murmured.

I was proud of myself. All I said was, “Thanks.”

One thing did go right in the next few minutes. Between their mountain and ours, the dragons had a disagreement about who would eat the sheep they’d scented. Being dragons, they settled it by fighting. People would have formed committees and alliances and taken much longer to come to the same conclusion: the largest, meanest one got to do what he wanted, while the rest flew off dreaming of being the largest, meanest one the next time they smelled something good to eat.

The winner was an impressive beast, silvery below and a metallic blue-green above. His wings were the wings a bat might have if a bat were the size of a dragon. The size of a big dragon, I should say-this fellow was to dragons as Max is to ordinary mortals. I wished I hadn’t thought of it quite that way; it made me feel much too ordinarily mortal myself.

As the dragon drew closer, I got a good look at his red, glowing eyes. What I saw there was a nasty blend of raw hunger and old sin. I looked over to my left to make sure Essad Pasha hadn’t suddenly sprouted wings. But no, there he sprawled beside me. What I saw in his eyes was a nasty blend of raw nerves and old sin. We could kill the dragon. Oh, yes. But the dragon could kill us, too. And the closer it got, the more forcefully it reminded me of that.

“Soon, your Highness,” Essad Pasha murmured.

Much too soon, I thought, but no help for it. If I didn’t try to shoot the great worm, I would be reckoned a coward till I got flamed and eaten-a brief but unpleasant interval. If I shot and missed, I would be reckoned a thumbfingered dunderhead till I got flamed and eaten-a brief interval that also left something to be desired. There was one other possibility-if I could bring it off.

When I popped up from behind the boulders, the wind from the dragon’s wings all but knocked me off my feet. He was a weatherworker of sorts himself. He was also wise in the ways of men. He wouldn’t have grown to that size without being hunted before.

His head swung toward me. His great jaws fell open. He was going to flame. He was going to, but I squeezed the trigger first.

That cursed crossbow came closer to knocking me off my feet than the dragonwind had. Any crossbow worth the name will kick. You don’t shoot a bolt without its pushing back at you. This miserable weapon shot an extra heavy bolt, and shot it especially hard. I felt as if a mule or a Shqipetar or some other stubborn creature with hard feet had booted me in the shoulder.

As I staggered back, Essad Pasha and Max sprang to their feet. They were going to do what they could to keep me breathing so they could call me a thumbfingered dunderhead at their leisure. When I didn’t hear their crossbows snap, I thought we were all doomed.

Then Essad Pasha cried, “Well shot, your Highness! Oh, well shot!” He threw himself into my arms and kissed me on both cheeks.

I recovered my balance and tried to recover from Essad Pasha. The dragon was thrashing its life away on the mountainside. It never even got a taste of the sheep. I hadn’t seen where my quarrel hit. I still couldn’t see where it had hit.

“Right down the throat,” Max said, sounding more than suitably impressed. Considering what he knew of right down the throat, I liked his accolade better than Essad Pasha’s kisses.

“In my time, I have seen many marvelous things,” Essad Pasha said, though his eyes denied it. He went on, “I don’t believe I have ever seen anything to match a dragon slain so. People will talk of this for the next hundred years. North and south, east and west, they will.”

I’d come to Shqiperi to give people things more interesting to talk about than any mere dragon. Telling Essad Pasha as much, though, struck me as…inexpedient. Instead, I waved toward the dragon as if I’d practiced that shot for years and brought it off twice a day in Vyzance. “Let’s wait till it stops wiggling, and then we’ll see what we’ve got.”

“Just as you say, your Highness, so shall it be.” Essad Pasha was eating out of my hand now. A less attractive picture would be hard to imagine. I surreptitiously wiped my palm against my trouser leg.

Waiting for a dragon to die takes almost as much patience as waiting for Dooger and Cark to smile while they pay back wages. I wondered whether the other flying worms would pay us a call while this one perished, but they kept their distance. Maybe the scent of its death agonies reached them and persuaded them they might do well to shop at another meat market.

Slowly, slowly, the fire in the dragon’s eyes went out. I hoped the same held true for the fire in its belly. Its blood smoked on the ground. When at last it lay still, I stepped out from behind the sheltering boulders. Essad Pasha and Max followed my lead.

As I walked past one of those smoking patches, I stooped and dipped my finger in the dragon’s blood. “What are you doing, your Highness?” Essad Pasha asked, curiously but respectfully.

Max’s cough was anything but respectful. Witte is a Schlepsigian grand duchy; he’d grown up on the same legends I had. Who doesn’t remember the story of What’s-his-name, the fellow they made the opera about, who tasted dragon’s blood and could suddenly understand the speech of birds and beasts?

The dragon’s blood was burning my finger. “Just-wondering,” I told Essad Pasha, who’d grown up on a different set of legends. I brushed my finger against my mouth. The dragon’s blood burned my lips and tongue, too. I didn’t hear any squeaky or hissy or chirpy voices.

I’ll never go to that opera again. A vole or a starling probably hasn’t got anything interesting to say anyhow.

“Take a trophy, your Highness,” Essad Pasha urged as we walked up to the enormous, twisted corpse. A trophy? I wondered. In Leon, they fight bulls. They don’t give the bulls swords, so the fights aren’t what you’d call even, but they do fight them. And if the human fighter (the killer, he’s called in Leonese, an uncommonly honest language) does well, they award him the bull’s ears and its tail, those being its most useless parts. (I don’t know what they give a bull that kills its man-his brains, probably.)

Dragons have no ears. This one did have a tail, of course, but it was about three times as long as Max. I drew my belt knife and worried off one of the metallic blue-green upper scales. It was not quite the size of the hand Essad Pasha was eating out of (I wished that hadn’t occurred to me). I held it out to him, saying, “Have a mount set in the back of this. I will wear it over my heart henceforward, in memory of the day.” Insults aren’t the only place where Hassocki overwrite their dialogue.

He bowed as low as his years and his belly would let him. “It shall be as you say, your Highness,” he told me.

I’d heard things like that more often since coming to Shqiperi than in my whole life before then. I knew exactly what that meant. It meant I should have decided to become a king a long time ago.

Instead of feeding the dragon, that sheep gave us supper. Fried mutton again, with fried parsnips to go with it. They didn’t fry the wool; I will say that for them. They didn’t fry the coffee, either. I wonder why not. Because they hadn’t thought of it, I suppose. If a copy of my tale ever gets back to Shqiperi, it may give them ideas.

Just what they need.

We didn’t drink so deep as we had the night before. Two debauches like that in a row, and I think Essad Pasha could have donated his liver to medical magecraft. As things were, he kept praising me. “I’ve never seen a shot like that,” he said. “Never, not in all my hunts. Never heard of one like that, either. North and south, east and west, I don’t think anybody’s ever heard of one like that.”

I was modest. “Nothing to it,” I said.

He choked on his liquid fire. Max almost did, but not quite. But then, Max has heard me before. Essad Pasha was still getting used to his new sovereign. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we go on to Peshkepiia for your coronation.”

“The harem is arranged, then?” I hoped I didn’t sound too eager.

“Your Highness, it is,” Essad Pasha assured me, “and I apologize again for the delay. In a way, it’s almost a pity. I’d like to see that shot again.”

So would I, I thought: one more thing Essad Pasha didn’t need to know.

I was getting out of my clothes and into my nightshirt when a scrawny cat wandered into the bedroom. The shooting box was full of mice. Several cats ambled through it. If they didn’t catch mice, they didn’t eat. They were all on the skinny side, as if to say, I’d rather be free than work hard. Cats are cats, all over the world.

This one gave me a green-eyed stare and said, “Call you a king? Ha! Not likely!”

I heaved a boot at it. Even a cat may look at a king, but the proverb doesn’t say one thing about badmouthing him.

We rode for Peshkepiia, all five syllables of it, the next morning. The horses didn’t have a thing to say. Maybe I’d imagined the snide crack from the cat the night before. Maybe I had-except I hadn’t. I could still feel the sting of the dragon’s blood on my lips and tongue.

When the fellow in the legends heard animals talk, they told him things he needed to hear. What did I get? Some mouse-breathed, mangy feline with an overblown sense of its own importance. (Is there any other kind of cat? Give me leave to doubt it.) Just my luck.

If the horses were quiet, Essad Pasha wasn’t. He kept going on about what a splendid coronation it would be and how many diplomats would be there from the great powers and the powers that wished they were great. Listening to that was a lot more pleasant than getting the glove from a cream-stealing tabby.

We rode into a village at midmorning. Essad Pasha shouted to the locals in Hassocki. “Do you speak Shqipetari?” I asked him.

He looked at me as if I’d asked him if he ate with his fingers. No-he looked at me as if I’d asked him if he picked his nose and then ate with his fingers. “Those barbarous gruntings and mooings and fartings? I should hope not!” he said, sounding as insulted as the cat about my becoming king.

Still…“If I’m to rule them, I suppose I ought to learn to talk with them in their own language,” I said.

“Suit yourself, your Highness. I’ve ruled them for years, and I never did.” Pride clanged in Essad Pasha’s voice. “I rule. They are ruled. Let them learn my speech.”

These Shqipetari, at least, understood Hassocki and spoke it well enough. One of them led us to the village square. That was a lovely little place, shaded by plum and pear trees, with a fountain laughing in the middle of it and one of the Quadrate God’s low, modest shrines off to one side. Men with bushy mustaches and spotless white headscarves sat on backless benches and drank coffee from a shop by the temple-you could smell the roasting beans-and passed the amber mouthpieces of water pipes from one to the next. Unsanitary, yes, but charming.

Our guide found a bench for us. Then he shouted in Shqipetari. A woman fetched us black bread and honey and yogurt with fruit stirred into it (a Hassocki dish originally, now it’s popular all through the Nekemte Peninsula) and small cups of Hassocki-style coffee and even smaller cups of brandy distilled from plums and lightning. Nothing fried. I could hardly believe it.

The locals already in the square let us eat in peace, proving they’d never had anything to do with scribes. Only after the woman had taken away the tray on which she’d brought our lunch did one of them approach us. He looked like a bandit who’d done well enough at his trade to retire from it at a fairly early age, and stood waiting with dignity for me to acknowledge him.

I nodded, I hoped politely. “You wish?” I asked.

“You will be king? King of all Shqiperi?” By the way he said it, all Shqiperi might have been a great and grand place, not a couple of wrinkles on the Nekemte Peninsula’s hairy backside.

Max coughed. I knew what that meant. The villager, fortunately, didn’t. I nodded again. “That’s so, yes.”

He looked me up and down. His eyes were as hard and shiny and unwinking as a bird of prey’s. “By what right should you be king?”

Max coughed again, this time in some alarm. Essad Pasha growled like an angry bear. I held up a hand and murmured to him. He raised an elegantly pruned eyebrow, then reached into his belt pouch and handed me the dragon scale. I held it up so the Shqipetar could see exactly what it was. He still didn’t blink, but those hard, dark eyes widened a hair’s breadth. “By this right,” I told him as I rose from the bench. “And by this right as well.” I flipped forward and started walking on my hands.

He hadn’t expected that. He said something harsh in his own language, then went back to Hassocki: “North and south, east and west, why do you do such an undignified thing?”

“To show you I will turn Shqiperi upside down if I have to, to make this kingdom go the way it should.” From my own upside-down vantage point, I saw all the men in the square gawking at me. A man who would be king sitting around drinking coffee and brandy was one thing. A man who would be king waving his boots in the air was something else entirely.

I bounced to my feet again. This takes a push with the arms and a snap of the legs-and a deal of practice as well, with luck on a soft mat. You will fall the first time you try it, and the fifth, and probably the tenth, too. But once you have it down, it’s a striking effect. I brushed my dirty palms on my trouser legs.

“You are…not an ordinary prince,” the Shqipetar said.

“Indeed not.” I struck a pose. “I am an extraordinary prince, a much superior type.” Max coughed again, but I can’t for the life of me fathom why. In all the history of the world, has there ever been a prince more extraordinary than I?

If I hadn’t convinced the Shqipetar, I’d confused him, which often serves just as well. He bowed and withdrew, as one might withdraw from the presence of a large and possibly dangerous animal. I smiled after him. For some reason, that only made him withdraw faster.

In a low voice, Essad Pasha said, “I didn’t know you could do that, your Highness.”

I smiled at him, too. “Well, your Excellency, now you do,” I said. Let him make whatever he pleased of that. He didn’t make anything of it, which pleased me.

The prosperous ruffian who’d come up to take my measure sat down with his cronies and started talking. Every so often, he would look over toward me. I always knew when he did, and was never looking in his direction then. There is a knack to keeping an eye on people without letting them know you’re doing it. I had the knack. He didn’t. The more he talked, the more impressed he seemed. I smiled once more, this time only to myself.

After that, my party rode on toward Peshkepiia, the capital from which I would rule Shqiperi. More than one traveler from Peshkepiia to Fushe-Kuqe, seeing so many armed men riding toward him, took us for a bandit troop and fled. More than one herdsman in the fields and meadows did the same.

That made Essad Pasha smile. “Already fear of your might goes before you, your Highness,” he said.

“Only evildoers should fear me,” I said, and glared so hard at Max that he didn’t let out a peep.

I puzzled Essad Pasha, who said, “But, your Highness, anyone who opposes you is an evildoer by the very nature of things.”

Anyone who opposes you is an evildoer-not because I was always right, but because I was always king. No wonder kings get an exaggerated sense of their own importance. Anyone who opposes you… Yes, I liked that as much as any other king would have.

With the sun setting ahead of us, Essad Pasha pointed to the city its golden rays illuminated. “There is Peshkepiia, your Highness. May your rule be long and glorious.”

“May it be so,” I answered. At last, at last, I was coming into my own!