A couple of minutes after he left the throne room, Max ambled in. “Um, your Majesty, what have you done?” he asked.

“Declared war on Belagora. Why?”

He laughed. Getting a laugh out of Max isn’t easy. I laughed, too, at the look on his face when he realized I wasn’t joking. “Well, there’s a record!” he said. “You haven’t had a crown on your head more than a few hours, and you’ve already started a war? I can think of a lot of kings who’d be jealous, I can.”

“Your Majesty!” Skander sounded scandalized. “Is this-this personage allowed to speak to you so?”

That made Max laugh again. “You try and stop me, pal!” A warning of this sort from an officer six feet eight inches tall and armed with a sword does carry a certain persuasiveness. Skander sent me a look of appeal.

“My aide-de-camp means well,” I said, and don’t think that didn’t made Max laugh one more time. “Sometimes I find it useful to employ a man who enjoys full freedom of speech.” Sometimes, even before I was royal, I found it a royal pain in the fundament, too. But I didn’t tell that to Skander.

“Yes, your Majesty.” My majordomo’s tone suggested that I was eating with my fingers and didn’t know any better. When I showed no sign of ordering Max drawn and quartered and placed outside the palace as a warning to others, Skander threw his hands in the air and stalked off. All things considered, he made a better exit than Barisha had.

“You really declared war on Belagora?” Max said. I nodded, not without pride. He, by contrast, shook his head. “How are you going to fight it?”

“Don’t be silly,” I answered. “Nobody can fight a proper war in those mountains. The Belagorans and the Hassocki have just spent months proving it. Why should things be any different now?”

“Because you’re in command instead of old Essad Pasha?” Max suggested. “What you know about running an army doesn’t exactly fill up the Encyclopaedia Albionica.”

All at once, drawing and quartering Max looked much more attractive. I thought about calling Skander back. If he knew a reliable wizard, he probably knew a reliable executioner, too. But thinking of Zogu and his magic made me decide to try to distract Max instead. Execution is so…permanent.

I told Max about the sorcery, adding, “I’m going to have Rexhep bring some of the harem girls to the royal bedchamber tonight.”

“Are you?” Max said. That got his attention, all right.

“Of course I am. What else would a king do? Insult the poor dears by leaving them lonely? What sort of cad do you think I am?” I held up a hasty hand; Max was liable to answer that. Having forestalled him, I went on, “Rexhep may fetch more girls than even a king can handle, all in one night.”

“You expect me to take care of your leftovers?” Max asked haughtily.

“Well, unless you’d rather not,” I replied.

Now he was the one holding up a hand. “I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything like that.” He got sensible mighty fast. Somehow, I thought he might.

“All right, then,” I said. “We’ll see how that goes after the sun sets.”

I waited to find out what happened next. What happened was that Max, realizing which side his bread was buttered on, bowed very low. “Thank you, your Majesty,” he said. All of a sudden, he didn’t care so much about war with Belagora.

And do you know what else? Neither did I.

I don’t remember much about the rest of the afternoon. After war and the harem, not much seems important. I think Jean-Jacques-Pierre-Roland called on me. I can’t begin to tell you why. Narbonensis is a long way from Shqiperi. Any civilized kingdom is a long way from Shqiperi. And Narbonensis is friendly toward Vlachia and Belagora, which only goes to show all its taste is in its mouth.

Maybe he wanted to tell me not to go to war against Belagora. That makes as much sense as anything else, and more sense than a lot of things I can think of. I can’t prove it, though. And if Jean-Jacques-Pierre-Roland had any sense to start with, what was he doing in Shqiperi?

Not long before supper, I heard screams and the clash of cutlery-I hoped it was cutlery, not swords-from the kitchens. I sent Skander off to see who’d murdered whom, and why. When he came back, he reported, “Nothing to worry about, your Majesty. Only a disagreement. No blood.”

“No, eh? By the noise, I expected you’d be wading through it up to your knees.” My answer was punctuated by more shouts and the ringing of steel on steel. With a sigh, I said, “You must have hired the cooks from the Metropolis.”

“How did you know, your Majesty?” I think it was the first time I impressed Skander as myself and not as King of Shqiperi.

Supper was…what you would expect with a bunch of Shqipetari cooking it. Fried chicken, which again wasn’t bad-though fried chicken feet were something I’d never tried before. (And, remembering my little love fest with Barisha, I kept wondering where the fowl came from.) Fried potatoes, once more pretty good, even if we’d be likely to boil them in Schlepsig. Fried squash, which was-well, better than it sounds, anyway. Fried lettuce, about which I draw a merciful veil of silence.

By Eliphalet’s beard, if they had ice cream in Shqiperi they would fry that. They’ve never heard of it, proving mercy still does stream down from on high.

As the meal came to its greasy conclusion, I turned to Max and said, “Captain Yildirim!”

“Yes, your Majesty?” Max gives nothing away, not even to himself.

“Attend me in my quarters, if you would be so kind,” I said. “We can smoke a pipe together and study the best way to drive the Belagoran curs off our soil.” I got that out with a straight face. I really did.

“Yes, your Majesty.” Despite the uniform he wore, Max was and is about as military as your cat. Soldiers make other people swallow their swords. Max swallows his own. Need I say more? But, again, no one who didn’t know him would know that. Skander and the servants who cleared the table looked very impressed.

One of the servants, in fact, was so busy sneaking glances at Max that he knocked over a goblet he should have picked up. It fell off the table and smashed. The servant turned pale. So did his friends. They muttered in Shqipetari.

“Mercy, your Majesty!” Skander begged. “Mercy!”

What was I supposed to do, cut off his hand? Cut off his head? By the fear in their eyes, maybe I was. I started to laugh and tell them not to worry about it. I started to, but I didn’t. Shqiperi is the kind of place where they see kindness as weakness. “Take it out of his pay,” I told Skander. “It had better not happen again.”

“No, your Majesty. Of course not, your Majesty. Thank you, your Majesty,” Skander said. The servant bowed very low indeed. I did it right.

I nodded to Max. “Shall we go, Captain?”

“Certainly, your Majesty,” he said. “You are as merciful as you are kind.” I’ve never known a man who could pay a more venomous compliment.

Have you ever seen a sorcerous print of one of those Narbonese paintings that imagine what the Hassockian Atabeg’s bedchamber looks like? They’re all carpets and cushions and silks and gauzy curtains and polished brasswork and bright colors and clashing patterns. I don’t know what the Hassockian Atabeg’s bedchamber really looks like; the authentic Halim Eddin may, I suppose.

Mine looked like…one of those paintings. Not one of the good ones, where everything seems elegant and expensive, but the tasteless kind, where all the furnishings look as if they’re one step-and a small step, at that-up from what a whorehouse would have. All that was missing were the naked girls.

They weren’t far away, though.

Max looked around as if he couldn’t believe what he saw. I didn’t blame him; I had trouble believing it, too. He waved. “How are you supposed to sleep with all this going on?”

“This place mostly isn’t for sleeping,” I answered.