“My friend is a little longer,” I agreed.

“He will cost extra, too,” the clothier said.

“A little extra, I suppose,” I said. “Not a lot.”

Torinans think they’re good hagglers. Put them next to Schlepsigians or Albionese, who hardly haggle at all, and they’re right. In the Nekemte Peninsula, they’d be picked to skin and bones before they knew what hit them. I was used to playing a tougher game than the clothier. I got the price I wanted without even coming close to mentioning his mother again.

By that afternoon, Max and I looked like a couple of men who’d just bought new clothes in a Torinan provincial town. It could have been worse. We could have gone on looking like Shqipetari.

People gawked at Max when we bought fares on a northbound stage. But people gawk at Max’s inches even in Schlepsig, though he did seem to have more of them in Torino, where the folk are mostly shorter. And the fellow who sold us our tickets smiled at my accent. “You are from the north, eh?” he said. “You speak dialect up in that part of the kingdom.”

He didn’t think I was a foreigner, mind. He just thought I talked funny. Well, I thought he-and the clothier, and everybody else down there-talked funny, too. It’s true that the lovely and talented lady (and she was both, dear Annaluisa was) from whom I learned most of my Torinan did come from the north. I was happy enough to follow her lead in whatever she did-you’d best believe I was.

She didn’t slap my face, either. I was luckier with her than Max was with the girl from whom he’d learned his little bits of the language.

And I was luckier when it came to the coach. Max eyed it with distaste. “Crammed into another bloody shoebox,” he said.

“Would you rather stay in Torino?” I asked him.

“Weather’s better,” he said, which is true. After you’ve sailed the Middle Sea, you can never look at the weather in Schlepsig the same way again. But in the end, he shook his head. “No, I’ll go home, too.”

An hour later than it should have, the coach rattled north. Even though a small woman sat across from him, Max didn’t have much legroom. I didn’t, either. I don’t think anyone else on the coach did. But Max had it worse than the rest of us.

We were all glad to stretch our legs when we got to the next town. This one boasted a Consolidated Crystal office across from the depot. I stretched my legs by walking over there. The crystallographers inside wore turbans. I smiled, seeing myself back in a civilized kingdom.

I sent my message to several leading Schlepsigian journals. The exiled King of Shqiperi returns to his homeland, it said. I hoped that would pique some interest. Scribes had helped bring my reign to a premature end, but I couldn’t make my bid for fame without them now. It was like sitting down to supper with a dragon: you know you may be the next course, but if you’re hungry enough you have to take the chance.

When I got back to the depot, one of the clerks recognized that my accent was foreign, not just northern. “Your passport, please, sir,” he said. Seeing that Max was traveling with me, the clerk asked for his, too. He looked up from them a moment later, his face a dark cloud. “I am afraid you two gentlemen do not have proper Torinan entry stamps. This is a matter of some importance, since flouting our regulations can lead to a fine or imprisonment or both, at the judge’s discretion.”

“I am devastated!” I cried, and clapped a hand to my heart-Torinans love melodrama. “What can we do?”

After a bit of dickering, we did it. From that time forward, our passports did boast proper Torinan entry stamps. Well, they boasted proper-looking Torinan entry stamps, anyhow. A forensic wizard might have expressed a different opinion, but how likely was it that a forensic wizard would examine the proper-looking passports of a couple of obviously respectable, obviously innocent travelers?

Not very. I hoped.

When we got up into the north of Torino, I sent the journals in Schlepsig another message, this one letting them know where and when I was likely to come up into Schlepsig. I hadn’t wanted to do that before, since travel in Torino is tardy and inefficient enough to come right out of the Nekemte Peninsula, and things in the Dual Monarchy aren’t always better.

The turbaned crystallographer who sent my message said, “So you’re the fellow who pretended to be the Hassocki prince, are you?”

“That’s me.” I strutted a little, even sitting down. “So you’ve heard of me, eh?” Maybe the scribes in Shqiperi were good for something after all. And sure enough, the crystallographer nodded. I showed off a little more. Then I asked, “What do you think of me? What does the world think of me?”

“You must have been out of your mind to try it, and you’re lucky you got away with your neck,” he answered without the least hesitation.

One good thing, anyhow: Max wasn’t along to hear him say it.

Our passports passed muster when we passed from Torino to the Dual Monarchy. The customs official at the border checkpoint added more stamps. “Why were you in Torino?” he asked. Like most officials in the Dual Monarchy, he was of Schlepsigian blood. Like some other Schlepsigian officials I’ve known, he liked to throw his weight around just because he could.

“I’d just escaped from Shqiperi,” I answered.

“And what were you doing in Shqiperi?” he asked, as if I’d just confessed to some horrible depravity. In his eyes, no doubt I had.

“I was being King of Shqiperi,” I said, not without pride.

And his whole attitude changed. He pounded me on the back. He clasped my hand. He gave me a knock of cherry brandy from a flask on his belt. He gave Max a knock, too, when he found out I’d had an enormous aide-de-camp. Max drank only with the greatest suspicion. Now that you mention it, so did I. Who ever heard of a customs official acting like a human being?

But this one had his reasons. “You’re the fellow who turned the dragons loose on the Belagorans!” he exclaimed. “By Eliphalet’s toes, they’ve been screeching like a bunch of cats with their tails under rocking chairs for the past week!”

I looked at Max. Max was looking at me. Zogu’s magic had worked again. He was no lightweight wizard, not Zogu. He was wasted there in Peshkepiia, the way Stagiros the weatherworker was wasted aboard the Gamemeno. Both of them-and how many others?-could have done so much more with themselves if only they’d got the chance.

All of a sudden, nothing was too good for Max and me. The Dual Monarchy hated and feared Belagora and Vlachia because even then they were doing their best to lure their relatives inside the Monarchy away from Vindobon and the King-Emperor and into some kind of kingdom with them. The Vlachs weren’t fussy over how they went about it, either. And so anybody who’d given the Belagorans a good tweak was a friend of the Dual Monarchy’s.

Max and I rode in government coaches fit for a grand duke-which, I suppose, made them more or less fit for a king, too. We feasted at every stop. We got put up at the grandest hostels. No one asked for a thaler from us-or even for a copper thent. I was almost sorry to cross the border into Schlepsig. Oh, and we got there ahead of schedule, which, in the Dual Monarchy, is as near unheard-of as makes no difference.

Crossing into Schlepsig ahead of schedule complicated things for me. I wanted to tell my story, and the stupid scribes hadn’t got there to hear it. You just can’t rely on those people. They’re there when they shouldn’t be, they stir up trouble when you don’t want them to-and when you really need them, where are they?

And then, at last, they finally did show up. Took them bloody long enough, that’s all I’ve got to tell you. But they listened as I told my tale. They listened as Max told his, too. One enterprising journal sent along a sketch artist as well as a scribe. He did my portrait-I still have the original, as a matter of fact. That outfit ran the picture of me next to the one of Prince Halim Eddin that had started my adventure. ONE MAN OR TWO? it said below them.