He stopped at the prescribed distance from the throne. He bowed the prescribed bow. “Your Majesty,” he said: the prescribed phrase. Except he didn’t say, “Your Majesty.” He said, “Your Majesty?” He admitted the possibility of doubt that I was his Majesty.

Doubt is not a good thing. Doubt subverts faith. If you don’t have faith in me on this score, ask a priest. It doesn’t matter whether he’s a sedate Eliphilatelist, a wild-eyed Zibeonite, or a votary of the Quadrate God. He will tell you the same thing. Doubt does subvert faith. If you could find a priest who serves the old Aenean gods nowadays, he would tell you the same thing, too. But you can’t find one of those priests any more. They’re as extinct as unicorns (or is it virgins?). Doubt has subverted their faith.

“Your Excellency,” I said. I didn’t sound like a man who had doubts. Well, I daresay the brandy helped. “What brings you here today, your Excellency?”

Like I didn’t know! Scribes!

“Your Majesty?” There it was again, that cursed question mark, hanging in the air. And if Essad Pasha didn’t get his punctuation revised, Max and I might end up hanging in the air, too-by our necks, or perhaps in some fashion even less pleasant than that.

“Yes?” I said, as portentously as a sozzled sovereign could. I didn’t doubt that I was King Halim Eddin-or if I did, no one else ever knew it.

Essad Pasha gathered himself. I was glad to see he needed to gather himself. He wasn’t sure I was Halim Eddin. But he wasn’t sure I wasn’t Halim Eddin, either. Good. That gave me something to work with. After coughing a couple of times (which made me stare at him to see if he’d suddenly turned tall and lean: he hadn’t), he said, “Your Majesty, I have received a peculiar, a most peculiar, report from the offices of Consolidated Crystal.”

“Have you?” I said indifferently-or maybe I was just drunk. “Well, what report is this?”

He sounded hesitant. He sounded apologetic-better that than sounding apoplectic, I suppose. But I heard from him what I’d already heard from Max: that the Hassockian Atabeg, Eliphalet smite his scrawny arse with boils, had the infernal gall to deny that I was the authentic Prince Halim Eddin, just because I wasn’t.

“Oh, that,” I said, more indifferently still. “Well, weren’t you expecting that?”

“Your Majesty?” Now Essad Pasha sounded like he doubted which end was up, and, unlike some people in the throne room I could name, he wasn’t even pie-eyed-or I don’t think he was. “I don’t understand, your Majesty.”

“Obviously.” I piled on the scorn the way Shqipetari cooks pile on the grease.

It worked, too. I could all but hear the gears grinding inside Essad Pasha’s head. An impostor who knew he’d been found out should have trembled like an aspen leaf in fall. I didn’t act the way a terrified fraud should have. I acted every inch a king, or at least a prince.

“Perhaps your Majesty would be gracious enough to explain?” Cautious wasn’t a bad way for Essad Pasha to sound, either.

“Perhaps he would.” I don’t think I’d ever talked about myself in the third person before. It’s even more fun than the royal we. “Perhaps he wouldn’t have to if he were served by men who could see past the end of their nose.”

Behind me, Max coughed. Well, it might have been the two-headed eagle on the wall, but I suspected the doubtable-to say nothing of redoubtable-Captain Yildirim. Essad Pasha looked wounded. He wouldn’t have bothered with an expression like that for a man he didn’t believe in. He would have gone about wounding the pretender instead. “North and south, east and west, my ignorance is wide as the sky, deep as the sea, black as blackest midnight,” he said. “Would your Majesty grant his slave the boon of enlightenment?”

When a Hassocki goes all poetical on you, he’s either being insulting or you’ve got him on the run. Essad Pasha wasn’t being insulting. I smiled…to myself. Then I fed him the same farrago of nonsense about why the Atabeg couldn’t publicly admit I was who I was that I’d rammed down Max’s throat.

Max did what any normal human being would do: he gagged. Essad Pasha swallowed the whole thing. He didn’t even choke. He must have been eating Shqipetari cooking for a long time.

“I see, your Majesty,” he breathed when I was through. “Indeed, that makes most excellent good sense.”

Yes, maybe it was the two-headed eagle that coughed. When I looked back at Max, he wasn’t doing it. I knew what he was thinking, though: that it made no sense at all. I was thinking the same thing. Then again, in the Nekemte Peninsula things that make no sense often prove perfectly sensible, while what would be sensible anywhere else turns out to be the height of folly.

An actor in a down-at-the-heels circus would be most unlikely to claim the crown of Albion, for instance. He would be even less likely to find it plopped on his head.

I graciously inclined my head to Essad Pasha. “Now that you see where the truth lies”-and the truth was lying as hard as it could, believe you me it was-“perhaps you will be so kind as to take it back to your junior officers, to avoid any unfortunate outbreaks of excessive zeal.”

To keep them from coming over here and murdering me, I meant. I happen to think it sounded much nicer the way I put it.

Essad Pasha bowed. “As your Majesty commands, so shall it be.” He did a smart about-turn and marched out of the throne room. I looked down at my hands. I felt like a successful surgeon. And so I was: I’d just amputated Essad Pasha’s question mark, and without even numbing him beforehand.

“My hat’s off to you, your Majesty,” Max said. May Eliphalet beshrew me if he hadn’t doffed it when I looked around.

“If a man knows the truth when he hears it, he will do what is right,” I said, which sounded good and had nothing to do with anything. Essad Pasha couldn’t tell the truth from saltwater taffy. As for doing what was right-he was doing what I wanted, which was even better.

Having removed or at least reduced Essad Pasha’s inflamed interrogative, I thought the world was my oyster. And maybe it was, but I forgot something essential: oysters don’t keep. No sooner had Essad Pasha departed than Skander bowed to me and said, “Your Majesty, a woman wishes to appeal her sentence as a witch.”

“Oh, she does, does she?” I wasn’t so sure that sounded appealing to me. “Can she do that?”

Skander shrugged. “It is for you to decide. You are the king.”

So I was. For the first time, I wondered if I wanted to be. Romping through the harem was fun. Declaring war on Belagora was fun, too. So was arranging things so the mountain dragons decided Belagoran soldiers made even better snacks than sheep (to say nothing of shepherds).

But hearing a possible-probably a probable-witch’s appeal? It sounded much too much like work. Worse, it sounded like boring work. I didn’t want to admit that to Skander. I didn’t much want to admit it to myself, either. Not wanting to admit it, I asked the majordomo, “What is the Shqipetari custom? I am not of your blood”-Eliphalet be praised!-“and I do not wish to offend by accident or ignorance.”

He only shrugged again. “We have not had a king for many, many years. The custom is what your Majesty chooses to make it. Once your Majesty makes it, we will uphold it with all our might.”

“What will they do with the woman if I don’t hear her appeal?” I asked.

“Burn her, I suppose. Or else stone her,” Skander said indifferently. “Give her what she deserves, anyhow.”

“I see.” And I did. So much for Skander’s faith in her innocence. Maybe I could enlighten the Shqipetari. By all appearances, they needed it. “Fetch her in. I will hear her,” I declared in ringing tones.

“Before you do, though, call Zogu the wizard to the palace,” Max put in. “Just on the off chance she is what everybody thinks she is.”