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!