“Thank you very much, gentlemen,” I said. Two thousand years ago, some Aenean Emperor was probably telling his scribes the same thing. No doubt it meant then what it means now. Go away, you nuisances. You’ve bothered me long enough. The Aenean Emperor could have made heads roll if his scribes hadn’t listened to him. All at once, I realized I could do the same.

But my pack did go away. Life is full of disappointments. There are, I suppose, bigger ones. I suppose.

Where I watched the scribes go with a certain bloodthirsty regret, Essad Pasha knew nothing but relief as they headed down toward the Consolidated Crystal office. “You handled them very well, your Highness,” he said. “Better than I expected, in fact.”

“Oh?” I said, and the air around me got ten degrees colder. Maybe fifteen. Up went my left eyebrow. That expression looks like I’ve practiced it in the mirror. There’s a reason for that: I have. I’ve practiced it for a reason, too: it works. “And why is it better than you expected, your Excellency?”

He went pale again. Nice to know he was convinced I meant business. “Me-Me-Meaning no offense,” he finally got out. “But they-they are infidels and foreigners, out to trip you up.”

He wasn’t wrong, though they would have been just as ghoulishly gleeful to trip up a follower of the Two Prophets. I said, “If we Hassocki are not more clever than foreign infidels, the Quadrate God will not smile upon the four corners of our land.” By the way the Hassockian Empire has been shrinking for the past 250 years, the Quadrate God hasn’t smiled much lately. I forbore from mentioning that.

And Essad Pasha, out here in what had been the remotest corner of the Empire and now would have to sink or swim on its own, nodded till his jowl-wobbling really did rival Bob’s. “Every word a truth worthy to be inscribed in letters of gold,” he said. When the compliments turn flowery, you know you’ve got your man just where you want him.

Knowing that, I changed the subject: “When had you planned to hold the coronation ceremony?” Behind me, Max inhaled sharply and started to cough.

Not being acquainted with my comrade (save as someone who almost took his head: a limited and one-sided relationship), Essad Pasha didn’t know that meant Max thought I was getting onto thin ice. “Your Highness, I had thought to bring you into Peshkepiia in two or three days’ time for the ceremony, with perhaps a dragon hunt in the hills beforehand, if that should please you,” he said.

“A dragon hunt would please me well enough,” I said-not the smallest understatement of my career. There aren’t many places outside the Nekemte Peninsula-and not so many in it, not in these modern times-where you can hunt dragons in the wild. That the dragons are also hunting you adds a certain spice to the sport. But I couldn’t let Essad Pasha off easily, and so I asked, “Why the delay?”

Now he coughed, with a delicacy Max couldn’t have matched. “Please forgive me, your Highness, but it was only yesterday when I learned you were arriving. I confess to not yet having fully recruited the requisite royal harem.”

“The-royal harem?” I echoed, and Essad Pasha nodded. A pace behind me and a pace to my left, Max didn’t cough, but his breathing picked up. I said, “Well, in that case, your Excellency, I think the small delay may be excused.”

Essad Pasha bowed. “You are gracious.” His smile had a certain I-don’t-know-what about it. Well, actually, I do know what. It was a leer.

Now, harems are right out as far as followers of the Two Prophets go. Eliphalet had only one wife. Zibeon had only one wife. The Goddess is only one Wife. I don’t see how the rule could be any plainer than that. Rule or no rule, though, my coreligionists have been doing what they wanted to do and what they thought they could get away with doing for a good many years-or should I say a good many centuries?

If I’d spoken to a prelate, I think I could have got a dispensation. I was, after all, impersonating a personage who followed the Quadrate God. His followers have silly, cumbersome rules of their own, but not about wives. Their only rule there is if they can afford it, they can do it-and do it, and do it, and do it.

To this very day, the Hassockian Atabeg’s harem is legendary for the beauty and variety of its inhabitants. Every so often, some madman inflamed by lust will try to sneak in. The Hassocki don’t kill such adventurers when they catch them. No, indeed. They let them go-minus a few important bits. Nobody tries to sneak into the harem more than once.

I didn’t suppose Essad Pasha could find me that sort of quality in this backwoods excuse for a kingdom. But I did want to make sure he would be diligent. “I look forward to, ah, evaluating the recruits,” I said.

“I shall do everything I can to give satisfaction, your Highness. And so will the girls, I assure you.” Yes, Essad Pasha definitely leered.

“You lucky bastard,” Max hissed when the erstwhile governor of Shqiperi turned away. My mother and father were married. To each other, in fact. Except for that, I wasn’t inclined to argue with him.

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.