With all eyes on him, Max withdrew the blade, conscientiously dried it on a napkin, and sheathed it once more. Then he took a skewer of chunks of fried meat. Everyone in the large room inhaled at once. I was glad to be quick; otherwise, there might not have been any air left. He pulled off the first gobbet with his fingers and popped it into his mouth. Everyone exhaled, a bit regretfully. The show was over-for the moment, anyhow.

“Truly, your Highness, your aide-de-camp is a man of parts,” Essad Pasha remarked in the much too calm tones a man will use only when trying his best not to show how shaken or impressed he is.

“I would not deny it for a moment, your Excellency. Some of those parts, however, are wont to be more useful than others.” If the slightest of edges came into my own voice, well, who could blame me for that?

Max bowed low, first to me and then to Essad Pasha, as if we’d paid him undoubted compliments. “I seek to show what any who oppose his Highness may expect,” he said.

Essad Pasha bowed almost as low as Max had, which, considering the belly hindering him, wasn’t easy. “That is well said,” he boomed. “North and south, east and west, that is very well said.” He turned to me. “You are fortunate in your servants.”

“Yes, I know,” I said blandly. Max coughed. I hadn’t expected anything else. “Good thing you didn’t do that with the sword in there,” I murmured.

“Not like I haven’t done it before,” he answered, and I knew that was true. “I spit red when it happens, so I don’t spit for a while then, that’s all.”

“Such a gentleman,” I told him. His bow was even deeper than the last one.

Count Potemkin came shambling up to me then, a glass in each hand, his eyes glittering, his earth-apple of a nose as red as if it grew on a tree. “You gave the lout from the Dual Monarchy his comeuppance,” he said in elegant, accentless Narbonese. Most Tverski nobles are fluent in it, which is fortunate, for it saves other people the bother of learning their language. Tverski has more cases than Caledonia Yard, and a battery of choking and gargling noises that make a man speaking it sound as if he’s trying to strangle himself.

I speak good Narbonese myself, so I understood him. Halim Eddin, however, was more limited. “Do you speak Schlepsigian?” I asked Count Potemkin in that language.

“Only if I must,” he answered grumpily. In Schlepsigian, he had a Tverski accent, and a strong one. He translated his comment. It sounded much ruder than it had before. Maybe it lost-or gained-something in the translation. Or maybe Narbonese puts a veneer of false politeness on almost anything. Not by accident is it the language of diplomacy…for now. As a good Schlepsigian patriot, I dare hope a change is coming.

But that is by the way. I had to find some diplomatic (oh, well) way to respond. “I am who I am,” I said, with which not even the bibulous Potemkin could disagree. “I have the duty to defend myself and what is to be my kingdom.”

“Your kingdom? Pah!” Count Potemkin said. Some Tverskis make a sport of being rude. Maybe Potemkin was one of those. Or maybe he was drunk. Then again, maybe he’d seen more of Shqiperi than I thought and was giving his honest opinion. You never can tell. Whatever the answer to that riddle, he went on, “Leave Vlachia and Belagora alone, and Tver will not trouble you.”

“How generous!” I exclaimed, wondering if he could recognize sarcasm (at that moment, I wasn’t altogether convinced he could recognize himself). But that sounded like something the Poglavnik of Tver’s representative would say. Tver thinks of itself as the big brother of the Plovdivians, the Vlachs (in both Vlachia and Belagora), and the Vlachs’ close cousins the Hrvats. They all speak related languages, and they’re all Zibeonites except the Hrvats, who have the good sense to accept Eliphalet’s primacy.

Using this big brotherdom as an excuse, Tver has fought a lot of wars with the Hassockian Empire, and won most of them. Since Tver would have to charge all the way across the Nekemte Peninsula to get at Shqiperi, I wasn’t too worried about Potemkin’s threat, if that was what it was.

Count Rappaport probably wouldn’t take such a relaxed view of it. There is no Kingdom of Hrvatsk. There hasn’t been one for centuries, ever since the Hrvats suffered through their disastrous vowel famine. The Hrvats live in the Dual Monarchy. So do some Vlachs. So do some Torinans. So do the Yagmars. So do most of the Schlepsigians who don’t live in Schlepsig. So do the Voslaks and the Voslenes, who are not the same (though only they care). So do the Prahans, who aren’t quite the same as the Voslaks (or is it the Voslenes?), either. So do some Dacians, and all the Gdanskers who don’t live in Schlepsig or Tver (no more Kingdom of Gdansk, either, which is what you get for ending up stuck between Schlepsig and Tver and the Dual Monarchy). So do…I could go on.

It’s a complicated place-or, if you’d rather, just a bloody mess.

So when Tver appoints itself the Hrvats’ big brother, the king-emperor of the Dual Monarchy is just as Not Amused as the late Queen of Albion. I don’t mean she was Not Amused at the Hrvats; I’d bet money she never once heard of them. But I suppose she had other things not to amuse her.

Potemkin was thinking. It took a while. You could watch the wheels turn, like the ones on a milk wagon pulled by a lazy horse. In due course, he said, “You trouble our friends, we trouble you.”

I put my hand on the blue velvet sleeve of his jacket. “I wouldn’t dream of it, my dear fellow,” I said. I might do it, but I had better things to dream about.

“Don’t touch the coat!” He shook me off. “You listen and you listen good, or you be sorry.” Yes, he was what Tver calls a diplomat.

“I’m all ears,” I assured him. “North and south, east and west, I am nothing but ears. Even my eyes are ears. Even my toenails are ears.”

Those wheels inside Count Potemkin’s head slowly started turning once more. This time, I watched them stop: Potemkin gave up thinking as a bad job. “You listen,” he said again. “Maybe you lucky, coming out here to middle of nowhere. When Tver takes Vyzance, no room for Hassocki princes there no more.”

He could have said it better in Narbonese, I’m sure. Bad grammar aside, what he meant was plain enough. Tver has always lusted after the capital of the Hassockian Empire the way a callow boy lusts after a stage actress. She might be a clapped-out old whore-Eliphalet will testify Vyzance is-but he doesn’t know that, or care. All he knows is, he wants her.

I yawned in Count Potemkin’s face. “The Tverski who will lay hold of Vyzance has not been born, nor has his grandfather’s grandfather.” Switching to Hassocki, I went on, “So take thyself off, thou infinite and endless liar, thou hourly promise-breaker, thou owner of no one good quality.”

“Whoreson mandrake, thy pisspot kingdom is the canker of a calm world and a long peace, and thou provest thyself fit to rule it,” he retorted in the same language, and lumbered away.

You just can’t tell with some people, that’s all.

Taken as a whole, I suppose the evening at the fortress was a success. Nobody challenged anyone else to a duel. And no one except Barisha and the delightful Potemkin threatened to go to war. (As if anyone who didn’t have the influence to escape being consigned to Peshkepiia would have the influence to send his kingdom to war!) Even more to the point, as far as I was concerned, no one except Count Rappaport doubted I was who I said I was, and no one seemed to take him seriously.

When I went to the Metropolis’ dining room for breakfast, a pack of ministers semiplenipotentiary and another pack of scribes set upon me. I wished they would have found satisfaction in one another. Jean-Jacques-Pierre-Roland, for instance, talked enough to keep any four men or eight scribes happy. But no. I was the man of the hour, and they all were either mad to talk to me or to hear me talk.