'Yes, of course… I'm sorry.' Jezal raised his arm a little higher, inwardly cursing at having apologised yet again. He was a king now, as Bayaz was constantly telling him. If he had shoved one of the tailors out of the window, no apology would have been necessary. The man would probably have thanked him profusely for the attention as he plummeted to the ground. As it was he merely gave a wooden smile, and smoothly unravelled his measuring tape. His colleague was crawling below, doing something similar around Jezal's knees. The third was punctiliously recording their observations in a marbled ledger.

Jezal took a long breath, and frowned into the mirror. An uncertain-seeming young idiot with a scar on his chin gazed back at him from the glass, draped with swatches of glittering cloth as though he were a tailor's dummy. He looked, and certainly felt, more like a clown than a king. He looked a joke, and undoubtedly would have laughed, had he not himself been the ridiculous punch-line.

'Perhaps something after the Osprian fashion, then?' The Royal Jeweller placed another wooden nonsense carefully on Jezal's head and examined the results. It was far from an improvement. The damn thing looked like nothing so much as an inverted chandelier.

'No, no!' snapped Bayaz, with some irritation. 'Far too fancy, far too clever, far too big. He will scarcely be able to stand in the damn thing! It needs to be simple, to be honest, to be light. Something a man could fight in!'

The Royal Jeweller blinked. 'He will be fighting in the crown?'

'No, dolt! But he must look as if he might!' Bayaz came up behind Jezal, snatched the wooden contraption from his head and tossed it rattling on the polished floor. Then he seized Jezal by the arms and stared grimly at his reflection from over his shoulder. 'This is a warrior king in the finest tradition! The natural heir to the Kingdom of Harod the Great! A peerless swordsman, who has dealt wounds and received them, who has led armies to victory, who has killed men by the score!'

'Score?' murmured Jezal, uncertainly.

Bayaz ignored him. 'A man as comfortable with saddle and sword as with throne and sceptre! His crown must go with armour. It must go with weapons. It must go with steel. Now do you understand?'

The Jeweller nodded slowly. 'I believe so, my Lord.'

'Good. And one more thing.'

'My Lord has but to name it.'

'Give it a big-arsed diamond.'

The Jeweller humbly inclined his head. 'That goes without saying.'

'Now out. Out, all of you! His Majesty has affairs of state to attend to.'